After I had given him the day’s report, to which he reacted the same as he had the day before, namely not at all, and after getting nothing but a grunt of indifference when I volunteered the opinion that Kerr Naylor had been read the riot act by his sister and as a result was crawling from under, I decided to take in a flat-face opera.
Ordinarily I let the movies wait when we’re busy on a case, but I broke precedent that Friday evening because (a) we weren’t busy—at least God knows Wolfe wasn’t—and (b) I strongly doubted if it was a case. I would have been willing to settle for nothing more homicidal than a mess of dirty internal politics on the higher levels at Naylor-Kerr, Inc., and while that may have seemed important and even exciting to the Board of Directors and hostile camps of executives, I had to confess that I couldn’t blame Wolfe for going aloof on it, since I was inclined to feel the same way. So I let my mind go blank and enjoyed the movie up to a certain point, staying nearly to the end. When it came to where they were preparing to wind it up right and let it out that the hero really had not put over the fake contract and cleaned up, I left in a hurry, because I had formed my own opinion of the hero from where I sat and chose to think otherwise.
Then, when I got home at half-past eleven, I found Inspector Cramer there in the office, seated in the red leather chair, talking to Wolfe. Evidently it wasn’t a very amiable conversation, for Cramer’s look at me as I entered was an unfriendly glare, and, since I had done nothing to earn it, it must have been the state of his feelings toward Wolfe.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, as if he had me under contract or I was on the parole list.
“It was a wonderful movie,” I informed them, sitting down at my desk. “Only two people in it have amnesia, this incredibly beautiful girl with—”
“Archie,” Wolfe snapped. He was out of humor too. “Mr. Cramer wants to ask you something. I suppose you have seen the piece about us in this evening’s Gazette?”
“Sure. It’s a bum picture of you, but—”
“You didn’t mention it to me.”
“Yeah, you were busy reading, and anyway it wasn’t worth wasting breath on.”
“It’s an outrage!” Cramer rasped. “It’s a flagrant betrayal of a client’s confidence!”
“Nuts.” I had to keep my eyes on the go to meet the two glares alternately. “It doesn’t quote me and it doesn’t even say I was interviewed. It merely says that Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s brilliant lieutenant, is investigating the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore, and therefore it may be conjectured that somebody smells murder. Except for those it mentions no names. Since about a thousand people down at Naylor-Kerr know about it, and at least one of them knows who I am and probably a lot more, you can have that word betrayal back and use it somewhere else. Even so, Lon Cohen wouldn’t have done it without getting my okay. It was that damn Whosis, the city editor. Whose belly aches, the client’s? Have you been promoted from homicide to patting the kittens?”
Wolfe and Cramer started to speak both at once, and Wolfe won. “The piece,” he said, “does indeed apply that word, brilliant, to you, and that’s all I find in it to object to. But Mr. Cramer is seriously annoyed. It seems that Mr. O’Hara, the Deputy Commissioner, is also annoyed. They want us to quit the job.”
“They’ve got a hell of a nerve,” I asserted. “Will they feed us?”
Cramer started again to speak, but Wolfe pushed a palm at him.
“Nothing edible,” Wolfe said with a grimace. There was no joking about food with him. “They say the piece in the Gazette is the opening of another campaign of criticism of the police for an unsolved murder, and that it is irresponsible because there isn’t the slightest evidence that Mr. Moore’s death was anything but a hit-and-run accident. They say that our undertaking an investigation is the only valid excuse the Gazette can have for starting such a campaign or continuing it. They say that either we have been gulled by the whimsicality of an eccentric man, Mr. Kerr Naylor, or that, not gulled, we are exploiting it in order to build up for a fee. They say that you have even gone so far as to report that Mr. Naylor said something to you—that he knows who killed Mr. Moore—which he never said, in the necessity to invent something that would justify our continued employment. Does that cover it, Mr. Cramer?”
“It’ll do for an outline,” Cramer rasped. “I want to ask Goodwin—”
“If you please.” Wolfe was brusque. He turned to me. “Archie. If I need to tell you, I do, that I have unqualified confidence in you and am completely satisfied with your performance in this case, as I have been in all past cases and expect to be in all future ones. Of course you tell lies and so do I, even to clients when it seems advisable, but you would never lie to me nor I to you in a matter where mutual trust and respect are involved. Your lack of brilliance may be regrettable but is really a triviality, and in any event two brilliant men under one roof would be intolerable. Your senseless peccadillocs, such as your refusal to use a noiseless typewriter, are a confounded nuisance, but this idiotic accusation that you lied in that report to Mr. Pine has put me in a different frame of mind about it. Keep your typewriter, but for heaven’s sake oil it.”
“Good God,” I protested, “I oil it every—”
Cramer exploded with a word which the printer would not approve of. “Your goddam household squabbles will keep,” he said rudely. He was at me. “Do you stick to it that Naylor told you he knew who killed Moore?”
“No, I don’t,” I told him, “not to you. To you I don’t stick to anything. This is a private investigation about a guy shooting off his mouth, and I do my reporting to Mr. Wolfe and to our client. Where do you come in? You’re the head of the Homicide Squad, but you say yourself that Moore’s death was an accident, so it’s none of your business what I stick to and what I let go of. I don’t blame you for not wanting the Gazette to start a howl, but if you expect any co-operation from me you’re not going to get it by asking me whether I stick to it that I’m not a liar. I suppose O’Hara has been on the phone and given you a pain in the sitdown, a substitute I use out of respect for your age, but you don’t need to take it out on me.”
I spread out my palms. “Take it this way. Let’s suppose you’re a reasonable man instead of a hothead, and you come here to ask me something in that spirit, suppose you even call me Archie. And you tell me what you want in a friendly well-modulated tone. What would it be?”
“I’ve already told Wolfe, and he has told you.” Cramer was no longer bellicose, merely firm. “I want you to quit stirring up a murder stink where there’s no evidence and peddling stale rumors to the papers.”
“I didn’t peddle. I went to the Gazette boys for information, and I got it. As for stink-stirring, do you mean you want me to quit my job at Naylor-Kerr?”
“Yes. You don’t need money that bad.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’m only the bookkeeper. That’s up to Mr. Wolfe. He employs me and I follow orders.”
“And I,” Wolfe put in, “am in turn employed by Naylor-Kerr, Inc., through its president, Mr. Pine. I am inclined to think that in hiring me he and his fellow executives had certain special undeclared purposes in mind. Their nature is not known to me, but I have reason to suppose them to be criminal or unethical, and they may even be praiseworthy. Why don’t you ask Mr. Pine about it? Have you talked to him?”
“The Deputy Commissioner has.” Cramer had got out a cigar and was threatening his teeth with it. “This afternoon. I understand it was mostly about Goodwin lying about what Naylor had said to him. I don’t suppose the Deputy Commissioner asked him specifically to call you off. That part of it was left to me.”
“I wouldn’t feel justified,” Wolfe said virtuously, “in quitting the case without the approval of the client.”
“Okay, then get it. Call him up now. We’ll both talk to him, and me first.”
Wolfe nodded at me. “Get Mr. Pine, Archie. But not you first, Mr. Cramer. You second.”
I got the number from the book an
d dialed it. When, after a short wait, there was a voice in my ear that I recognized, I was surprised that a woman with enough money to keep pets answered the phone herself, but it was midnight and the servants probably didn’t get to sleep as late in the morning as she did. I told her who I was and she reacted instantly.
“Of course, I knew your voice at once! How is your face, Archie?”
She sounded as if she had really had it on her mind and wanted to know. “Better, thanks,” I told her. “I’m sorry to disturb you so late at night, but—”
“Oh, it’s not late for me! I’m never in bed before three or four. The season tickets aren’t available yet, but they will be next week, and yours will be sent at once.”
“Much obliged. Is your husband there? Mr. Wolfe would like to speak to him.”
“Yes, he’s here, but he may be asleep. He goes to bed much earlier than I do. Hold the wire and I’ll find out. Is it important?”
“Not important enough to wake him up if he hates it as much as I do.”
“All right, hold the wire. I’ll see.”
It took her long enough. I sat and held it, reflecting that considering the state of their romance her husband’s bed was probably not just the other side of a door. Finally she was back.
“No, I’m sorry, he’s sound asleep. I thought he might be reading. Is it about what I came to see you about?”
“Yes, it’s connected with that. We’ll get him in the morning. Many thanks.”
“Maybe I could help. What is it?”
“I don’t think so, it’s just a detail. Hold it a second.” I covered the transmitter and announced, “He’s asleep and she wants to know if she can help. She would like very much to help.”
“No,” Wolfe said positively.
“Wait a minute,” Cramer began, but I ignored him and told the phone, “Mr. Wolfe thanks you for your offer, Mrs. Pine, but he will call your husband tomorrow.”
“Then just tell me what it is, Archie, and I can discuss it with him before Mr. Wolfe calls.”
It took me a good three minutes to get it concluded without being impolite.
A childish wrangle started. Cramer adopted the position that I should have persuaded her to wake Pine up, and Wolfe, who hates having his sleep interrupted even more than I do, violently disagreed. They kept at it as if it had been one of the world’s major problems, like what to do with the Ruhr. Neither of them budged an inch, so they ended where they began, stalemated.
“Very well,” Cramer said finally, still belligerent. “So I get nothing for losing two hours of my own sleep and coming clear over here to ask you a favor.”
“Nonsense.” Wolfe was belligerent too. “You haven’t asked a favor. You have called Mr. Goodwin a liar and you have made preposterous demands. Besides, this is on your way home from your office.”
That was the intellectual level they had descended to. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Cramer had produced a map of the city, to prove that Wolfe’s house was not on a direct line between his office and his home, but he skipped that and concentrated on the other point—whether he had asked a favor or not. He maintained that he had, and that if it had sounded like a demand that was only on account of his mannerisms, with which we were well acquainted and therefore had no right to misinterpret. At length, by that roundabout route, he got back to his main point: would we or would we not break off relations with Naylor-Kerr, Inc.? Apparently Deputy Commissioner O’Hara had really built a fire under him.
“It isn’t as urgent as all that, is it?” Wolfe asked in his tone of fake concern, which has maddened older men than me, or even than Cramer. “For a long time Mr. Kerr Naylor—”
The phone rang. I gave it a glance of distaste before reaching for it, thinking it was certainly Mrs. Pine, with nothing special to do for another two hours till bedtime, calling to ask about my face. But no. A gruff male voice asked to speak to Inspector Cramer, and I moved out of my chair to let Cramer take the call at my desk.
It was a one-sided conversation, with Cramer contributing only a few grunts and, at the end, three or four questions. He told someone he would be there in five minutes, hung up, and swiveled to us.
“Kerr Naylor has been found dead on Thirty-ninth Street near Eleventh Avenue. Four blocks from here. Apparently run over by a car, with his head smashed.” Cramer was on his feet. “They got his name from papers in his pocket.” He growled at me, “Want to come and identify him?”
“Indeed,” Wolfe muttered. “Remarkable coincidence. Mr. Moore died there too. It must be a dangerous street.”
“And now,” I complained, “I’ll never be able to make him take back calling me a liar. Sure, glad to help. Come along, Inspector.”
20.
Since so far as I knew I was still on the Naylor-Kerr payroll, it was a good thing they didn’t work Saturdays, because Saturday morning I didn’t get out of bed until noon was in plain sight. At that I had been there something short of six hours, having got home just as the sun was taking its first slanting look at Thirty-fifth Street.
Coincidence was right. On Thirty-ninth Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, not thirty feet from the spot where the body of Waldo Wilmot Moore had been found nearly four months before, a car had run over Kerr Naylor, flattening his head and breaking his bones. I had appreciated, better than I had when he had told me about it, the difficulties Kerr Naylor had encountered when he had gone to the morgue to identify the remains of Waldo Moore, but there had been no doubt about it. It was unquestionably Naylor, when you had made the mental adjustment required by the transformation of a sphere into a disk.
To go on with the coincidence, the body, which had been discovered by a taxi driver at twelve-forty A.M., had been there unnoticed for some time, anyway over half an hour, if the guess of the Medical Examiner on the time of death was any good. Not only that—and this was really stretching it too far—the car that had run over him had been found parked on Ninety-fifth Street just west of Broadway, in front of a branch laundry, in the identical spot where the car that had finished Moore had been found. On that one I had to hand it to Inspector Cramer. One of his first barks on arriving at the scene had been at a squad dick, telling him to beat it to Ninety-fifth Street and go over the cars parked in that block. Showing that an inspector knows a coincidence when he sees one. Already, before I had left to go home for a nap, the owner of the car had been brought in from Bedford Hills and thoroughly processed. The processing was mostly unnecessary, since it was easily established that he had reported to the police at eleven-eighteen that his car had been stolen from where he had parked it on Forty-eighth Street, having driven to town to go to the theater; and having, as lots of boobs do every day, forgotten to lock the car or even take the key.
It had taken two laboratory men, working with spotlights on the tires of the car where it stood on Ninety-fifth Street, to get the proof that it was the one that had rolled over Naylor, and that was one more detail of the coincidence.
Part of the time I had been a kibitzer, but had been made to feel welcome throughout because Inspector Cramer wanted me handy to answer some more questions when he got a chance to work them in, between other chores. During all the hours he made no reference to Wolfe’s objectionable behavior, and mine, in trying to stir up a murder stink when there had been no murder, and I, knowing he was busy and it would aggravate him, brought it up only eight or nine times. Even then he didn’t have me bounced because he wanted me around. The first session with him I stalled a little on the ground that it would be outrageous for me to betray the confidence of a client, but when he got to the point of a certain tone I gave him everything that I knew he would soon be getting elsewhere anyway. I told him all, or nearly all, about the folks I had been meeting down at Naylor-Kerr, including, of course, such details as the impression Ben Frenkel had been carrying around since December. When I had tried to loosen Gwynne Ferris up by threatening to tell the cops all and let them take a crack at her I hadn’t dreamed I would actually be d
oing so within ten hours.
Cramer shifted headquarters three times, taking me along. For half an hour or so he worked outdoors there on Thirty-ninth Street and then moved inside, to the 18th Precinct Station House on Fifty-fourth Street. Around three o’clock he moved again, to his own hangout, the office of the squad on Twentieth Street, and an hour later made another transfer, this time to the office of Deputy Commissioner O’Hara at Centre Street. O’Hara himself was there and things had really started to hum. I was right in the middle of it and was even given the pleasure of an interview with the Deputy Commissioner himself. From the way he started in on me it was a fair inference that he not only regarded me as a damn liar but also had inside dope to the effect that I had done it all myself, and that when I had got home and joined Wolfe and Cramer in the office at 11:30 I had just come, not from a movie, but from parking the murder car on Ninety-fifth Street. Since I had already given Cramer all the information I had that could help any, I though I might as well let O’Hara keep his illusions and fed him a peck or more of miscellaneous lies, such as I didn’t know how to drive a car and in strict confidence I had not been at a movie, but in a hotel room with the wife of a prominent politician whom I would rather die than name. Eventually O’Hara caught on and there was quite a scene.
Kerr Naylor’s sister had of course been notified, not on the phone, but by dispatching Lieutenant Rowcliff to her house on Sixty-seventh Street. When Rowcliff returned—we were then at the 18th Precinct Station House—Jasper Pine was with him, having had his sleep broken into after all. Pine had been taken by Rowcliff, on their way, to identify the body, and since I knew from having done it myself how jolly that was, I didn’t blame him for looking a little pale. He didn’t have the appearance of a man overcome by grief, but neither did he look like a top executive with everything under control. Cramer, having learned that both he and his wife disclaimed any knowledge of Kerr Naylor’s whereabouts Friday evening and had no idea of what he might have been doing on Thirty-ninth Street, spent only a short time on him and then gave him back to Rowcliff for more talk. I spoke just sixteen words to him. As he started away with Rowcliff he confronted me and demanded, “Did Naylor tell you what you reported to me? That he knew who had killed Moore?”
Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 12 Page 11