Wolfe, finished, dropped the phone back in its cradle and snapped at her, “What do you mean, coming in here dressed like that? Go back upstairs until I’m ready for you!”
His effort, it seemed to me, was no improvement on the ones I had rejected. But no effort would have been good enough. She hadn’t merely blundered in. She came forward, on past Cramer and Purley, clear to me. She might easily have had it in mind to resume her former seat on my lap, so by the time she reached me I was standing up.
“You promised you’d be with me when they are,” she said. That was not strictly true, but close enough for a woman, especially for one who was scared to death of cops. “There’s a police car out in front, so I came to the hall and listened, and that’s who they are, and I knew I’d never get a better chance, with you here and Mr. Wolfe too.”
She turned and told Cramer and Purley right to their faces, “My name is Rosa Bendini, or it’s Mrs. Harold Anthony, either one will do, and I live at Four-eighteen Bank Street, second floor, and when a cop came for me Friday night I was there in bed all the time. Now what do you want to ask me?”
One thing I approved of, she didn’t hook onto my arm or try to climb into my pocket. She just wanted to say it with me there.
“This,” Cramer declared in as gloaty a tone as I had ever heard from him, “is really rich. How long have you had her hid here, Wolfe? Wasn’t there time enough to train her?”
“Mr. Cramer, you’re an imbecile,” Wolfe told him for his information.
I broke in, thinking the best thing now was to mess it up good. “I bolixed it up,” I said regretfully. “Like a damn fool, I told her to bust in when I sneezed, and then Purley sneezed.” I glared at Purley. “How the hell could I know you had a cold?”
“Okay.” Cramer rose, still gloating. “I suppose you have some things here, Miss Bendini? Some clothes?”
“Yes, but I—”
“You have three minutes to change, unless you want to travel around like that. Go and change.”
“No,” Wolfe said. His forefinger was tapping on the desk, which meant he was ready to pick up tigers and knock their heads together. “Stay here, Miss Bendini.” His eyes darted to Cramer. “Have you a warrant? Or are you charging her?”
“Nuts. Murder. Material witness.”
“Witness to what?”
“I’ll tell her, not you.”
“Bah. Miss Bendini, I advise you not to leave here unless you are taken by force. Make them carry you.”
I intervened for several reasons. First, Wolfe was not following a program but was simply so mad he couldn’t see. Second, Rosa had gone so white and rigid that I doubted if she could walk, especially accompanied by a cop, and I didn’t regard it as desirable to let her be carried out of our house in the costume she had on. Third, while I hadn’t promised her, I had unquestionably given her an inducement.
“Look,” I said to Cramer, “why all the war paint? If you do carry her out, and if she proves to be no more material than I am, with Mr. Wolfe as sore as he is you’ll get blisters. If you don’t like conversing with her here I’ll make an offer, take it or leave it. She changes her clothes, and Purley and I drive her downtown in Mr. Wolfe’s car, and I am present, not too talkative, during your talk with her. I’ll stay as long as she does. When the time comes, unless you are prepared to charge her, she leaves with me. What the hell, I was with you all Friday night, wasn’t I? Well?”
“You might,” Wolfe said testily, “ask my permission, Archie.”
“This is Sunday.” I told Cramer, “It’s no deal unless you say yes out loud so everybody can hear you. I would prefer to see you carry her and let Mr. Wolfe see what the law can do, but Miss Bendini is like a sister to me. Yes?”
“Yes,” Cramer snarled.
I was thinking, as I went for the car, that one of the leading roles had bounced back to us again—the last to see Naylor alive. For a while it had been me. Then Saul Panzer, who had passed it on to the taxi driver. Now it was once more back in the family, with Fritz ticketed for it. Who next?
25.
I missed Sunday dinner but not supper.
It was no wonder that under the circumstances Cramer thought he had hooked a real fish and had also made a monkey out of Wolfe. But after half an hour with Rosa and me in his office, beginning to suspect that he had merely got caught on a snag, he left us to Lieutenant Rowcliff and beat it for Centre Street. Rowcliff didn’t care much for the assignment, since his opinion of me is a perfect match for mine of him. He shot questions at Rosa for an hour or so in his correspondence-school grammar, meanwhile trying to keep me from contributing any kind of sound, let alone a word, and halted only when he was interrupted by the return of a squad man who had been sent to Washington Heights to check with the in-laws.
Not only had father-in-law and mother-in-law verified Rosa’s story, but husband-in-law came back with the squad man to try to raise some hell. He wasn’t going to let his wife be abused and would see to it personally that she wasn’t. Knowing what had led up to his wife’s departure from his parental apartment in the Sunday dawn, I regarded him with awe. I had noticed on the Naylor-Kerr stationery that the motto of the firm was ANYTHING IN THE WORLD, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. It struck me that the motto of the male personnel of the stock department appeared to be PROTECT THE WOMAN. Or if they wanted it to have eight words like the firm’s it could be PROTECT YOUR WOMAN NO MATTER WHOSE SHE IS.
That left Rowcliff with nothing to discuss with Rosa except the time she had spent in bed Friday night, especially the hours from ten to twelve, which gave him limited space to turn around in. He sent a man down to Bank Street to see the janitor and the other tenants, but all they could say was that they hadn’t happened to see Miss Bendini come home Friday evening. Finally, around seven o’clock, he adjourned sine die, and I drove Rosa, with her luggage, to her home address, having phoned Wolfe and been told that there was no reason to suppose she had saved anything for him. The husband went with us and then came with me, and I let him out at a subway station. Knowing by now that his wife’s relations with me were purely on a business basis, he even wanted to buy me a drink.
I spent Sunday evening in the office with my typewriter. Wolfe was there too, but sight was the only one of my five senses that knew about it. When Saul Panzer phoned to make another classified report to Wolfe I arranged for him to meet me downtown in the morning instead of coming to Wolfe’s place. The authorities, looking for him, had phoned his home a few times, and he was going to spend the night at a friend’s apartment. It was just possible that they were eager enough about it to keep an eye on our address, and I still thought it would be polite to give Hester Livsey a chance to do some explaining in a congenial atmosphere.
I fully expected Saul’s check on her to be nothing more than a formality, and so it was. Monday morning I met him and took him with me to the lobby of the building on William Street, and chose a strategic point for overlooking the arriving throng and the stampede for the elevators. I recognized a few of the faces as the feet trotted, walked, marched, and click-clicked on the way to another week’s paycheck. At two minutes to nine I was thinking we had missed her and would have to proceed upstairs, where it would be more awkward and would require arranging, when Saul suddenly pinched me and muttered at me:
“To the right, thirty feet, turning now, same hat and coat, behind the tall man with glasses, going on the elevator—”
“Okay,” I said as she was swallowed up in the elevator and its door started to close. “How many coats do you think she has? She’s an honest working girl.”
“It’s none of my business,” Saul said.
“Meaning, not her honesty, but her name. Yes, you have heard the name. If you happen to be phoning Wolfe and he happens to ask, you can tell him yes, and also tell him I’ll bring her to see him but I don’t know when. I have to find out whether I’m still working here or not. There’s to be a directors’ meeting—you’re not listening.”
“I’m lo
oking. Do you know that man”—his eyes were pointing—“gray coat and hat, big and broad, fleshy face, now his back is to us—he’s stepping on the elevator—”
“Yeah, I know him. Why?”
“I’ve seen him.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” The combination of Saul’s eyes and the filing equipment in his skull is the equal of any card system yet invented. “You probably saw him August seventeenth, nineteen hundred and thirty-eight, crossing Madison Avenue against a light—”
“No. I saw him Friday, twice. When Naylor met the woman at First Avenue and Fifty-second Street that man was standing across the street in a doorway looking at them. An hour later, when they parted at Second Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, he was standing forty feet away, again in a doorway, and when the woman walked downtown on Second Avenue he started after her. That’s all I saw because Naylor was on his way and I was tailing him.”
“Is this certified?”
“For me it is.”
“Then me too. In case this head-flattener is going on with his career and picks me next, the man’s name is Sumner Hoff. He works for Naylor-Kerr and his office is in the stock department. File it.”
“I will. Is that all here?”
I said it was, and Saul went.
I took an elevator to the thirty-fourth floor, not knowing what to expect. It was quite possible that a delegation of executives would be waiting for me, to tell me to get the hell out and stay out. But nobody at all was waiting for me. It is true that when I got to the arena, skirted it, and started down the long aisle, I was on the receiving end of plenty of assorted glances, but that was only more of the same as last week. I left my coat and hat in my room, emerged immediately, crossed to the other side of the arena, opened the door of Hester Livsey’s room, entered, and shut the door behind me.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
She had straightened up from dusting off her desk. She looked nervous, unhappy, and annoyed. Fritz would have said that she did not have the appearance of a good eater. I did not entirely lose the impression that she was in some kind of trouble that no one but me could understand and no one but me could help her out of, but the most vulgar eye could have seen at a glance that she was in trouble. That much of it I would have to share.
“My name,” I said, “is Archie Goodwin and I work for Nero Wolfe.”
“I know that. What do you want?”
Evidently everybody in the stock department knew everything. “I’m afraid,” I told her, “that I can’t make my answer quite as direct and to the point as your question. I can tell you what I want, but I’ll have to leave it more or less blank why I want it. I want to date you up—to meet me at five o’clock this afternoon and go to Nero Wolfe’s office with me. He wants to have a talk with you—”
“What about?”
“You’re so damn gruff,” I complained. “I can’t tell you what about except that it’s connected with the murder of Kerr Naylor, and you could guess that with both eyes shut. Let me try it that way first, just ask you, will you do it?”
“Certainly not. Why should I?”
“In that case that comes next, why you should. I would have liked it much better without that, but I can’t have everything. Mr. Wolfe has learned a certain fact which has to do with you and Kerr Naylor, and he wants to ask you about it. The nature of the fact is such—”
“What is it?”
I shook my head. “Its nature is such that if you don’t go and let him ask you about it he will be obliged to give the fact to the police and then there will be no question of letting. You won’t go, you’ll be taken, and the asking atmosphere will be different.”
“My God,” she said in a tone with no expression at all, as if she were too stunned to feel anything.
It irritated me. “It’s a good thing for you I’m not a policeman,” I declared. “You’d better think up a better entrance than that for them if it goes that far. Your chin’s sagging.”
She came to me, abruptly and swiftly, put her hands on me, her open palms flat against my chest so I had to brace myself, raised her face to me, and half commanded, half implored, “What—is—the—fact?”
She nearly got the desired result at that. But I stopped it before it reached my tongue and shook my head firmly. “Nope. You’ll get it from Mr. Wolfe.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“No.”
“There isn’t any. I don’t believe it. There isn’t any fact.”
“The hell there isn’t.” I was disgusted with her for not doing better. “You’re just like glass to look through. You have just told me that there’s not one fact, but two and maybe more, and you’ve got to know which one Wolfe has.”
She had certainly uncovered herself, but she was not floored, and she now showed that she could grab a nettle. She went to the rack in the corner and got her coat and stuck an arm in it.
“I’ll go now,” she said.
“You can’t.” I went to relieve her of the coat. “The one appointment Mr. Wolfe wouldn’t break is the one with the orchids from nine to eleven in the morning.” I glanced at my wrist. “We can leave in an hour and a quarter. I’ll meet you in the lobby at a quarter to eleven.”
But she knew what she wanted. “I’m not going to just sit here,” she said, “and if I tried to take dictation—I couldn’t. We can go now and wait for him. Wait here a minute while I tell Mr. Rosenbaum.”
Having her coat, I hung it up, and explained that anyway I had an errand in the building that had to be attended to before I could leave. She gave in, but only because she couldn’t help it. I got out of there, not being absolutely sure how I would react if she snapped out of it and started to work on me in earnest. She agreed to meet me in the lobby at 10:45, and I returned to my room, picked up the phone, and called Wolfe and told him to expect us at eleven. I also told him of Saul’s recognition of Sumner Hoff. Then I got the Naylor-Kerr switchboard and gave the extension number of the office of the president.
I had to fight for him that time. He was in an important meeting and couldn’t be disturbed, but I finally persuaded his secretary that no meeting was more important than me that morning and was told to hold the wire. It was a long hold. After five minutes I wondered who was kissing her now, and after three more I suspected I had been left to starve. I had my finger poised ready to start jiggling when the secretary’s voice came.
“Mr. Goodwin.”
“Still here and still hoping.”
“Please come up to the Board Room on the thirty-sixth floor. You will be admitted.”
Her tone implied that that was a break in a thousand, so I thanked her warmly.
On the thirty-sixth floor the executive receptionist told me where the Board Room was, and when I reached it an executive sentinel, outside the door, made sure my name was mine and then opened for me. I walked in looking dignified.
It was up to snuff. The room was big, high-ceilinged, well lighted, and impressive to a rank-and-filer like me, who had only been on the payroll three-fifths of a week. An enormous rug nearly covered the floor. The table, of bleached walnut, was about the size of my bedroom though not the same shape. All around it were roomy armchairs, upholstered in brown leather, twenty or more, with all but four or five of them occupied. There were two chairs at each end of the table and the others were along the sides.
In one of the chairs at the far end sat Jasper Pine. In the other one was a man of whose bulk there was so little left that most of the chair was being wasted. Age had certainly withered him. At the first glance I recognized him, from a portrait of him on the wall of the president’s office, as old George Naylor, one of the founders of the firm and the father of Mrs. Jasper Pine, Cecily to me, and of Kerr Naylor, deceased.
Pine said, not getting up, “Gentlemen, this is Mr. Archie Goodwin. Goodwin, this is a joint meeting of the Board of Directors and some of the executive staff. It is a special meeting, called to consider the matter of the death of Mr. Kerr Naylor. We have d
iscussed it at some length in all its aspects. The suggestion has been made that we instruct Nero Wolfe, your employer, to continue the investigation and extend it to include Mr. Naylor’s death. Some of those present think that before deciding that point we should—”
He stopped because old George Naylor uttered an emphatic word. It was a word often heard among engineers doing field work, truck drivers, and detectives when working under strain, but I wouldn’t have expected it to be used at a directors’ meeting.
The founder added to it, “It’s already decided! Certainly Wolfe continues!” It wasn’t from him, I noted, that his son had got a tenor voice. His was baritone and still had volume and force, though his age was in it too.
There were murmurs. Pine told him with courteous deference but with not quite all the impatience filtered out, “It was agreed, I thought, Mr. Naylor, that we should hear from Goodwin first. Goodwin, tell us what you have done since you came here last Wednesday.”
Nothing was said about sitting down, in spite of five empty chairs, so, seeing that one there at my end was vacant, I got into it and adjusted myself comfortably.
“Do you want the high spots,” I asked, “or all the trimmings?”
Pine said to go ahead and they would stop me if it was too detailed. I did so. I gave them what I thought should be enough to satisfy, but nothing to compare with one of my all-out performances with Wolfe, and skipping a few items entirely, as for instance my first encounter with Gwynne Ferris when she put on her non-spelling act. They interrupted me whenever they felt like it, to ask questions or make critical comments, and when I got to the scene at the door of Sumner Hoff’s office, where Kerr Naylor told me he knew who killed Waldo Moore, they came at me in pairs and threes. Evidently there were two schools of thought and maybe more.
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