Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 14
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“She was good at offering incentives,” I declared. “She was good period. The way she pretended here, Tuesday afternoon, that she wanted Poor to skip it and go live in the country and grow roses, with her to cook and darn socks.”
Wolfe nodded. “I admit she was ingenious. By the way, Mr. Groll, did she have an opportunity to conceal those four capsules in that desk calendar?”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Helen and I were discussing that. She came there Tuesday to go with Poor to the rodeo, and she could have done it then. Anyway, she had keys, she could have done it any time.”
“That was well conceived,” Wolfe said approvingly. “That and the hairs in the box of cigars. She was preparing for all contingencies. Neither of those touches was meant for you, Mr. Cramer, but for a jury in case it ever got to that. She had sense enough to know what a good lawyer could do with complications of that sort. Will you gentlemen have some beer?”
“No,” Cramer said bluntly. “I’ll have a question. Poor wasn’t here Tuesday afternoon?”
“No, sir. Arthur Howell was.”
“Then where was he?”
“At the rodeo.” Wolfe pushed a button, two pushes for beer. “Again Mrs. Poor was ingenious. Look at her schedule for Tuesday. She went to the Blaney and Poor office—what time, Mr. Groll?”
Helen answered. “She came around noon. They went to lunch together and then were going to the rodeo.”
“Thank you. So all she had to do was to make some excuse and see that he went to the rodeo alone. It was an ideal selection—Madison Square Garden, that enormous crowd. Then she met Arthur Howell somewhere near, having arranged for him to be dressed as her husband was dressed, and brought him here. She was driving her car—or her husband’s car. They left here a little before five o’clock. Between here and Forty-second Street he got out and went to Grand Central to take a train to White Plains. A woman who could persuade a man to help her kill her husband could surely persuade him to take a train to White Plains.”
Fritz brought beer, and Wolfe opened a bottle and poured.
“Then she continued to Fiftieth Street and met her husband as he left the rodeo, and they drove to West-chester, having an appointment to see Mr. Blaney at his place there. She talked her husband out of that, left him at a place called Monty’s Tavern, drove somewhere, probably the White Plains railroad station, met Arthur Howell there as arranged, drove to an isolated spot probably previously selected, turned off the road into an orchard, killed Mr. Howell or knocked him unconscious with whatever she used for that purpose, removed his clothing, and ran the car over him to obliterate his face.”
A noise came from Helen Vardis. She had obliterated her own face by covering it with her hands. That gave Joe an excuse to touch her again, which he did.
“Granted her basic premise,” Wolfe went on, “she couldn’t very well have been expected to let Arthur Howell continue to live. She would never have had a carefree moment. What if Mr. Goodwin or I had met him on the street? That thought should have occurred to him, but apparently something about Mrs. Poor had made him quit thinking. There are precedents. Since she was good at detail, I presume she spread his coat over his head so as to leave no telltale matter on her tires. What she then did with the clothing is no longer of interest, at least not to me.”
He drank beer. “She proceeded. First to Mr. Blaney’s place to make sure, by looking through windows, that he was alone there, so that she could safely say that she had gone to see him and couldn’t find him. Again she was providing for all contingencies. If Arthur Howell’s body was after all identified, known as that of a man who was with the Beck Products Corporation and had access to those capsules, it would help to have it established that Mr. Blaney had not been at home during the time that Arthur Howell had been killed. It wouldn’t surprise me if a good search around Mr. Blaney’s place discovered Mr. Howell’s clothes concealed—no, that wouldn’t do, since they were the same as Mr. Poor’s. She wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.”
He emptied the glass. “The rest is anticlimax, though of course for her it was the grand consummation. She returned to Monty’s Tavern, told her husband Mr. Blaney had not been at home, dined with him, drove back to New York and went to their apartment, and got him a nice fresh cigar from a new box. Everything worked perfectly. It sounds more complicated than it really was. Such details as making sure that no photographs of her husband would be available for the newspapers had no doubt been already attended to.”
“That receipt you signed,” Cramer growled.
“What? Oh. That gave her no difficulty. Arthur Howell gave the receipt to her, naturally, and she put it in her husband’s pocket. That was important. It was probably the first thing she did after the cigar exploded.”
“Meanwhile you’ve got the five thousand dollars.”
“Yes, sir. I have.”
“But Poor didn’t pay it to you. You never saw Poor. You weren’t hired by him. If you want to say Mrs. Poor paid it, do you take money from murderers?”
It was one of Cramer’s feeblest attempts to be nasty, certainly not up to his standard.
Wolfe merely poured beer and said, “Pfui. Whether Mr. Poor paid me or not, he got his money’s worth.”
Try analyzing the logic of that. I can’t.
The Rex Stout Library
Fer-de-Lance
The League of Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
The Red Box
Too Many Cooks
Some Buried Caesar
Over My Dead Body
Where There’s a Will
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Silent Speaker
Too Many Women
And Be a Villain
The Second Confession
Trouble in Triplicate
In the Best Families
Three Doors to Death
Murder by the Book
Curtains for Three
Prisoner’s Base
Triple Jeopardy
The Golden Spiders
The Black Mountain
Three Men Out
Before Midnight
Might As Well Be Dead
Three Witnesses
If Death Ever Slept
Three for the Chair
Champagne for One
And Four to Go
Plot It Yourself
Too Many Clients
Three at Wolfe’s Door
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Homicide Trinity
The Mother Hunt
A Right to Die
Trio for Blunt Instruments
The Doorbell Rang
Death of a Doxy
The Father Hunt
Death of a Dude
Please Pass the Guilt
A Family Affair
Death Times Three
The Hand in the Glove
Double for Death
Bad for Business
The Broken Vase
The Sound of Murder
Red Threads
The Mountain Cat Murders
Rex Stout
REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but left to enlist in the navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sight-seeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds from his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels t
hat received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program Speaking of Liberty, and as a member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.
The World of
Rex Stout
Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen, some never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in “The Rex Stout Library” will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.
Trouble in Triplicate
At the time of TROUBLE IN TRIPLICATE’S publication in 1949, The New Yorker magazine did a rather complimentary (and by no means embellished) piece on Rex Stout. One reader lacked sufficient faith in the great author and took the magazine to task for its claims. Here is his response.
DEPARTMENT OF
AMPLIFICATION
JULY 14, 1949
To the Editors, The New Yorker,
SIRS:
IT is perilous at any time to take issue with a writer of Alva Johnston’s reputation. It is doubly dangerous when one may be taking issue at the same time with Rex Stout, who, to judge by Mr. Johnston’s recent Profile of him, could singlehanded out-argue a team made up of Sam Leibowitz, Casey Stengel, and Donald Duck. Nevertheless, I am going to take issue with Mr. Johnston and let Mr. Stout shoulder his way into the matter if he feels like it.
In the Profile of Mr. Stout, Mr. J. says, “John Wallace Stout [Rex Stout’s father] had an extraordinary library. It consisted of about twelve hundred volumes of biography, history, fiction, philosophy, science, and poetry. Rex had read them all by the time he was eleven.”
I just plain don’t believe this assertion I say that it is impossible for an eleven-year-old boy, Stout or not Stout, to have read twelve hundred assorted volumes of printed matter, especially of such printed matter as must have been in the Stout home fifty-odd years ago. It was a windy era, and books ran long.
Let us say, since Mr. Johnston does not state otherwise, that Rex Stout began reading books—honest, three-pound books—at the age of six. That allows him five years, or 1,826 days. (1896 was a leap year.) On the next factor in this computation, let us give Mr. Johnston’s statement a break; let us say that the twelve hundred volumes averaged three hundred pages apiece. In reality, they probably averaged many more pages than that. No thrifty Quaker of that time would have handed out good money for a skinny little book of less than four or five hundred pages.
Well, twelve hundred volumes of three hundred pages each is three hundred and sixty thousand pages. That means that for five years, from the time he was six until he was eleven, this spare-time bookworm was devouring a hundred and ninety-seven pages of heavy stuff every single day, without fail.
Now, a person could easily read a hundred and ninety-seven pages a day, although I deem it unlikely that any seven- or eight-year-old boy would do so, but by Mr. Johnston’s own account the young Stout was not a lad with a one-track mind. He was doing plenty of other things that took time. To clarify my position in all this, I have jotted down my own estimate—arbitrary, of course—of what the boy was up to:
YOUNG REX STOUT’s DAY
School1 4 hours
Travel time to and from school2 2 hours
Sleep 8 hours
Mathematical wizardry2 2 hours
Meals 2 hours
Ghost exorcising and such sundries ½ hour
Going to church4 1 hour
Committing routine annoyances5 2 hours
Natural odds and ends ½ hour
Total 22 hours
Left for reading 2 hours
1If this figure seems low, it is because it is estimated on a yearly basis, allowing for vacations. As for holidays, I couldn’t be bothered figuring them in.
2At one place in the Profile, I got the impression that the nearest school was nine miles away and thus involved a round trip of eighteen miles. So, considering the transportation of the period, I figure the portal-to-portal time expenditure, apread over a seven-day week, must have averaged about two hours a day.
3Mr. Johnston tells fully of the tyke’s mathematical prowess and of the exhibitions of it he gave, indicating that he spent a good deal of time on this branch of tiresomeness. I’ve let it go, conservatively, at two hours daily.
4Come to look back at the Profile, it was the church and not the school that I took to be nine miles away, but, at that, the church was probably near the school, and since this garrulous lad Stout used to engage his Sunday-school teacher in arguments about such things as the possibility of changing water into wine, the whole process of Sunday-school attending must have used up seven hours a week, or an average of one hour a day. In debating a much simpler feat—turning wine into water—I have heard arguments continue for weeks and months between certain saloon proprietors accused of this metamorphosis and the customers at the bar, so I think my estimate is fair.
5I am moved to explain here that Rex Stout between the ages of six and eleven does not appeal to me as the most entrancing of youngsters, at least as set forth by Mr. Johnston. To put it another way, if his duplicate were up for adoption this minute, my dear ones and I would take a distinctly bleak attitude toward any effort to fob him off on us. Therefore, I have assumed that the lad set aside an hour or so a day for being a nuisance generally, purely as a matter of routine.
My reasoning thus far compels me either to accept the deduction that young Rex Stout read a hundred and ninety-seven pages in two hours of every day from the age of six to the age of eleven or to reject the deduction. I reject the deduction. That would be ninety-eight and a half pages an hour, or about 1.6 pages a minute. Mostly heavy stuff, too—biography, history, philosophy, science, poetry. I simply don’t believe it. Not for 1.6 minutes do I believe it.
Sincerely,
JOHN MCNULTY