The Golden Spiders

by Rex Stout

  If he intended the glance he shot at me to be complimentary, I’d hate to have him give me one of disapproval.

  Wolfe spoke. “I don’t prefer to tell you privately, Mr. Maddox. I prefer not to tell you at all.”

  Maddox didn’t look any sourer, because he couldn’t. “Do you know law, Mr. Wolfe?”

  “No.”

  “Then you should seek advice. Unless you can establish that Mrs. Fromm received value for that payment, I can compel you to disgorge it. I am giving you a chance to establish it.”

  “I can’t. She received nothing. As I told Mr. Horan on the phone, I intend to earn that money.”

  “How?”

  “By making sure that the murderer of Mrs. Fromm is exposed and punished.”

  “That’s ridiculous. That’s the function of officers of the law. The information I got about you today, on inquiry, indicated that you are not a shyster, but you sound like one.”

  Wolfe chuckled. “You’re prejudiced, Mr. Maddox. The feeling of virtuous lawyers toward shysters is the same as that of virtuous women toward prostitutes. Condemnation, certainly; but somewhere in it one tiny grain of envy, not to be recognized, let alone acknowledged. But don’t envy me. A shyster is either a fool or a fanatic, and I am neither. I would like to ask a question.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Did you know that Mrs. Fromm intended to call on me, before she came?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know that she had called on me, after she came?”

  “No.”

  Wolfe’s eyes moved. “You, Mr. Horan? Both questions.”

  “I don’t see—” Horan hesitated. “I question your right to ask them.”

  Maddox looked at him. “Meet him, Horan. You insisted on coming. You have claimed that Mrs. Fromm consulted you on important matters. He’s trying to lay ground. If he can establish that she told either you or me that she was coming to him, or had come, without disclosing what for, he’ll take the position that manifestly she didn’t want us to know and therefore he can’t betray the confidence. Head him off.”

  Horan wasn’t buying it. “I will not,” he insisted, “submit to a cross-examination.”

  Maddox started to argue, but Wolfe cut in. “Your elucidation may be acute as far as it goes, Mr. Maddox, but you don’t appreciate Mr. Horan’s difficulty. He is stumped. If to my second question he says yes, you’re right, I have a weapon and I’ll use it. But if he says no, then I ask him how he knew that Mrs. Fromm had given me a check. I’ll want to know, and I should think you will too.”

  “I already know. At least I know what he told me. This morning, when he heard of Mrs. Fromm’s death, he telephoned her home and spoke with Miss Estey, Mrs. Fromm’s secretary, and she told him about the check. I was in the country for the weekend, and Horan got me there. I drove to town immediately.”

  “Where in the country?”

  Maddox’s chin went up. “That’s sheer impudence.”

  Wolfe waved it away. “At any rate, it’s futile. I beg your pardon, not for impudence but for stupidity. Force of habit impelled it. In this intricate maze I must leave the conventional procedures, such as inquiry into alibis, to the police. Since you’re not stumped, Mr. Horan, will you answer my questions?”

  “No. On principle. You have no warrant to ask them.”

  “But you expect me to answer yours?”

  “No, not mine, because I have no warrant either. But Mr. Maddox has, as executor of the estate. You’ll answer him.”

  “We’ll see.” Wolfe was judicious. He addressed Maddox. “As I understand it, sir, you are not demanding that I return the money Mrs. Fromm paid me.”

  “That depends. Tell me under what arrangement and for what purpose it was paid, and I’ll consider the matter. I will not have the death of a valued client exploited and sensationalized by a private detective for his personal or professional profit.”

  “A worthy and wholesome attitude,” Wolfe conceded. “I could remark that I would be hard put to make the affair more sensational than it already is, but even so your attitude is admirable. Only here’s the rub: I’ll tell you nothing whatever of the conversation I had yesterday with Mrs. Fromm.”

  “Then you’re withholding evidence!”

  “Pfui. I have reported it to the police. In writing, signed.”

  “Then why not to me?”

  “Because I’m not a simpleton. I have reason to think that the conversation was one of the links in a chain that led to Mrs. Fromm’s death, and if that is so, the person most eager to know what she said to me is probably her murderer.”

  “I’m not her murderer.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  For a moment I thought Maddox was going to choke. His throat swelled visibly. But a veteran lawyer has had lots of practice controlling his reactions, and he managed it. “That’s worse than stupidity, it’s drivel.”

  “I disagree. Have the police talked with you?”

  “Certainly.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Two—no, three.”

  “Would you mind telling me who they were?”

  “A Captain Bundy, and a sergeant, and Deputy Commissioner Youmans. Also Assistant District Attorney Mandelbaum.”

  “Did any of them tell you what Mrs. Fromm consulted me about yesterday?”

  “No. We didn’t get onto that.”

  “I suggest that you see someone at the District Attorney’s office—preferably someone you know well—and ask him to tell you. If he does so, or if any other official does, without important reservations, I’ll disgorge—your word—the money Mrs. Fromm paid me.”

  Maddox was looking as if someone were trying to persuade him that his nose was on upside down.

  “I assure you,” Wolfe went on, “that I am not ass enough to withhold evidence in a capital crime, especially not one as sensational as this. Indeed, I am meticulous about it. Unless the police have information about you that is unknown to me I doubt if they have hitherto regarded you as a likely suspect, but you may now find them a nuisance, after I have reported that you were so zealous to learn what Mrs. Fromm said to me that you went to all this trouble. That, of course, is my duty. This time it will also be my pleasure.”

  “You are—” He was about to choke again. “You are threatening to report this interview.”

  “Not a threat. Merely informing you that I will do so as soon as you leave.”

  “I’m leaving now.” He was up. “I’ll replevy that ten thousand dollars.”

  He wheeled and marched out. I followed to go and open the door for him, but he beat me to it, though he had to dive into the front room for his hat. When I returned to the office Horan was on his feet looking down at Wolfe, but no words were passing. Wolfe told me, “Get Mr. Cramer’s office, Archie.”

  “Wait a minute.” Horan’s thin tenor was urgent. “You’re making a mistake, Wolfe. If you really intend to investigate the murder. Investigate how? You had two of the persons closest to Mrs. Fromm and her affairs here in your office, and you have chased one of them out. Is that sensible?”

  “Bosh.” Wolfe was disgusted. “You won’t even tell me whether Mrs. Fromm told you she came to me.”

  “The context of your question was offensive.”

  “Then I’ll try being affable. Will you give me the substance of what was said at the gathering at your home last evening?”

  Horan’s long eyelashes fluttered. “I doubt if I should. Of course I have told the police all about it, and they have urged me to be discreet.”

  “Naturally. But will you?”

  “No.”

  “Will you describe, fully and frankly, the nature and course of your relations with Mrs. Fromm?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “If I send Mr. Goodwin to the office of the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons, for which you are counsel, will you instruct the staff to answer his questions fully and freely?”

  “No.”

  “
So much for affability.” Wolfe turned. “Get Mr. Cramer’s office, Archie.”

  I swiveled and dialed WA 9-8241, and got a prompt response, but then it got complicated. None of our dear friends or enemies was available, and I finally had to settle for a Sergeant Griffin, and so informed Wolfe, who took his instrument and spoke.

  “Mr. Griffin? Nero Wolfe speaking. This is for the information of Mr. Cramer, so please see that he gets it. Mr. James Albert Maddox and Mr. Dennis Horan, both attorneys-at-law, called on me this evening. You have the names correctly? Yes, I suppose they are familiar. They asked me to tell them about my conversation with Mrs. Damon Fromm when she came to my office yesterday. I refused, and they insisted. I won’t go so far as to say that Mr. Maddox tried to bribe me, but I got the impression that if I told him about the conversation he wouldn’t press me to return the money Mrs. Fromm paid me; otherwise, he would. Mr. Horan concurred, at least tacitly. When Mr. Maddox left in a huff, Mr. Horan told me I was making a mistake. Will you please see that this reaches Mr. Cramer? No, that’s all now. If Mr. Cramer wants details or a signed statement I’ll oblige him.”

  Wolfe hung up and muttered at the lawyer, “Are you still here?”

  Horan was going, but in three steps he turned to say, “You may not know law, but you know how to skirt the edges of slander. After this performance I wonder how you got your reputation.”

  He went, and I got to the hall in time to see him emerge from the front room with his hat and depart. After chain-bolting the door, I went back to the office and observed enthusiastically, “Well, you certainly pumped them good! Milked ‘em and stripped ‘em. Congratulations!”

  “Shut up,” he told me, and picked up a book, not to throw.

  Chapter 9

  I had been scheduled to leave Saturday afternoon for a weekend jaunt to Lily Rowan’s fourteen-room shack in Westchester, but of course that had been knocked in the head—or rather, run over by a car. And my Sunday was no Sunday at all. Items:

  Sergeant Purley Stebbins came bright and early, when Wolfe was still up in his room with his breakfast tray, to get filled in on the invasion by the lawyers. I accommodated him. He was suspicious when he arrived, and more suspicious when he left. Though I explained that my employer was a genius and time would show that his stiff-arming them was a brilliant stroke, Purley refused to believe that Wolfe would have those two corralled in his office and not do his damndest to get a needle in. He did accept five or six crescents and two cups of coffee, but that was only because no man who has ever tasted Fritz’s Sunday-morning crescents could possibly turn them down.

  Wolfe and I both read every word of the accounts in the morning papers. Not that we hoped to get any hot leads, but at least we knew what the DA and Cramer had seen fit to release, and there were a few morsels to file for reference. Angela Wright, the Executive Secretary of Assadip, had formerly worked for Damon Fromm, and had been put in the Assadip job by him. Mrs. Fromm had supported more than forty charities and worthy causes, but Assadip had been her pet. Vincent Lipscomb, the publisher who had been at the dinner party at Horan’s apartment, had run a series of articles on displaced persons in his magazine, Modern Thought, and was planning another. Mrs. Dennis Horan had formerly been a movie star—well, anyhow, she had acted in movies. Paul Kuffner handled public relations for Assadip as a public service without remuneration, but he had also been professionally engaged in the interest of Mrs. Fromm personally. Dennis Horan was an authority on international law, belonged to five clubs, and had a reputation as an amateur chef.

  There still wasn’t a word about the flap from Matthew Birch’s pocket that had been retrieved from the chassis of the car that had killed Pete Drossos. The police were hanging onto that one. But because of the similarity of the manner of the killings, the Birch murder was getting a play too.

  Wolfe phoned his lawyer, Henry Parker, to ask about the process of a replevin and to tell him to get set for one in case Maddox kept his promise to make a grab for the ten grand. I had to track Parker down at a country club on Long Island.

  Not a peep out of Jean Estey.

  During the day three reporters phoned, and two made personal appearances on the stoop, but that was as far as they got. They didn’t like it that the Gazette had had an exclusive on Nero Wolfe’s working on the murder, and I sympathized with them.

  My morning phone call to Lon Cohen at the Gazette was too early, and I left word for him to call me back, which he did. When I went there in the afternoon to collect a supply of prints of their best shots of the people we were interested in, I told Lon we could use a few dozen crucial inside facts, and he said he could too. He claimed they had printed everything they knew, though of course they had pecks of hot hearsay, such as that Mrs. Dennis Horan had once thrown a cocktail shaker at Mrs. Fromm, and that a certain importer had induced Vincent Lipscomb to publish an article favoring low tariffs by financing a trip to Europe. None of it seemed to me to be worth toting back to Thirty-fifth Street.

  Anyway I had errands. For distribution of the photographs I met Saul Panzer at the Times Building, where he was boning up on displaced persons and Assadip; Orrie Cather at a bar and grill on Lexington Avenue, where he told me that the man who owed him a favor was playing golf at Van Cortlandt Park and could be seen later; and Fred Durkin at a restaurant on Broadway with his family, where Sunday dinner was $1.85 for adults and $1.15 for children. New York on a Sunday late in May is no place to open up a trail.

  I made one little try on my own before heading back to Thirty-fifth Street. I don’t remember ever doing a favor for a jewelry salesman, but I did a big one once for a certain member of the NYPD. If I had done my duty as a citizen and a licensed detective, he would have got it good and would still be locked up, but there were circumstances. No one knows about it, not even Wolfe. The man I did the favor for has given me to understand that he would like to hold my coat and hat if I ever get in a brawl, but as far as possible I’ve steered clear of him. That Sunday I thought what the hell, give the guy a chance to work it off, and I rang him and met him somewhere.

  I said I would give him five minutes to tell me who had killed Mrs. Fromm. He said the way it was going it would take him five years and no guarantee. I asked him if that was based on the latest dispatches, and he said yes. I said that was all I wanted to know and therefore withdrew my offer of five minutes, but if and when he could make it five hours instead of five years I would appreciate it if he would communicate.

  He asked, “Communicate what?”

  I said, “That it’s nearly ripe. That’s all. So I can tell Mr. Wolfe to dive for cover.”

  “He’s too damn fat to dive.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay, it’s a deal. You sure that’s all?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I thought maybe you were going to ask for Rowcliff’s head with an apple in his mouth.”

  I went home and told Wolfe, “Relax. The cops are playing eeny, meeny, miney, mo. They know more than we do, but they’re no closer to the answer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Gypsies. It’s authentic, fresh, and strictly private. I saw the boys and gave them the photos. Do you want the unimportant details?”

  “No.”

  “Any instructions?”

  “No.”

  “No program for me for tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  That was Sunday night.

  Monday morning I got a treat. Wolfe never shows downstairs until eleven o’clock. After breakfast in his room he takes the elevator to the roof for the two hours with the plants before descending to the office. For morning communication with me he uses the house phone unless there is something special. Apparently that morning was special, for when Fritz came to the kitchen after taking breakfast up he announced solemnly, “Audience for you. Levée!” I spell it French because he pronounced it so.

  I had finished with the morning paper, in which there was nothing to contradict my gypsies, and when my coff
ee cup was empty I ascended the one flight, knocked, and entered. On rainy mornings, or even gray ones, Wolfe breakfasts in bed, after tossing the black silk coverlet toward the foot because stains are bad for it, but when it’s bright he has Fritz put the tray on a table near a window. That morning it was bright, and I had my treat. Barefooted, his hair tousled, with his couple of acres of yellow pajamas dazzling in the sun, he was sensational.

  We exchanged good mornings, and he told me to sit. There was nothing left on his plate, but he wasn’t through with the coffee.

  “I have instructions,” he informed me.

  “Okay. I was intending to be at the bank at ten o’clock to deposit Mrs. Fromm’s check.”

  “You may. You will proceed from there. You will probably be out all day. Tell Fritz to answer the phone and take the usual precautions with visitors. Report by phone at intervals.”

  “The funeral is at two o’clock.”

  “I know, and therefore you may come home for lunch. We’ll see. Now the instructions.”

  He gave them to me. Four minutes did it. At the end he asked if I had any questions.

  I was frowning. “One,” I said. “It’s clear enough as far as it goes, but what am I after?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then that’s probably what I’ll get.”

  He sipped coffee. “It’s what I’ll expect. You’re stirring them up, that’s all. You’re turning a tiger loose in a crowd—or, if that’s too bombastic, a mouse. How will they take it? Will any of them tell the police, and if so, which one or ones?”

  I nodded. “Sure, I see the possibilities, but I wanted to know if there is any specific item I’m supposed to get.”

  “No. None.” He reached for the coffee pot.

  I went down to the office. In a drawer of my desk there is an assortment of calling cards, nine or ten different kinds, worded differently for different needs and occasions. I took some engraved ones with my name in the center and “Representing Nero Wolfe” in the corner, and on six of them I wrote in ink beneath my name, “To discuss what Mrs. Fromm told Mr. Wolfe on Friday.” With them in my wallet, and the check and bankbook in my pocket, and a gun under my armpit, I was fully loaded, and I got my hat and beat it.