by Rex Stout
“That’s better,” Wolfe said. “I have extended my apology and regret, and we have given you all the information we have. I add this: first, that nothing in that statement will be revealed to anyone by Mr. Goodwin or me without your consent; and second, that my self-esteem has been severely injured and it would give me great satisfaction to expose the murderer. Granted that that’s a job for the police, for me it is my job. I would welcome your help, not as my client; I would accept no fee. I realize that at the moment you are under shock, that you are overwhelmed by the disaster in prospect for the firm you head; and when your mind clears you may be tempted by the possibility of minimizing the damage by dealing with your intramural treachery yourself, and letting the culprit escape his doom. If you went about it with sufficient resourceful-ness and ingenuity it is conceivable that the police could be cheated of their prey, but not that I could be.” “You are making a wholly unwarranted assumption,” Otis said.
“I am not making an assumption. I am merely telling you my intention. The police hypothesis, and mine, is the obvious one: that a member of your firm killed Miss Aaron. Though the law does not insist that the testi-mony against him in court must include proof of his motive, inevitably it would. Will you assert that you won’t try to prevent that? That you will not regard the reputation of your firm as your prime concern?”
Otis opened his mouth and closed it again.
Wolfe nodded. “I thought not. Then I advise you to help me. If you do, I’ll have two objectives, to get the murderer and to see that your firm suffers as little as possible; if you don’t, I’ll have only one. As for the police, I doubt if they’ll expect you to cooperate, since they are not nincompoops. They will realize that you have a deeper interest than the satisfaction of justice. Well, sir?”
Otis’s palms were cupping his knees and his head was tilted forward so he could study the back of his left hand. His eyes shifted to his right hand, and when that too had been properly studied he lifted his head and spoke. “You used the word ‘hypothesis,’ and that’s all it is, that a member of my firm killed Miss Aaron. How did he know she was here? She said that nobody knew.”
“He could have followed her. Evidently she left your office soon after she talked with him. Archie?”
“She probably walked,” I said. “Between fifteen and twenty-five minutes, depending on her rate. At that time of day empty taxis are scarce, and crosstown they crawl. It would have been a cinch to tail her on foot.”
“How did he get in?” Otis demanded. “Did he sneak in unseen when you admitted her?”
“No. You have read my statement. He saw her enter and knew this is Nero Wolfe’s address. He went to a phone booth and rang this number and she answered. Here.” I tapped my phone. “With me not here that would be automatic for a trained secretary. I had not pushed the button so it didn’t ring in the plant rooms. It would ring in the kitchen, but Fritz wasn’t there. She answered it, and he said he wanted to see her at once and would give her a satisfactory explanation, and she told him to come here. When he came she was at the front door and let him in. All he was expecting to do was stall for time, but when he learned that she was alone on this floor and she hadn’t seen Mr. Wolfe he had another idea and acted on it. Two minutes would have been plenty for the whole operation, even less.”
“All that is mere conjecture.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t present. But it fits. If you have one that fits better I do shorthand.”
“The police have covered everything here for fingerprints.”
“Sure. But it was below freezing outdoors and I suppose the members of your firm wear gloves.”
“You say that he learned she hadn’t seen Wolfe, but she had talked with you.”
“She didn’t tell him that she had told me. It wouldn’t take many words for him to learn that she was alone and hadn’t seen Mr. Wolfe. Either that, or she did tell him but he went ahead anyhow. The former is more probable and I like it better.”
He studied me a while, then he closed his eyes and his head tilted again. When his eyes opened he put them at Wolfe. “Mr. Wolfe. I reserve comment on your suggestion that I would be moved by personal considerations to balk justice. You ask me to help you. How?”
“By giving me information. By answering questions. Your mind is trained in inquiry; you know what I will ask.”
“I’ll know better when I hear you. Go ahead and we’ll see.”
Wolfe looked at the wall clock. “It’s nearly an hour past midnight, and this will be prolonged. It will be a tiresome wait for Miss Paige.”
“Of course,” Otis agreed. He looked at me. “Will you ask her to step in?”
I got up and crossed to the door to the front room. As I entered, words were at the tip of my tongue, but that was as far as they got. She wasn’t there. Through a wide-open window cold air was streaming in. As I went to it and stuck my head out I was prepared to see her lying there with one of my neckties around her throat, though I hadn’t left one in the room. It was a relief to see that the areaway, eight feet down, was unoccupied.
Chapter 3
A roar came from the office. “Archie! What the devil are you up to?”
I shut the window, glanced around to see if there were any signs of violence or if she had left a note, saw neither, and rejoined the conference.
“She’s gone,” I said. “Leaving no message. When I-”
“Why did you open a window?”
“I didn’t. I closed it. When I took her in there I locked the door to the hall so she couldn’t wander around and hear things she wasn’t supposed to, so when she got tired waiting the window was the only way out.”
“She climbed out a window?” Otis demanded.
“Yes, sir. It’s a mere conjecture, but it fits. The window was wide open, and she’s not in the room, and she’s not outside. I looked.”
“I can’t believe it. Miss Paige is a level-headed and reliable-” He bit it off. “No. No! I no longer know who is reliable.” He rested his elbow on the chair arm and propped his head with his hand. “May I have a glass of water?”
Wolfe suggested brandy, but he said he wanted wa-ter, and I went to the kitchen and brought some. He got a little metal box from a pocket, took out two pills, and washed them down.
“Will they help?” Wolfe asked. “The pills?”
“Yes. The pills are reliable.” He handed me the glass. “Then we may proceed?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any notion why Miss Paige was impelled to leave by a window?”
“No. It’s extraordinary. Damn it, Wolfe, I have no notions of anything! Can’t you see I’m lost?”
“I can. Shall we put it off?”
“No!”
“Very well. My assumption that Miss Aaron was killed by a member of your firm, call him X, rests on a prior assumption, that when she spoke with Mr. Goodwin she was candid and her facts were accurate. Would you challenge that assumption?”
Otis looked at me. “Tell me something. I know what she said from your statement, and it sounded like her, but how was she-her voice and manner? Did she seem in any way��� well, out of control? Unbalanced?”
“No, sir,” I told him. “She sat with her back straight and her feet together, and she met my eyes all the time.”
He nodded. “She would. She always did.” To Wolfe:
“At this time, here privately with you, I don’t challenge your assumption.”
“Do you challenge the other one, that X killed her?”
“I neither challenge it nor accept it.”
“Pfui. You’re not an ostrich, Mr. Otis. Next: if Miss Aaron’s facts were accurate, it must be supposed that X was in a position to give Mrs. Sorell information that would help her substantially in her action against her husband, your client. That is true?”
“Of course.” Otis was going to add something, decided not to, and then changed his mind again. “Again here privately with you, it’s not merely her action at law. It’s blackmail. Pe
rhaps not technically, but that’s what it amounts to. Her demands are exorbitant and preposterous. It’s extortion.”
“And a member of your firm could give her weapons. Which one or ones?”
Otis shook his head. “I won’t answer that.” Wolfe’s brows went up. “Sir? If you pretend to help at all that’s the very least you can do. If you’re rejecting my proposal say so and I’ll get on without you. By noon tomorrow-today-the police will have that elemen-tary question answered. It may take me longer.”
“It certainly may,” Otis said. “You haven’t mentioned a third assumption you’re making. You are assuming that Goodwin was candid and accurate in reporting what Miss Aaron said.”
“Bah.” Wolfe was disgusted. “You are gibbering. If you hope to impeach Mr. Goodwin you are indeed forlorn. You might as well go. If you regain your faculties later and wish to communicate with me I’ll be here.” He pushed his chair back.
“No.” Otis extended a hand. “Good God, man, I’m trapped! It’s not my faculties! I have my faculties.”
“Then use them. Which member of your firm was in a position to betray its interests to Mrs. Sorell?”
“They all were. Our client is vulnerable in certain respects, and the situation is extremely difficult, and we have frequently conferred together on it. I mean, of course, my three partners. It could have only been one of them, partly because none of our associates was in our confidence on this matter, but mainly because Miss Aaron told Goodwin it was a member of the firm. She wouldn’t have used that phrase, ‘member of the firm,’ loosely. For her it had a specific and restricted application. She could only have meant Frank Edey, Miles Heydecker, or Gregory Jett. And that’s incredible!”
“Incredible literally or rhetorically? Do you disbelieve Miss Aaron-or, in desperation, Mr. Goodwin? Here with me privately?”
“No.”
Wolfe turned a palm up. “Then let’s get at it. It is equally incredible for all three of those men, or are there preferences?”
During the next hour Otis balked at least a dozen times, and on some details-for instance, the respects in which Morton Sorell was vulnerable-he clammed up absolutely, but I had enough to fill nine pages of my notebook.
Frank Edey, fifty-five, married with two sons and a daughter, wife living, got twenty-seven per cent of the firm’s net income. (Otis’s share was forty per cent.) He was a brilliant idea man but seldom went to court. He had drafted the marriage agreement which had been signed by Morton Sorell and Rita Ramsey when they got yoked four years ago. Personal financial condition, sound. Relations with wife and children, so-so. Interest in other women, definitely yes, but fairly discreet. Interest in Mrs. Sorell casual so far as Otis knew.
Miles Heydecker, forty-seven, married and wife liv-ing but no children, got twenty-two per cent. His fa-ther, now dead, had been one of the original members of the firm. His specialty was trial work and he handled the firm’s most important cases in court. He had appeared for Mrs. Sorell at her husband’s request two years ago when she had been sued by a man who had formerly been her agent. He was tight with money and had a nice personal pile of it. Relations with his wife, uncertain; on the surface, okay. Too interested in his work and his hobbies, chess and behind-the-scene politics, to bother with women, including Mrs. Sorell.
Gregory Jett, thirty-six, single, had been made a firm member and allotted eleven per cent of the income because of his spectacular success in two big corporation cases. One of the corporations was controlled by Morton Sorell, and for the past year or so Jett had been a fairly frequent guest at the Sorell home on Fifth Avenue but had not been noticeably attentive to his hostess. His personal financial condition was one of the details Otis balked on, but he allowed it to be inferred that Jett was careless about the balance between in-come and outgo and was in the red in his account with the firm. Shortly after he had been made a member of the firm, about two years ago, he had dropped a fat chunk, Otis thought about forty thousand dollars, back-ing a Broadway show that flopped. A friend of his, female, had been in the cast. Whether he had had other expenses connected with a female friend or friends Otis either didn’t know or wasn’t telling. He did say that he had gathered, mostly from remarks Bertha Aaron had made, that in recent months Jett had shown more attention to Ann Paige than their professional association required.
But when Wolfe suggested the possibility that Ann Paige had left through a window because she suspected, or even knew, what was in the wind, and had decided to take a hand, Otis wouldn’t buy it. He was having all he could do to swallow the news that one of his partners was a snake, and the idea that another of his associates might have been in on it was too much. He would tackle Ann Paige himself; she would no doubt have an acceptable explanation.
On Mrs. Morton Sorell he didn’t balk at all. Part of his information was known to everyone who read newspapers and magazines: that as Rita Ramsey she had dazzled Broadway with her performance in Reach for the Moon when she was barely out of her teens, that she had followed with even greater triumphs in two other plays, that she had spumed Hollywood, that she had also spumed Morton Sorell for two years and then abandoned her career to marry him. But Otis added other information that had merely been hinted at in gossip columns: that in a year the union had gone sour, that it became apparent that Rita had married Sorell only to get her lovely paws on a bale of dough, and that she was by no means going to settle for the terms of the marriage agreement. She wanted much more, more than half, and she had carefully begun to collect evidence of certain activities of Scroll’s, but he had got wise and consulted his attorneys, Otis, Edey, Heydecker and Jett, and they had stymied her-or thought they had. Otis had been sure they had, until he had read the copy of my statement. Now he was sure of nothing.
But he was still alive. When he got up to go, at two hours past midnight, he had bounced back some. He wasn’t nearly as jittery as he had been when he asked for a glass of water to take the pills. He hadn’t accepted Wolfe’s offer in so many words, but he had agreed to take no steps until he had heard further from Wolfe, provided he heard within thirty-two hours, by ten o’clock Wednesday morning. The only action he would take during that period would be to instruct Ann Paige to tell no one that he had read my statement and to leam why she had skedaddled. He didn’t think the police would tell him the contents of my statement, but if they did he would say that he would credit it only if it had corroboration. Of course he wanted to know what Wolfe was going to do, but Wolfe said he didn’t know and probably wouldn’t decide until after breakfast.
When I returned to the office after holding Otis’s coat for him and letting him out, Fritz was there.
“No,” Wolfe was saying grimly. “You know quite well I almost never eat at night.”
“But you had no dinner. An omelet, or at least-”
“No! Confound it, let me starve! Go to bed!”
Fritz looked at me, I shook my head, and he went. I sat down and spoke. “Do I get Saul and Fred and Orrie?”
“No.” He took in air through his nose and let it out through his mouth. “If I don’t know how I am going to proceed, how the deuce can I have errands for them?
“Rhetorical,” I said.
“It is not rhetorical. It’s logical. There are the obvious routine errands, but that would be witless. Find the cheap restaurant or lunchroom where they met? How many are there?”
“Oh, a thousand. More.”
He grunted. “Or question the entire personnel of that law office to learn which of those three men spoke at length with Miss Aaron yesterday afternoon? Or, assuming that he followed her here, left the office on her heels? Or which one cannot account for himself from five o’clock to ten minutes past six? Or find the nearby phone booth from which he dialed this number? Or investigate their relations with Mrs. Sorell? Those are all sensible and proper lines of inquiry, and by mid-moming Mr. Cramer and the District Attorney will have a hundred men pursuing them.”
“Two hundred. This is special.”
> “So for me to put three men on them, four including you, would be frivolous. A possible procedure would be to have Mr. Otis get them here-Edey, Heydecker, and Jett. He could merely tell them that he has engaged me to investigate the murder that was committed in my house.”
“If they’re available. They’ll be spending most of the day at the DA’s office. By request.”
He shut his eyes and tightened his lips. I picked up the copy of my statement which Otis had surrendered, got the second carbon from my drawer, went and opened the safe, and put them on a shelf. I had closed the safe door and was twirling the knob when Wolfe spoke.
“Archie.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will they tackle Mrs. Sorell?”
“I doubt it. Not right away. What for? Since Cramer warned us that if we blab what Bertha Aaron told me we may be hooked for libel, which was kind of him, evidently he’s going to save it, and going to Mrs. Sorell would spill it.”
He nodded. “She is young and comely.”
“Yeah. I’ve never seen her offstage. You have seen pictures of her.”
“You have a flair for dealing with personable young women.”
“Sure. They melt like chocolate bars in the sun. But you’re exaggerating it a little if you think I can go to that specimen and ask her which member of the firm she met in a cheap restaurant or lunchroom and she’ll wrap her arms around me and murmur his name in my ear. It might take me an hour or more.”
“You can bring her here.”
“Maybe. Possibly. To see the orchids?” “I don’t know.” He pushed the chair back and raised his bulk. “I am not myself. Come to my room at eight o’clock.” He headed for the hall.
Chapter 4
At 10:17 that Tuesday morning I left the house, walked north fourteen short blocks and east six long ones, and entered the lobby of the Churchill. I walked instead of flagging a taxi for two reasons: because I had had less than five hours’ sleep and needed a lot of oxygen, especially from the neck up, and because eleven o’clock was probably the earliest Mrs. Morton Sorell, bom Rita Ramsey, would be accessible. It had taken only a phone call to Lon Cohen at the Gazette to leam that she had taken an apartment at the Churchill Towers two months ago, when she had left her husband’s roof.