by Rex Stout
If any of the developments, such as they were, meant anything to him, he gave no sign of it. Elinor Vance was arrested, held as a material witness, and after two days released on bail. The word I brought from Homicide was that there was nothing to it except that she had by far the best opportunity to put something in the coffee, with the exception of the cook. Not that there weren’t plenty of others; the list had been considerably lengthened by the discovery that the coffee had been made, bottled, and kept overnight in Miss Eraser’s apartment, with all the coming and going there.
Then there was the motive-collecting operation. In a murder case you can always get some motives together, but the trouble is you can never be sure which ones are sunfast for the people concerned. It all depends. There was the guy in Brooklyn a few years ago who stabbed a dentist in and around the heart eleven times because he had pulled the wrong tooth. In this case the motive assortment was about average, nothing outstanding but fairly good specimens. Six months ago Miss Fraser and Bill Meadows had had a first-class row, and she had fired him and he had been off the programme for three weeks. They both claimed that they now dearly loved each other.
Not long ago Nat Traub had tried to persuade a soup manufacturer, one of the Fraser sponsors, to leave her and sign up for an evening comedy show, and Miss Fraser had retaliated by talking the sponsor into switching to another agency.
Not only that, there were vague hints that Miss Fraser had started a campaign for a similar switch by other sponsors, including Starlite, but they couldn’t be nailed down. Again, she and Traub insisted that they were awful good friends.
The Radio Writers’ Guild should have been delighted to poison Miss Fraser on account of her tough attitude toward demands of the Guild for changes in contracts, and Elinor Vance was a member of the Guild in good standing. As for Tully Strong, Miss Fraser had opposed the formation of a Sponsors’ Council, and still didn’t like it, and of course if there were no Council there would be no secretary.
And so on. As motives go, worth tacking up but not spectacular. The one that would probably have got the popular vote was Deborah Koppel’s. Somebody in the DAs office had induced Miss Fraser to reveal the contents of her will. It left ten grand each to a niece and nephew, children of her sister who lived in Michigan, and all the rest to Deborah. It would be a very decent chunk, somewhere in six figures, with the first figure either a 2 or a 3, certainly worth a little investment in poison for anyone whose mind ran in that direction.
There was, however, not the slightest indication that Deborah’s mind did. She and Miss Fraser, then Miss Oxhall, had been girlhood friends in Michigan, had taught at the same school, and had become sisters-in-law when Madeline had married Deborah’s brother Lawrence.
Speaking of Lawrence, his death had of course been looked into again, chiefly on account of the coincidence of the cyanide. He had been a photographer and therefore, when needing cyanide, all he had to do was reach to a shelf for it.
What if he hadn’t killed himself after all? Or what if, even if he had, someone thought he hadn’t, believed it was his wife who had needed the cyanide in order to collect five thousand dollars in insurance money, and had now arranged, after six years, to even up by giving Miss Fraser a dose of it herself?
Naturally the best candidate for that was Deborah Koppel. But they couldn’t find one measly scrap to start a foundation with. There wasn’t the slightest evidence, ancient or recent, that Deborah and Madeline had ever been anything but devoted friends, bound together by mutual interest, respect and affection.
Not only that, the Michigan people refused to bat an eye at the suggestion that Lawrence Koppel’s death had not been suicide. He had been a neurotic hypochondriac, and the letter he had sent to his best friend, a local lawyer, had clinched it. Michigan had been perfectly willing to answer New York’s questions, but for themselves they weren’t interested.
Another of the thousand lines that petered out into nothing was the effort to link up one of the staff, especially Elinor Vance, with Michigan. They had tried it before with Cyril Orchard, and now they tried it with the others. No soap.
None of them had ever been there.
Wolfe, as I say, read some of this in the papers, and courteously listened to the rest of it, and much more, from me. He was not, however, permitted to limit himself strictly to the role of spectator. Cramer came to our office twice during that week, and Anderson, the Starlite president, once; and there were others.
There was Tully Strong, who arrived Saturday afternoon, after a six-hour session with Cramer and an assortment of his trained men. He had probably been pecked at a good deal, as all of them had, since they had told the cops a string of barefaced lies, and he was not in good humour. He was so sore that when he put his hands on Wolfe’s desk and leaned over at him to make some remarks about treachery, and his spectacles slipped forward nearly to the tip of his nose, he didn’t bother to push them back in place.
His theory was that the agreement with Wolfe was null and void because Wolfe had violated it. Whatever happened, Wolfe not only would not collect his fee, he would not even be reimbursed for expenses. Moreover, he would be sued for damages. His disclosure of a fact which, if made public, would inflict great injury on Miss Fraser and her programme, the network, and Starlite, was irresponsible and inexcusable, and certainly actionable.
Wolfe told him bosh, he had not violated the agreement.
No?” Strong straightened up. His necktie was to one side and his hair needed a comb and brush. His hand went up to his spectacles, which were barely hanging on, but instead of pushing them back he removed them. “You think not? You’ll see. And, besides, you have put Miss Eraser’s life in danger! I was trying to protect her! We all were!” “All?” Wolfe objected. “Not all. All but one.” “Yes, all!” Strong had come there to be mad and would have no interference. “No one knew, no one but us, that it was meant for her! Now everybody knows it! Who can protect her now? I’ll try, we all will, but what chance have we got?” It seemed to me he was getting illogical. The only threat to Miss Fraser, as far as we knew, came from the guy who had performed on the coffee, and surely we hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know.
I had to usher Tully Strong to the door and out. If he had been capable of calming down enough to be seated for a talk I would have been all for it, but he was really upset. When Wolfe told me to put him out I couldn’t conscientiously object. At that he had spunk. Anybody could have told from one glance at us that if I was forced to deal with him physically I would have had to decide what to do with my other hand, in case I wanted to be fully occupied, but when I took hold of his arm he jerked loose and then turned on me as if stretching me out would be pie. He had his specs in one hand, too. I succeeded in herding him out without either of us getting hurt.
As was to be expected, Tully Strong wasn’t the only one who had the notion that Wolfe had committed treason by giving their fatal secret to the cops. They all let us know it, too, either by phone or in person. Nat Traub’s attitude was specially bitter, probably because of the item that had been volunteered by Bill Meadows, that Traub had served the bottle and glass to Orchard, drainer’s crew must have really liked that one, and I could imagine the different keys they used playing it for Traub to hear. One thing I preferred not to imagine was what we would have got from Mr Walter B. Anderson, the Starlite president, and Fred Owen, the director of public relations, if anyone had told them the full extent of Wolfe’s treachery. Apparently they were still ignorant about the true and horrible reason why one of the bottles had contained coffee instead of The Drink You Dream Of.
Another caller, this one Monday afternoon, was the formula hound, Professor Savarese. He too came to the office straight from a long conference with the cops, and he too was good and mad, but for a different reason. The cops had no longer been interested in his association with Cyril Orchard, or in anything about Orchard at all, and he wanted to know why. They had refused to tell him.
They had rev
iewed his whole life, from birth to date, all over again, but with an entirely different approach. It was plain that what they were after now was a link between him and Miss Fraser. Why? What new factor had entered? The intrusion of a hitherto unknown and unsuspected factor would raise hell with his calculation of probabilities, but if there was one he had to have it, and quick.
This was the first good chance he had ever had to test his formulas on the most dramatic of all problems, a murder case, from the inside, and he wasn’t going to tolerate any blank spaces without a fight.
What was the new factor? Why was it now a vital question whether he had had any previous association, direct or indirects with Miss Fraser?
Up to a point Wolfe listened to him without coming to a boil, but he finally got annoyed enough to call on me again to do some more ushering. I obeyed in a half-hearted way. For one thing, Wolfe was passing up another chance to do a dime’s worth of work himself, with Savarese right here and more than ready to talk, and for another, I was resisting a temptation. The question had popped into my head, how would this figure wizard go about getting Miss Eraser’s indigestion into a mathematical equation? It might not be instructive to get him to answer it, but at least it would pass the time, and it would help as much in solving the case as anything Wolfe was doing. But, not wanting to get us any more deeply involved in treachery than we already were, I skipped it.
I ushered him out.
Anyhow, that was only Monday. By the time four more days had passed and another Friday arrived, finishing a full week since we had supplied Cramer with a fact, I was a promising prospect for a strait jacket. That evening, as I returned to the office with Wolfe after an unusually good dinner which I had not enjoyed, the outlook for the next three or four hours revolted me. As he got himself adjusted comfortably in his chair and reached for his book, I announced: “I’m going to my club.” He nodded, and got his book open.
“You do not even,” I said cuttingly, “ask me which club, though you know damn’ well I don’t belong to any. I am thoroughly fed up with sitting here day after day and night after night, waiting for the moment when the idea will somehow seep into you that a detective is supposed to detect. You are simply too goddam lazy to live. You think you’re a genius. Say you are. If in order to be a genius myself I had to be as self-satisfied, as overweight, and as inert as you are, I like me better this way.” Apparently he was reading.
“This,” I said, “is the climax I’ve been leading up to for a week-or rather, that you’ve been leading me up to. Sure, I know your alibi, and I’m good and sick of it-that there is nothing we can do that the cops aren’t already doing.
Of all the sausage.” I kept my voice dry, factual, and cultured. “If this case is too much for you why don’t you try another one? The papers are full of them.
How about the gang that stole a truckload of cheese yesterday right here on Eleventh Avenue? How about the fifth-grade boy that hit his teacher in the eye with a jelly bean? Page fifty-eight in the Times. Or, if everything but murder is beneath you, what’s wrong with the political and economic fortune-teller, a lady named Beula Poole, who got shot in the back of her head last evening? Page one of any paper. You could probably sew that one up before bedtime.” He turned over a page.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “is Saturday. I shall draw my pay as usual. I’m going to a fight at the Garden. Talk about contrasts-you in that chair and a couple of good middle-weights in a ring.” I blew.
But I didn’t go to the Garden. My first stop was the corner drugstore, where I went to a phone booth and called Lon Cohen of the Gazette. He was in, and about through, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t buy him eight or ten drinks, provided he could have a two-inch steak for a chaser.
So an hour later Lon and I were at a corner table at Pietro’s. He had done well with the drinks and had made a good start on the steak. I was having highballs, to be sociable, and was on my third, along with my second pound of peanuts. I hadn’t realized how much I had short-changed myself on dinner, sitting opposite Wolfe, until I got into the spirit of it with the peanuts.
We had discussed the state of things from politics to prize-fights, by no means excluding murder. Lon had had his glass filled often enough, and had enough of the steak in him, to have reached a state of mind where he might reasonably be expected to be open to suggestion. So I made an approach by telling him, deadpan, that in my opinion the papers were riding the cops too hard on the Orchard case.
He leered at me. “For God’s sake, has Cramer threatened to take your licence or something?” “No, honest,” I insisted, reaching for peanuts, “this one is really tough and you know it. They’re doing as well as they can with what they’ve got. Besides that, it’s so damn’ commonplace. Every paper always does it-after a week start crabbing and after two weeks start screaming. It’s got so everybody always expects it and nobody ever reads it. You know what I’d do if T ran a newspaper?
I’d start running stuff that people would read.” “Jesus!” Lon gawked at me. “What an idea! Give me a column on it. Who would teach ‘em to read?” “A column,” I said, “would only get me started. I need at least a page. But in this particular case, where it’s at now, it’s a question of an editorial. This is Friday night. For Sunday you ought to have an editorial on the Orchard case.
It’s still hot and the public still loves it. But-” “I’m no editor, I’m a news man?
“I know, I’m just talking. Five will get you ten that your sheet will have an editorial on the Orchard case Sunday, and what will it say? It will be called OUR PUBLIC GUARDIANS, and it will be the same old crap, and not one in a thousand will read it beyond the first line. Phooey. If it was me I would call it TOO OLD OR TOO FAT, and I wouldn’t mention the cops once. Nor would I mention Nero Wolfe, not by name. I would refer to the blaze of publicity with which a certain celebrated private investigator entered the Orchard case, and to the expectations it aroused. That his record seemed to justify it. That we see now how goofy it was, because in ten days he hasn’t taken a trick. That the reason may be that he is getting too old, or too fat, or merely that he hasn’t got what it takes when a case is really tough, but no matter what the reason is, this shows us that for our protection from vicious criminals we must rely on our efficient and well-trained police force, and not on any so-called brilliant geniuses. I said I wouldn’t mention the cops, but I think I’d better, right at the last. I could add a sentence that while they may have got stuck in the mud on the Orchard case, they are the brave men who keep the structure of our society from you know.” Lon, having swallowed a hunk of steak, would have spoken, but I stopped him: “They would read that, don’t think they wouldn’t. I know you’re not an editor, but you’re the best man they’ve got and you’re allowed to talk to editors, aren’t you? I would love to see an editorial like that tried, just as an experiment. So much so that if a paper ran it I would want to show my appreciation the first opportunity I get, by stretching a point a hell of a ways to give it first crack at some interesting little items.” Lon had his eyebrows up. “If you don’t want to bore me, turn it the other side up so the interesting little item will be on top.” “Nuts. Do you want to talk about it or not?” “Sure. I’ll talk about anything.” I signalled the waiter for refills.
CHAPTER Fourteen
I would give anything in the world, anyway up to four bits, to know whether Wolfe saw or read that editorial before I showed it to him late Sunday afternoon. I think he did. He always glances over the editorials in three papers, of which the Gazette is one, and if his eye caught it at all he must have read it. It was entitled THE FALSE ALARM, and it carried out the idea I had given Lon to a T.
I knew of course that Wolfe wouldn’t do any spluttering, and I should have realized that he probably wouldn’t make any sign or offer any comment. But I didn’t, and therefore by late afternoon I was in a hole. If he hadn’t read it I had to see that he did, and that was risky. It had to be done right or he would smell an elephant. So I thought
it over: what would be the natural thing? How would I naturally do it if I suddenly ran across it?
What I did do was turn in my chair to grin at him and ask casually: “Did you see this editorial in the Gazette called THE FALSE ALARM?” He grunted. “What’s it about?” “You’d better read it.” I got up, crossed over, and put it on his desk. “A funny thing, it gave me the feeling I had written it myself. It’s the only editorial I’ve seen in weeks that I completely agree with.” He picked it up. I sat down facing him, but he held the paper so that it cut off my view. He isn’t a fast reader, and he held the pose long enough to read it through twice, but that’s exactly what he would have done if he already knew it by heart and wanted me to think otherwise.
“Bah!” The paper was lowered. “Some little scrivener who doubtless has ulcers and is on a diet.” “Yeah, I guess so. The rat. The contemptible louse. If only he knew how you’ve been sweating and stewing, going without sleep-” “Archie. Shut up.” “Yes, sir.” I hoped to God I was being natural.
That was all for then, but I was not licked. I had never supposed that he would tear his hair or pace up and down. A little later an old friend of his, Marko Vukcic, dropped in for a Sunday evening snack-five kinds of cheese, guava jelly, freshly roasted chestnuts, and almond tarts. I was anxious to see if he would show the editorial to Marko, which would have been a bad sign. He didn’t. After Marko had left, to return to Rusterman’s Restaurant, which was the best in New York because he managed it, Wolfe settled down with his book again, but hadn’t turned more than ten pages before he dogeared and closed it and tossed it to a far corner of his desk. He then got up, crossed the room to the big globe, and stood and studied geography. That didn’t seem to satisfy him any better than the book, so he went and turned on the radio. After dialling to eight different stations, he muttered to himself, stalked back to his chair behind his desk, and sat and scowled. I took all this in only from a corner of one eye, since I was buried so deep in a magazine that I didn’t even know he was in the room.