by Rex Stout
“No,” Anderson said coldly, “and you won’t either before you hear the last of it. You through?”
“Good heavens, no. I’ve barely started. As I say, I reached that conclusion, but it was nothing to crow about. What was I to do with it? I had a screw I could put on you, but it seemed unwise to be hasty about it, and I considered a trial of other expedients. I confess that the one I chose to begin with was feeble and even sleazy, but it was at breakfast this morning, before I had finished my coffee and got dressed, and Mr. Goodwin was fidgety and I wanted to give him something to do. Also, I had already made a suggestion to Mr. Cramer which was designed to give everyone the impression that there was evidence that Miss Vance had been blackmailed, that she was under acute suspicion, and that she might be charged with murder at any moment. There was a chance, I thought, that an imminent threat to Miss Vance, who is a personable young woman, might impel somebody to talk.”
“So you started that,” Elinor Vance said dully.
Wolfe nodded. “I’m not boasting about it. I’ve confessed it was worse than second-rate, but I thought Mr. Cramer might as well try it; and this morning, before I was dressed, I could devise nothing better than for Mr. Goodwin to type an anonymous letter about you and take it up there—a letter which implied that you had committed murder at least twice.”
“Goddam pretty,” Bill Meadows said.
“He didn’t do it,” Elinor said.
“Yes, he did,” Wolfe disillusioned her. “He had it with him, but didn’t get to use it. The death of Miss Koppel was responsible not only for that, but for other things as well—for instance, for this gathering. If I had acted swiftly and energetically on the conclusion I reached twenty-four hours ago, Miss Koppel might be alive now. I owe her an apology but I can’t get it to her. What I can do is what I’m doing.”
Wolfe’s eyes darted to Anderson and fastened there. “I’m going to put that screw on you, sir. I won’t waste time appealing to you, in the name of justice or anything else, to tell me why you abruptly turned tail and scuttled. That would be futile. Instead, I’ll tell you a homely little fact: Miss Fraser drank Hi-Spot only the first few times it was served on her program, and then had to quit and substitute coffee. She had to quit because your product upset her stomach. It gave her a violent indigestion.”
“That’s a lie,” Anderson said. “Another lie.”
“If it is it won’t last long.—Miss Vance. Some things aren’t as important as they once were. You heard what I said. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Strong?”
“I don’t think this—”
“Confound it, you’re in the same room and the same chair! Is it true or not?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Meadows?”
“Yes.”
“That should be enough.—So, Mr. Anderson—”
“A put-up job,” the president sneered. “I left their damn program.”
Wolfe shook his head. “They’re not missing you. They had their choice of sixteen offers. No, Mr. Anderson, you’re in a pickle. Blackmail revolts you, and you’re being blackmailed. It is true that newspapers are reluctant to offend advertisers, but some of them couldn’t possibly resist so picturesque an item as this, that the product Miss Fraser puffed so effectively to ten million people made her so ill that she didn’t dare swallow a spoonful of it. Indeed yes, the papers will print it; and they’ll get it in time for Monday morning.”
“You sonofabitch.” Anderson was holding. “They won’t touch it. Will they, Fred?”
But the director of public relations was frozen, speechless with horror.
“I think they will,” Wolfe persisted. “One will, I know. And open publication might be better than the sort of talk that would get around when once it’s started. You know how rumors get distorted; fools would even say that it wasn’t necessary to add anything to Hi-Spot to poison Mr. Orchard. Really, the blackmail potential of this is very high. And what do you have to do to stop it? Something hideous and insupportable? Not at all. Merely tell me why you suddenly decided to scoot.”
Anderson looked at Owen, but Owen was gazing fixedly at Wolfe as at the embodiment of evil.
“It will be useless,” Wolfe said, “to try any dodge. I’m ready for you. I spent all day yesterday on this, and I doubt very much if I’ll accept anything except what I have already specified: that someone or something had persuaded you that Miss Fraser herself was in danger of being exposed as a murderer or a blackmailer. However, you can try.”
“I don’t have to try.” He was a stubborn devil. “I told you yesterday. That was my reason then, and it’s my reason now.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Fred Owen wailed. “Oh, my God!”
“Goddam it,” Anderson blurted at him. “I gave my word! I’m sewed up! I promised!”
“To whom?” Wolfe snapped.
“All right,” Owen said bitterly, “keep your word and lose your shirt. This is ruin! This is dynamite!”
“To whom?” Wolfe persisted.
“I can’t tell you, and I won’t. That was part of the promise.”
“Indeed. Then that makes it simple.” Wolfe’s eyes darted left. “Mr. Meadows, a hypothetical question. If it was you to whom Mr. Anderson gave the pledge that keeps him from speaking, do you now release him from it?”
“It wasn’t me,” Bill said.
“I didn’t ask you that. You know what a hypothetical question is. Please answer to the if. If it was you, do you release him?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Mr. Traub, the same question. With that if, do you release him?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Vance? Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Strong. Do you?”
Of course Tully Strong had had time, a full minute, to make up his mind what to say. He said it:
“No!”
Chapter 25
ELEVEN PAIRS OF EYES fastened on Tully Strong.
“Aha,” Wolfe murmured. He leaned back, sighed deep, and looked pleased.
“Remarkable!” a voice boomed. It was Professor Savarese. “So simple!”
If he expected to pull some of the eyes his way, he got cheated. They stayed on Strong.
“That was a piece of luck,” Wolfe said, “and I’m grateful for it. If I had started with you, Mr. Strong, and got your no, the others might have made it not so simple.”
“I answered a hypothetical question,” Tully asserted, “and that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Correct,” Wolfe agreed. “In logic, it doesn’t. But I saw your face when you realized what was coming, the dilemma you would be confronted with in a matter of seconds, and that was enough. Do you now hope to retreat into logic?”
Tully just wasn’t up to it. Not only had his face been enough when he saw it coming; it was still enough. The muscles around his thin tight lips quivered as he issued the command to let words through.
“I merely answered a hypothetical question,” was the best he could do. It was pathetic.
Wolfe sighed again. “Well. I suppose I’ll have to light it for you. I don’t blame you, sir, for being obstinate about it, since it may be assumed that you have behaved badly. I don’t mean your withholding information from the police; most people do that, and often for reasons much shoddier than yours. I mean your behavior to your employers. Since you are paid by the eight sponsors jointly your loyalty to them is indivisible; but you did not warn all of them that Miss Fraser was, or might be, headed for disgrace and disaster, and that therefore they had better clear out; apparently you confined it to Mr. Anderson. For value received or to be received, I presume—a good job?”
Wolfe shrugged. “But now it’s all up.” His eyes moved. “By the way, Archie, since Mr. Strong will soon be telling us how he knew it was Miss Fraser, you’d better take a look. She’s capable of anything, and she’s as deft as a bear’s tongue. Look in her bag.”
Cramer was on his feet. “I’m
not going—”
“I didn’t ask you,” Wolfe snapped. “Confound it, don’t you see how ticklish this is? I’m quite aware I’ve got no evidence yet, but I’m not going to have that woman displaying her extraordinary dexterity in my office. Archie?”
I had left my chair and stepped to the other end of Wolfe’s desk, but I was in a rather embarrassing position. I am not incapable of using force on a woman, since after all men have never found anything else to use on them with any great success when it comes right down to it, but Wolfe had by no means worked up to a point where the audience was with me. And when I extended a hand toward the handsome leather bag in Madeline Fraser’s lap, she gave me the full force of her gray-green eyes and told me distinctly:
“Don’t touch me.”
I brought the hand back. Her eyes went to Wolfe.
“Don’t you think it’s about time I said something? Wouldn’t it look better?”
“No.” Wolfe met her gaze. “I’d advise you to wait, madam. All you can give us now is a denial, and of course we’ll stipulate that. What else can you say?”
“I wouldn’t bother with a denial,” she said scornfully. “But it seems stupid for me to sit here and let this go on indefinitely.”
“Not at all.” Wolfe leaned toward her. “Let me assure you of one thing, Miss Fraser, most earnestly. It is highly unlikely, whatever you say or do from now on, that I shall ever think you stupid. I am too well convinced of the contrary. Not even if Mr. Goodwin opens your bag and finds in it the gun with which Miss Poole was shot.”
“He isn’t going to open it.”
She seemed to know what she was talking about. I glanced at Inspector Cramer, but the big stiff wasn’t ready yet to move a finger. I picked up the little table that was always there by the arm of the red leather chair, moved it over to the wall, went and brought one of the small yellow chairs, and sat, so close to Madeline Fraser that if we had spread elbows they would have touched. That meant no more notes, but Wolfe couldn’t have everything. As I sat down by her, putting in motion the air that had been there undisturbed, I got a faint whiff of a spicy perfume, and my imagination must have been pretty active because I was reminded of the odor that had reached me that day in her apartment, from the breath of Deborah Koppel as I tried to get her onto the divan before she collapsed. It wasn’t the same at all, except in my fancy. I asked Wolfe:
“This will do, won’t it?”
He nodded and went back to Tully Strong. “So you have not one reason for reluctance, but several. Even so, you can’t possibly stick it. It has been clearly demonstrated to Mr. Cramer that you are withholding important information directly pertinent to the crimes he is investigating, and you and others have already pushed his patience pretty far. He’ll get his teeth in you now and he won’t let go. Then there’s Mr. Anderson. The promise he gave you is half gone, now that we know it was you he gave it to, and with the threat I’m holding over him he can’t reasonably be expected to keep the other half.”
Wolfe gestured. “And all I really need is a detail. I am satisfied that I know pretty well what you told Mr. Anderson. What happened yesterday, just before he took alarm and leaped to action? The morning papers had the story of the anonymous letters—the blackmailing device by which people were constrained to make payments to Mr. Orchard and Miss Poole. Then that story had supplied a missing link for someone. Who and how? Say it was Mr. Anderson. Say that he received, some weeks ago, an anonymous letter or letters blackguarding Miss Fraser. He showed them to her. He received no more letters. That’s all he knew about it. A little later Mr. Orchard was a guest on the Fraser program and got poisoned, but there was no reason for Mr. Anderson to connect that event with the anonymous letters he had received. That was what the story in yesterday’s papers did for him; they made that connection. It was now perfectly plain: anonymous letters about Miss Fraser; Miss Fraser’s subscription to Track Almanac; the method by which those subscriptions were obtained; and Mr. Orchard’s death by drinking poisoned coffee ostensibly intended for Miss Fraser. That did not convict Miss Fraser of murder, but at a minimum it made it extremely inadvisable to continue in the role of her sponsor. So Mr. Anderson skedaddled.”
“I got no anonymous letters,” Anderson declared.
“I believe you.” Wolfe didn’t look away from Tully Strong. “I rejected, tentatively, the assumption that Mr. Anderson had himself received the anonymous letters, on various grounds, but chiefly because it would be out of character for him to show an anonymous letter to the subject of it. He would be much more likely to have the letter’s allegations investigated, and there was good reason to assume that that had not been done. So I postulated that it was not Mr. Anderson, but some other person, who had once received an anonymous letter or letters about Miss Fraser and who was yesterday provided with a missing link. It was a permissible guess that that person was one of those now present, and so I tried the experiment of having the police insinuate an imminent threat to Miss Vance, in the hope that it would loosen a tongue. I was too cautious. It failed lamentably; and Miss Koppel died.”
Wolfe was talking only to Strong. “Of course, having no evidence, I have no certainty that the information you gave Mr. Anderson concerned anonymous letters. It is possible that your conviction, or suspicion, about Miss Fraser, had some other basis. But I like my assumption because it is neat and comprehensive; and I shall abandon it only under compulsion. It explains everything, and nothing contradicts it. It will even explain, I confidently expect, why Mr. Orchard and Miss Poole were killed. Two of the finer points of their operation were these, that they demanded only a small fraction of the victim’s income, limited to one year, and that the letters did not expose, or threaten to expose, an actual secret in the victim’s past. Even if they had known such secrets they would not have used them. But sooner or later—this is a point on which Mr. Savarese could speak with the authority of an expert, but not now, some other time—sooner or later, by the law of averages, they would use such a secret by inadvertence. Sooner or later the bugaboo they invented would be, for the victim, not a mischievous libel, but a real and most dreadful terror.”
Wolfe nodded. “Yes. So it happened. The victim was shown the letter or letters by some friend—by you, Mr. Strong—and found herself confronted not merely by the necessity of paying an inconsequential tribute, but by the awful danger of some disclosure that was not to be borne; for she could not know, of course, that the content of the letter had been fabricated and that its agreement with reality was sheer accident. So she acted. Indeed, she acted! She killed Mr. Orchard. Then she learned, from a strange female voice on the phone, that Mr. Orchard had not been the sole possessor of the knowledge she thought he had, and again she acted. She killed Miss Poole.”
“My God,” Anderson cut in, “you’re certainly playing it strong, with no cards.”
“I am, sir,” Wolfe agreed. “It’s time I got dealt to, don’t you think? Surely I’ve earned at least one card. You can give it to me, or Mr. Strong can. What more do you want, for heaven’s sake? Rabbits from a hat?”
Anderson got up, moved, and was confronting the secretary of the Sponsors’ Council. “Don’t be a damn fool, Tully,” he said with harsh authority. “He knows it all, you heard him. Go ahead and get rid of it!”
“This is swell for me,” Tully said bitterly.
“It would have been swell for Miss Koppel,” Wolfe said curtly, “if you had spoken twenty hours ago. How many letters did you get?”
“Two.”
“When?”
“February. Around the middle of February.”
“Did you show them to anyone besides Miss Fraser?”
“No, just her, but Miss Koppel was there so she saw them too.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. I gave them to Miss Fraser.”
“What did they say?”
Tully’s lips parted, stayed open a moment, and closed again.
“Don’t be an ass,” Wolfe snap
ped. “Mr. Anderson is here. What did they say?”
“They said that it was lucky for Miss Fraser that when her husband died no one had been suspicious enough to have the farewell letters he wrote examined by a handwriting expert.”
“What else?”
“That was all. The second one said the same thing, only in a different way.”
Wolfe’s eyes darted to Anderson. “Is that what he told you, sir?”
The president, who had returned to the couch, nodded. “Yes, that’s it. Isn’t it enough?”
“Plenty, in the context.” Wolfe’s head jerked around to face the lady at my elbow. “Miss Fraser. I’ve heard of only one farewell letter your husband wrote, to a friend, a local attorney. Was there another? To you, perhaps?”
“I don’t think,” she said, “that it would be very sensible for me to try to help you.” I couldn’t detect the slightest difference in her voice. Wolfe had understated it when he said she was an extremely dangerous woman. “Especially,” she went on, “since you are apparently accepting those lies. If Mr. Strong ever got any anonymous letters he never showed them to me—nor to Miss Koppel, I’m sure of that.”