Gambit

14

At ten minutes to one Friday afternoon I was seated at one of the small tables along the right wall of Piotti’s little restaurant, eating spaghetti with anchovy sauce and sipping red wine — and not the wine you’ll get if you go there. Wolfe had once got John Piotti out of a difficulty and hadn’t soaked him, and one result was that whenever I dropped in for a plate of the best spaghetti in New York I got, for sixty cents, a pint of the wine which John reserved for himself and three or four favorite customers, and which was somewhat better than what you paid eight bucks for at the Flamingo. Another result had been that back in 1958 John had let us use his premises for a setup for a trap, including running some wires through the cellar, coming up through the floor in the kitchen at one end, and up to one of the tables in the restaurant at the other end. That was the table I was sitting at.

The morning hadn’t been as busy as I had expected, chiefly because the wires running through the cellar were still there, intact, and when we tested them they were as good as new. We didn’t have to call in a technician at all. For the kitchen end Saul brought the tape recorder from the cupboard in Wolfe’s kitchen, and for the restaurant end I bought the latest model midget mike. That was the main cash outlay, $112.50 for the mike, a lot of lettuce for a mike, but it had to be good and it had to fit into the bowl of artificial flowers on the table. Of course the bowl had to be the same as those on the other tables, and we had a devil of a time making a hole in the bottom for the wires to come through. Against the risk that my table companion would take it into his head to move the bowl and find himself pulling wires up through a hole in the table, which would have stopped the show, we made two smaller holes in the bottom of the bowl and screwed it to the table. So if he tried to move it and it wouldn’t budge I could say, “By golly, Piotti doesn’t let the customers walk out with anything, does he?”

Everything was in order by half past eleven, well before the lunch hour, which is early in that neighborhood. Saul went to the kitchen, to stick there, since it was just possible that the subject might come for a look around in advance, and it wouldn’t do for him to catch sight of the man who had taken my job. I went to the Talbott, to learn if there were any messages for me. There weren’t. I phoned Wolfe that we were ready, and returned to Piotti’s at twelve-thirty. John had kept the table free, and I took it and began on the spaghetti and wine. At ten minutes to one the tables were pretty well filled with customers, and two of them were known to me. At the next table in front of me, seated facing me, was Fred Durkin, and at the next table but one back of me was Orrie Cather. I was facing the door. Very neat.

At four minutes to one Dr. Victor Avery entered, stopped three steps in, saw my raised hand, and came. I took in a forkload of spaghetti while he removed his coat and hat and hung them on the wall hooks, and I was sipping wine as he sat. He looked more middle-aged than he had last night, more than middle-aged, and not so well-fed.

“The spaghetti here is something special,” I said. “Better have some.”

He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

“The wine is special too.”

“I never drink during the day.”

“Neither do I usually, but this is a special occasion.” My eyes were on my plate, where I was twisting spaghetti onto my fork, and I raised them and aimed them at him. “How much did you bring?”

His hands were open on the table and his finger tips were working. “I came out of curiosity,” he said. “What kind of trick is this?” He was nothing like as good as he had been on the phone, but of course he had had a hard night.

I leaned to him. “Look,” I said, “you’ll just waste your breath dodging. I saw you go in Kalmus’s house Wednesday and I saw you come out. Yesterday I asked—”

“What time did I go in? What time did I come out?”

“Nuts. Don’t think I can’t tell Nero Wolfe, and also the cops, and also a judge and jury when the time comes. If you want to try fixing up an alibi, you know the times as well as I do. This isn’t a quiz show with you asking the questions. Yesterday I asked myself a question, could it have been you who killed Paul Jerin? Of course it could; when you mixed the mustard water you put arsenic in it. But the trouble was, Jerin had got sick before you went in to him, and that stopped me, until yesterday afternoon, when I learned why he got sick before you were called in. Not only that, I also learned that you knew he was going to get sick, so you brought some arsenic along because you knew you would have a chance to use it. So you had killed Jerin, and I knew why, or at least a damned good guess. Tuesday evening Nero Wolfe told you that the man who killed Jerin had no malice for him, he wanted to destroy Matthew Blount, and you said tommyrot, but you knew it wasn’t, because you were the man who did it and that was your motive. Then when you learned that Kalmus had figured it out and was on to you, you went to his place and killed him, and I saw you coming and going. So how much did you bring?”

He had realized that his hands were out of control and had taken them from the table. “That’s all tommyrot,” he said. “Every word of it.”

“Okay, then get up and walk out. Or ring the District Attorney’s office and have them come and take me for attempted blackmail. The phone booth is in the rear. I promise to wait here for them.”

He licked his lips. “That’s what I ought to do,” he said, “report you for attempted blackmail.”

“Go ahead.”

“But that would be — it would start — scandal. It would be very — disagreeable. Even if you saw me entering and leaving that house — you didn’t, but even if you did — that wouldn’t be proof that I killed Kalmus. It was after ten o’clock when you went up to his apartment and found the body. Someone had entered after I left — that is, it would have been after I left if I had been there. So your He that you saw me enter and leave — it’s not a very good lie. But if you—”

“Cut.” I snapped it. “I’ll listen to sense if you’ve got any, but not that crap. We’ll settle that right now, yes or no, and if it’s no I get up and walk out. To Nero Wolfe. Did you enter that house Wednesday, late afternoon or early evening, whichever you want to call it, or didn’t you? Yes or no.”

He licked his lips. “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of coercing me into—”

I had pushed my chair back and was getting up. He put a hand out. “No,” he said. “Sit down.”

I bent over to him. “No?”

“I mean yes.”

“Did you enter that house at that time Wednesday?”

“Yes. But I didn’t kill Dan Kalmus.”

I sat down and picked up my glass for a sip of wine. “I advise you to watch your step,” I told him. “If I have to keep jumping up to make you talk sense it will attract attention. How much money did you bring?”

His hand went into his breast pocket but came out again empty. “You admit you’re a blackmailer,” he said.

“Sure. Birds of a feather, a murderer and a blackmailer.”

“I am not a murderer. But if I refuse to be victimized and you do what you threaten to do I’ll be involved in a scandal I can never live down. I’ll be under a suspicion that will never be entirely removed. To prevent that I’m willing to — to submit. Under protest.”

His hand went to the pocket again and this time got something, a slip of paper. He unfolded it, glanced at it, said, “Read that,” and handed it to me. It was handwritten in ink:

I dropped it on the table and grinned at him. “You could frame it,” I suggested.

“I have ten thousand dollars in cash,” he said. “When you write that and sign it and give it to me, I’ll hand it over.”

“And the other ninety thousand?”

“That’s fantastic. I couldn’t possibly pay such a sum, and even if I had it... it’s absurd. In addition to the ten thousand now, I’ll guarantee to give you another twenty thousand within a week.”

“I’ll be damned. You actually have the gall to haggle.”

“I’m not haggling. To me thirty thousand dollars is a fortune.”

I regarded him. “You know,” I said, “I admire your nerve, I really do. You’re too much for me.” I looked around, caught the eye of Mrs. Piotti, and signed to her, and she came. I asked her how much, and she said a dollar-forty, and I handed her two ones and told her to keep the change. Of course that was just for appearance’s sake; I had given John fifty bucks and would give him more.

I shook my head at Avery. “Positively too much for me. We’ll have to go and put it up to Mr. Wolfe.”

He gawked. “What?”

“I said, put it up to Mr. Wolfe. This isn’t my show, it’s his, I only work for him. That last night, me being fired, that was just dressing. You’ll have to come and do your haggling with him. He certainly won’t settle for a measly thirty grand.”

He was still gawking. “Nero Wolfe is behind this?”

“He sure is, and also in front of it.” I shoved my chair back. “Okay, let’s go.”

“I will not.”

“For God’s sake.” I leaned to him. “Dr. Avery, you are unquestionably the champion beetlebrain. Nero Wolfe has got you wrapped up and addressed straight to hell, and you sit there and babble I will not. Do you prefer hell or are you coming?” I picked up the slip of paper and pocketed it, rose, got my coat from the hook and put it on, got my hat, and headed for the door. As I passed the next table Fred Durkin, crammed with spaghetti and wine to his chin, got up and headed in the opposite direction, toward the kitchen. As I emerged to the sidewalk a gust of winter wind nearly took my hat, and as I clapped my hand on it here came Avery, his coat on his arm. When he tried to put the coat on, the wind tossed it around, so I helped him, and he thanked me. A murderer and a blackmailer, both with good manners.

Second Avenue was downtown, so we walked to Third for a taxi. When we had got one and were in and rolling I rather expected Avery to start a conversation, but he didn’t. Not a word. I didn’t look at him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw that his hand was working inside his overcoat pocket. If he had nerve he also had nerves.

Wolfe made more concessions during the five days of the Blount thing than he usually makes in a year. Ordinarily, at ten minutes to two, the hour at which Avery and I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and entered, Wolfe is right in the middle of lunch, and I was expecting to have to entertain the guest in the office for at least half an hour while we waited. But as I learned later from Fritz, he had been told when he took up the breakfast tray that lunch would be at 12:45 sharp. To you that merely means that Wolfe had sense enough to change the schedule when it was called for, but to me it meant that at breakfast time he had taken it for granted that half an hour with Avery at Piotti’s would be all I would need and I would have him at the office before two o’clock. It’s nice to have your gifts recognized, but some day he’ll take too much for granted.

So I had barely got the guest into the office and seated in the red leather chair when Wolfe entered. I went and shut the door. Saul and Fred and Orrie would soon be passing by on their way to the kitchen with the recorder and tape. As I returned to my desk Avery was blurting, “I’m here under protest, and if you think you and Goodwin—”

“Shut up!” It wasn’t a roar, just the crack of a whip. Wolfe, seated, turned to me: “Was there any difficulty?”

“No, sir.” I sat. “All okay. More than enough. To the question did he enter that house at that time Wednesday, a flat yes. He offered me ten thousand cash now and a guarantee of twenty grand more within a week if I would sign a statement that I hadn’t seen him. He didn’t—”

“That’s a lie,” Avery said.

So he hadn’t started a conversation in the taxi because he had been too busy deciding on his line, and the line was to call me a liar and make Wolfe start from scratch. Not so dumb at that.

Wolfe leaned back and regarded him, not with hostility, merely as an object of interest. Of course he was just passing the time until the trio arrived. “A book could be written,” he said, “on the varieties of conduct of men in a pickle. Men confronted with their doom. In nearly all cases the insuperable difficulty is that their mental processes are numbed by the emotional impact of the predicament. It is a fallacy to suppose that the best mind will deal most effectively with a crisis; if the emotion has asphyxiated the mind what good is it? Take you with Mr. Goodwin in that restaurant. Since you have succeeded in your profession you probably have a fairly capable mind, but you reacted like a nincompoop. You should either have defied him and prepared to fight it out, or, asking him to sign a document that would remove his threat, you should have met his demands in full; and you should have admitted nothing. Instead, you tried to dicker, and you made the one vital admission, that you had entered that house Wednesday evening. Indeed—”

“That’s a lie.” Apparently that was to be his verse and chorus. Not a bad idea if he had the guts to fight it out, but in that case he should get up and go.

The doorbell rang. I went and opened the door to the hall a crack. Fritz came from the kitchen and went to the front and opened up, and here came the trio, not stopping at the rack to take their coats off. Saul nodded at my face in the crack as he passed, and Orrie made the sign, a jerk with the tips of his thumb and forefinger joined. When they had disappeared into the kitchen I swung the door wide, returned to my desk, and reached around behind it to flip a switch. That was all that was needed at my end.

Wolfe was talking. “... and perhaps that would have been your wisest course. After Mr. Goodwin had spoken with you from his hotel room last night, you knew you were in mortal danger, and you thought he was its sole agent. He alone had knowledge of the crucial fact; but for him, you had little to fear. Why didn’t you kill him, at whatever hazard? You knew where he was and you had all night. Disguise yourself and bribe one of the hotel staff, any amount required, to get you into the room. Engage the room next to his, or above or below it, and go from window to window. A man in your plight should be able to scale a perpendicular wall of marble by force of will. Any normal will can overcome a mere difficulty; one made desperate by impending disaster should—”

The house phone buzzed. I took it and said, “Archie,” and Saul’s voice came: “All set.”

“Right. I’ll buzz you.” I hung up and gave Wolfe a nod, and he nodded back and sat up.

“I’m boring you,” he told Avery. “What you might have done is vinegar. What matters now is what you’re going to do, and to consider that realistically you must hear something.” He turned. “All right, Archie.”

I pushed the button, three short, and swiveled to face Avery. In a moment there was a faint whirring sound from a grill at the wall back of my desk, where the loudspeaker was, then a few little crackles, then other noises, not loud, which could have been from a restaurant where people were moving and eating and talking, and then my voice:

“The spaghetti here is something special. Better have some.”

After a slight pause another voice: “I’m not hungry.”

“The wine is special too.”

“I never drink during the day.”

“Neither do I usually, but this is a special occasion. How much did you bring?”

“I came out of curiosity. What kind of a trick is this?”

“Look, you’ll just waste your breath dodging. I saw you go in Kalmus’s house Wednesday and I saw you come out. Yesterday I asked—”

“What time did I go in? What time did I come out?”

As Wolfe had said, a book could be written on the varieties of conduct of men in a pickle. At the sound of the first words, mine, Avery frowned at me. When his own voice came, “I’m not hungry,” he twisted his neck to look around, right and then left. Then he clamped his teeth on his lip and sat frowning at me through my main spiel, and when he said, “That’s all tommyrot, every word of it,” he nodded in approval. But when I asked him did he enter that house at that time Wednesday and he said yes, he yawped, “That’s a lie!” and bounced up and started for me. I was on my feet by the time he arrived, but he had no idea of slugging or choking, he had no idea at all, he was merely reacting. I sidestepped only because I wanted to hand something to Wolfe — the slip of paper — and he was in the way. Wolfe took it and read it while all that came from the grill was the background restaurant noise when I had been reading it, and he dropped it on his desk just as I dropped it on the table and said, “You could frame it.” Good timing. And Avery stopped reacting and acted. He lunged to get the slip of paper, but I beat him to it. I call your attention to Wolfe. If he had hung onto it he might have had the bother of warding off Avery, so he left it to me. More taking for granted. Avery grabbed my arm and I didn’t jerk loose, thinking the poor goof might as well have the satisfaction of that much personal contact. He was gripping me with both hands, but when I told him, or the speaker did, that Wolfe had him wrapped up and addressed straight to hell, which I admit was a little corny, he let go and stood, his jaw set, looking down at Wolfe. I stepped to the end of my desk and reached around to the switch and turned it off, and when I faced around Saul and Fred and Orrie were there, in a group at the door.

“I thought it best,” Wolfe told Avery, “to leave no loophole.” He motioned at the group. “You saw the man on the left, Mr. Panzer, here last evening. He had the tape recorder in the kitchen. The others, Mr. Durkin and Mr. Cather, were at nearby tables in the restaurant while you and Mr. Goodwin conversed. There’s no room for wriggling, doctor.”

Avery took a couple of uncertain steps toward the group and stopped. Wolfe said, “Move aside, Saul. Don’t block the door — if he wishes to leave.”

Avery turned. “Five of you,” he said. “Five of you.” He came to the desk. “You said a tape recorder? It’s on a tape?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you one hundred thousand dollars for it. In cash. Tomorrow morning. For the tape and that signed by Goodwin. You can’t prove anything, I know that, but I don’t... All right. Tomorrow morning.”

Wolfe nodded. “You see? You tried to dicker with doom. Mr. Goodwin would have declined it, but you didn’t know that, and if you had gone ready to meet his terms it would have been ticklish business getting any admission from you for the record. Now I can decline with unconcern. You’re right, I can’t prove anything, but I can earn my fee, and I can demonstrate to my client that I have earned it — by letting Mr. Blount and his wife and daughter listen to that tape.”

“No,” Avery said. “Never.”

“But yes. Of course.”

Avery’s jaw was working. “How much do you want?”

Wolfe shook his head. “My self-esteem is the hitch. Quite possibly you are of more value to the world, to the society I am a member of, than Matthew Blount. If I held its interest paramount perhaps I should salvage you, but there’s my ego. Like most of my fellow-beings, I like myself too well. I’ll be insufferably smug as I sit and watch the Blount family listen to that tape. You had better go, doctor.”

“I’m not going. How much will you take? How much?”

“Confound it, go.”

“No! No! No!”

Wolfe turned. “Fred. Orrie. Archie and Saul have done a day’s work. You have been merely spectators. Take him out.”

They came, and, as they took his arms, Fred said gruffly, “Come on, what the hell.” I would like to be able to record that he jerked away and marched out, but I’m reporting. He had to be propelled, and, as they hustled him to the door, he squawked, and as soon as they were in the hall Saul shut the door. Wolfe growled at me, “Without dignity a man is not a man. Get Mr. Cramer.”

I thought it would have been more dignified to wait until Fred and Orrie returned to say he was out of the house, since he wouldn’t want Cramer until he came down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, so there was no rush, but I obeyed. And had a time of it. Some character at Homicide wasn’t going to relay me at all, even to Sergeant Stebbins, unless I told him everything about everything, and when he finally passed me on it was to Lieutenant Rowcliff. Of course that was a battle, and I won it only because I reminded him of an occasion a couple of years back when he had hung up on me and we had called the District Attorney, and Wolfe had given him something that Cramer would have liked to get first. So at last I got Cramer and gave Wolfe a nod, and he took his phone. I stayed on.

“This is Nero—”

“I know it is. I’m busy. What do you want?”

“You. Here at your earliest convenience. The man who killed Paul Jerin and Daniel Kalmus just left my house, and I—”

“Left your house?”

“Yes, and I—”

“Why did you let him go?”

You couldn’t beat that for a compliment. Not how do you know he killed them, or this or that, but why did you let him go.

“Because he was repugnant,” Wolfe said. “I put him out. I would like—”

“Who is he?”

“Confound it, stop interrupting. I would like to refer the matter to you. I have something here—”

“I want his name now!”

“No. When may I expect you?”

“You know damn well when you may expect me.” He hung up.

I looked at my watch. Twenty to three. It was hard to believe. Another rule in danger, and this time the strictest of all. For years it had been to the plant rooms at four on the dot, no matter what, every day except Sunday, and he couldn’t leave Cramer in the middle of the showdown. It had certainly got under his skin. As I swiveled to ask Fred and Orrie if any bones had been broken the phone rang, and I swiveled back and got it.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Good—”

“It’s Sally, Archie.”

“Good morning. I mean good afternoon. We miss you. I was going to ring you as soon as I could fit it in. I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Did you... was it...”

“I did and it was. Everything went according to plan. I’m glad to have met you and I want your autograph. If this is the first good thing you ever did you did it good. If you ever want a job as a blackmailer’s moll give me a ring.”

“But was it... did he...”

“He did exactly what he was expected to do. I’ll tell you all about it, words and music, but not now. Everything’s under control. Just sit tight for another twenty-four hours, maybe less. Of course say nothing to your mother — or to anyone.”

“Of course not. But can’t I... I could come...”

“Not now, we’re busy. If you can’t take it easy take it hard, but take it until I call you. Okay?”

“Okay.” She hung up.