Gambit

2

Twenty-two thousand dollars is not hay. Even after expenses and taxes it would make a healthy contribution to the upkeep of the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, owned by Wolfe, lived in and worked in by him, by Fritz Brenner, chef and housekeeper, and by me, and worked in by Theodore Horstmann, who spent ten hours a day, and sometimes more, nursing the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms at the top of the house. I once calculated the outgo per hour for a period of six months, but I won’t mention the figure because the District Director of Internal Revenue might read this and tell one of his sniffers to compare it with the income tax report. As for the twenty-two grand, received in cash, he would find it included in income.

But when, at a quarter past one, I returned to the office after letting Sally Blount out and put the wad in the safe, I was by no means chipper. We had the wad with no strings attached; Wolfe had made it clear that his only commitment was to give it a try, but it seemed more than likely that we were licked before we started, and that’s hard to take for the ego of a wizard, not to mention a dog.

I had filled a dozen pages of my notebook with such items as:

1. As far as Sally knew, none of the four messengers, the only ones besides her father and the cook and steward who had been in reaching distance of the chocolate, had ever seen Paul Jerin before or had any connection with him; and if they had she would almost certainly have known because they were all in the Blounts’ circle, one way or another, and she saw them fairly frequently. Ditto for Bernard Nash and Tony Laghi, the steward and cook, though she had never seen them.

2. The messengers. Charles W. Yerkes, the banker, had occasional social contacts with the Blounts. Blount was on the Board of Directors of Yerkes’s bank. Yerkes enjoyed being in the same room with Mrs. Blount, Sally’s mother, but so did lots of men. In my notes I included a parenthesis, a guess that Sally thought it would be just as well if men would take time out from looking at her mother to give her a glance now and then. That was a little odd, since Sally herself was no eyesore, but of course I hadn’t seen her mother.

3. Morton Farrow, age thirty-one, was not a wizard, but wasn’t aware of it. He drew a good salary from the Blount Textile Corporation only because he was Mrs. Blount’s nephew, and thought he was underpaid. I’m translating what Sally told us, not quoting it.

4. Ernst Hausman, retired broker, a lifelong friend of Matthew Blount, was Sally’s godfather. He was an unhappy man and would die unhappy because he would give ten million dollars to be able to play a chess master without odds and mate him, and there was no hope. He hadn’t played a game with Blount for years because he suspected Blount of easing up on him. He had disapproved of the idea of having Paul Jerin come to the club and do his stunt; he thought no one but members should ever be allowed in. In short, a suffering snob.

5. Daniel Kalmus, the lawyer, had for years been counsel for Blount’s corporation. Sally had some kind of strong feeling for him, but I wasn’t sure what it was, and I’m still not sure, so I’ll skip it. She had said that Yerkes was in his forties, and Hausman, her godfather, was over seventy, but she said definitely that Kalmus was fifty-one. If a twenty-two-year-old girl can rattle off the age of a man more than twice as old who is not a relative and with whom she isn’t intimate, there’s a reason. There were other indications, not only things she said but her tone and manner. I put it down that her not trusting Kalmus — she always said “Dan Kalmus,” not “Mr. Kalmus” or just “Kalmus” — that her not trusting him to pull her father out of the hole was only partly because she thought he couldn’t. The other part was a suspicion that even if he could, he wouldn’t. If Blount were sent to the chair, or even sent up for life, Mrs. Blount might be available. Sally didn’t say that, but she mentioned for the third time that Dan Kalmus was in love with her mother. Wolfe asked her, “Is your mother in love with him?” and she said, “Good heavens, no. She’s not in love with anyone — except of course my father.”

6. So much for the messengers. Of the other items in my notebook I’ll report only one, the only one that was material. If any container that had held arsenic had been found the newspapers didn’t know about it, but that’s the kind of detail the police and DA often save. When Wolfe asked Sally if she knew anything about it I held my breath. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had said yes, a bottle half full of arsenic trioxide had been found in her father’s pocket. Why not? But she said that as far as she knew no container had been found. Dr. Avery, who was usually called on by her father or mother when a doctor was needed, had told her father two or three days after the affair, before Blount had been arrested, that after questioning and examining Jerin he had considered the possibility of poison and had looked around; he had even gone down to the kitchen; and he had found nothing. And four days ago, last Thursday, when Sally, after two sleepless nights, had gone to his office to get a prescription for a sedative, he had said that he had been told by an assistant DA that no container had ever been found, and now that Blount had been charged and was in custody he doubted if the police would try very hard to find one. The police hadn’t been called in until after Jerin died, and Blount, who had walked to the hospital, only a couple of blocks from the Gambit Club, after the ambulance had taken Jerin, had had plenty of opportunity to ditch a small object if he had one he wanted to get rid of. Dr. Avery, convinced that his friend and patient Matthew Blount was innocent, had told Sally that someone must have had a container and disposed of it, and had advised her to tell Kalmus to hire a detective to try to find it. It was that advice from Dr. Avery that had given Sally the idea of coming to Nero Wolfe.

One item not in the notebook. At the end Wolfe told her that it was absurd to suppose that he could act without the knowledge of Kalmus and her father. He would have to see people. At the very least he would have to see the four men who had been messengers, and, since he never left the house on business, they would have to come to him, and Sally would have to bring them or send them. Inevitably Kalmus would hear about it and would tell Blount. Sally didn’t like that. For a couple of minutes it had looked as if there was going to be an exchange, me handing her the wad and her giving me back the receipt, but after chewing on her lip for twenty seconds she decided to stick. She asked Wolfe who he wanted to see first, and he said we would let her know. She asked when, and he said he had no idea, he had to consider it.

At a quarter past one, when I returned to the office, not chipper, after letting her out, and put the wad in the safe, he was sitting straight, his mouth pressed so tight he had no lips, his palms flat on the desk pad, scowling at the door to the front room. It could have been either his farewell to the subversive dictionary or his greeting to a hopeless job, and it wouldn’t help matters any to ask him which. As I swung the safe door shut, Fritz appeared to announce lunch, saw Wolfe’s pose and expression, looked at me, found my face no better, said, “All right, you tell him,” and went.

Of course business was out at the table, but Wolfe refuses to let anything whatever spoil a meal if the food is good, as it always is in that house, and he managed to pretend that life was sweet and the goose hung high. But when we finished the coffee, got up, and crossed the hall back to the office, he went to his desk, sat, rested fists on the chair arms, and demanded, “Did he do it?”

I raised a brow. If Sally herself had been suspected of murder I would have humored him, since I am supposed, by him, after an hour or so in the company of an attractive young woman, to be able to answer any question he wants to ask about her. But it was stretching it too far to assume that my insight extended to relatives I had never seen, even a father.

“Well,” I said. “I admit that if there is anything to the idea of guilt by association there can also be innocence by association, but I recall that you once remarked to Lewis Hewitt that the transference—”

“Shut up!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t you intervene? Why didn’t you stop me?”

“My job is starting you, not stopping you.”

“Pfui. Why in heaven’s name did I consent? The money? Confound it, I’ll take to a cave and eat roots and berries. Money!”

“Nuts are good too, and the bark of some trees, and for meat you could try bats. It was only partly the money. She said you can do things no one else on earth can do, so when it developed that prying Blount loose is obviously something that no one on earth can do you were stuck. Whether Blount did it or not is beside the point. You have to prove he didn’t even if he did. Marvelous. By far your best case.”

“Yours too. Ours. You didn’t stop me.” He reached to put a finger on the button and pressed it, two short and one long, the beer signal. That was bad. He never rings for beer until an hour after lunch, giving him half an hour or so before he is to leave for his four-to-six afternoon session with Theodore in the plant rooms. I went to my desk. Seated there, my back is to the door to the hall, but in the mirror before me I saw Fritz enter with the beer and stop two paces in to aim his eyes at me with a question in them. One of my two million functions, as Fritz knows, is to keep Wolfe from breaking his beer rules. So I swiveled and said, “Okay. He’s taking to a cave, and I’m going along. This is a farewell fling.”

Fritz stood. “That woman? Or the dictionary?”

“I don’t want the beer,” Wolfe said. “Take it back.”

Fritz turned and went. Wolfe took in a bushel of air through his nose as far down as it would go, and let it out through his mouth. “I agree,” he said. “Consideration of his guilt or innocence would be futile. Either we proceed on the assumption that he is innocent or we withdraw. Do you wish to get that stuff from the safe and go and return it to her?”

“No. We took it and let her go. You know damn well why I didn’t try to stop you. It was too good to pass up — the chance of seeing you tackle one that was absolutely impossible.”

“You’re prepared to assume that Mr. Blount is innocent?”

“Hell, I have to. As you say.”

“Then someone else is guilty. I begin by eliminating the cook and the steward.”

“Good. That simplifies it. Why?”

“Look at it. The arsenic was in the chocolate. Therefore if either—”

“No. Not known. The only arsenic found was inside Jerin. The pot was full of fresh chocolate, no arsenic, the cup was clean, and no container was found. Not known.”

“But it is.” Usually Wolfe’s tone had a trace of satisfaction when he corrected me, but that time he didn’t bother. “After four days of investigation the District Attorney charged Mr. Blount with murder. Blount couldn’t possibly have given Jerin arsenic in any medium other than the chocolate. Before arresting him, the possibility that the arsenic had been administered in some other medium had to be eliminated beyond question, and at that sort of inquiry the police are highly competent. Certainly they have established that Jerin didn’t swallow the arsenic before he arrived at the Gambit Club, and at the club he swallowed only the chocolate; otherwise they wouldn’t have charged Blount.”

“Check,” I conceded. “The cook and steward?”

“This is not conclusive, only strongly probable. There they were in the kitchen, preparing the chocolate. One or both of them knew Mr. Jerin, had reason to wish him dead, knew he was coming to the club, and knew the chocolate was for him. Confine it to one. He puts arsenic in the chocolate. At the time he does so he doesn’t know that Mr. Blount will come for it; he supposes that it will be taken to the library by himself or his colleague. He doesn’t know that later Mr. Blount will bring the pot and cup down and rinse them out. He doesn’t know that any club member has an animus toward Mr. Jerin — unless you think I should allow that?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t know if there will be an opportunity for anyone else to put something in the chocolate. He does know that the police will certainly discover his connection, whatever it is, with Jerin. But he puts arsenic in the chocolate?”

“No. At least we can save them for the last. Of course the cops have checked on them. With Blount and the cook and steward out, what you have left is the messengers. Unless someone sneaked in uninvited?”

He shook his head. “Mr. Blount told his daughter only that he thought not, he wasn’t absolutely certain, but his table was near the door to the library. And it would have been foolhardy. Only the messengers were supposed to go in to Mr. Jerin, and anyone else entering would have been observed and noted. It would have been rash beyond sanity. I exclude it, tentatively. But there is one other possibility besides the messengers, Mr. Jerin himself. He had arsenic in a soluble capsule, put it in his mouth, and washed it down with the chocolate. Shall I deal with that?”

“No, thanks. I don’t need help with that one. Deal with the messengers. I grant opportunity. He goes in to report a move, shutting the door. We assume that he shut the door on account of the noise made by the spectators moving around in the big room?”

“Yes.”

“Right. He knows that another messenger may enter at any moment, but he only needs five seconds. The pot is there on the table. Jerin, on the couch, has his eyes closed, concentrating. He has the arsenic ready, say in a paper spill, and in it goes. He wouldn’t have to stir it. Nothing to it. Shall I name him?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Ernst Hausman, the chess fiend. He had been against inviting Jerin to come, but since he was there, there was his chance at a guy who could give odds of a rook to Blount, who could beat him. He would have liked to poison all the chess masters alive, beginning with the world champion, who I understand is a Russian.”

“Botvinnik.”

“Not only a lusus naturae, but also a Commie. I know of no case on record where that was the motive, killing a man because he played chess too well, but everything has to have a first. I am not blathering. Hausman may be off the rails.”

Wolfe grunted. “Not may be. Is. If he would give a fortune to excel at chess. Then you dismiss the other three.”

“I file them. Until I take a look at Hausman. The client says they had never seen Jerin, though they may have heard of him, from her. Of course we might cut a motive to fit the lawyer, Dan Kalmus. He’s not really in love with her mother, he’s in love with her. Being a married man, if he is, he has to hide his passion for a virgin, if she is, so when he’s with the Blounts he ogles the mother as a cover. He has the impression that Sally has fallen for Paul Jerin, which could be true in spite of what she told you, and the thought of her holding hands with another man is unbearable, so he buys some arsenic.”

“That’s a little farfetched.”

“Murder is usually farfetched. Would we settle for making Blount merely an accessory? We have to assume he didn’t commit the murder, sure, but he could have suspected that Hausman or Kalmus had doctored the chocolate, so he took care of the pot and cup.”

“No.” Wolfe shook his head. “Our assumption is that Mr. Blount is not involved. He took the pot and cup, and emptied and cleaned them, because he thought that Jerin’s indisposition might have been caused by something in the chocolate — as indeed it had been. A natural and proper action.” He closed his eyes, but he didn’t lean back, so he wasn’t thinking, he was merely suffering. His lips twitched. After a dozen or so twitches he opened his eyes and spoke. “At least we have a free field. The police and District Attorney have Mr. Blount in custody and are committed; they have no interest in our targets except as witnesses, and of course they have signed statements from them. There will be no jostling.” He looked up at the wall clock. “Mr. Cohen is in his office?”

“Sure.”

“See him. Besides the published accounts we have information from only one source, Miss Blount, and we have no knowledge of either her competence or her veracity. Tell Mr. Cohen that I have engaged to inquire into certain aspects of this matter, and I need—”

“It’ll be tough — I mean for him. He’ll know that can mean only one thing, that you’ve been hired to get Blount out, and you think it can be done or you wouldn’t have taken the job, and to expect him to sit on that — I don’t know.”

“I don’t expect him to sit on it.”

“He can print it?”

“Certainly. As I told Miss Blount, my intervention can’t be kept secret, and the sooner the murderer knows of it the better. He may think it necessary to do something.”

“Yeah. Of course if — no. I’ll have to tie a string on my finger to remind me that Blount didn’t do it.” I got up. “If I don’t tell Lon who hired you he’ll assume it was Blount or Kalmus.”

“Let him. You can’t prescribe his assumptions.”

“I wouldn’t try. Any particular point or points?”

“No. All points.”

I went to the hall, got my hat and coat from the rack, let myself out, and nearly got pushed off the stoop by a gust of the icy winter wind.