The League of Frightened Men

Chapter 20

Monday morning when I woke up I was still in bed. That sounds as if I meant something else, but I don’t. When I got enough awake to realize where I was I had a feeling that I had gone to bed sometime during Lent and here it was Christmas. Then I saw Doc Vollmer standing there beside me.

I grinned at him. “Hello, doc. You got a job here as house physician?”

He grinned back. “I just stopped in to see how it went with what I pumped into you last night. Apparently—”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Good God.” It struck me that the room seemed full of light. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to twelve.”

“No!” I twisted to see the clock. “Holy murder!” I jerked myself upright, and someone jabbed a thousand ice-picks into my skull. “Whoa, Bill.” I put my hands up to it and tried moving it slowly. I said to Vollmer, “What’s this I’ve got here, my head?”

He laughed. “It’ll be all right.”

“Yeah. You’re not saying when. Wowie! Is Mr. Wolfe down in the office?”

He nodded. “I spoke to him on the way up.”

“And it’s noon.” I slid to my feet. “Look out, I might run into you.” I started for the bathroom.

I began soaping up, and he came to the bathroom door and said he had left instructions with Fritz for my breakfast. I told him I didn’t want instructions, I wanted ham and eggs. He laughed again, and beat it. I was glad to hear him laugh, because it seemed likely that if there really were ice-picks sticking in my head he, being a doctor, would be taking them out instead of laughing at me.

I made it as snappy as I could with my dizziness, cleansing the form and assuming the day’s draperies, and went downstairs in pretty good style but hanging onto the banister.

Wolfe, in his chair, looked up and said good morning and asked me how I felt. I told him I felt like twin colts and went to my desk. He said:

“But, Archie. Seriously. Should you be up?”

“Yeah. Not only should I be up, I should have been up. You know how it is, I’m a man of action.”

His cheeks unfolded. “And I, of course, am super-sedentary. A comical interchange of roles, that you rode home last evening from the Bronx River Inn, a matter of ten miles or more, with your head on my lap all the way.”

I nodded. “Very comical. I told you a long while ago, Mr. Wolfe, that you pay me half for the chores I do and half for listening to you brag.”

“So you did. And if I did not then remark, I do so now — but no. We can pursue these amenities another time, now there is business. Could you take some notes, and break your fast with our lunch?—Good. I spoke on the telephone this morning with Mr. Morley, and with the District Attorney himself. It has been arranged that I shall see Mr. Chapin at the Tombs at two-thirty this afternoon. You will remember that on Saturday evening I was beginning to dictate to you the confession of Paul Chapin when we were interrupted by news from Fred Durkin which caused a postponement. If you will turn to that page we can go on. I’ll have to have it by two o’clock.”

So as it turned out I not only didn’t get to tie into the ham and eggs I had yearned for, I didn’t even eat lunch with Wolfe and Hibbard. The dictating wasn’t done until nearly one, and I had the typing to do. But by that time the emptiness inside had got to be a vacuum, or whatever it may be that is emptier than emptiness, and I had Fritz bring some hot egg sandwiches and milk and coffee to my desk. I wanted this typed just right, this document that Paul Chapin was to sign, and with my head not inclined to see the importance of things like spelling and punctuation I had to take my time and concentrate. Also, I wasted three minutes phoning the garage to tell them to bring the sedan around, for I supposed of course I would take Wolfe in it; but they said they already had instructions from Wolfe, and that the instructions included a driver. I thought maybe I ought to be sore about that, but decided not to.

Wolfe ate a quick lunch, for him. When he came into the office at a quarter to two I barely had the thing finished and was getting the three copies clipped into brown folders. He took them and put them in his pocket and told me to take my notebook and started on the instructions for my afternoon. He explained that he had asked for a driver from the garage because I would be busy with other things. He also explained that on account of the possibility of visitors he had procured from Hibbard a promise that he would spend the entire afternoon in his room, until dinner time. Hibbard had gone there from the lunch-table.

Fritz came to the door and said the car was there, and Wolfe told him he would be ready in a few minutes.

What gave me a new idea of the dimensions of Wolfe’s nerve was the disclosure that a good part of the arrangements had been completed for a meeting of the League of the White Feather, in the office that evening at nine o’clock. Before he had seen Chapin at all! Of course I didn’t know what Dora might have told him, except a couple of details that had been included in the confession, but it wasn’t Dora that was supposed to sign on the dotted line, it was her little crippled husband with the light-colored eyes; and that was a job I was glad Wolfe hadn’t bestowed on me, even if it did mean his sashaying out of the house twice in two days, which was an all-time record. But he had gone ahead and telephoned Boston and Philadelphia and Washington, and six or eight of them in New York, after we got home Sunday evening and from his room early that morning, and the meeting was on. My immediate job was to get in touch with the others, by phone if possible, and ensure as full an attendance as we could get.

He gave me another one more immediate, just before he left. He told me to go and see Mrs. Burton at once, and dictated two questions to ask her. I suggested the phone, and he said no, it would be better if I saw the daughter and the maids also. Fritz was standing there holding his coat. Wolfe said:

“And I was almost forgetting that our guests will be thirsty. Fritz, put the coat down and come here, and we shall see what we need.—Archie, if you don’t mind you had better start, you should be back by three.—Let us see, Fritz. I noticed last week that Mr. Cabot prefers Aylmer’s soda—”

I beat it. I walked to the garage for the roadster, and the sharp air glistened in my lungs. After I got the roadster out into the light I looked it over and couldn’t find a scratch on it, and it was then I reflected on miracles. I got back in and headed uptown.

I was worried about Wolfe. It looked to me like he was rushing things beyond reason. It was true that Andrew Hibbard’s parole was up that evening, but probably he could have been persuaded to extend it, and besides it certainly wasn’t vital to produce him at the meeting as a stunt. But it was like Wolfe not to wait until the confession was actually in the bag. That sort of gesture, thumbing his nose at luck, was a part of him, and maybe an important part; there were lots of things about Wolfe I didn’t pretend to know. Anyhow, there was no law against worrying, and it didn’t make my head feel any better to reflect on the outcome of the meeting that evening if Paul Chapin stayed mule. So that was what I reflected on, all the way to Ninetieth Street.

Wolfe had said that both of the questions I was to ask Mrs. Burton were quite important. The first was simple: Did Dr. Burton telephone Paul Chapin between 6:50 and 7:00 o’clock Saturday evening and ask him to come to see him?

The second was more complicated: At 6:30 Saturday evening a pair of gray gloves was lying on the table in the Burton foyer, near the end towards the double doors. Were the gloves removed between then and 7:20 by anyone in the apartment?

I got a break. Everybody was home. The housekeeper had me wait in the drawing-room and Mrs. Burton came to me there. She looked sick, I thought, and had on a gray dress that made her look sicker, but the spine was still doing its stuff. The first question took about nine seconds; the answer was no, definitely. Dr. Burton had done no telephoning after 6:30 Saturday evening. The second question required more time. Mrs. Kurtz was out of it, since she hadn’t been there. The daughter, having left before 6:30, seemed out of it too, but I asked Mrs. Burton to call her in anyhow, to make sure. She came, and said she had left no gloves on the foyer table and had seen none there. Mrs. Burton herself had not been in the foyer between the time she returned home and around six, and 7:33 when the sound of the shots had taken her there on the run. She said she had left no gloves on that table, and certainly had removed none. She sent for Rose. Rose came, and I asked her if she had removed a pair of gloves from the foyer table between 6:30 and 7:20 Saturday evening.

Rose looked at Mrs. Burton instead of me. She hesitated, and then she spoke: “No, ma’am, I didn’t take the gloves. But Mrs. Chapin—”

She stopped. I said, “You saw some gloves there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When?”

“When I went to let Mrs. Chapin in.”

“Did Mrs. Chapin take them?”

“No, sir. That’s when I noticed them, when she picked them up. She picked them up and then put them down again.”

“You didn’t go back later and get them?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

That settled that. I thanked Mrs. Burton, and left. I wanted to tell her that before tomorrow noon we would have definite news for her that might help a little, but I thought Wolfe had already done enough discounting for the firm and I’d better let it ride.

It was after three when I got back to the office, and I got busy on the phone. There were eight names left for me, that Wolfe hadn’t been able to get. He had told me the line to take, that we were prepared to mail our bills to our clients, the signers of the memorandum, but that before doing so we would like to explain to them in a body and receive their approval. Which again spoke fairly well for Wolfe’s nerve, inasmuch as our clients knew damn well that it was the cops who had grabbed Chapin for Burton’s murder and that we had had about as much to do with it as the lions in front of the library. But I agreed that it was a good line, since the object was to get them to the office.

I was doing pretty well with my eight, having hooked five of them in a little over half an hour, when, at a quarter to four, while I was looking in the book for the number of the Players’ Club, on the trail of Roland Erskine, the phone rang. I answered, and it was Wolfe. As soon as I heard his voice I thought to myself, uh-huh, here we go, the party’s up the flue. But it didn’t appear that that was the idea. He said to me:

“Archie? What luck at Mrs. Burton’s?”

“All negatives. Burton didn’t phone, and nobody took any gloves.”

“But perhaps the maid saw them?”

“Oh, you knew that too. She did. She saw Mrs. Chapin pick them up and put them down again.”

“Excellent. I am telephoning because I have just made a promise and I wish to redeem it without delay. Take Mr. Chapin’s box from the cabinet, wrap it carefully, and convey it to his apartment and deliver it to Mrs. Chapin. I shall probably be at home by your return.”

“Okay. You got any news?”

“Nothing startling.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything startling. Let’s try a plain straightforward question. Did you get the confession signed or didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“It’s really signed?”

“It is. But I forgot to say: before you wrap Mr. Chapin’s box take out a pair of gloves, gray leather, and keep them. Please get the box to Mrs. Chapin at once.”

“Okay.”

I hung up. The fat devil had put it over. I had no idea what items of ammunition he had procured from Dora Chapin, and of course he had the advantage that Chapin was already in the Tombs with a first degree murder charge glued on him, but even so I handed it to him. I would say that that cripple was the hardest guy to deal with I had ever run across, except the perfume salesman up in New Rochelle who used to drown kittens in the bathtub and one day got hold of his wife by mistake. I would have loved to see Wolfe inserting the needle in him.

Wolfe had said without delay, so I let the last three victims wait. I wrapped the box up and drove down to Perry Street with it, removing a pair of gloves first in accordance with instructions and putting them in a drawer of my desk. I parked across the street from 203 and got out. I had decided on the proper technique for that delivery. I went across to where the elevator man was standing inside the entrance and said to him:

“Take this package up to Mrs. Chapin on the fifth floor. Then come back here and I’ll give you a quarter.”

He took the package and said, “The cop was sore as a boil yesterday when he found you’d gone. How’re you feeling?”

“Magnificent. Run ahead, mister.”

He went, and came back, and I gave him a quarter. I asked him, “Did I break anything on your vertical buggy? The lever wouldn’t work.”

He grinned about a sixteenth of an inch. “I’ll bet it wouldn’t. Naw, you didn’t break it.”

So I kept Wolfe’s promise for him and got the package delivered without running any unnecessary risk of being invited in for tea, and all it cost me was two bits, which was cheap enough.

Wolfe returned before I got back home. I knew that in the hall, seeing his hat and coat there. Since it was after four o’clock he would of course be upstairs with the plants, but all of his traipsing around had me nervous, and before going to the office I went up the three flights. I had hardly seen the orchids for more than brief glances for nearly a week. Wolfe was in the tropical room, going down the line looking for aphids, and from the expression on his face I knew he had found some. I stood there, and pretty soon he turned and looked at me as if I was either an aphid myself or had them all over me. There was no use attempting any conversation. I beat it downstairs to resume at the telephone.

I only got two of the remaining three, couldn’t find Roland Erskine anywhere. As it was, we had done pretty good. A telegram had come from Boston saying that Collard and Gaines would be there, and Mollison was coming down from New Haven. I suspected that Wolfe would have handled the long distance babies himself even if I hadn’t been in bed.

Wolfe didn’t come to the office directly from the plant-rooms at six o’clock as usual. Apparently he had stopped in his room, for when he appeared around six-thirty he was lugging a stack of books and I saw they were Paul Chapin’s novels. He put them on his desk and sat down and rang for beer.

I told him Mrs. Chapin had the box, and read him the notes of my afternoon call on Mrs. Burton. He gave me some instructions for the evening, which I made notes of because he liked to have everything down, and then he got playful. He made a lot of random remarks and I took them like a gentleman, and then because it was getting on towards dinner I observed that it was about time I got acquainted with the mystery of the pair of gloves on the foyer table. To my surprise he agreed with me.

He said: “That was the contribution of Mrs. Chapin. She furnished other information too, but nothing as interesting as that. She arrived at the Burton apartment, as you know, at six-thirty. The maid called Rose let her in. As she passed through the foyer she saw a pair of gloves on the table, and she stopped to pick them up. She says she intended to take them in to Mrs. Burton, but it would not be charitable to surmise that she had in mind starting a new treasure box for her husband; and that it is supported by the reasons she gives for returning the gloves to the table. She gives two reasons: that the maid had turned and was looking at her, and that the gloves seemed a little heavier than any she had known Mrs. Burton to wear. At any rate, she left them there. But when she went through the foyer, alone, on the way out, she thought to look at them again to satisfy herself whether they were Mrs. Burton’s or not. The gloves were gone. She even looked around for them. They were gone.”

“I see. And that proves she didn’t croak Burton.”

“It does. And it identifies the murderer. If it should turn out that factual corroboration is needed of Mrs. Chapin’s innocence, which seems unlikely, it can be established that at half past seven she was receiving a summons from a policeman at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street for passing a red light. Not to mention the probability that the hallman and doorman saw her leaving the building before the event occurred. But none of that should be needed.”

“Uh-huh. I suppose you got her confidence by giving her some orchids.”

“No. But as a matter of fact, I promised her some. Make a note of that for tomorrow. I got her confidence by telling her the truth, that the conviction of her husband for murder would cost me many thousands of dollars. You see, what happened — what time is it?—Good. She was convinced, as was Chapin himself, that I was responsible for his predicament. Not knowing the nature of my agreement with his friends, he thought I had framed him. Having seen me, he could not of course suppose that I myself had performed the acrobatics in the foyer. Do you know who did that? You. Yes, indeed, you did the killing, I merely devised it. Mrs. Chapin, believing that, seized an opportunity. With you and Pitney Scott fast asleep, she went through your pockets, took his cap and jacket, sat down and wrote a note, and drove the taxicab here. She handed the envelope to Fritz at the door and returned to the cab. The note was brief and quite clear, I can quote it verbatim: Archie Goodwin will be dead in two hours unless you get in my taxi and go where I drive you. And it was signed with her name, Dora Chapin. Admirably forthright. What persuaded me that some sort of action was called for was the presence in the envelope of the leather case you had seemed to like.”

He paused for a glass of beer. I grunted, and thought I ought to say something, but all I could think of was, “Yeah, I liked it. And you’ve still got it.”

He nodded, and resumed. “The only aspect of the episode that was really distressing came from Mrs. Chapin’s romantic idea of what constitutes a remote and secluded spot. Since I was committed to follow her, a bush in a corner of Central Park would have done her just as well, but that infernal female ass bounced that cab far beyond the limits of the city. I learned subsequently that she had in mind an isolated wood somewhere on the edge of Long Island Sound where she and her husband had gone last summer to have a picnic. It became unendurable. I lowered the glass between us and shouted at the back of her ear that if she did not stop within three minutes I would call for help at every passing car and every visible human being. I convinced her. She turned into a byroad and soon stopped under a clump of trees.

“This will amuse you. She had a weapon. A kitchen knife!—By the way, that carving she exhibited to us last Wednesday was done on her own initiative; her husband disapproved. At that time the game was still on of establishing Mr. Chapin in the minds of his friends as a dangerous and murderous fellow, without involving him in any demonstrable guilt. He already suspected that I might uncover him, and his wife’s bloody neck was a red herring, though her own idea.—Well. She could not very well have expected to kill me with a knife, since none could be long enough to reach a vital spot; I suppose no gun was available, or perhaps she mistrusts them as I do. Perhaps she meant merely to hack me into acquiescence; and of course she had in reserve my anxiety as to the peril of your situation. At all events, her purpose was to force me to reveal the skulduggery by which her husband had been entrapped. I was to write it. She had pen and paper with her. That attention to detail endeared her to me.”

“Yeah. And?”

He drank beer. “Nothing much. You know my fondness for talking. It was an excellent opportunity. She was calm from the outset. She and I have much in common — for instance, our dislike of perturbation. It would have been instructive to see her using the knife on the back of her neck that day, I would wager she did it much as one trims a chop. After I had explained the situation to her, we discussed it. The moment arrived when it seemed pointless to continue our conference in that cold, dark forbidding spot, and besides, I had learned what had happened to you. She seemed so uncertain as to what she had used to flavor your coffee that I thought it best to reach a telephone with as little delay as possible.—Ah! Mr. Hibbard, I trust the long afternoon has been fairly tolerable.”

Hibbard walked in, looking a little groggy, still wearing my brown necktie. Behind him came Fritz, to announce dinner.