Trio for Blunt Instruments

5

OF ALL THE THOUSAND or more times I have felt like putting vinegar in Wolfe’s beer, I believe the closest I ever came to doing it was that Thursday evening when the doorbell rang at a quarter past nine, and after a look at the front I told him that Carl Heydt, Max Maslow, and Peter Jay were on the stoop, and he said they were not to be admitted.

In the nine and a half hours that had passed since Cramer had used my phone to call Purley Stebbins I had let it lie. I couldn’t expect Wolfe to start any fur flying until there was a reaction, or there wasn’t, say by tomorrow noon, to what had happened to Sue. However, I had made a move on my own. When Wolfe had left the office at four o’clock to go up to the plant rooms, I had told him I would be out on an errand for an hour or so, and I had taken a walk, to Rusterman’s, thinking I might pick up some little hint.

I didn’t. First I went out back for a look at the platform and the alley, which might seem screwy, since two days and nights had passed and the city scientists had combed it, but you never know. I once got an idea just running my eye around a hotel room where a woman had spent a night six months earlier. But I got nothing from the platform or alley except a scraped ear from squeezing under the platform and out again, and after talking with Felix and Joe and some of the kitchen staff I crossed it off. No one had seen or heard anyone or anything until Zoltan had stepped out for a cigarette (no smoking is allowed in the kitchen) and had seen the station wagon and the body on the ground.

I would have let it ride that evening, no needling until tomorrow noon. When Lily Rowan phoned around seven o’clock and said Sue had phoned her from the DA’s office that she was under arrest and had to have a lawyer and would Lily send her one, and Lily wanted me to come and tell her what was what, I would have gone if I hadn’t wanted to be on hand if there was a development. But when the development came Wolfe told me not to let it in.

I straight-eyed him. “You said you’d be concerned.”

“I am concerned.”

“Then here they are. You tossed her to the wolves to open them up, and here-”

“No. I did that to keep you out of jail. I am considering how to deal with the problem, and until I decide there is no point in seeing them. Tell them they’ll hear from us.”

The doorbell rang again. “Then I’ll see them. In the front room.”

“No. Not in my house.” He went back to his book.

Either put vinegar in his beer or get the Marley.32 from my desk drawer and shoot him dead, but that would have to wait; they were on the stoop. I went and opened the door enough for me to slip through, did so, bumping into Carl Heydt, and pulled the door shut. “Good evening,” I said. “Mr. Wolfe is busy on an important matter and can’t be disturbed. Do you want to disturb me instead?”

They all spoke at once. The general idea seemed to be that I would open the door and they would handle the disturbing.

“You don’t seem to realize,” I told them, “that you’re up against a genius. So am I, only I’m used to it. You were damn fools to think he was bluffing. You might have known he would do exactly what he said.”

“Then he did?” Peter Jay. “He did it?”

“We did. I share the glory. We did.”

“Glory hell.” Max Maslow. “You know Sue didn’t kill Ken Faber. He said so.”

“He said we were satisfied that she didn’t. We still are. He also said that we doubt if she’ll be convicted. He also said that our interest was to get me from under, and we had alternatives. We could either find out who killed Faber, for which we needed your help; or, if you refused to help, we could switch it to Sue. You refused, and we switched it, and I am in the clear, and here you are. Why? Why should he waste time on you now? He is busy on an important matter; he’s reading a book entitled My Life in Court, by Louis Nizer. Why should he put it down for you?”

“I can’t believe it, Archie.” Carl Heydt had hold of my arm. “I can’t believe you’d do a thing like this-to Sue-when you say she didn’t-”

“You never can tell, Carl. There was that woman who went to the park every day to feed the pigeons, but she fed her husband arsenic. I have a suggestion. This is Mr. Wolfe’s house and he doesn’t want you in it, but if you guys have changed your minds, at least two of you, about helping to find out who killed Faber, I’m a licensed detective too and I could spare a couple of hours. We can sit here on the steps, or we can go somewhere-”

“And you can tell us,” Maslow said, “what Sue told the cops that got them on you. I may believe that when I hear it.”

“You won’t hear it from me. That’s not the idea. You tell me things. I ask questions and you answer them. If I don’t ask them, who will? I doubt if the cops or the DA will; they’ve got too good a line on Sue. I’ll tell you this much, they know she was there Tuesday at the right time, and they know that she lied to them about what she was there for and what she saw. I can spare an hour or two.”

They exchanged glances, and they were not the glances of buddies with a common interest. They also exchanged words and found they agreed on one point: if one of them took me up they all would. Peter Jay said we could go to his place and they agreed on that too, and we descended to the sidewalk and headed east. At Eighth Avenue we flagged a taxi with room for four. It was ten minutes to ten when it rolled to the curb at a marquee on Park Avenue in the Seventies.

Jay’s apartment, on the fifteenth floor, was quite a perch for a bachelor. The living room was high, wide, and handsome, and it would have been an appropriate spot for our talk, since it was there that Sue McLeod and Ken Faber had first met, but Jay took us on through to a room smaller but also handsome, with chairs and carpet of matching green, a desk, bookshelves, and a TV-player cabinet. He asked us what we would drink but got no orders, and we sat.

“All right, ask your questions,” Maslow said. The twisted smile.

He was blocking my view of Heydt, and I shifted my chair. “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I looked it over on the way, and I decided to take another tack. Sue told the police, and it was in her signed statement, that she and I had arranged to meet there at the alley at five o’clock, and she was late, she didn’t get there until five-fifteen, and I wasn’t there, so she left. She had to tell them she was there because she had been seen in front of the restaurant, just around the corner, by two of the staff, who know her.”

Their eyes were glued on me. “So you weren’t there at five-fifteen,” Jay said. “The body was found at five-fifteen. So you had been and gone?”

“No. Sue also told the police that Faber had told her on Sunday that he had told me on Tuesday that she thought she was pregnant and he was responsible. He had told you that, all three of you. She said that was why she and I were going to meet there, to make Faber swallow his lies. So it’s fair to say she set the cops on me, and it’s no wonder they turned on the heat. The trouble-”

“Why not?” Maslow demanded. “Why isn’t it still on?”

“Don’t interrupt. The trouble was, she lied. Not about what Faber had told her on Sunday he had told me on Tuesday; that was probably his lie, he probably had told her that, but it wasn’t true; he had told me nothing on Tuesday. That’s why your names in his notebook had checkmarks but mine didn’t; he was going to feed us that to put the pressure on Sue, and he had fed it to you but not me. So that was his lie, not Sue’s. Hers was about our arranging to meet there Tuesday afternoon to have it out with Faber. We hadn’t. We hadn’t arranged anything. She also-”

“So you say.” Peter Jay.

“Don’t interrupt. She also lied about what she did when she got there at five-fifteen. She said she saw I wasn’t there and left. Actually she went down the alley, saw Faber’s body there on the ground with his skull smashed, panicked, and blew. The time thing-”

“So you say.” Peter Jay.

“Shut up. The time thing is only a matter of seconds. Sue says she got there at five-fifteen, and the record says that a man coming from the kitchen discovered the body at five-fifteen. Sue may be off half a minute, or the man may. Evidently she had just been and gone when the man came from the kitchen.”

“Look, pal.” Maslow had his head cocked and his eyes narrowed. “Shut up? Go soak your head. Who’s lying, Sue or you?”

I nodded. “That’s a fair question. Until noon today, a little before noon, they thought I was. Then they found out I wasn’t. They didn’t just guess again, they found out, and that’s why they took her down and they’re going to keep her. Which-”

“How did they find out?”

“Ask them. You can be sure it was good. They were liking it fine, having me on a hook, and they hated to see me flop off. It had to be good, and it was. Which brings me to the point. I think Sue’s lie was part truth. I think she had arranged with someone to meet her there at five o’clock. She got there fifteen minutes late and he wasn’t there, and she went down the alley and saw Faber dead, and what would she think? That’s obvious. No wonder she panicked. She went home and looked it over. She couldn’t deny she had been there because she had been seen. If she said she had gone there on her own to see Faber, alone, they wouldn’t believe she hadn’t gone in the alley, and they certainly would believe she had killed him. So she decided to tell the truth, part of it, that she had arranged to meet someone and she got there late and he wasn’t there and she had left-leaving out that she had gone in the alley and seen the body. But since she thought that the man she had arranged to meet had killed Faber she couldn’t name him; but they would insist on her naming him. So she decided to name me. It wasn’t so dirty really; she thought I could prove I was somewhere else, having decided not to meet her. I couldn’t, but she didn’t know that.” I turned a palm up. “So the point is, who had agreed to meet her there?”

Heydt said, “That took a lot of cutting and fitting, Archie.”

“You were going to ask questions,” Maslow said. “Ask one we can answer.”

“I’ll settle for that one,” I said. “Say it was one of you, which of course I am saying. I don’t expect him to answer it. If Sue stands pat and doesn’t name him and it gets to where he has to choose between letting her go to trial and unloading, he might come across, but not here and now. But I do expect the other two to consider it. Put it another way: if Sue decided to jump on Faber for the lies he was spreading around and to ask one of you to help, which one would she pick? Or still another: which one of you would be most likely to decide to jump Faber and ask Sue to join in? I like the first one better because it was probably her idea.” I looked at Heydt. “What about it, Carl? Just a plain answer to a plain question. Which one would she pick? You?”

“No. Maslow.”

“Why?”

“He’s articulate and he’s tough. I’m not tough, and Sue knows it.”

“How about Jay?”

“My God, no. I hope not. She must know that nobody can depend on him for anything that takes guts.”

Jay left his chair, and his hands were fists as he moved. Guts or not, he certainly believed in making contact. Thinking that Heydt probably wasn’t as well educated as Maslow, I got up and blocked Jay off, and darned if he didn’t swing at me, or start to. I got his arm and whirled him and shoved, and he stumbled but managed to stay on his feet. As he turned, Maslow spoke.

“Hold it, Pete. I have an idea. There’s no love lost among us three, but we all feel the same about this Goodwin. He’s a persona non grata if I ever saw one.” He got up. “Let’s bounce him. Not just a nudge, the bum’s rush. Care to help, Carl?”

Heydt shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll watch.”

“Okay. It’ll be simpler if you just relax, Goodwin.”

I couldn’t turn and go, leaving my rear open. “I hope you won’t tickle,” I said, backing up a step.

“Come in behind, Pete,” Maslow said, and started, slow, his elbows out a little and his open hands extended and up some. Since he had been so neat with the kidney punch he probably knew a few tricks, maybe the armpit or the apple, and with Jay on my back I would have been a setup, so I doubled up and whirled, came up bumping Jay, and gave him the edge of my hand, as sharp as I could make it, on the side of his neck, the tendon below the ear. It got exactly the right spot and so much for him, but Maslow had my left wrist and was getting his shoulder in for the lock, and in another tenth of a second I would have been meat. The only way to go was down, and I went, sliding off his shoulder and bending my elbow into his belly, and he made a mistake. Having lost the lock, he reached for my other wrist. That opened him up, and I rolled into him, brought my right arm around, and had his neck with a knee in his back.

“Do you want to hear it crack?” I asked him, which was bad manners, since he couldn’t answer. I loosened my arm a little. “I admit I was lucky. If Jay had been sideways you would have had me.” I looked at Jay, who was on a chair, rubbing his neck. “If you want to play games you ought to take lessons. Maslow would be a good teacher.” I unwound my arm and got erect. “Don’t bother to see me out,” I said and headed for the front.

I was still breathing a little fast when I emerged to the sidewalk, having straightened my tie and run my comb through my hair in the elevator. My watch said twenty past ten. Also in the elevator I had decided to make a phone call, so I walked to Madison Avenue, found a booth, and dialed one of the numbers I knew best. Miss Lily Rowan was in and would be pleased to have me come and tell her things, and I walked the twelve blocks to the number on 63rd Street where her penthouse occupies the roof.

Since it wasn’t one of Wolfe’s cases with a client involved, but a joint affair, and since it was Lily who had started Sue on her way at my request, I gave her the whole picture. Her chief reactions were a) that she didn’t blame Sue and I had no right to, I should feel flattered; b) that I had to somehow get Sue out of it without involving whoever had removed such a louse as Kenneth Faber from circulation; and c) that if I did have to involve him she hoped to heaven it wasn’t Carl Heydt because there was no one else around who could make clothes that were fit to wear, especially suits. She had sent a lawyer to Sue, Bernard Ross, and he had seen her and had phoned an hour before I came to report that she was being held without bail and he would decide in the morning whether to apply for a writ.

It was after one o’clock when I climbed out of a cab in front of the old brownstone on West 35th Street, mounted the stoop, used my key, went down the hall to the office and switched the light on, and got a surprise. Under a paperweight on my desk was a note in Wolfe’s handwriting. It said:

AG: Saul will take the car in the morning, probably for most of the day. His car is not presently available. NW

I went to the safe, manipulated the knob, opened the door, got the petty-cash book from the drawer, flipped to the current page, and saw an entry:

10/14 SP exp AG 100

I put it back, shut the door, twirled the knob, and considered Wolfe had summoned Saul, and he had come and had been given an errand for which he needed a car. What errand, for God’s sake? Not to drive to Putman County to get the corn that had been ordered for Friday; for that he wouldn’t need to start in the morning, he wouldn’t need a hundred bucks for possible expenses, and the entry wouldn’t say “exp AG.” It shouldn’t say that anyway since I wasn’t a paying client; it should say “exp JA” for joint affair. And if we were going to split the outlay I should damn well have been consulted beforehand. But up in my room, as I took off and put on, what was biting me was the errand. In the name of the Almighty Lord or J. Edgar Hoover, whichever you prefer, what and where was the errand?

Wolfe eats breakfast in his room from a tray taken up by Fritz, and ordinarily I don’t see him until he comes down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock. If he has something important or complicated for me he sends word by Fritz for me to go up to his room; for something trivial he gets me on the house phone. That Friday morning there was neither word by Fritz nor the buzzer, and after a late and leisurely breakfast in the kitchen, having learned nothing new from the report of developments in the morning papers on the Sweet Corn Murder, as the Gazette called it, I went to the office and opened the mail. If Wolfe saw fit to keep Saul’s errand strictly private, he could eat wormy old corn boiled in water before I’d ask him. I decided to go out for a walk and was starting for the kitchen to tell Fritz when the phone rang. I got it, and a woman said she was the secretary of Mr. Bernard Ross, counsel for Miss Susan McLeod, and Mr. Ross would like very much to talk with Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Goodwin at their earliest convenience. He would greatly appreciate it if they would call at his office today, this morning if possible.

I would have enjoyed telling Wolfe that Bernard Ross, the celebrated attorney, didn’t know that Nero Wolfe, the celebrated detective, never left his house to call on anyone whoever, but since I wasn’t on speaking terms with him I had to skip it. I told the secretary that Wolfe couldn’t but I could and would, went and told Fritz I would probably be back for lunch, put a carbon copy of the twelve-page conversation with affidavits in my pocket, and departed.

I did get back for lunch, just barely. Including the time he took to study the document I had brought, Ross kept me a solid two hours and a half. When I left he knew nearly everything I did, but not quite; I omitted a few items that were immaterial as far as he was concerned-for instance, that Wolfe had sent Saul Panzer somewhere to do something. Since I couldn’t tell him where, to do what, there was no point in mentioning it.

I would have preferred to buy my lunch somewhere, say at Rusterman’s, rather than sit through a meal with Wolfe, but he would be the one to gripe, not me, if he didn’t know where I was. Entering his house, and hearing him in the dining room speaking to Fritz, I went first to the office, and there on my desk under a paperweight were four sawbucks. Leaving them there, I went to the dining room and said good morning, though it wasn’t.

He nodded and went on dishing shrimps from a steaming casserole. “Good afternoon. That forty dollars on your desk can be returned to the safe. Saul had no expenses and I gave him sixty dollars for his six hours.”

“His daily minimum is eighty.”

“He wouldn’t take eighty. He didn’t want to take anything, since this is our personal affair, but I insisted. This shrimp Bordelaise is without onions but has some garlic. I think an improvement, but Fritz and I invite your opinion.”

“I’ll be glad to give it. It smells good.” I sat. That was by no means the first time the question had arisen whether he was more pigheaded than I was strong-minded. I was supposed to explode. I was supposed to demand to know where and how Saul had spent the six hours, and he would then be good enough to explain that he had got an idea last night in my absence, and, not knowing where I was, he had had to call Saul. So I wouldn’t explode. I would eat shrimp Bordelaise without onions but with garlic and like it. Obviously, whatever Saul’s errand had been, it had been a washout, since he had returned and reported and been paid off. So it was Wolfe’s move, since he had refused to see the three candidates when they came and rang the bell, and I would not explode. Nor would I report on last night or this morning unless and until he asked for it. Back in the office after lunch, he got settled in his favorite chair with My Life in Court, and I brought a file of cards from the cabinet and got busy with the germination records. At one minute to four he put his book down and went to keep his date with the orchids. It would have been a pleasure to take the Marley.32 from the drawer and plug him in the back.

I was at my desk, looking through the evening edition of the Gazette that had just been delivered, when I heard a noise I couldn’t believe. The elevator. I looked at my watch: half past five. That was unprecedented. He never did that. Once in the plant rooms he stuck there for the two hours, no matter what. If he had a notion that couldn’t wait he buzzed me on the house phone, or Fritz if I wasn’t there. I dropped the paper and got up and stepped to the hall. The elevator jolted to a stop at the bottom, the door opened, and he emerged.

“The corn,” he said. “Has it come?”

For Pete’s sake. Being finicky about grub is all right up to a point, but there’s a limit. “No,” I said. “Unless Saul brought it.”

He grunted. “A possibility occurred to me. When it comes-if it comes-no. I’ll see for myself. The possibility is remote, but it would be-”

“Here it is,” I said. “Good timing.” A man with a carton had appeared on the stoop. As I started to the front the door bell rang, and as I opened the door Wolfe was there beside me. The man, a skinny little guy in pants too big for him and a bright green shirt, spoke. “Nero Wolfe?”

“I’m Nero Wolfe.” He was on the sill. “You have my corn?”

“Right here.” He put the carton down and let go of the cord.

“May I have your name, sir?”

“My name’s Palmer. Delbert Palmer. Why?”

“I like to know the names of men who render me a service. Did you pick the corn?”

“Hell, no. McLeod picked it.”

“Did you pack it in the carton?”

“No, he did. Look here, I know you’re a detective. You just ask questions from habit, huh?”

“No, Mr. Palmer. I merely want to be sure about the corn. I’m obliged to you. Good day, sir.” He bent over to slip his fingers under the cord, lifted the carton, and headed for the office. Palmer told me distinctly, “It takes all kinds,” turned, and started down the steps, and I shut the door. In the office, Wolfe was standing eying the carton, which he had put on the seat of the red leather chair. As I crossed over he said without looking up, “Get Mr. Cramer.”

It’s nice to have a man around who obeys orders no matter how batty they are and saves the questions for later. That time the questions got answered before they were asked. I went to my desk, dialed Homicide South, and got Cramer, and Wolfe, who had gone to his chair, took his phone.

“Mr. Cramer? I must ask a favor. I have here in my office a carton which has just been delivered to me. It is supposed to contain corn, and perhaps it does, but it is conceivable that it contains dynamite and a contraption that will detonate it when the cord is cut and the flaps raised. My suspicion may be groundless, but I have it. I know this is not your department, but you will know how to proceed. Will you please notify the proper person without delay?… That can wait until we know what’s in the carton… Certainly. Even if it contains only corn I’ll give you all relevant information… No, there is no ticking sound. If it does contain explosives there is almost certainly no danger until the carton is opened… Yes, I’ll make sure.”

He hung up, swiveled, and glared at the carton. “Confound it,” he growled, “again. We’ll get some somewhere before the season ends.”