Archie Goes Home

Chapter 29

After lunch, Wolfe repaired to the kitchen, with sleeves rolled up and donning the oversized apron he, or perhaps Fritz, had the foresight to pack. There, with my mother as his second-in-command, he undertook the preparations for our dinner.

Saul and I watched with amusement from the doorway, but after a couple of minutes, I suggested we take a drive. “We will only be in the way here,” I said.

“Not that it will help much, if at all,” I told him as we pulled out of the driveway in the convertible, “but I’ll show you a few of the places of interest in our investigation, if indeed Wolfe is ever going to start doing some investigating.”

“The funny thing is, he never uttered a single word about the case on our trip down here,” Saul said. “I am still surprised that he made the trek at all, especially as there’s no client, ergo, no fee.”

“Yeah, that’s a puzzler, all right. What did he say when he decided to leave the brownstone?”

“I was typing up some of his correspondence as he came down from the plant rooms in the morning, settled in behind his desk, and said, ‘Archie’s mother called, and thinks I need to go down to Ohio and help with an investigation of his.’

“‘Is that right?’ I said to him. ‘You of course turned her down. You surely are not about to travel.’ He didn’t respond until about an hour later. When he said, ‘How would you feel about driving me to Ohio?’

“I damned near fell off my chair... er, your chair, and after I recovered from the shock, I told him that I could be ready any time he was, and a few hours later, we were off. I knew damned well that he would be one nervous passenger. Based on my occasional glances in the rearview mirror, I think that he kept his eyes closed for at least half the trip, which was too bad. There’s some picturesque country along the way, especially in the Pennsylvania mountains.”

“I don’t think Wolfe is high on picturesque country, unless it’s in a book of photographs. Back to the business at hand: that big old house coming up on the right is where Logan Mulgrew lived,” I told Saul.

“Dreary comes to mind,” he said. “It looks like an ideal place to set a movie murder.”

“Doesn’t it, though? And it’s possible that two murders took place inside — Mulgrew’s wife and the man himself.” I proceeded to tell Saul what had been said about the possibility of Sylvia Mulgrew having been poisoned by her husband — or her caregiver.

“You grew up in this burg, Archie. Do you remember anything like this ever happening during the years of your callow youth?”

“Callow, eh? I’ll have to look that one up; knowing you, I suppose it’s some sort of an insult. But the answer to your question is no, I can’t remember a single murder in the county in my growing-up years. The closest thing was when a farmer whose name I’ve long forgotten came home and found his wife in bed with another man and chased him out of the house, firing at him with a shotgun. The story I heard from classmates was that the unwelcome guest ended up picking shotgun pellets out of his rear for weeks.”

“Serves him right,” Saul said. “I wonder how the farmer treated his wife.”

“There was plenty of speculation about that, too, but apparently he didn’t beat her. She showed up in town just a few days later with no apparent marks on her.”

“Did she have to wear a red ‘A’ on her clothes?”

“Huh?”

“You should read The Scarlet Letter sometime, Archie, a novel by a man named Hawthorne.”

“The only Hawthorne I ever heard of was some guy whom our grade school was named after.”

“Same man. Heck of a writer.”

“I will have to take your word for it,” I said as I turned the car around and we headed back toward town. “Have a look at that farm,” I said to Saul. “Harold Mapes lives there.”

“I don’t know anything about farms, but it looks like a pretty nice layout.”

“It is, but Mapes and his wife are just the tenants, not the owners. Mulgrew foreclosed on him when he couldn’t keep up the loan payments, and he lost his own spread, which was down the road from this one.”

“The banker as Scrooge,” Saul observed.

“One more poor soul who had reason to dislike Mulgrew,” I said as we continued back into town.

“See that second-story window? That’s the apartment where the reporter Katie Padgett lives, and after Mulgrew’s death, somebody fired a shot, breaking the window. Fortunately for Katie, she wasn’t in that room at the time.”

“Lucky for her, all right, especially given that she was writing about Mulgrew’s death. Didn’t that make the police chief suspicious?”

“He brushed it off as somebody getting drunk on a Saturday night and going on a toot. Even though nothing like that had happened around town in recent memory.”

“He didn’t think it was more than a coincidence that the shot just happened to be fired at a reporter’s home?”

“You’re getting a picture of a small-town police department. It makes Inspector Cramer back home look good, doesn’t it?”

“I happen to think Cramer’s a damned good cop, Archie,” Saul said. “He just lets Nero Wolfe get under his skin too often.”

“In fairness, I think this Blankenship is an okay cop, as well. But he hasn’t had any experience with murder, which is what I think we’re dealing with.

“On the left is Renson’s Garage, where Charles Purcell works,” I said, continuing in my role as tour director. “He’s the one who started a bank to compete with Mulgrew.”

“Who then torpedoed him by spreading rumors about the financial instability of the new bank.”

“Bingo! You were listening earlier when I told you about the way Mulgrew ruined Purcell, wiped him out.”

“Of course I was listening,” Saul snapped. “I always listen. Don’t think you’re the only guy who’s got good retention skills. I have a mind like a steel trap. It seems that if Mulgrew had ever been sentenced to death by a firing squad, you could probably have gotten several local volunteers to pull the collective triggers.”

“No doubt, and to my thinking, someone did nominate themselves as his executioner. One more stop in town. Coming up on the right is Charlie’s Tap, where yours truly and the very dour Eldon Kiefer got into a brief shoving-match-cum-fistfight in which I emerged as the victor.”

“I’m proud of you, lad.”

“Don’t be. Kiefer looks like he’d be tough, but he isn’t very good when it comes to barroom brawling. He gives away his moves, although he did land one decent punch that my shoulder can still feel.”

“The evils of physical violence. Have I now seen the high spots?”

“In and near town, yes. The other principals in this drama are scattered: Donna Newman out west in Selkirk, Lester Newman down in Waverly, and Carrie Yeager in Charleston, West Virginia.”

“It would be fun trying to round them all up if your boss decided to have one of his show-and-tell sessions,” Saul said.

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me. Well, let’s head back to the homestead. Wolfe’s planked porterhouse will soon be awaiting us.”

“I’ve never had it in all the times I’ve dined at your place.”

“You are in for a treat then,” I told Saul. “Even though my boss relies on Fritz most of the time, I have to say that he knows his way around a kitchen himself.”