Archie in the Crosshairs

Chapter 27

The next morning, true to form, Inspector Cramer arrived at the brownstone shortly after eleven. After getting the okay from Wolfe, I let him in. My smile was met with a grim nod as he walked by me toward the office. After settling into the red chair and pulling out an unlit cigar, the inspector looked at Wolfe and shook his head. “I don’t know whether to thank you or tell you to go to hell,” he said.

“Indeed a quandary,” Wolfe replied. “I’m afraid I am not in a position to counsel you. Would you like something to drink? Coffee, perhaps? Beer?”

Cramer waved the offer away with his stogie. “The Hutchinson kid — hell, he’s hardly a kid, is he? — spilled his guts at the station this morning without much prompting. His father got him a lawyer — a damned good one, too, one of the best in town — but young Hutchinson wouldn’t listen to the mouthpiece’s advice. He babbled like a magpie, and some of what he said might even be true.”

“I am surprised,” Wolfe said. “He seemed so truculent here that I supposed he would stubbornly deny everything.”

“No, he caved in, totally. I think he saw how devastated his young sister was last night when she learned of his betrayal of her, and he had no fight left in him, none at all.”

“Did he tell you how he and Alan Marx met?”

“Yes, he did. Say, that beer of yours looks good. If it’s not too much of an imposition, I wouldn’t mind some after all.”

Wolfe pushed the buzzer on the underside of his desk, using the long-short-long signal that indicated to Fritz that a guest wanted a beer.

“Anyway,” Cramer continued, “Hutchinson said he met Marx about a year ago at an art gallery party someplace down in the Village.”

“I had suspected as much. This was hardly surprising, given that Marx was a collector and young Hutchinson is an artist, albeit one said to possess mediocre abilities.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, they got to talking, and Hutchinson confided that he had been in financial trouble ever since his former college classmate’s import-export scheme had gone bust and his father had cut him off from any further family money. That first conversation led to others, with Marx learning more each time about the Hutchinson clan, particularly Cordelia and all her money.” The inspector paused to drink from the beer Fritz had brought in and placed it on the small table next to him.

“Eventually, the two of them, with Marx being the mastermind, hit on the blackmail scheme, but they needed an accomplice. Enter Marlene Peters. She and Doug had been carrying on quietly for some time after their supposed breakup, with her pushing him to make more money so they could get married.

“Well, it seems that you know a lot of this already,” Cramer continued, “but Marlene persuaded her friend Cordelia to go to Italy, saying she would also be there. In fact, Marlene made sure to get there first, hooking up with Carlo Veronese and bringing him into the scheme. She had met this Veronese on a previous trip to Florence. By the way, that was one sweet stunt of yours, having Veronese step into the room at the key moment. That unnerved the hell out of everybody.” Wolfe dipped his chin in acknowledgment.

“According to young Hutchinson during his babbling, Marlene got Veronese to agree to romance Cordelia and get pictures of them embracing in that park to make her fiancé back home jealous and get him to propose.”

“Even though he — Lance Mercer by name — had already proposed to her,” I put in.

“Yeah, I can’t decide which of them was slimier — young Hutchinson or Marlene,” Cramer said. “Veronese was slimy, too, of course, but at least he could fall back on the excuse, lame as it is, that he was doing this as a way to bring two young people together.”

“So, how did Alan Marx get young Hutchinson to buy into the plan to kill me?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, here is what — by the way, how are you?” the inspector asked, turning to me with a look of genuine concern, probably the first one he had ever thrown my way.

“Healing nicely,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Good. Here is what Douglas Hutchinson told us this morning. He swore, for what it’s worth, that he had no idea murder was in the plans for the Central Park money drop. He claims he asked Marx what was in all this for him, and Marx told him he didn’t like Nero Wolfe — although he didn’t specify a reason — and was going to play a trick on him by making his assistant, Goodwin, be a party to the blackmailing.”

“And what if we hadn’t gone along with all of this?” I asked.

“I posed that question to young Hutchinson, and he told us he hadn’t thought about it,” Cramer said.

“Rubbish,” Wolfe growled.

“I agree,” Cramer said. “An awful lot of what this guy has been feeding us may well be rubbish. Including what happened later at Marx’s co-op. He says he was still stunned by what he saw in the park from his vantage just west of the drop-off point for the money. First McManus shoots Goodwin and then Marx plugs McManus in the back. And to top it off, the money gets spirited away — by Durkin, you said.”

“Yes, Fred brought the money here — all of it,” Wolfe replied.

“The two men screamed at each other briefly in the park,” Cramer continued, “but then they knew they had to get the hell out of there before squad cars came, which they did, going their separate ways.

“Doug Hutchinson said he brooded all night and into the next day, and then the next night, he went to Alan Marx’s place and the two got into a shouting match all over again. Hutchinson says Marx swung the fireplace poker at him and they struggled over it, and somehow, Marx got hit hard, very hard, and fell on the floor, and Hutchinson panicked, running out and leaving by a back entrance and into a passageway behind the building.”

“An implausible scenario,” Wolfe remarked.

“Isn’t it?” Cramer said. “Unfortunately, there were no witnesses, so there is only Hutchinson’s version, which doesn’t make him look very good. If I were his lawyer, I’d go for a manslaughter plea.”

“Assuming he pays any attention to his lawyer,” I said.

“That’s his problem,” Cramer said with a snort, before taking another sip of beer and licking his lips. “You tipped off your pal at the Gazette,” he said to me.

I nodded. “Old friends, old loyalties.”

“Cohen and I talked this morning. I assume there will be an item in the afternoon edition,” he said. “It probably won’t have Hutchinson’s name in it, though. At least I didn’t give it to him.”

“Neither did I, Inspector. I just suggested he call you, and said that there was a development in the Marx murder. And I told him Mr. Wolfe wanted his name left out of it.”

“Very noble of you both, I am sure,” Cramer said, turning back to Wolfe. “I assume it was your sawbones down the block — what’s-his-name — Vollmer, who patched Goodwin up.”

“Mr. Goodwin was tended to by a doctor in New Jersey,” Wolfe said with a straight face.

“Which, of course, is outside of my jurisdiction,” Cramer remarked. “I get it. Well, if that’s your story, who am I to contradict you? You’ve done what you damn well please all the way through this whole messy business anyway. What’s one more nose-thumbing at the law?”

“You have your murderers, sir,” Wolfe said.

“One of whom is dead. Well, I had better go out and grab a copy of the Gazette to see how badly Cohen butchered my quotes,” the inspector said, rising slowly. “Thanks for the beer.”

“There is a man who bears the burdens of the world on his shoulders,” I said, returning to the office after having seen Cramer out.

“Or so he would have one believe,” Wolfe said. “Mr. Cramer is used to complaining when he is here, but this time he does not have a great deal to be unhappy about.”

“I suppose not. And the Gazette piece will likely make him look good. Lon has a lot of respect, albeit grudging, for the inspector. Say, I would like to know more about Saul’s trip to Italy, unless that’s privileged information.”

Wolfe’s cheeks creased again. At this rate, he would get a record for smiles on a single case. “I gave him a simple assignment: Fly to Italy, find Carlo Veronese, persuade him to come to New York, and return here with him by the fastest means possible.”

“Nothing to it. Cramer is right that Carlo’s appearance here was a dandy stunt that knocked everyone for a loop. Those two left here last night before I had a chance to talk to them. Got an idea where Veronese is now?”

“Saul was to check him into a hotel, the Churchill, I believe, for two nights. Mr. Veronese had wanted a chance to see something of New York, as he had never been here before. I approved the expense, which, along with their airfares, will be added to Parkhurst Hutchinson’s bill.”

“As well it should,” I said. “He can pay us out of his petty cash account. I doubt if he is happy with the outcome, though.”

“Surely not. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’”

“Sounds like it could be Shakespeare.”

“Henry IV, Part II,” Wolfe said.

“Well, maybe that also applies to Parkhurst the First.”

“Money has purchased many things for the kingly Mr. Hutchinson, but happiness does not appear to be one of them.”

In case you are wondering, that very night I did tell Wolfe about Annie Hutchinson’s idea that he be the advertising face of Remmers Beer. “Unthinkable!” he exploded. When I handed him a sheet on which the amount he would have been paid was written, Wolfe was speechless.

When he finally found his voice, he turned to me and said, “Archie, please call Annie Hutchinson and tell her she has lost control of her senses.”

Needless to say, I never made that call.