Archie in the Crosshairs

Chapter 3

When I got back to the office, I found Wolfe in a somber mood, and I was feeling pretty somber myself. “We’ve made a lot of enemies over the years,” I remarked as I dropped into my desk chair.

“Did you recognize the voice on the telephone?” he asked.

“No, but then it probably was disguised, with that high pitch and all.”

“Perhaps. Do you have any thoughts?”

“I’m reminded of something you have said several times over the years: ‘If someone has decided to kill you, and he is possessed of ordinary intelligence, you will die,’ or words to that effect.”

“There are always exceptions,” Wolfe said, but his tone lacked conviction.

“In this case, I am all for exceptions. Where do we go from here?”

Wolfe drew in a bushel of air and let it out slowly. “Whenever you leave this house — and ventures out should be severely limited for now — you must use the rear exit.” He was referring to a narrow passageway behind the brownstone that goes between a warehouse and an auto repair shop and leads out to Thirty-Fourth Street. At our end of the path, there is a solid wood gate seven feet high that has no knob or latch on the outside, only a Hotchkiss lock. But if someone is expected and knocks on the gate, it can be opened from the kitchen with the push of a button.

“So now I learn that I am under a form of house arrest. That’s hardly an action plan, is it?”

“We find ourselves at war,” Wolfe declared. “It is incumbent upon me to act, as I am the cause of these straits.”

“A quibble,” I said, using one of his favorite words. “At the risk of appearing self-important, I have done my share to alienate a variety of people in past investigations of ours. It is possible we may be dealing with someone who is holding a grudge against me, not you.”

“I think it unlikely, but I am not about to debate the point, Archie. We have work to do.”

“As in...?”

“As in reviewing all of our cases over the last two decades. Anything older would no doubt be fruitless.”

Wolfe and I differ in almost every way but one: we both take pride in being well-organized. One result is that we have amassed highly detailed records on each case we have tackled since I began drawing paychecks in the old brownstone. These records are stored by year in three locked four-drawer walnut filing cabinets in one corner of the office, each case given its own folder. We were about to undertake a trip down memory lane.

We spent all of the next two days wading through the files, and I use the first-person plural pronoun to be accurate. In what for him was a shocking departure, Wolfe chose to forgo his twice-daily visits to the plant rooms on the roof, which no doubt drove Theodore Horstmann, our orchid nurse, to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even though old Horstmann is fully capable of coddling the ten thousand orchids himself, he remains convinced that without Wolfe’s presence, those exotic specimens would somehow wither and die of neglect.

Back to our search through the archives. We each tackled one case at a time, and upon finishing it, we passed it to the other for review. Overall, I was surprised at how few people we seemed to have alienated, other than those, of course, who ended up going to prison or to that well-known electric chair up at Sing Sing on the Hudson.

It was those who got sent to the penitentiary, or their relatives, on whom we concentrated. “Regardless of the surety of a person’s guilt,” Wolfe said, “that malfeasant or his friends and relatives will focus their hatred upon me, and by extension upon you.”

“Is that enough to drive someone to threaten murder?” I posed.

Wolfe lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Who is to say? I knew of a man years ago in Romania who shot and killed a neighbor for no other reason than because the man had complained to local police about noisy parties at the neighbor’s house.”

“Okay, I will concede there are some nutcases out there like your trigger-happy Romanian, but so far, we haven’t come across anybody who seems like the type to blast away at me.”

“I do not concur, Archie. As we have gone over these cases, I have come up with five, or possibly six—”

He was cut short by the telephone, which I answered. “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Yes, Mr. Goodwin, you may recognize my voice.” I gestured to Wolfe to pick up his receiver.

“It’s possible I have heard it before,” I said, gripping the phone.

“Of course you have, very recently, and I assume Nero Wolfe is on the line now, as well.”

“I am,” Wolfe snapped.

A mirthless chuckle. “Good, very good. If I know anything about human nature, the two of you probably have been searching your memories, and very possibly your records as well, these last two days, to see if you can figure out just who might want to kill Mr. Goodwin. Having any luck, boys?” Another chuckle, as dry as a saltine cracker.

“The reason for your call?” Wolfe asked.

“Just checking in to monitor your progress. And do not bother trying to trace this, assuming you have the technology. It is from a pay phone somewhere in our great city, and I am about to sign off. Good day to you both.” The line went dead.

“Human nature, huh?” I said. “Nervy bastard.”

“Nervy, maybe; insolent, without question — but a bastard? I do not possess the information with which to make such a judgment.”

“Okay, you are the grammarian here, as you have pointed out to me so many times. You were making a point when we were so rudely interrupted.”

“I was about to say that after having reviewed the files of our past commissions, I identified five or possibly six individuals whose enmity toward us is such that they might wish one or both of us dead. I have since revised that number to five.”

“So, I am to hunt down all these people and shoot them before one gets me, right?”

“Stop prattling, Archie.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s a bad habit that I fall into — prattling, I mean — when I learn that someone wants to kill me.”

Wolfe glowered at me. “When you have finished indulging yourself by wallowing in self-pity, let us consider the list I have drawn up.”

“The wallowing is over,” I said, flipping open my notebook and swiveling to face him.

“Good. The names are Simeon Marx, Tobias Lester, Charles Stinson, Grover Applegate, and Bradley Jameson. Here are the files, to refresh your memory,” he said, putting them on the corner of his desk within my reach.

“I recognize all of those monikers, of course,” I said as I scooped up the folders, “although I’m sure you would claim this is only because I have also just been through the files myself, and at least three of them jumped out as possibilities to me, as well. I suppose you’re testing me to see if I can figure out just why you fastened on this bunch.”

“Your supposition is correct,” Wolfe said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. He was being smug, which made me determined to come up with some answers.

“Simeon Marx strangled that ballet dancer a dozen or so years back. Marx was a higher-up in one of the big Wall Street brokerage houses, and the ballerina was blackmailing him by threatening to tell his wife about their relationship. The cops were sure they had another man fingered for the killing, but the dancer’s wealthy father — from down in Virginia — hired you to dig deeper, and you did.”

“Just so.” The folds in Wolfe’s cheeks deepened, which for him is a smile.

“Simeon Marx ended up going to the chair, and his brother Alan loudly insisted he was innocent, that he was framed. If my memory holds, Alan Marx called you a number of names, including several that no newspaper will print.”

“Your memory holds,” Wolfe muttered. “Continue.”

“Tobias Lester was known to his friends and in the society pages as Toby. And in said pages, either ‘playboy’ or ‘man-about-town’ invariably preceded his name. Almost nine years ago, Lester was one of a group of socialites partying on a yacht up north of the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson when a man fell overboard and drowned.

“The death was ruled an accident originally. However, one member of the group claimed she saw someone push the man, David Warren, but couldn’t identify him in the darkness. The Warren family hired you to investigate, and you — with my intrepid legwork, I hasten to add — were able to make a strong case that Toby Lester was responsible for the killing because the dead man had won the affections of a young woman Lester thought of as his private property, so to speak.

“He was awaiting trial in the Tombs when he hanged himself with rope that somehow got smuggled in. Lester’s sister, Maybelle, then held a press conference saying that her brother would have been cleared at a trial, and she claimed that you and I were directly responsible for his death. The only reason her claim about us didn’t get more press was because of the prison system’s high-profile — and unsuccessful — investigation into how Toby Lester was able to get ahold of the rope he used to kill himself. Have I left anything out?”

“Nothing of significance,” Wolfe said, “other than to underscore my absolute certainty that Mr. Lester was the murderer, despite his sister’s loud and offensive protestations.”

“So noted. Next, we have Charles Stinson, a reclusive bachelor in his thirties who worked in a stamp and coin shop on East Twenty-Third Street and lived with his widowed mother near Stuyvesant Square. He was one of a half-dozen suspects in the bludgeoning death of a young woman on a promenade along the East River eleven years back.

“The police were getting nowhere — apparently the woman had been promiscuous, to say the least,” I said. “Her rich — make that very rich — uncle, frustrated by the lack of progress on the part of Cramer and his crew, turned to us. Or rather, to you.”

“When they hire me, they hire you,” Wolfe put in after taking a healthy drink from the first of two beers Fritz had just brought in on a tray with a chilled pilsner glass.

“Anyway, you nailed the creep, who finally broke down in tears right here in the office. A pathetic sight, a pathetic little man. As far as I’m aware, he is still up in Attica and will be for the rest of his days.

“Somehow, his mouthpiece, a lowly public defender no less, gave such an impassioned defense of Stinson’s mental state that he got him off with life rather than the chair. His mother, Anna, despite her son’s confession, could not believe her dear boy had done something so awful, and at least two of the local dailies quoted her as calling you an ‘ogre’ and a ‘charlatan,’ among other names.”

“Don’t forget ‘mountebank.’ I rather liked that one,” Wolfe said.

“I guess I’d forgotten. What does it mean?”

“A huckster, a hawker of quack medicines, an out-and-out phony.”

“At least Anna Stinson has a big vocabulary. Next, we move on to Grover Applegate. This one was not a murderer,” I said.

“No, but he was a miscreant of the first rank.”

“Yeah, he’ll have a hard time passing through the Pearly Gates, all right,” I said as I opened his folder and scanned the report. “He was a well-known financial adviser who handled the money of a lot of rich old ladies. I remember him well. He conned them out of millions until little Mrs. Ferguson came to you on the advice of a former client of yours, Melville Perkins, whom you had helped get rid of a sleazy blackmailer.

“She was a neighbor of Perkins in one of those tony co-ops up on Park Avenue, and she thought something was funny, and confusing, about the way Applegate was moving her dough around.”

“Moving much of it into his own accounts,” Wolfe remarked.

“After you exposed him, Applegate went to prison, and he died there two years later of a heart attack. His son, Grover Jr., who thought from the beginning that dear old dad was innocent of all wrongdoing, claimed publicly that you killed him just as surely as if you had put a bullet through his heart.”

“The young man was given to hyperbole,” Wolfe said.

“He also said you would roast in the fires of hell. More hyperbole, I guess. Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that we can definitely count the younger Applegate as an enemy.

“Now we go to the last person on your list, one Bradley Jameson. I remember that case like it was yesterday, no need for me to look at the file or have you prompt me. With a name like his, it seems like he should have been a banker or a company president instead of a hockey player — and not just any player, but an all-star goalie for the Rangers.

“There had been a brawl in a saloon on Second Avenue several years back. A graduate student at Columbia got a fractured skull in the melee and fell into a coma. When the police tried to find out who hit the kid, they were met with a conspiracy of silence from everyone who’d been in the joint. The boy’s father hired you to learn who did it, and you delivered.”

“With your and Saul’s help,” Wolfe said.

“Particularly Saul’s. He found out that the barkeep had served time for being the wheelman in an armed robbery up in Utica some years earlier. That’s a felony, and felons cannot hold a liquor license in this state. You had the bar owner over a barrel, so to speak. He had a choice: tell you who mauled the young man or lose his profitable watering hole.

“So he sang, and the words he came up with were... Bradley Jameson. No wonder everybody in that bar had clammed up. Hockey’s regular season had just ended, and the playoffs were about to begin. For once, the Rangers were favored to win the Stanley Cup, but after you presented Jameson to the police, everything changed. Normally, in a case like that, there would have been continuances — allowing Jameson to play — but this brawl happened just after another man had been killed in a bar fight, and the district attorney was under pressure from the mayor and the newspapers, so bail was denied. Have I left anything out?”

“Not so far,” Wolfe said.

“The star goalie quickly went to trial and was found guilty of assault and battery, and attempted murder, and got sent to stir. In the meantime, the substitute goalie was a sieve, and Detroit ran up some big scores against the Rangers on their way to winning the Cup. One sports columnist wrote that you were ‘the most hated man in New York,’ with the D.A. right behind you on the hate list.”

“More hyperbole.”

“I suppose, but you did get several pieces of hate mail, including a few that suggested the world would be better off without you.”

“I discount the ranting of zealots,” Wolfe said.

“I have been to enough Rangers games at the Garden to realize many of the seats are filled with those you term ‘zealots.’ And having seen these people in action, I would not be quick to discount them.”

Wolfe reacted with a shrug. “It was Mr. Jameson whom I found to be of the greatest concern. He forcefully suggested at the time of his sentencing that I had not heard the last of him.”

“I haven’t kept track, but he’s probably out of the cooler by now. Luckily for him, the Columbia student recovered, so the charge wasn’t upgraded to murder or manslaughter. Now that we have reviewed the five cases you selected, I have a number of questions.”

“I will try to mask my surprise.”

“Did I detect just a touch of sarcasm? I will ignore it and plow on: First, two of the people angriest with you are women — Maybelle Lester and Anna Stinson. Yet the voice from the two phone calls seemed to be that of a man, albeit disguised. Do you feel that lets the ladies off the hook?”

“Not necessarily, and you should know that, as an expert on women and their foibles,” Wolfe said. “Either of them could easily have enlisted a consort to speak for her. Many, if not most, women are adept at getting men to do their bidding. It also is likely that if one of the females were the instigator of the calls, she may have felt a male voice would be more threatening and intimidating.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” I said, grinning and throwing up my hands in mock surrender. “How do you explain that all of these events happened five or more years ago — a couple of them more than a decade back — yet someone waited until now to exact revenge?”

“Revenge may be sweetest when contemplated over an extended period,” Wolfe replied.

“Nice. Who said that — Shakespeare?”

“I did. I once knew a man who waited more than twenty years before killing the cousin who had assaulted his wife. And at least once a year in each of those two decades, he reminded the cousin, sometimes in subtle ways, that he knew of his transgression.”

“You are filled with stories, a few of them possibly even true. All right, we have identified some possible suspects who could be behind these calls. Where do we go from here?”

“We begin by inviting Saul to dinner tonight. Call him and tell him we are having a casserole of lamb cutlets with gammon and potatoes. I recall that he enjoyed those cutlets on a previous occasion. And have him arrive through the passageway in the rear.”

We, indeed, were under siege.