Before I Die

VII

Violet Angelina Sally sat in the red leather chair with one knee arranged over the other. Wolfe’s gaze, under half-closed lids, was directed straight at her, and she was meeting it. They had been that way for fully half a minute. Neither of them had spoken a word.

“Like it?” Violet asked with a high-pitched laugh.

“I was trying to decide,” Wolfe muttered, “whether to let you keep the twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars you have got from Mr. Perrit or get that from you too. At least most of it.”

Violet let out a word. Ordinarily I try to report conversations without editing but we’ll let that one go. Wolfe made a face. He never cares for coarse talk, but he can stand it better from men than from women.

Judging from that word, Violet talked coarser than she looked. Of an entirely different design than Beulah, with a nice long flow to her body and a face whose only objectionable characteristics were acquired, she could easily have been made an attractive number by a couple of months on the farm, with fresh eggs and milk and going to bed early. But it was obvious that she hadn’t been on the farm.

“I do not intend,” Wolfe said testily, no longer muttering, “to prolong this. Here’s the situation. You are getting money — having already got the sum I mentioned — from Mr. Perrit by threatening to disclose the existence of his daughter. That, of course, is blackmail—”

“If you think silence gives consent,” Violet put in, “you’re crazy.” Her voice was softer and better handled than might have been expected from her opening word.

“I’ll get along without the consent for the sake of the silence,” Wolfe said dryly. “As I say, that’s blackmail, but I’m not concerned with the legal or criminal aspects. Your position is a little peculiar, which is often the case with blackmailers. Should Mr. Perrit call your hand and should you make the disclosure, you lose your current job and source of income. Also, since he would surely retaliate, the smallest misfortune you might expect would be a jail term in Utah. So, obviously, you are convinced that he won’t call your hand. I agree that it’s highly unlikely. He came to me today to get help. The job is to make you stop demanding money. I took the job.”

“I came down here.” Violet said, “because my father told me to. I simply can’t believe my ears! You say my father told you those lies? Holy Jesus, Dazy Perrit telling anyone I’m not his daughter! Now you think I believe that?”

“I think you find it difficult to believe it, Miss Murphy. Naturally. Because you calculated that Mr. Perrit, desperately anxious to keep his daughter’s identity secret, would under no circumstances tell anyone that you are a counterfeit. But you misjudged his character. You didn’t know, or didn’t stop to consider, that his strongest feeling, stronger even than his feeling for his daughter, is his vanity. Indeed, his feeling for his daughter may be only one aspect of his vanity, but that’s beside the point. He cannot, and will not, tolerate anyone’s ascendancy over him. He can’t stand it to have you diddle him.”

Wolfe shifted to get more comfortable. “But he made the same mistake you did. He misjudged a man’s character. Mine. You have demanded fifty thousand dollars from him. Henceforth, Miss Murphy, whenever you get money from Mr. Perrit, above the hundred dollars a week he allows you, you will give me ninety per cent of it — that’s nine-tenths, ninety dollars from each hundred — within twenty-four hours from the moment you get it, or the Salt Lake City authorities will come and get you.”

Violet stared at him. She took a breath, stared some more, and gulped. “But you—” She stopped and stared some more. Then she broke out, “You goddam fool, you can’t do that to Dazy! He don’t have to let you alone like he does me! All I have to do is tell him—”

She cut it off and started staring again. Suddenly the stare changed, her whole face changed. “Aw, for the love of Christ,” she said contemptuously. “You think I’m that dumb? Dazy thinks I’m that dumb? I give it to you and you hand it to him and he gets off cheap, wouldn’t that be sweet. And he thought I would fall for that?”

She uncrossed her knees and leaned forward. “Listen,” she said earnestly. “I’ve got what it takes, see? You think it don’t take guts to face up to Dazy Perrit and make him fork it over? Wait till I show you.” She began unfastening her dress. “I was at the theater tonight, but you notice I’m wearing sleeves and I’ll show you why.”

She had the fastenings loose and was wriggling it down from her shoulders. Down it came, revealing pink doings, and revealing also a bare arm which she extended. “What do you think of that?” she demanded.

It was quite an exhibit. The black and purple blotches began a few inches below the elbow and continued up to the shoulder curve. Curious as to what he had done it with, I got up and stepped over for a close-up, and she obligingly kept her arm up for me. I couldn’t tell; it might have been fingers or fists, or he might have used something.

“That’s not all,” Violet said on a mixed note of pride and grievance. “There’s other places, but you’d have to pay to see them. And I took it. I told him, listen, I said, if you hurt me enough, don’t think I’ll just go baby. You can’t lock me up, you can’t lock up your daughter, can you? If you hurt me enough I’ll spill it plenty where it will do the most good and I’ll clear out, and try and find me, you or anyone else. So you can let up, see?”

She had the dress back over her shoulders and was starting to fasten it. “He let up. I’ve got Dazy Perrit right, and I’m the only one that ever did that and lived to tell it. And now he thinks he can get most of it back through you with this lousy runaround!” She pronounced the word with which she had declared her position at the start.

Wolfe made another face. “But Miss Murphy.” His tone was even. “You’ll have to think this through. Though my assurance that Mr. Perrit and I didn’t cook this up is worthless to you, I do give that assurance. The point is that even if you are ninety-nine per cent convinced that Mr. Perrit arranged for me to take this line, dare you risk that one per cent? What if I’m acting on my own hook? You would discover it too late. To me you’re no asset at all unless you get money from Mr. Perrit and give most of it to me. I have no stake in you; your fate is of no concern to me. If you get money from Mr. Perrit and don’t give me my share, you’ll never know what minute or where you’ll feel that hand on your shoulder.”

“I wouldn’t be there,” Violet said harshly.

Wolfe sighed. “You’re not thinking straight. Certainly you’d be there. You’ll have to be, if you go on chousing Mr. Perrit. Incidentally, it will be useless for you to repeat this conversation to him. Naturally I have prepared for that, and he won’t believe a word of it.”

“The hell he won’t. He told you to say it.”

“No. He didn’t.” Wolfe pushed his chair back from the desk. “If you knew me better, Miss Murphy, you would believe me when I say that this is strictly my own idea. This is my own scheme, conceived and executed by me alone, and I expect to profit from it. So will you; I’m not trying to freeze you out. Mr. Perrit makes a lot of money. You can keep ten thousand out of every hundred thousand you get.”

Wolfe arose and walked past her to the door. There he turned. “A word of caution, Miss Murphy. Your natural impulse would be to get all you can and disappear. Mr. Perrit might possibly decide not to find you, for obvious reasons. I wouldn’t. I would find you. I am fully as vain as Mr. Perrit. I will not be diddled.”

He went.

Violet had not turned around to see him out. She now sat with her eyes on his chair as if he were still in it. A corner of her lips was screwed around and up. She didn’t seem to be in anything like a panic, merely trying to think straight. Finally she turned her eyes to me and spoke, not as to an enemy:

“My God, he’s fat.”

I nodded at her approvingly. “You’re a brave little woman and I admire you. Luckily you don’t have to toss in or boost the pot now and here. You’ve got time to sleep on it, which is a good idea. Shall I take you home and tuck you in?”

She smiled at me and I grinned back.

“You don’t look like a grifter,” she said. “You look healthy and handsome.”

“Inside,” I said, “I am clean but mean.” I stood up. “I don’t offer to drive you home because I noticed you’ve got your own car. But I can go along just for the air.”

She left her chair, crossed to me, put four fingers carefully and precisely at the top of my forehead, and ran them back over and down my scalp, giving me a comb.

“Air,” she said. “Baby, do I need air!”

“We’ll share it,” I told her. “Ninety per cent for you and ten for me.”

I got my hat and topcoat from the hall, escorted her out, opened the door of her coupé for her, and went around to the other side and climbed in. What I was actually after was not air, nor yet more hair-combing, but insurance against bodily injury. I wasn’t condemning Wolfe for not informing Dazy Perrit before pulling that on her, since he might have thought it up just before she came, or even after she came, but all the same I didn’t care for the sketch as it now stood. If she bounced into the penthouse and blurted it out to Perrit, which she was certainly capable of, there was no way of telling how he might react. Common sense would have told him what Wolfe was up to, trying to get nine out of ten to hand back to him, but the trouble was that there was nothing common about a bird like Perrit, not even sense. Probably he didn’t think there was an honest man on earth. So there I was in her coupe with her.

She was a first-rate driver, fully half as good as me. As she slowed down for a red light at Fortieth Street I said, “Miss Murphy, you’re sunk.”

“Cut out the Murphy,” she snapped. Then she reached to pat me on the knee. “Just call me Angel Food.”

I didn’t have much time, since the penthouse was on Seventy-eighth Street, not more than a few minutes away at that time of night, and I didn’t really intend to go up with her and tuck her in.

“I don’t like angel food,” I told her. “I’ll call you Maple Delight. But you’re absolutely sunk if you try to bull it through. I speak frankly because I admire you in more ways than one, and also because I enjoy life and don’t care to leave it at this point. If you go on putting the bee on Perrit and don’t give Wolfe his nine-tenths, you’re through. Wolfe is a hyena, a vulture, and a jackal. If you do give Wolfe his nine-tenths, Perrit will find it out sooner or later, and then not only will Wolfe get it, which might or might not be a calamity, but I am liable to get it too. Even if I’m not as healthy and handsome as you thought I was there for a minute. I do have my skin on straight and I like it that way.”

“Go on talking.” She didn’t take her eyes from her driving. “You haven’t said anything yet, but your voice goes through me. I won’t even want a drink.”

We were at Fifty-first Street. I went on, “So to show you how selfish I am, I’ve got a suggestion. You haven’t got a chance of cleaning up, not one in a million. You’re squeezed in between Dazy Perrit and Nero Wolfe, and that’s no set-up for a Sherman tank, let alone a lady. The big haul is out for good, and you might as well face it and show you’ve got brains as well as guts.”

I patted her thigh. “So take it, Maple Delight. First, you can keep the screw on Perrit, handing most of it over to Wolfe, but you’d be a sucker if you did. It wouldn’t be worth your measly percentage. Second, you can slide out and away, and my opinion is no good on that because I don’t know how hard you’d find it to make a living. Of course you’d have to travel, which would be a disadvantage if you like New York. Third, and this is my suggestion, you can tell Perrit — or I’ll do it if you want me to — that the gyp is out, you are merely his loving and obedient daughter, but it would be nice to have the weekly handout stepped up to three centuries instead of one.”

She sent me a sharp glance and back again to her driving. I somehow gathered that I was doing fine.

“Wolfe would get no cut,” I said firmly. “I doubt if he would even expect it, and anyhow you can leave that to me. I have — a way of bringing pressure. Almost certainly Perrit would settle for that and no hard feelings. As for you, you don’t have to be a damn pig. That would be fifteen thousand, six hundred bucks a year, no income tax, and I suppose Perrit pays the household expenses, including such items as this car. Six hundred dollars more than a United States Senator gets! You could stay in New York, with no thought of Utah or any other desert, not to mention confined spaces, enjoy your friends, sleep as late as you want, visit the museums and art galleries — what the hell, what if two hundred is as high as he’ll go? That’s twice what a plumber makes! Usually I hate to be driven by a woman, but you’re good. I thought you would be. You’re very good.”

“I can turn corners and back up,” she admitted. “Yeah, art galleries. Are you comic?”

We had made it crosstown and were going north on Fifth Avenue, in the Sixties. “Someday,” I said, “you must drive me up to that roadhouse Perrit owns in Westchester. I just tossed in the art galleries. Forget it. One thing, if my suggestion strikes you at all and you want to think it over, for God’s sake, don’t mention Wolfe’s double-cross to Perrit. Not till you’re sure what you want. That would start, fireworks that nobody could stop.”

“It would?” She was scornful “Or it wouldn’t.”

“If you still think Perrit and Wolfe framed it you’re batty. You don’t know Wolfe.”

“I know Dazy Perrit.” She turned east on Seventy-eighth Street.

“But not Wolfe,” I insisted. “The first chance I get I’ll explain him to you. It’s not only his fat that keeps you from seeing through him. Perrit has met his match twice, first you and now Wolfe.”

She pulled up at the curb on the right, by an awning, and I hopped out and held the door open for her, but she emerged on her own side and came around.

She put a hand on my arm. “We’ll leave the car here. Later I’ll come down and drive you home.”

For the second time that night I was given the job of crawling from under, and this time there was no Morton to give me an assist. I resisted, politely, the pull on my arm and started arranging words, but the words never got spoken. At that instant the question became not whether those words would get spoken, but whether any more words at all would ever get spoken — by me. A car had turned into the street from Fifth Avenue, tearing along in second gear, and slowed down, nearly to a stop, just behind Violet’s coupé. I was aware of it only from noises because my back was to it When Violet’s hold on my arm tightened and her face went stiff and she jerked to the left and tight against me, I reacted fast by whirling around, and the force of my whirl, with her holding my arm, yanked her to one side. The bullets were coming by then. With his gun poked through the open window, the guy in the car had a range of not more than twenty feet.

I think the first bullet got her. Anyhow, the shots came so fast together that that was a minor point. As she went down I went down with her, both because of her drag on my arm, which she held on to, and because my reflexes decided that standing up was a bad idea under the circumstances. Then other reflexes took a hand, and I rolled to the curb and was kneeling behind Violet’s coupé, with the gun from my coat-pocket in my hand, aiming it at the other car, which was on the move again, thirty yards toward Madison Avenue and going fast. I pulled the trigger until the gun was empty. The car was going faster as it crossed Madison.

I was upright by then and I turned to Violet. She was on her hands and knees, trying to get up. As I moved to her she crumpled. I knelt down for a look and saw that one bullet had torn through her cheek, but obviously there were others.

I told her, “Quit moving, kid. Quiet” Then I said, though you won’t believe it and I find it hard to believe myself, “Angel Food.”

She quit moving soon enough. “Uh— uh—” she said. She was gasping, and in between gasps sucking in breath with a hiss. She was trying to talk. “It’s— uh— uh— shame,” she got out. Her chin came up and she screamed at me, “Shame!” Then she gave up and flopped.

I raised up for a glance around. Windows were opening and voices came, and someone was running my way down the sidewalk from Fifth Avenue. The door of the apartment house at the other end of the awning opened, and a man in uniform came out and toward me, a doorman or elevator man. I saw that the one coming down the sidewalk was a cop, so I got upright, called out, “Doctor!” and dived into the apartment house. The lobby was empty, and so was the elevator, with its door standing open. I found the switchboard, plugged in, pushed a button, and dialed a number, trying to remember if I had left it connected to the extension in Wolfe’s room, which I certainly should have done from force of habit.

I had. Finally his voice came. “Nero Wolfe speaking.”

“Archie. I took her home. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house on Seventy-eighth Street. A guy came along in a car and started shooting, and then got away. She is dead. Tell Fritz—”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’ll tell the world I’m hurt, but not with bullets. That bastard Perrit decided to get her and to use us for proof of something, and you can figure out what while I spend the night as a quiz kid. Tell Fritz—”

A voice came at me from behind. “Get offa that phone! Now!”