In the Best Families

Chapter 11

On my previous visit to Birchvale I had got the impression that Annabel Frey had her head on right side up, and her conduct that Monday evening strengthened it. For one thing, she had had sense enough not to gather that bunch around a dining table but invite them for half-past eight. With the kind of attitudes and emotions that were crisscrossing among those six people, an attempt to feed them at the same trough would have resulted in an acidosis epidemic.

In her first phone call, Wednesday, she had indicated that it was not a tête-à-tête she had in mind, so I was expecting to find company, probably the widower and the cousin, but to my surprise it was a full house. They were all there when I was shown into the big living room. Annabel Frey, as hostess there now, came to meet me and gave me her hand. The other five gave me nothing but dirty looks. I saw right off that my popularity index was way down, so I merely stood, gave them a cool collective greeting, and lifted a brow at my hostess.

“It’s not you, Goodwin,” the politician Pierce assured me, but in a raspy tone. “It’s simply the strain of this unbearable situation. We haven’t been all together like this since that terrible night.” He glared at Annabel. “It was a mistake to get us here.”

“Then why did you come?” Barry Rackham demanded, really nasty. “Because you were afraid not to, like the rest of us. We all hated to come, but we were all afraid to stay away. A bunch of cowards — except one, of course. You can’t blame that one for coming.”

“Nonsense,” said Dana Hammond, the banker. The look he was giving Rackham was just the opposite of the kind of look a banker is supposed to give a millionaire. “It has nothing to do with cowardice. Not with me. By circumstances beyond my control I am forced into an association that is hateful to me.”

“Have they,” Lina Darrow asked him sweetly, “finished with the audit of your department?”

“They haven’t finished anything,” Calvin Leeds growled, and I didn’t know he was aiming at her until he went on. “Not even with wondering what you see in Barry Rackham all of a sudden — if it is sudden.”

Rackham was out of his chair, moving toward Leeds, snarling, “You can eat that, Cal, or—”

“Oh, stop it!” Annabel stepped to head Rackham off. She whirled, taking them in. “My God, isn’t it bad enough without this?” She appealed to me. “I didn’t know this was how it would be!” To Rackham, “Sit down, Barry!”

Rackham backed up and sat. Lina Darrow, who had been standing, went and stretched out on a couch, detaching herself. The others stayed put, with Annabel and me on our feet. I have had plenty of contacts with groups of people, all kinds, who have suddenly had a murder explode among them, but I don’t think I have ever seen a bunch blown quite so high.

Annabel said, “I didn’t want to have Mr. Goodwin come and discuss it just with me. I didn’t want any of you to think — I mean, all I wanted was to find out, for all of us. I thought it would be best for all of us to be here.”

“All of us?” Pierce asked pointedly. “Or all but one?”

“It was a mistake, Annabel,” Hammond told her. “You can see it was.”

“Exactly what,” Rackham inquired, “was your idea in sending for Goodwin?”

“I want him to work for us. We can’t let it go on this way, you all know we can’t. I’ll pay him, but he’ll be working for all of us.”

“All but one,” Pierce persisted.

“Very well, all but one! As it is now, it isn’t all but one, it’s all of us!”

Lina Darrow sang out from the couch, “Is Mr. Goodwin giving a guarantee?”

I had taken a chair. Annabel dropped into one facing me and put it to me. “What about it? Can you do anything?”

“I can’t give a guarantee,” I told her.

“Of course not. Can you do anything?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how it stands. Shall I try sketching it?”

“Yes.”

“Stop me if I go wrong. It’s true I was here when it happened, but that’s no help except what I actually saw and heard. Does everyone know what I was here for?”

“Yes.”

“Then they understand why I wasn’t much interested in anyone but Rackham. And you and Miss Darrow, of course, but that interest wasn’t professional. It looks to me like a case that will probably never be solved by exhibits or testimony on facts. The cops have had plenty of good men on it, and if they had got anything usable on footprints or fingerprints, or getting the steak knife from the drawer, or alibis or timetables, or something like shoes that had been worn in the woods, someone would have been arrested long ago. And they’ve had it for a month, so no kind of routine would be any good now, and that’s all most detective work amounts to. Motive is no help, with four of you inheriting piles from two hundred grand up, and the other two possibly counting on marrying one of the piles. Only I must say, in the atmosphere here tonight, courtship doesn’t seem to be on the program.”

“It isn’t,” Annabel asserted.

I glanced at Hammond and Pierce, but neither of them seemed to want the floor.

“So,” I continued, “unless the cops have got a trap set that you don’t know about, it’s one of those things. You never can tell. It would be a waste of money to pay me to go over the ground the cops have covered — or any other detective except Nero Wolfe, and he’s not around. There’s only one way to use me, or anyhow only one way to start, and stand a chance of getting your money’s worth, and that would be to give me a good eight or ten hours with each of you six people, each one separately. I have watched and listened to Nero Wolfe a good many years and I can now do a fair imitation. It might possibly turn out to be worth it to all of you — except one, as Mr. Pierce would say.”

I flipped a hand. “That’s the best suggestion I can offer. With nothing like a guarantee.”

Annabel said, “No one would tell you everything you asked. I haven’t myself, to the police.”

“Sure. I understand that. That’s part of it.”

“You would be working for me — for us. It would be confidential.”

“Things that weren’t used would be confidential. Nothing that was evidence would be.”

Annabel sat and regarded me. She had had her fingers twisted tight together, and now she loosened them and then they twisted again. “I want to ask you something, Mr. Goodwin. Do you think one of us killed Mrs. Rackham?”

“I do now. I don’t know what I would think after I had worked at it.”

“Do you think you know which one?”

“Nope. I’m impartial.”

“All right. You can start with me.” She turned her head. “Unless one of you would rather be first?”

No one moved or spoke. Then Calvin Leeds: “Count me out, Annabel. Not with Goodwin. Let him tell us first where Nero Wolfe is and why.”

“But Cal — you won’t?”

“Not with him I won’t.”

“Dana?”

Hammond looked unhappy. He got up and went to her. “Annabel, this was a mistake. The whole idea was no good. What can Goodwin do that the police couldn’t do? I doubt if you have any conception of how a private detective works.”

“He can try. Will you help, Dana?”

“No. I hate to refuse, but I must.”

“Oliver, will you?”

“Well.” The statesman was frowning, not at her, at me. “This seems to me to be a case of all or none. I don’t see how anything could be accomplished—”

“Then you refuse me too?”

“Under the circumstances I have no other course.”

“I see. You won’t even give me a straight no. Barry?”

“Certainly not. Goodwin has lied to the police about my wife’s visit to Wolfe. I wouldn’t give him eight seconds, let alone eight hours.”

Annabel left her chair and went toward the couch. “Lina, I guess it’s up to the women. You and me. She was darned good to us, Lina — both of us. What about it?”

“Darling,” Lina Darrow said. She sat up. “Darling Annabel. You know you don’t like me.”

“That isn’t true,” Annabel protested. “Just because—”

“Of course it’s true. You thought I was trying to squeeze you out. You thought I was making a play for Barry merely because I was willing to admit he might be human, so wait and see. You thought I was trying to snatch Ollie from you, when as a matter of fact—”

“Lina, for God’s sake,” Pierce implored her.

Her fine dark eyes flashed at him. “She did, Ollie! When as a matter of fact she got bored with you, and I happened to be near.” The eyes darted right to left, sweeping them. “And look at you now, all of you, and listen to you! You all think Barry killed her — all except one, you would say, Ollie. But you haven’t got the guts to say so. And this Mr. Goodwin of yours, darling Annabel, have you told him that what you really want him for is to find some kind of proof that Barry did it? No, I suppose you’re saving that for later.”

Lina arose, in no hurry, and confronted Annabel from springing distance. “I thought it would be something like this,” she said, and left us, detouring around Leeds’ chair and heading for the door to the reception hall. Eyes followed her, but no one said anything; then, as she passed out of sight, Barry Rackham got up and, without a glance for any of us, including his hostess, tramped from the room.

The remaining three guests exchanged looks. Leeds and Pierce left their chairs.

“I’m sorry, Annabel,” Leeds said gruffly. “But didn’t I tell you about Goodwin?”

She didn’t reply. She only stood and breathed. Leeds went, with not as much spring to his step as I had seen, and Pierce, mumbling a good night, followed. Dana Hammond went to Annabel, had a hand out to touch her arm, and then let it drop.

“My dear,” he said, appealing to her, “it was no good. It couldn’t be. If you had consulted me—”

“I’ll remember next time, Dana. Good night.”

“I want to talk with you, Annabel. I want to—”

“For God’s sake, let me alone! Go!”

He backed up a step and scowled at me, as if I were to blame for everything. I lifted my right brow at him. It’s one of my few outstanding talents, lifting one brow, and I save it for occasions when nothing else would quite serve the purpose.

He walked out of the room without another word.

Annabel dropped onto the nearest chair, put her elbows on her knees, and buried her face in her hands.

I stood looking down at her. “It was not,” I told her sympathetically, “what I would call a success, but anyhow you tried. Not to try to make you feel better, but for future guidance, it might have been wiser, instead of calling a convention, to tackle them one at a time. And it was too bad you picked Leeds to sell first, since he has a grudge against me. But the truth is you were licked before you started. The shape their nerves are in, touching them with a feather wouldn’t tickle them, it would give them a stroke. Thanks all the same for asking me.”

I left her. By the time I got out to the parking space the cars of the other guests were gone. Rolling down the curving driveway, I was thinking that my first incoming phone call hadn’t been so damned magnificent after all.