Prisoner's Base

Chapter 11

From his manner and expression it was apparent that it was hard for Perry Helmar to believe that he was in such a fix. For him, a senior member of an old and respected Wall Street law firm, to have to sit conspicuously in that red leather chair and undertake to persuade a private detective named Nero Wolfe that he was not a murderer was insufferable, but he had to suffer it. His oratorical baritone was raspy and supercilious under the strain.

“You say you are not interested,” he told Wolfe, “in the factors of means and opportunity. The motive is palpable for all of us, but it is also palpable that Miss Duday is biased by animus. She cannot support her statement that after June thirtieth my income from the corporation would have ceased. I deny that Miss Eads intended to take any action so ill advised and irresponsible.”

He took a paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “As you know, when I went to Miss Eads’s apartment Monday evening to keep an appointment with her, I found a note she had left for me. The police have the original. This is a copy. It reads:

He folded the paper and returned it to his pocket. “In my opinion, the tone and substance of that communication do not indicate that Miss Eads had decided to repay my many years of safeguarding and advancing her interests in the manner described by Miss Duday. She was neither an ingrate nor a fool. I decline to offer justification of the amount paid to me by the corporation as counsel, but will say only that it was for services rendered. The business is by no means confined solely to making and selling towels, as Miss Duday sneeringly implied. Its varied activities and wide interests require constant and able supervision.”

He sent a cold, straight glance at Viola Duday and went back to Wolfe. “However, even if Miss Eads had decided to act as Miss Duday suggests, I would certainly not have been desperate. My income from my law practice, exclusive of the payments from Softdown, is adequate for my needs. And even if I had been desperate I would not have resorted to murder. The idea that a man of my training and temperament would, to gain any conceivable objective, perform so vicious a deed and incur so tremendous a risk is repugnant to every reputable theory of human conduct. That’s all.”

He clamped his jaw.

“Not quite,” Wolfe objected. “You leave too much untouched. If there was no question of desperation, if you had no thought that you were about to be squeezed out, why did you offer me five thousand dollars to find Miss Eads within six days, and double that to produce her, as you put it, alive and well?”

“I told you why. I thought it likely that she had gone, or was going, to Venezuela to see her former husband, and I wanted, if possible, to stop her before she reached him. I had had that letter from him, claiming a half-interest in her property, and she was greatly disturbed over it, and I was afraid she might do something foolish. My using that hackneyed phrase, ‘alive and well’ had no significance. I told you that the first thing to do would be to check all airplane passengers to Venezuela.” He pointed a straight, stern, bony finger. “And you had her here, in this house, and kept it from me. And after I left, you sent her to her death!”

Wolfe, no doubt aware that the finger wasn’t loaded, did not counter. He asked, “Then you’re conceding that the document Mr. Hagh was waving around is authentic? That his wife signed it?”

“No.”

“But she surely knew whether she had signed it or not. If she hadn’t, if it was a fake, why would she go flying off to Venezuela?”

“She was — wild sometimes.”

Wolfe shook his head. “You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Helmar. Let’s get it straight. You had shown Miss Eads the letter from Mr. Hagh and the photostat of the document. What did she say? Did she acknowledge she had signed it, or deny it?”

Helmar took his time replying. Finally he said, “I’ll reserve my answer to that.”

“I doubt if aging will help it,” Wolfe said dryly. “Now that you know that Miss Eads had not gone to Venezuela, and I assure you she had no intention of going, how do you explain her backing out from her appointment with you, her departure, her asking you not to try to find her?”

“I don’t have to explain it.”

“Do you decline to try?”

“I don’t see that it needs more explanation than you already have. She knew that I was coming that evening with documentary proof that Miss Duday was utterly incompetent to direct the affairs of the corporation. I told her so that morning on the phone. I think it likely that she was already aware that she would have to abandon her idea of putting Miss Duday in control, and she didn’t want to face me and admit it. Also she knew that Miss Duday would not give her a moment’s peace for the week that was left.”

“What a monstrous liar you are, Perry,” Viola Duday said in her clear, pleasant voice.

He looked at her. That was the first time I had seen him give her a direct and explicit look, and, since she was just off the line from him to me, I had a good view of it. It demolished one detail of his exposition — the claim that a man of his training and temperament couldn’t possibly commit a murder. His look at her was perfect for a guy about to put a cord around a neck and pull tight. It was just one swift, ugly flash, and then he returned to Wolfe.

“I should think,” he said, “that would explain her leaving and her note to me. Whether it also explains what she said to you I can’t say, because I don’t know what that was.”

“What about Miss O’Neil?”

“I have nothing to say about Miss O’Neil.”

“Oh, come. She may be a mere voluptuous irrelevance, but I need to know. What was her manner of play? Was she intimate with both Mr. Brucker and you, or neither? What was she after — diversion, treasure, or a man?”

Helmar’s jaw worked. It jutted anyway, and when he gave it muscle it was as outstanding as the beak of a bulldozer. He spoke. “It was stupid to submit to this at all. With the police it’s unavoidable, there’s no help for it, but with you it’s absurd — your ignorant and malicious insinuations about a young woman whom you are not fit to touch. In her innocence and modest merit she is so far above all this depravity — no! I was a fool to come!” He set the jaw for good.

I was gawking at him. It was hard to believe. It is not unheard of for a Wall Street lawyer to find relaxation in the companionship of a well-made female grabber, but when you hear one with his mind still working blathering like that about it, you wonder. Such a man is a menace to healthy and normal dealings between the sexes. After hearing Helmar emit that blah about a specimen like Daphne O’Neil, for weeks I got suspicious whenever I heard myself addressing a young woman in anything more sociable than a defiant snarl.

Wolfe said, “I take it you’re through, Mr. Helmar?”

“I am.”

Wolfe turned. “Mr. Brucker?”

Brucker was the one I favored. It will sometimes happen, when a group of people are under the blazing light of a murder job, that they all look alike to you, but not often. Usually, sometimes for a reason you can name and sometimes not, you have a favorite, and mine in this case was Jay L. Brucker, the president. I didn’t know why, but it could have been his long pale face and long thin nose, which reminded me of a bird I had once worked for during summer vacation in Ohio in my high school days, who had diddled me out of forty cents; or again it could have been the way he had looked at Daphne O’Neil, Tuesday afternoon in the Softdown conference room. There is no law against a man showing his admiration for works of nature, but it had been only a few hours since he had heard of the death of Priscilla Eads, and it wouldn’t have hurt him any to wait till sundown to start gloating.

He wasn’t gloating now. He was the only one who had had three drinks — a good shot of rye each time, with a splash of water — and I had noticed that when he conveyed the glass to his lips his hand trembled.

“I would like to tell—” he started. It didn’t come through well, and he cleared his throat twice and started over. “I would like to tell you, Mr. Wolfe, that I regard this action by Mrs. Jaffee as completely justified. My opinion was that the stock should be placed in escrow until the matter of Miss Eads’s death has been satisfactorily cleared up, but the others objected that sometimes a murder is not solved for months or even years, and sometimes never. I had to admit that their position had some validity, but so has Mrs. Jaffee’s, and it should be possible to arrive at a compromise. I do not resent the interest you are taking in the matter. I would welcome and appreciate your assistance in arranging a compromise.”

Wolfe shook his head. “You’re wasting time, sir. I’m an investigator, not a negotiator. I’m after a murderer. Is it you? I don’t know, but you do. I ask you to speak to that.”

“I would be glad to” — he cleared his throat again — “if I thought I knew anything that would help you to arrive at the truth. I’m just a plodding, hard-working businessman, Mr. Wolfe; there’s nothing brilliant or spectacular about me the way there is about you. I remember a day back in nineteen thirty-two, the worst year for American business in this century. I was an awkward young fellow, had been with Softdown just three years, had started there when I finished college. It was a cold December day, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I was in a gloomy frame of mind. Word had got around that on account of business conditions further retrenchment had been decided on, and at the end of the year several of us in my section would be dropped.”

“If you think this is pertinent,” Wolfe muttered.

“I do, yes, sir. On that cold December day Mrs. Eads had come to the office to see Mr. Eads about something, and had brought with her Priscilla, their little five-year-old daughter, a lovely little girl. Priscilla remained out on the floor while her mother went into her father’s office, walking around looking at people and things, as children will; and I happened to be there, and she came up to me and asked what my name was, and I told her, Jay. Do you know what she said?”

He waited for a reply, and Wolfe, coerced, said, “No.”

“She said, ‘Jay? You don’t look like a bluejay!’ She was simply irresistible. I had been busy that morning with some tests of a new yarn we were considering, and I had a little of it in my pocket, just a few short strands of bright green, and I took it and tied it loosely around her neck and told her that was a beautiful necklace I was giving her for Christmas, and I took her to a mirror on the wall and held her up so she could look at it.”

He had to clear his throat some more. “She was delighted, clapping her hands and making little childish cries of glee, and then her mother came, coming to get her, and with her was the husband and father, Mr. Nathan Eads. And little Priscilla ran to him, to her father, displaying her beautiful green necklace, and do you know what she said to him?”

“No.”

“She said, ‘Daddy, look what Jay gave me! Oh, Daddy, you can’t make Jay go with the others! Daddy, you must keep Jay!’ And I was kept! I was the youngest man in my section, and some of my seniors had to go, but I was kept! That, Mr. Wolfe, was the first time I ever saw Priscilla Eads. You can imagine how I felt about her. You can imagine how I have felt about her ever since, through all the years, in spite of all the difficulties and frictions and disagreements. That green necklace, just a scrap of yarn, I put around her little neck! I have of course told this to the police, and they have verified it. You can imagine how I feel now, knowing that I am actually suspected of being capable of killing Priscilla Eads.” He extended his hands, and they fluttered. “With these hands! These hands that tied that necklace on her twenty years ago!”

He got up and went to the refreshment table and used the hands, one to hold a glass and the other to pour rye and splash in a little water. Returning to his chair, he gulped half of it down.

“Well, sir?” Wolfe prodded him.

“I have no more to say,” he declared.

“You’re not serious.” Wolfe was flabbergasted.

“Oh, yes, he is.” Viola Duday was grimly gratified. “For three years he has written most of the copy for Softdown advertising — but I don’t suppose you read advertisements.”

“Not ardently.” Wolfe eyed Brucker. “Manifestly, sir, either your mental processes are badly constipated or you think mine are. Let’s jump twenty years to day before yesterday. Tuesday afternoon you told Mr. Goodwin that you five people — Mr. Helmar was not present, but Miss O’Neil was — had been discussing the murder and had entertained the notion that Miss Eads had been killed by her former husband, Mr. Hagh. You mentioned—”

“Who said that?” Eric Hagh was reacting. He passed between Pitkin and Miss Duday to confront them, and his blue eyes swept the arc as he repeated his challenge. “Who said that?”

Wolfe told him to sit down and was ignored. I got up and headed for him, as Irby, his lawyer, called something to him. I suppose I was more on edge than I realized, with the long session dragging out and obviously getting nowhere, and it must have shown on my face that I was ready to plug someone and why not Eric Hagh, for Wolfe called my name sharply.

“Archie!”

It brought me to. I stopped short of Hagh and told him, “Back up. You were to take part only if and when invited.”

“I’ve been accused of murder!”

“Why not? So has everyone else. If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from. Sit down and listen and start cooking up a defense.”

Irby was there with a hand on his arm, and the big handsome chiseling ex-husband let himself be urged back to his seat in the rear.

Wolfe resumed to Brucker: “Regarding Mr. Hagh, you said that he wouldn’t even have had to come to New York, that he could have hired someone to kill his former wife. What was the significance of your suggestion that the deed had been done by a hired assassin?”

“I don’t know.” Brucker was frowning. “Was it significant?”

“I think it may have been. In any case, I am impressed by your enterprise in hustling off to Venezuela for a candidate when there was no lack of eligibles near at hand. But the question arises, what was in it for Mr. Hagh? Why did he want her dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone would have to know. Miss Duday offered the singular suggestion, to Mr. Goodwin, that Miss Eads had denied she had signed the document, or Mr. Hagh thought she was going to, and so he had to destroy her. That is doubly puerile. First, she had acknowledged that she had signed the document. Second, she had offered, through Mr. Irby, to pay one hundred thousand dollars in settlement of the claim — just last week. Whereupon Mr. Hagh, in a fit of pique, dashes to the airport for a plane to New York, flies here and kills her, after first lolling her maid to get a key, and flies back again. Does that sound credible?”

“No.”

“Then arrange it so it does. Why did Mr. Hagh kill his former wife?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“That’s a pity, since the simplest way for you people to make me doubt your guilt would be to offer an acceptable substitute. Have you one?”

“No.”

“Have you anything else to offer?”

“No.”

“Do you wish to make any comment on what has been said about Miss O’Neil?”

“I do not.”

Wolfe’s gaze went left. “Mr. Quest?”