Prisoner's Base

Chapter 6

At a quarter to six that afternoon I sat on a chair in a smallish room in a well-known building on Leonard Street. I was bored, disillusioned, and hungry. If I had known what was going to happen in sixty seconds, at fourteen minutes to six, my outlook would have been quite different, but I didn’t.

I had been bandied a good deal, though I had not yet been tossed in the coop or even charged. Escorted first to the Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth Street, where Cramer’s office is, I had sat neglected for half an hour, at the end of which I was told that if I wanted to see Inspector Cramer I would have to be taken elsewhere. I had expressed no desire to see Cramer, but I was tired of sitting, and when one in uniform invited me to accompany him I did so. He conveyed me in a taxi to 24 °Centre Street, took me up in an elevator, and gripped my arm on a long walk around halls, winding up at an alcove with a bench, where he told me to sit. He also sat. After a while I asked him who or what we were waiting for.

“Listen, bud,” he demanded aggressively, “do I look like I know much?”

I hedged. “At first sight, no.”

“Right. I don’t know one single thing about anything. So don’t ask me.”

That seemed to settle it, and I sat. People, the assortment you expect and always get at 24 °Centre Street, kept passing by along the corridor, both directions. I was at the point where I was shifting on the hard bench every thirty seconds instead of every two minutes when I saw a captain in uniform marching past and called to him. “Captain!”

He stopped, whirled, saw me, and approached.

“Captain,” I said, “I appeal to you. My name is Archie Goodwin, Nine-fourteen West Thirty-fifth Street, which is Nero Wolfe’s address. This officer must of course stick to me or I might escape. I appeal to you to send me a photographer. I want a picture of me in these things” — I lifted my manacled hands — “for evidence. A double-breasted ape named Rowcliff had me fettered, and I intend to sue him for false arrest and exposing me to shame, degradation, and public scorn.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said sympathetically and went.

I had of course stopped the captain and appealed to him as a diversion, just for something to do, and it was totally unexpected when, some twenty minutes later, a sergeant walked up to me and asked my name. I told him.

He turned to my chaperon. “What’s this man’s name?”

“He told you, Sergeant.”

“I’m asking you!”

“I don’t know of my own knowledge, Sergeant. Up at Homicide they said his name was Archie Goodwin, like he told you.”

The sergeant made a noise, not complimentary, glanced at my cuffs, produced a ring of keys and used one, and my hands were free. I had never seen that captain before and haven’t seen him since, and I don’t know his name, but if you ever get struck in an alcove at headquarters with handcuffs on, ask for a captain around fifty to fifty-five with a big red nose and a double chin, wearing metal-rimmed glasses.

A little later another sergeant came with orders, and I was escorted down and out, to Leonard Street, up to the District Attorney’s layout, and to a room. There at last some attention was paid to me, by a Homicide dick named Randall, whom I knew a little, and an assistant DA I had never seen before, named Mandelbaum. They pecked at me for an hour and a half, and there was nothing in it for anybody, except that I got the impression that there would be no charge. When they left they didn’t even bother about a sentinel, merely telling me to stick. The third or fourth time I looked at my watch after their departure it was a quarter to six.

As I said, I was bored and disillusioned and hungry. An encounter with Rowcliff was enough to ruin a day anyhow, and that was only one item of the record. I had to meet Lon Cohen at seven-thirty to buy him a steak as promised, and afterward I had to go home and pack a bag before finding a hotel room. That was okay, but there was no telling what frame of mind they had pestered Wolfe into, and if I went home he would probably be laying for me. Also I didn’t mind sleeping in a hotel room, but what about when I left it in the morning? What were my plans? I shrugged that off, thinking I would get some kind of lead from Lon, and decided to call him then instead of waiting until seven. There was no phone in the room where I was, so I got up and went out to the corridor, glanced right and left, and started left. There were doors on both sides, all closed. I preferred one standing open, with a phone in sight, and kept going. No luck. But nearly at the end of the corridor the last door on the left was ajar, a three-inch crack, and as I approached it I heard a voice. That was the event I have referred to as occurring at fourteen minutes to six — my hearing that voice, coming from that room. At twelve paces it was audible, at five paces it was recognizable, and when I got my ear within six inches of the crack the words were quite plain.

“This whole performance,” Nero Wolfe was saying, “is based on an idiotic assumption, which was natural and indeed inevitable, since Mr. Rowcliff is your champion ass — the assumption that Mr. Goodwin and I are both cretins. I do not deny that at times in the past I have been less than candid with you — I will acknowledge, to humor you, that I have humbugged and hoodwinked to serve my purpose — but I still have my license, and you know what that means. It means that on balance I have helped you more than I have hurt you — not the community, which is another matter, but you, Mr. Cramer, and you, Mr. Bowen, and of course you others too.”

So the DA himself was in the audience.

“It means also that I have known where to stop, and Mr. Goodwin has too. That is our unbroken record, and you know it. But what happens today? Following my customary routine, at four o’clock this afternoon I go up to my plant rooms for two hours of relaxation. I have been there but a short time when I hear a commotion and go to investigate. It is Mr. Rowcliff. He has taken advantage of the absence of Mr. Goodwin, whom he fears and petulantly envies, and has entered my house by force and—”

“That’s a lie!” Rowcliff’s voice came. “I rang and—”

“Shut up!” Wolfe roared, and it seemed to me that the door moved to narrow the crack a little. In a moment he went on, not roaring but not whispering either, “As you all know, a policeman has no more right to enter a man’s home that anyone else, except under certain adequately defined circumstances. But such a right is often usurped, as today when my cook and housekeeper unlatched the door and Mr. Rowcliff pushed it open against resistance, entered, brushed my employee aside, and ignored all protests while he was illegally mounting three flights of stairs, erupting into my plant rooms, and invading my privacy.”

I leaned against the jamb and got comfortable.

“He was ass enough to suppose I would speak with him. Naturally I ordered him out. He insisted that I must answer questions. When I persisted in my refusal and turned to leave him, he intercepted me, displayed a warrant for my arrest as a material witness in a murder case, and put a hand on me.” The voice suddenly went lower and much colder. “I will not have a hand put on me, gentlemen. I like no man’s hand on me, and one such as Mr. Rowcliff’s, unmerited, I will not have. I told him to give me his instructions under the authority of the warrant, in as few words as possible, without touching me. I am not bragging of my extreme sensitiveness to hostile touch, since it is shared by all the animals; I mention it only as one of the reasons why I refused to speak to Mr. Rowcliff. He took me into custody under the warrant, conducted me out of my house, and, in a rickety old police car with a headstrong and paroxysmal driver, brought me to this building.”

I bit my lip. While the fact that he too had been arrested and bandied was not without its charm, the additional fact that I was responsible made it nothing to titter about. Therefore I did not titter. I listened.

“I had assumed, charitably, that some major misapprehension, possibly even excusable, had driven Mr. Rowcliff to this frenzied zeal. But I learned from you, Mr. Bowen, that it was merely an insane fit of nincompoopery. To accuse Mr. Goodwin of impersonating a policeman is infantile; I don’t know what he said or did, and I don’t need to; I know Mr. Goodwin, and he couldn’t possibly be so fatuous. To accuse him, acting on my account, of giving false information may not be infantile, but it is pointless. You suspect that I have been hired by someone involved, either innocently or guiltily, in the death of Miss Eads and Mrs. Fomos, that I wish to conceal that fact, and that Mr. Goodwin went to that place today as my agent and, denying it, is lying.”

“I know damn well he is,” a voice blurted — Rowcliff’s.

“The arrangement,” Wolfe said curtly, “was that I was to speak without interruption. I say the accusation is pointless. If Mr. Goodwin is lying on instructions from me, do you suppose I didn’t consider the probabilities? It is likely that I’ll be halted or deflected by such inanities as putting handcuffs on him — yes, Mr. Rowcliff actually flaunted that — or dragging me down here in an unsafe vehicle? You suspect that I have a client; that I know something you don’t know and would like to; and that you can bully it out of me. You can’t, because I haven’t got it. But you’re correct in thinking I have a client. I admit it. I have.”

Rowcliff’s voice ejaculated something that sounded like a cry of triumph. I thought to myself, At last here it is. The sonofagun has got himself a customer!

Wolfe was going on. “I didn’t have a client this morning, or even an hour ago, but now I have. Mr. Rowcliff’s ferocious spasms, countenanced by you gentlemen, have made the challenge ineluctable. When Mr. Goodwin said that I was not concerned in this matter and that he was acting solely in his own personal interest, he was telling the truth. As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects. He is especially vulnerable to young women who possess not only those more obvious charms but also have a knack of stimulating his love of chivalry and adventure and his preoccupation with the picturesque and the passionate. Priscilla Eads was such a woman. She spent some time with Mr. Goodwin yesterday; he locked her in a bedroom of my house. Within three hours of her eviction by him at my behest, she was brutally murdered. I will not say that the effect on him amounted to derangement, but it was considerable. He bounded out of my house like a man obsessed, after telling me that he was going single-handed after a murderer, and after arming himself. It was pathetic, but it was also humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable, and your callous and churlish treatment of him leaves me with no alternative. I am at his service. He is my client.”

Rowcliff’s voice blurted incredulously, “You mean Archie Goodwin is your client?”

The dry cutting voice of Bowen, the DA, put in, “All that rigmarole was leading up to that?”

I pushed the door open and stepped in.

Eight pairs of eyes came at me. Besides Wolfe, Bowen, Cramer, and Rowcliff, there were the two who had been pecking at me previously, and two others, strangers. I crossed toward Wolfe. It had been desirable to let him know that I had heard what he said before witnesses, but it was equally desirable to make it plain that his new client had the warmest appreciation of the honor.

“I’m hungry,” I told him. “I had a soda-fountain lunch and I could eat a porcupine with quills on. Let’s go home.”

His reaction was humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable. As if we had rehearsed it a dozen times, he arose without a word, got his hat and stick from a nearby table, came and gave me a pat on the shoulder, growled at the audience, “A paradise for puerility,” and turned and headed for the door. I followed. No one moved to intercept us.

Since I knew the building better than he did, I took the lead in the corridor and got us downstairs and out to the street. In the taxi he sat with his lips pressed tight, gripping the strap. There was no conversation. At the curb in front of home I paid the driver, got out and held the door for him, preceded him up the stoop, and used my key, but the key was not enough. The door opened an inch and was stopped by the chain bolt, so I had to ring for Fritz. After he had come and let us in, Wolfe instructed us, “Never again an unbolted door. Never!” To Fritz: “You proceeded with the kidney?”

“Yes, sir. You didn’t phone.”

“The dumplings and burnt sugar?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Satisfactory. Beer, please. I’m so dry I crackle.”

His hat and stick disposed of, he went to the office, and I tagged. For hours I had been sweaty where the leather holster kept my skin from breathing, and it was a relief to get rid of the thing. That attended to, I did not sit at my desk. Instead I went to the red leather chair — the chair where a thousand clients had sat, not to mention thousands who had never attained cliency. I lowered myself into it, leaned back, and crossed my legs. Fritz came with beer, and Wolfe opened, poured, and drank.

He looked at me. “Buffoon,” he stated.

I shook my head. “No, sir. I sit here not as a gag but to avoid misunderstanding. As a client, the closer to you the better. As an employee, nothing doing until my personal problem is solved. If you meant what you said down there, tell me how much you want for a retainer, and I’ll give you a check. If not, all I can do is bound out of your house like a man obsessed.”

“Confound it, I’m helpless! I’m committed!”

“Yes, sir. How about a retainer?”

“No!”

“Would you care to hear how I spent the day?”

“Care to? No. But how the devil can I escape it?”

I reported in full. Gradually, as he progressed to his third glass of beer and on through it, the wrinkles of his scowl smoothed out some. Apparently he was paying no attention to me, but I had long ago learned not to worry about that. It would all be available any time he needed it. When I finished he grunted.

“How many of those five people could you have here at eleven in the morning?”

“As it stands now? With no more bait?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t bet on one, but I’m ready to try. I might get something useful from Lon Cohen if I buy him a thick enough steak — and by the way, I ought to call him.”

“Do so. Invite him to dine with us.”

On the face of it that suggestion was gracious and generous, and maybe it was, but the situation was complicated. If we had been engaged on the case in the usual manner, and, after dope, I had taken Lon to Pierre’s for a feed, it would of course have gone on the expense account and we would have been reimbursed. But this was different. If I listed it as an expense Wolfe was stuck unless he billed me as client. If I didn’t list it I was stuck and there could be no deduction on an income-tax report, either Wolfe’s or mine, which wouldn’t do at all.

So I phoned Lon, and he came and ate kidneys mountain style, and carameled dumplings, instead of a Pierre steak, which was convenient and economical but had its drawback — namely, that I usually dispose of six of those dumplings and this time was limited to four; and Wolfe had to be content with seven instead of ten. He took it like a man, filling the gap with an extra helping of salad and cheese.

Back in the office after dinner, I had to hand it to Lon. He was full of food as good as a man can hope for anywhere, and wine to go with it, but he was not blurry. My phoning him twice and the invitation to dine had him set either to take or to give, whichever was on the program, and as he relaxed in one of the yellow chairs, sipping B & B, his eyes darted from Wolfe to me and back again.

Wolfe’s chest billowed with a deep sigh. “I’m in a pickle, Mr. Cohen,” he declared. “I am committed to investigate a murder and I have no entree. When Archie told you today that I was not interested in the death of Miss Eads it was the truth, but now I am, and I need a toehold. Who killed her?”

Lon shook his head. “I was intending to ask you. Of course you know it’s out that she was here yesterday, that she left here not long before she was killed, so everybody takes it for granted that you’re working on it. Since when have you needed an entree?”

Wolfe squinted at him. “Are you in my debt, Mr. Cohen, or am I in yours?”

“I’ll call it square if you will.”

“Good. Then I assume I have credit. I’ll read your paper in the morning, and others too, but here we are now. Do you mind talking about it?”

Lon said he didn’t mind a bit and proceeded to prove it. He talked for nearly an hour, with some questions from Wolfe and a few from me, and when he finished we may have been better informed but had nothing we could call an entree.

Helmar, Brucker, Quest, Pitkin, and Miss Duday would not only own eighty per cent of the Softdown stock; they would also be in control of the distribution of another ten per cent of it to employees, with power to decide who got what. That made up the ninety per cent disposed of under the will of Priscilla’s father. The remaining ten per cent had been owned by an associate in the business, deceased, and now belonged to his daughter, a Mrs. Sarah Jaffee, a widow. Mrs. Jaffee had formerly been a close friend of Priscilla Eads. Her husband had been killed a year ago in Korea.

The favorite suspect with male journalists was Oliver Pitkin, for no convincing reason; the favorite with females was Viola Duday. No evidence had been disclosed that any of the five main beneficiaries was in financial difficulties or was excessively rancorous, greedy, or bloodthirsty; but since each of them would get an engraved certificate worth roughly a million and a half, the consensus was that such evidence was not required. As far as the press knew, none of them was eliminated by alibi or other circumstance. Of some sixty reporters, from all papers and wire services, working on the case, at least half were certain that Daphne O’Neil was deeply involved one way or another, and were determined to find out how.

The news that Priscilla had spent seven of her last hours on earth at Wolfe’s house had come through Perry Helmar, who had got it from an assistant DA. Helmar had told an AP City News man in the middle of the afternoon, and an hour later, refusing to see reporters, had issued a statement regarding his own visit to Wolfe and the “cruel deception” that had been practiced on him. The statement had been carried by the evening papers. It did not say, but clearly implied, that if Wolfe had not concealed from Helmar the presence of Priscilla in his house she would not have been killed. Lon’s paper, the Gazette, would give it a box on page three. When Lon mentioned that detail he paused and cocked his head at Wolfe, inviting comment, but got none.

Priscilla Eads’s life had been complicated by a series of phases she had gone through. After her father’s death when she was fifteen, her home had been with the Helmars, but she had spent most of the time away at school, where she had made a brilliant record, including two years at Smith. Then suddenly, a few months before her nineteenth birthday, she had quit in the middle of a semester, announced to friends that she intended to see the world, rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, hired a maid and cook and butler, and started giving parties. In a few months she had had enough of the Village, but Lon’s information on her next move was a little vague. The way a Gazette man had got it, her maid had decided she must go to New Orleans to see her sick mother, and Priscilla, glad of any excuse to get away from the Village, and particularly from her guardian, Perry Helmar, who was pestering her to return to college, bought plane tickets to New Orleans for herself and her maid, and off they went.

Probably in New Orleans, but anyhow somewhere around there, she had met Eric Hagh. On this Lon was even vaguer, but it was definite that she had met him, married him, and gone off with him to some part of South America where he had something to do with something. It was also definite that three months later she had suddenly appeared in New York, accompanied by the maid she had gone away with, but not by a husband; bought a house in the woods not far from Mount Kisco; and started in on men. For two years she had raised some miscellaneous hell with men, apparently with the idea that the higher you jacked up an expectation the more fun it was to watch it crash when you jerked it loose. In time that lost its appeal, and she moved to Reno, stayed the prescribed time, got her divorce, returned to New York, and joined the Salvation Army.

At that detail I had given Lon a stare, thinking that surely he had pulled it out of a hat. Priscilla Eads as I had known her, in the peach-colored dress and tailored jacket, was mighty hard to picture as a consecrated tambourine shaker. But obviously Lon was dealing it straight, with no fancy touches for effect.

Priscilla had actually stuck with the Salvation Army for nearly two years, in uniform, working seven days a week, giving up all her old friends and habits, and living modestly if not frugally. Then abruptly — she had always been abrupt — she had quit the Army, moved to a duplex apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street, and begun to take an active interest, for the first time, in the affairs of Softdown, Incorporated. That had aroused feelings in various quarters. It was known that there had been friction between her and her former guardian, Perry Helmar, still the trustee of the property soon to become hers. Specifically, it was known that some months ago she had fired Daphne O’Neil, told her to leave the premises and not come back, and had been overruled by the officers of the corporation, supported by Helmar, who was legally in control. There was no record of any threat or mortal attack.

The events of Monday night were pretty well time-tabled. According to the driver of the taxi I had put Priscilla into, she had told him to take her to Grand Central Station. Arrived there, she said she had changed her mind; she wanted to ride around Central Park. He obliged. When, after a leisurely winding trip clear to the north end and back down to Central Park South, she had said she was thinking something over and wanted to do another lap, he had got prudent and mentioned money, and she had handed him a ten. When they were completing the second circuit, she gave him an address, 618 East Seventy-fourth Street, and he drove her there, arriving shortly after one o’clock. He helped her with the luggage, out of the cab and through the entrance door, which she opened with her key, and then returned to his cab and drove off.

It was generally believed, by both the cops and the press, that the murderer had been in her apartment waiting for her, and that he had got in with the key which the maid, Margaret Fomos, had in her bag. So he had already killed Margaret Fomos to get the bag, not necessarily planning it that way. He might have counted on getting it at smaller cost but had been recognized by her, and she, having been with Priscilla for years, could have recognized anyone who had known Priscilla well.

I filled half a notebook with the stuff Lon Cohen gave us that evening, but I guess the above samples will do for this record. After escorting him to the front, I returned to the office and found Wolfe with his chin on his chest and his eyes closed. Not opening them, he asked what time it was, and I told him ten-thirty.

He grunted. “Too late to expect a welcome from people. What time is it in Venezuela?”

“My God, I don’t know.”

I started to cross to the big globe over by the bookshelves, but he beat me to it. Anything for an excuse to consult the globe. He ran his finger along a meridian, starting at Quebec and ending at the equator. “Several degrees east. An hour later, I suppose.” He twirled the globe, looking disappointed.

I thought it was pure fake and I resented it. “You’re right near the Panama Canal,” I suggested. “Go on through to the other ocean. Try Galapagos. It’s only half-past nine there.”

He ignored it. “Get your notebook,” he growled. “If I’m saddled with this thing, I am. Your program for the morning.”

I obeyed.