The Final Deduction

6

At 12:35 p.m. Friday, Inspector Cramer of Homicide West, seated in the red leather chair, took a mangled unlit cigar from his mouth and said, “I still want to know where you and Goodwin have been and what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours.”

The only objection to telling him was that he would have gone or sent someone to check, and Doc Vollmer was a busy man, so it would have been a poor return for his hospitality. As for the hospitality, I had no kick coming, having been given a perfectly good bed in a spare room, but Wolfe had had a few difficulties. Books to read, but no chair upstairs big enough to take him, and he won’t read lying down. No pajamas big enough for him, so he had to sleep in his underwear. Grub not bad enough to take credit for facing up to hardship, but not good enough to please the palate; only one brand of beer, and not his. Pillows too soft to use only one and too thick to use two. Towels either too little or too big. Soap that smelled like tuberoses (he said), and he uses geranium. He really bore up well for his first day and night away from home in more than a year; he was glum, of course, as you would be if you were forced to skedaddle, without stopping to take a toothbrush, by circumstances you weren’t to blame for.

We had not phoned Fritz to find out if there had been any callers because we didn’t know much about modern electronics, and who does? We knew tracing a phone call wasn’t as simple as it used to be, but they might have a tame neutron or positron or some other tron that could camp inside Wolfe’s number and tell where a call came from. For news there were the papers, Thursday evening and Friday morning. Not a word in the Gazette about kidnaping; Lon had kept it; and nothing in the Times Friday morning or on the radio at eleven o’clock. There was plenty about Jimmy Vail, but the main fact was still as I had got it from Lon: Margot Tedder had entered the library at 9:05 Thursday morning and found him there on the floor underneath Benjamin Franklin. The bronze statue had flattened his chest.

Five people, not one, had last seen him alive Wednesday evening — his wife; her son and daughter, Noel and Margot Tedder; her brother, Ralph Purcell; and her attorney, Andrew Frost. They had all been in the library after dinner (subject of the family conference not mentioned), and shortly after ten o’clock Jimmy Vail, saying that he hadn’t slept much for three days (reason not given), had stretched out on the couch and gone to sleep. He had still been there an hour later, sound asleep, when they broke it up and left. Noel and Margot Tedder and Ralph Purcell had gone up to bed, and Mrs. Vail and Andrew Frost had gone up to her study. Around midnight Frost had left, and Mrs. Vail had gone to bed. Evidently she too had been short on sleep, for she had still been in bed when her son and daughter came to her room Thursday morning to tell her about Jimmy.

Everyone in the house, of course including the servants, had known that Benjamin Franklin was wobbly. The Gazette had a piece by an expert about the different methods of fastening the bronze feet of a man to the base he stands on. He hadn’t been permitted to examine the statue that had toppled onto Jimmy Vail, but he said the trouble couldn’t have been a loose nut; his guess was that the bolt or bolts had had a flaw and had cracked at some time when the statue was being handled. It was quite possible, he said, that Jimmy Vail, half aroused from a deep sleep, on his way across the room to the door, had lost his balance and grabbed at the statue and pulled it down on him. I thought it was darned decent of the Gazette to run the piece. A good murder or suspicion of one will sell thousands of extra papers, and here they were promoting the idea that it had been accidental. They had got the picture Lon had said would be beautiful, of Benjamin Franklin on top of Jimmy Vail.

There were no quotes from any members of the family. Mrs. Vail was in bed under a doctor’s care, inaccessible. Andrew Frost wasn’t seeing reporters, but he had told the police that when he left the house around midnight, unescorted, he had not stopped at the library on his way out.

As I have said, there was nothing new on the radio at eleven o’clock Friday morning. At 11:10 I phoned Homicide West from Doc Vollmer’s office downstairs — he was at the hospital — and told the desk man to tell Inspector Cramer that Nero Wolfe had some information for him regarding Jimmy Vail. At 11:13 I called the District Attorney’s office at White Plains, got an assistant DA, and told him to tell Hobart that Wolfe had decided to answer any questions he might care to ask. At 11:18 I rang the Gazette, got Lon Cohen, and told him it was all his and would probably soon be everybody’s, and he could even use our names as the source if he spelled them right. Of course he wanted more, but I hung up. At 11:24 we thanked Helen Gillard and asked her to thank the doctor for us, left the house, walked sixty yards to Wolfe’s, found the door was bolted, pushed the button and were admitted by Fritz, and learned that Sergeant Purley Stebbins had come yesterday ten minutes after we left, and Inspector Cramer had come at six o’clock. No search warrant, but Cramer had phoned at 8:43 and again at 10:19. At the office door Wolfe asked about the mussels, and Fritz said they were in perfect condition. Wolfe was at his desk with his eyes closed, in the only chair that will really do, sitting and breathing, and I was at my desk opening the mail, when the doorbell rang and I went. It was Inspector Cramer, his rugged pink face a little pinker than normal and his burly shoulders hunched a little. When I let him in he didn’t even give me an eye, but kept going, to the office, and as I followed, after closing the door, I heard him rasping.

“Where have you and Goodwin been since yesterday noon?”

Fifty minutes later, as I have said, at 12:35 p.m., he demanded, “I still want to know where you and Goodwin have been and what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours.”

We had opened the bag. Most of the talking had been done by me because the whole world knows — well, six or eight people — that the only difference between me and a tape recorder is that you can ask me questions. And for some of it — the White Plains part and the session in the Harold F. Tedder library — Wolfe hadn’t been present. We had handed over the note that had come in the mail, the original, and my transcriptions, carbons, of the other two notes and the telephone conversation between Mrs. Vail and Mr. Knapp. I did make a few improvements on Wolfe’s phrasing, and mine too, by making it emphatic that the main point had been, first, to get Jimmy Vail back alive, and then to protect him and Mrs. Vail by keeping his promise to the kidnapers. Of course Cramer landed on that with both feet. Why had we gone on protecting Vail for twenty-four hours after he was dead? Obviously, so Wolfe could hang onto the money he already had in the bank. Withholding information vital to a murder investigation. Obstructing justice to earn a fee.

Wolfe snorted, and my feelings were hurt. There had still been Mrs. Vail to consider, and we hadn’t known that Vail had been murdered. Did he? I had read an article by a statue expert which said that it could have been an accident. Wasn’t it? Cramer didn’t say, but he didn’t have to; his being there was enough to show that it was open, though maybe not open-and-shut. He said we had of course seen the statement of the District Attorney’s office in the morning paper that the apparent cause of Vail’s death was the statue falling on him, that a final determination would be made when the autopsy had been completed, and that a thorough investigation was being made. Then he took the chewed unlit cigar from his mouth and said he still wanted to know where we had been the past twenty-four hours.

Wolfe would not be riled. He was back in his house, in his chair, the deadline was past, and the mussels would be ready in an hour. “As I told you,” he said, “we knew we would be pestered and we decamped. Where is of no consequence. We did nothing and communicated with no one. At eleven this morning, when our obligation to Mrs. Vail had been fulfilled, Mr. Goodwin telephoned your office. You have no valid grievance. Even now you will not say that you’re investigating a murder; you’re trying to determine if one has been committed. A charge of obstructing justice couldn’t possibly hold. Some of the questions you asked Mr. Goodwin indicated that you suspect him of trying to find the typewriter that was missing from Mrs. Vail’s study. Nonsense, Since yesterday noon he has been trying to find nothing whatever, and neither have I. Our interest in the matter is ended. We have no further commitment to Mrs. Vail. We have no client. If she herself killed both Miss Utley and Mr. Vail, which seems unlikely but is not inconceivable, I owe her no service.”

“She has paid you sixty thousand dollars.”

“And by the terms of my employment I have earned it.”

Cramer got up, came to my desk, and dropped the cigar in my wastebasket. That wasn’t regular; usually he threw the cigar at it and missed. He went back and picked up his hat from the floor where he had dropped it and turned to Wolfe.

“I want a statement with nothing left out signed by you and Goodwin. At my office by four o’clock. The District Attorney’s office will probably want to see Goodwin. It would suit me fine if they want you too.”

“Not everything everybody said by four o’clock,” I objected. “That would be a six-hour job.”

“I want the substance. All details. You can omit White Plains, we’ve got that from them.” He turned and tramped out. By the time I had followed him to the front, shut the door after him, and returned to the office, Wolfe had his book open. I finished opening the mail and put it on his desk and then pulled the typewriter around and got out paper and carbons. That would be a job, and it was water under the bridge, since we had no case and no client. Four carbons: one for Westchester, one for the Manhattan DA, and two for us. As I rolled the paper in Wolfe’s voice came at my back.

“Dendrobium chrysotoxum for Miss Gillard and Laelia purpurata for Doctor Vollmer. Tomorrow.”

“Right. And Sitassia readia for you and Transcriptum underwoodum for me.” I hit the keys.

With time out for lunch and a shave and a clean shirt, it was five minutes past four when I left the house, walked to 34th and Eighth Avenue for a Gazette, and flagged a taxi. I had made it barely in time for Wolfe to sign it before he went up to the plant rooms, but there had been interruptions. Sergeant Purley Stebbins had phoned to tell me to take the statement to the DA’s office instead of Homicide West. Ben Dykes had phoned and kept me on the wire fifteen minutes and had finally settled for an appointment with Wolfe at eleven-thirty Saturday morning. Reporters from three newspapers had called, two on the phone and one in person, and had been stalled. What had stung them was on the front page of the Gazette, which I perused as the taxi took me downtown — the first public notice of the kidnaping of Jimmy Vail and delivery of the ransom money by his wife. Of course it didn’t have the big kick of a kidnaping story, the suspense about the fate of the victim, since Jimmy had come back safe and sound, but it had the added attraction of his death by violence in his own home some fifteen hours after he returned. There were pictures of Fowler’s Inn and The Fatted Calf and Iron Mine Road. Lon had hung onto it, but he had taken steps. The mention of Wolfe and me was vague and sort of gave the impression that we knew about it because we knew everything, which wouldn’t hurt a bit. It was the fattest scoop I had ever given Lon, and that wouldn’t hurt either. When I got to 155 Leonard Street and was taken to the room of assistant DA Mandel, he greeted me by tapping the Gazette that was there on his desk and demanding, “When did you give them this?” I told him ten minutes after eleven this morning.

It didn’t amount to much that time. I have had several conversations in that building that lasted more than six hours, one that lasted fourteen hours, and two that ended by my being locked up as a material witness. That day Mandel and two Homicide Bureau dicks let me go in less than two hours, partly because I had the signed statement with me, partly because they weren’t officially interested in the kidnaping since that had been a Westchester job, and partly because they were by no means sure Jimmy Vail’s death had been a homicide and if it wasn’t that would be okay with them. A dick has enough grief dealing with riffraff, and he would prefer to have no part of Tedders and Vails. So after going through the routine motions for an hour and a half they shooed me out, and at a quarter past six I was paying a hackie in front of the old brownstone and climbing out. As my foot touched the sidewalk, someone grabbed my arm and pronounced my name, and I wheeled.

It was Noel Tedder. “Who the hell does this Nero Wolfe think he is?” he squeaked.

“It depends on his mood.” I moved my arm, but he had a grip. “Let go of my arm, I might need it. Why, did he bounce you?”

“I haven’t been in. First I was told through a crack to come back after six, and I did. Then I was told Wolfe was busy — ‘engaged,’ he said. I asked for you and was told you were out and he didn’t know when you’d be back. I said I’d come in and wait, and he said I wouldn’t. What does it take, a passport?”

“Did you give your name?”

“Certainly.”

“Did you say what you want to see him about?”

“No. I’ll tell him.”

“Not unless you tell me first. Not only is that the routine, but also he’s had a hard day. There was no homemade blackberry jam for breakfast, he had to skip his morning turn with the orchids, a police inspector came and annoyed him, and he had to read a long statement and sign it. If you tell me what you want, there may be a chance. If you don’t, it’s hopeless.”

“Out here?”

“We can sit on the stoop if you’d rather.”

He turned his head to look at a man and woman who were passing. He needed a shave. He also needed either a haircut, a comb and brush, or a hat, and his plaid jacket and striped slacks could have stood a little pressing. When the man and woman were ten paces away his eyes came back to me.

“I’ve got a chance to make a pot but I can’t do it alone. I don’t even know how to start. My mother told me that if I can find the money she paid the kidnapers, or any part of it, I can have it. Half a million. I want Wolfe to help me. He can have a fifth of it for his share.”

My brows were up. “When did your mother tell you that?”

“Wednesday evening.”

“She may feel different about it now.”

“No, she doesn’t. I asked her this afternoon. She’s not very — she’s in pretty bad shape — but I didn’t think it would hurt to ask her. She said yes. She said she wouldn’t want any of that money now anyhow.”

My brows were still up. “The police know about the kidnaping. And the FBI.”

“I don’t know about the FBI. We told the police this morning.”

“Dozens of trained men are on the job already. By tomorrow there’ll be hundreds. Fat chance you’d have.”

“Damn it, I know I wouldn’t! That’s why I’ve got to have Nero Wolfe! Isn’t he better than they are?”

“That’s a point.” I was looking at another point. We had never taken a crack at that kind of problem, and if Wolfe could be peekayed into tackling it, it would be interesting to see how he went about it. It would also be interesting to collect his share if there was anything to share.

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “I doubt very much if Mr. Wolfe will touch it. He’s not only eccentric, he hates to work, and he seldom takes a case on a contingent basis. But I’m willing to put it up to him. You may come inside to wait.”

“If you can get inside,” he squeaked. That tenor didn’t fit his make-up at all.

“I can try,” I said, and made for the stoop, and he followed me up. The chain-bolt was on, so I had to push the button. If Fritz, letting us in, was surprised to see me bringing a customer who had been turned away twice, he didn’t show it. Fritz shows only what he thinks it is proper to show. I took Tedder to the front room and left him, and went to the office by way of the hall instead of the connecting door. Wolfe, at his desk, had the middle drawer open and was fingering in it. Counting caps of beer bottles to see how much he had gained on the week’s quota by being away twenty-four hours. I waited to speak until he shut the drawer and looked up.

“Regards from Mandel. I didn’t see the DA. They probably won’t bother us again unless and until they have to decide that Jimmy Vail didn’t die by accident, which they would hate to do. You have seen the Gazette?”

“Yes.”

“Any comment?”

“No.”

“Then I’m still not fired. I’m taking a leave of absence without pay. Say a month, but it may be more.”

His lips tightened. He took a deep breath. “Are you bent on vexing me beyond endurance?”

“No, sir. I want to grab an opportunity. When I arrived just now Noel Tedder was there on the sidewalk, vexed beyond endurance because you wouldn’t see him. His mother told him Wednesday that he could have the money she paid the kidnaper if he could find it and get it, and he came to offer you a one-fifth share to help him. Of course you wouldn’t be interested now that you only take cases where all you have to do is put a notice in the paper, so I’m going to tell him I’ll take it on myself. I took the liberty of putting him in the front room. I thought I ought to tell you first. Of course it’s long odds, but if I got it, the whole pile, my cut would be a hundred grand and I could quit vexing you and open my own office, maybe with Saul Panzer for a partner, and we could—”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir. That will be one advantage, you won’t have to bellow—”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

He regarded me, not with affection. “So you expect to badger me into this fantastic gamble.”

“You might take a minute out to look at it. It would be satisfactory to find something that ten thousand cops and FBI men will be looking for. And each year when you top the eighty-per-cent bracket you relax. I admit it’s a big if, but if you raked this in and added it to what you’ve already collected this year, you could relax until winter, and it’s not May yet. If you missed, you would only be out expenses. As for my badgering you, we have nothing in prospect, and if I take a month off Fritz can dust your desk and empty the wastebasket and you can open the mail.”

“That’s bluster. You wouldn’t.”

“The hell I wouldn’t.”

He closed his eyes, probably to contemplate the rosy possibility of months and months with no work to do and no would-be customers admitted. In a minute he opened them and muttered, “Very well, bring him in.”