The Gun with Wings

I

The young woman took a pink piece of paper from her handbag, got up from the red leather chair, put the paper on Nero Wolfe’s desk, and sat down again. Feeling it my duty to keep myself informed and also to save Wolfe the exertion of leaning forward and reaching so far, I arose and crossed to hand the paper to him after a glance at it. It was a check for five thousand dollars, dated that day, August fourteenth, made out to him, and signed Margaret Mion. He gave a look and dropped it back on the desk.

“I thought,” she said, “perhaps that would be the best way to start the conversation.”

In my chair at my desk, taking her in, I was readjusting my attitude. When early that Sunday afternoon, she had phoned for an appointment, I had dug up a vague recollection of a picture of her in the paper some months back, and had decided it would be no treat to meet her, but now I was hedging. Her appeal wasn’t what she had, which was only so-so, but what she did with it. I don’t mean tricks. Her mouth wasn’t attractive even when she smiled, but the smile was. Her eyes were just a pair of brown eyes, nothing at all sensational, but it was a pleasure to watch them move around, from Wolfe to me to the man who had come with her, seated off to her left. I guessed she had maybe three years to go to reach thirty.

“Don’t you think,” the man asked her, “we should get some questions answered first?”

His tone was strained and a little harsh, and his face matched it. He was worried and didn’t care who knew it. With his deep-set gray eyes and well-fitted jaw he might on a happier day have passed for a leader of men, but not as he now sat. Something was eating him. When Mrs. Mion had introduced him as Mr. Frederick Weppler I had recognized the name of the music critic of the Gazette, but I couldn’t remember whether he had been mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the event that had caused the publication of Mrs. Mion’s picture.

She shook her head at him, not arbitrarily. “It wouldn’t help, Fred, really. We’ll just have to tell it and see what he says.” She smiled at Wolfe — or maybe it wasn’t actually a smile, but just her way of handling her lips. “Mr. Weppler wasn’t quite sure we should come to see you, and I had to persuade him. Men are more cautious than women, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Wolfe agreed, and added, “Thank heaven.”

She nodded. “I suppose so.” She gestured. “I brought that check with me to show that we really mean it. We’re in trouble and we want you to get us out. We want to get married and we can’t. That is — if I should just speak for myself — I want to marry him.” She looked at Weppler, and this time it was unquestionably a smile. “Do you want to marry me, Fred?”

“Yes,” he muttered. Then he suddenly jerked his chin up and looked defiantly at Wolfe. “You understand this is embarrassing, don’t you? It’s none of your business, but we’ve come to get your help. I’m thirty-four years old, and this is the first time I’ve ever been—” He stopped. In a moment he said stiffly, “I am in love with Mrs. Mion and I want to marry her more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.” His eyes went to his love and he murmured a plea. “Peggy!”

Wolfe grunted. “I accept that as proven. You both want to get married. Why don’t you?”

“Because we can’t,” Peggy said. “We simply can’t. It’s on account — you may remember reading about my husband’s death in April, four months ago? Alberto Mion, the opera singer?”

“Vaguely. You’d better refresh my memory.”

“Well, he died — he killed himself.” There was no sign of a smile now. “Fred — Mr. Weppler and I found him. It was seven o’clock, a Tuesday evening in April, at our apartment on East End Avenue. Just that afternoon Fred and I had found out that we loved each other, and—”

“Peggy!” Weppler called sharply.

Her eyes darted to him and back to Wolfe. “Perhaps I should ask you, Mr. Wolfe. He thinks we should tell you just enough so you understand the problem, and I think you can’t understand it unless we tell you everything. What do you think?”

“I can’t say until I hear it. Go ahead. If I have questions, we’ll see.”

She nodded. “I imagine you’ll have plenty of questions. Have you ever been in love but would have died rather than let anyone see it?”

“Never,” Wolfe said emphatically. I kept my face straight.

“Well, I was, and I admit it. But no one knew it, not even him. Did you, Fred?”

“I did not.” Weppler was emphatic too.

“Until that afternoon,” Peggy told Wolfe. “He was at the apartment for lunch, and it happened right after lunch. The others had left, and all of a sudden we were looking at each other, and then he spoke or I did, I don’t know which.” She looked at Weppler imploringly. “I know you think this is embarrassing, Fred, but if he doesn’t know what it was like he won’t understand why you went upstairs to see Alberto.”

“Does he have to?” Weppler demanded.

“Of course he does.” She returned to Wolfe. “I suppose I can’t make you see what it was like. We were completely — well, we were in love, that’s all, and I guess we had been for quite a while without saying it, and that made it all the more — more overwhelming. Fred wanted to see my husband right away, to tell him about it and decide what we could do, and I said all right, so he went upstairs—”

“Upstairs?”

“Yes, it’s a duplex, and upstairs was my husband’s soundproofed studio, where he practiced. So he went—”

“Please, Peggy,” Weppler interrupted her. His eyes went to Wolfe. “You should have it firsthand. I went up to tell Mion that I loved his wife, and she loved me and not him, and to ask him to be civilized about it. Getting a divorce has come to be regarded as fairly civilized, but he didn’t see it that way. He was anything but civilized. He wasn’t violent, but he was damned mean. After some of that I got afraid I might do to him what Gif James had done, and I left. I didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Mion while I was in that state of mind, so I left the studio by the door to the upper hall and took the elevator there.”

He stopped.

“And?” Wolfe prodded him.

“I walked it off. I walked across to the park, and after a while I had calmed down and I phoned Mrs. Mion, and she met me in the park. I told her what Mion’s attitude was, and I asked her to leave him and come with me. She wouldn’t do that.” Weppler paused, and then went on, “There are two complications you ought to have if you’re to have everything.”

“If they’re relevant, yes.”

“They’re relevant all right. First, Mrs. Mion had and has money of her own. That was an added attraction for Mion. It wasn’t for me. I’m just telling you.”

“Thank you. And the second?”

“The second was Mrs. Mion’s reason for not leaving Mion immediately. I suppose you know he had been the top tenor at the Met for five or six years, and his voice was gone — temporarily. Gifford James, the baritone, had hit him on the neck with his fist and hurt his larynx — that was early in March — and Mion couldn’t finish the season. It had been operated, but his voice hadn’t come back, and naturally he was glum, and Mrs. Mion wouldn’t leave him under those circumstances. I tried to persuade her to, but she wouldn’t. I wasn’t anything like normal that day, on account of what had happened to me for the first time in my life, and on account of what Mion had said to me, so I wasn’t reasonable and I left her in the park and went downtown to a bar and started drinking. A lot of time went by and I had quite a few, but I wasn’t pickled. Along toward seven o’clock I decided I had to see her again and carry her off so she wouldn’t spend another night there. That mood took me back to East End Avenue and up to the twelfth floor, and then I stood there in the hall a while, perhaps ten minutes, before my finger went to the pushbutton. Finally I rang, and the maid let me in and went for Mrs. Mion, but I had lost my nerve or something. All I did was suggest that we should have a talk with Mion together. She agreed, and we went upstairs and—”

“Using the elevator?”

“No, the stairs inside the apartment. We entered the studio. Mion was on the floor. We went over to him. There was a big hole through the top of his head. He was dead. I led Mrs. Mion out, made her come, and on the stairs — they’re too narrow to go two abreast — she fell and rolled halfway down. I carried her to her room and put her on her bed, and I started for the living room, for the phone there, when I thought of something to do first. I went out and took the elevator to the ground floor, got the doorman and elevator man together, and asked them who had been taken up to the Mion apartment, either the twelfth floor or the thirteenth, that afternoon. I said they must be damn sure not to skip anybody. They gave me the names and I wrote them down. Then I went back up to the apartment and phoned the police. After I did that it struck me that a layman isn’t supposed to decide if a man is dead, so I phoned Dr. Lloyd, who has an apartment there in the building. He came at once, and I took him up to the studio. We hadn’t been there more than three or four minutes when the first policeman came, and of course—”

“If you please,” Wolfe put in crossly. “Everything is sometimes too much. You haven’t even hinted at the trouble you’re in.”

“I’ll get to it—”

“But faster, I hope, if I help. My memory has been jogged. The doctor and the police pronounced him dead. The muzzle of the revolver had been thrust into his mouth, and the emerging bullet had torn out a piece of his skull. The revolver, found lying on the floor beside him, belonged to him and was kept there in the studio. There was no sign of any struggle and no mark of any other injury on him. The loss of his voice was an excellent motive for suicide. Therefore, after a routine investigation, giving due weight to the difficulty of sticking the barrel of a loaded revolver into a man’s mouth without arousing him to protest, it was recorded as suicide. Isn’t that correct?”

They both said yes.

“Have the police reopened it? Or is gossip at work?”

They both said no.

“Then let’s get on. Where’s the trouble?”

“It’s us,” Peggy said.

“Why? What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything.” She gestured. “No. I don’t mean that — not everything, just one thing. After my husband’s death and the — the routine investigation, I went away for a while. When I came back — for the past two months Fred and I have been together some, but it wasn’t right — I mean we didn’t feel right. Day before yesterday, Friday, I went to friends in Connecticut for the weekend, and he was there. Neither of us knew the other was coming. We talked it out yesterday and last night and this morning, and we decided to come and ask you to help us — anyway, I did, and he wouldn’t let me come alone.”

Peggy leaned forward and was in deadly earnest. “You must help us, Mr. Wolfe. I love him so much — so much! — and he says he loves me, and I know he does! Yesterday afternoon we decided we would get married in October, and then last night we got started talking — but it isn’t what we say, it’s what is in our eyes when we look at each other. We just can’t get married with that back of our eyes and trying to hide it—”

A little shiver went over her. “For years — forever? We can’t! We know we can’t — it would be horrible! What it is, it’s a question: who killed Alberto? Did he? Did I? I don’t really think he did, and he doesn’t really think I did — I hope he doesn’t — but it’s there back of our eyes, and we know it is!”

She extended both hands. “We want you to find out!”

Wolfe snorted. “Nonsense. You need a spanking or a psychiatrist. The police may have shortcomings, but they’re not nincompoops. If they’re satisfied—”

“But that’s it! They wouldn’t be satisfied if we had told the truth!”

“Oh.” Wolfe’s brows went up. “You lied to them?”

“Yes. Or if we didn’t lie, anyhow we didn’t tell them the truth. We didn’t tell them that when we first went in together and saw him, there was no gun lying there. There was no gun in sight.”

“Indeed. How sure are you?”

“Absolutely positive. I never saw anything clearer than I saw that — that sight — all of it. There was no gun.”

Wolfe snapped at Weppler, “You agree, sir?”

“Yes. She’s right.”

Wolfe sighed. “Well,” he conceded, “I can see that you’re really in trouble. Spanking wouldn’t help.”

I shifted in my chair on account of a tingle at the lower part of my spine. Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street was an interesting place to live and work — for Fritz Brenner, the chef and housekeeper, for Theodore Horstmann, who fed and nursed the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms up on the roof, and for me, Archie Goodwin, whose main field of operations was the big office on the ground floor. Naturally I thought my job the most interesting, since a confidential assistant to a famous private detective is constantly getting an earful of all kinds of troubles and problems — everything from a missing necklace to a new blackmail gimmick. Very few clients actually bored me. But only one kind of case gave me that tingle in the spine: murder. And if this pair of lovebirds were talking straight, this was it.