The Silent Speaker

Chapter 9

AT A QUARTER PAST ten Wolfe was leaning back in his chair with his eyes half closed, taking them in. They had been at it for over an hour.

There were thirteen of them. Thanks to my foresight with the seating arrangements, there had been no infighting. The NIA contingent was at the side of the room farthest from my desk, the side toward the hall door, with Erskine in the red leather chair. There were six of them: the four who had formed the afternoon delegation, including Winterhoff, who had had an appointment he couldn’t break, Hattie Harding, and Don O’Neill.

On my side of the room were the BPR’s, four in number: Mrs. Boone the widow, Nina the niece, Alger Kates, and a gate-crasher named Solomon Dexter. Dexter was around fifty, under rather than over, looked like a cross between a statesman and a lumberjack, and was the ex-Deputy Director, now for twenty-four hours Acting Director, of the Bureau of Price Regulation. He had come, he told Wolfe, ex officio.

In between the two hostile armies were the neutrals or referees: Spero of the FBI, and Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I had explained to Cramer that I was aware that he rated the red leather chair, but that he was needed in the middle. By a quarter past ten he was about as mad as I had ever seen him, because he had long ago caught on that Wolfe was starting from scratch and had arranged the gathering for the purpose of taking in, not giving out.

There had been one puny attempt to disrupt my seating plans. Mrs. Boone and the niece had come early, before nine, and since there is nothing wrong with my eyesight I had without the slightest hesitation put the niece in the chair-one of the yellow ones from the front room-nearest to mine. When Ed Erskine arrived, alone, a little later, I assigned him to a seat on the NIA side, only to discover, after attending to a couple of other customers, that he had bounced across and was in my chair talking to the niece. I went over and told him:

“This side is for the Capulets. Would you mind sitting where I put you?”

He twisted his neck and lifted his chin to get me, and his focusing was not good. It was obvious that he had been applying the theory of acquired immunity to his hangover. I want to be fair, he was not pie-eyed, but neither was he in danger of desiccating.

He asked me, “Huh? Why?”

“Besides,” I said, “this is my chair and I work here. Let’s not make an issue of it.”

He shrugged it off and moved. I addressed Nina Boone courteously:

“You run into all sorts of strangers in a detective’s office.”

“I suppose you do,” she said. Not a deep remark, nothing specially penetrating about it, but I smiled at her to show I appreciated her taking the trouble to make it when under a strain. She had dark hair and eyes, and was keeping her chin firm.

From the moment, right at the beginning, that Wolfe had announced that he had been retained by the NIA, the BPR’s had been suspicious and antagonistic. Of course everyone who reads a newspaper or listens to the radio, which includes me, knew that the NIA hated Cheney Boone and all he stood for, and had done everything possible to get him tossed to the wolves, and also knew that the BPR would gladly have seen the atom bomb tested by bunching the NIA crowd on an island and dropping one on them, but I hadn’t realized how it sizzled until that evening in Wolfe’s office. Of course there were two fresh elements in it then: the fact that Cheney Boone had been murdered, at an NIA dinner of all places, and the prospect that some person or persons either would or wouldn’t get arrested, tried, convicted, and electrocuted.

By a quarter past ten a good many points, both trivial and important, had been touched on. On opportunity, the BPR position was that everyone in the reception room, and probably many others, had known that Boone was in the room near the stage, the murder room, while the NIA claimed that not more than four or five people, besides the BPR’s who were there, knew it. The truth was that there was no way of finding out who had known and who hadn’t.

Neither hotel employees nor anyone else had heard any noise from the murder room, or seen anybody enter or leave it other than those whose presence there was known and acknowledged.

No one was eliminated on account of age, size, or sex. While a young male athlete can swing a monkey wrench harder and faster than an old female bridge player, either could have struck the blows that killed Boone. There had been no sign of a struggle. Any one of the blows, from behind, could have stunned him or killed him. G. G. Spero of the FBI joined in the discussion of this point, and replied to a crack from Erskine by stating that it was not a function of the FBI to investigate local murders, but that since Boone had been killed while performing his duty as a government official, the Department of Justice had a legitimate interest in the matter and was acting on a request for co-operation from the New York police.

One interesting development was that it was hard to see how Boone had got killed unless he did it himself, because everybody had alibis. Meaning by everybody not merely those present in Wolfe’s office-there being no special reason to suppose that the murderer was there with us-but all fourteen or fifteen hundred at the dinner. The time involved was about half an hour, between seven-fifteen, when Phoebe Gunther left the baby carriage and its contents, including the monkey wrenches, with Boone in the room, and around seven forty-five, when Alger Kates discovered the body. The police had gone to town on that, and everybody had been with somebody else, especially those in the reception room. But the hitch was that all the alibis were either mutual NIA’s or mutual BPR’s. Strange to say, no NIA could alibi a BPR, or vice versa. Even Mrs. Boone, the widow, for instance-no NIA was quite positive that she had not left the reception room during that period or that she had gone straight from there to the dais in the ballroom. The BPR’s were equally unpositive about Frank Thomas Erskine, the NIA president.

There was no evidence that the purpose had been to keep Boone from delivering that particular speech. The speech had been typical Boone, pulling no punches, but had exposed or threatened no particular individual, neither in the advance text distributed to the press nor in the last-minute changes and additions. Nothing in it pointed to a murderer.

The first brand-new ingredient for me, of which nothing had been reported in the papers, was introduced by accident by Mrs. Boone. The only person invited to our party who hadn’t come was Phoebe Gunther, Boone’s confidential secretary. Her name had of course been mentioned several times during the first hour or so, but it was Mrs. Boone who put the spotlight on it. I had the notion that she did it deliberately. She had not up to that moment got any of my major attention. She was mature and filled-out, though not actually fat and by no means run to seed, and she had been short-changed as to nose.

Wolfe had doubled back to the question of Cheney Boone’s arrival at the Waldorf, and Cramer, who was by then in a frame of mind to get it over with and disperse, had said sarcastically, “I’ll send you a copy of my notes. Meanwhile Goodwin can take this down. Five of them-Boone and his wife, Nina Boone, Phoebe Gunther, and Alger Kates-were to take the one o’clock train from Washington to New York, but Boone got caught in an emergency conference and couldn’t make it. The other four came on the train, and when they reached New York Mrs. Boone went to the Waldorf, where rooms had been engaged, and the other three went to the BPR New York office. Boone came on a plane that landed at LaGuardia Field at six-five, went to the hotel and up to the room where his wife was. By that time the niece was there too, and the three of them went together down to the ballroom floor. They went straight to the reception room. Boone had no hat or coat to check, and he hung onto a little leather case he had with him.”

“That was the case,” Mrs. Boone put in, “that Miss Gunther says she forgot about and left on a window sill.”

I looked at the widow reproachfully. That was the first sign of a split in the BPR ranks, and it sounded ominous, with the nasty emphasis she put on says. To make it worse, Hattie Harding of the NIA immediately picked it up:

“And Miss Gunther is absolutely wrong, because four different people saw that case in her hand as she left the reception room!”

Solomon Dexter snorted: “It’s amazing what-”

“Please, sir.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “What was this case? A brief case? A vanity case?”

“No.” Cramer was helping out again. “It was a little leather case like a doctor’s, and it contained cylinders from a dictating machine. Miss Gunther has described it to me. When she took that baby carriage and other stuff to him Tuesday evening, to the room where he was killed, he told her the conference in Washington had ended earlier than he expected, and he had gone to his office and spent an hour dictating before he took the plane to New York. He had the cylinders with him in that case for her to transcribe. She took it to the reception room when she went back there for a cocktail, and left it there on a window sill. That’s the last of it.”

“So she says,” Mrs. Boone repeated.

Dexter glared at her. “Nonsense!”

“Did you,” Hattie Harding demanded, “see the case in her hand when she left the reception room?”

All eyes went to the widow. She moved hers and got the picture. One word would be enough. She was either a traitor or she wasn’t. Confronted with that alternative, it didn’t take her long to decide. She met Hattie Harding’s gaze and said distinctly:

“No.”

Everybody breathed. Wolfe asked Cramer:

“What was on the cylinders, letters? What?”

“Miss Gunther doesn’t know. Boone didn’t tell her. No one in Washington knows.”

“The conference that ended earlier than Boone expected, what was it about?”

Cramer shook his head.

“Who was it with?”

Cramer shook his head again. G. G. Spero offered, “We’ve been working on that in Washington. We can’t trace any conference. We don’t know where Boone was for about two hours, from one to three. The best lead is that the head NIA man in Washington had been wanting to see him, to discuss his speech, but he denies-”

Breslow exploded. “By God,” he blurted, “there it is! It’s always an NIA man! That’s damned silly, Spero, and don’t forget where FBI salaries come from! They come from taxpayers!”

From that point on the mud was flying more or less constantly. It wasn’t on account of any encouragement from Wolfe. He told Breslow:

“The constant reference to your Association is unfortunate from your standpoint, sir, but it can’t be helped. A murder investigation invariably centers on people with motives. You heard Mr. Cramer, early in this discussion, say that a thorough inquiry has disclosed no evidence of personal enemies. But you cannot deny that Mr. Boone had many enemies, earned by his activities as a government official, and that a large number of them were members of the NIA.”

Winterhoff asked, “A question, Mr. Wolfe, is it always an enemy who kills a man?”

“Answer it yourself,” Wolfe told him. “Obviously that’s what you asked it for.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t always an enemy,” Winterhoff declared. “For an illustration, you couldn’t say that Mr. Dexter here was Boone’s enemy, quite the contrary, they were friends. But if Mr. Dexter had been filled with ambition to become the Director of the Bureau of Price Regulation-and that’s what he is at this moment-he might conceivably have taken steps to make the office vacant. Incidentally, he would also have placed under grave suspicion the members of an organization he mortally hates-which also has happened.”

Solomon Dexter was smiling at him, not a loving smile. “Are you preferring a charge, Mr. Winterhoff?”

“Not at all.” The other met his gaze. “As I said, merely an illustration.”

“Because I could mention one little difficulty. I was in Washington until eleven o’clock Tuesday evening. You’ll have to get around that somehow.”

“Nevertheless,” Frank Thomas Erskine said firmly and judicially, “Mr. Winterhoff has made an obvious point.”

“One of several,” Breslow asserted. “There are others. We all know what they are, so why not out with them? The talk about Boone and his secretary, Phoebe Gunther, has been going on for months, and whether Mrs. Boone was going to get a divorce or not. And lately a reason, a mighty good reason from Phoebe Gunther’s standpoint, why Boone had to have a divorce no matter how his wife felt about it. What about it, Inspector, when you’re dealing with a murder don’t you think it’s legitimate to take an interest in things like that?”

Alger Kates stood up and announced in a trembling voice: “I want to protest that this is utterly despicable and beyond the bounds of common decency!”

His face was white and he stayed on his feet. I had not supposed he had it in him. He was the BPR research man who had taken some up-to-the-minute statistics to the Waldorf to be used in Boone’s speech and had discovered the body. If my attention had been directed to him on the subway and I had been asked to guess what he did for a living, I would have said, “Research man.” He was that to a T, in size, complexion, age, and chest measurement. But the way he rose to protest-apparently he led the BPR, as there represented, in spunk. I grinned at him.

From the reaction he got you might have thought that what the NIA hated and feared most about the BPR was its research. They all howled at him. I caught the gist of only two of their remarks, one from Breslow to the effect that he had only said what everyone was saying, and the wind-up from Don O’Neill, in the accents of The Boss:

“You can keep out of this, Kates! Sit down and shut up!”

That seemed to me to be overdoing it a little, since he wasn’t paying Kates’s wages; and then Erskine, twisting around in the red leather chair to face the research man, told him cuttingly:

“Since you didn’t regard the President of the NIA as a fit person to bring the news to, you are hardly acceptable as a judge of common decency.”

So, I thought, that’s why they’re jumping on him, because he told the hotel manager instead of them. He should have had more sense than to hurt their feelings like that. Erskine wasn’t through with him, but was going on:

“Surely, Mr. Kates, you are aware that personal emotions, such as jealousy, revenge, or frustration, often result in violence, and therefore they are proper matters of inquiry when a murder has been committed. It would be proper to ask you, for example, whether it is true that you wanted to marry Boone’s niece, and you were aware that Boone opposed it and intended to prevent-”

“Why, you big liar!” Nina Boone cried.

“Whether it is proper or not,” Kates said in a high thin voice that was still trembling, “it certainly is not proper for you to ask me anything whatever. If I were asked that by the police, I would reply that part of it is true and part of it isn’t. There are at least two hundred men in the BPR organization who wanted, and it is a reasonable assumption that they still want, to marry Mr. Boone’s niece. I was not under the impression that Mr. Boone was having anything to say about it one way or another, and, knowing Miss Boone as I do, not intimately but fairly well, I doubt it.” Kates moved not his eyes, but his head, to change his target. “I would like to ask Mr. Wolfe, who has admitted that he is in the pay of the NIA, if we were invited here for a typical NIA inquisition.”

“And I,” Solomon Dexter put in, his voice sounding like a train in a tunnel in contrast to Kates’s, “would like to inform you, Mr. Wolfe, that you are by no means the only detective in the employ of the NIA. For nearly a year executives and other BPR personnel have been followed by detectives, and their whole lives have been thoroughly explored in an effort to get something on them. I don’t know whether you have taken part in those operations-”

More bedlam from the NIA, taking the form chiefly, as near as I could get it, of indignant denials. At that point, if it hadn’t been for my seating arrangements, the two armies would probably have made contact. Wolfe was looking exasperated, but making no effort to stop it, possibly aware that it would take more energy than he wished to spend. What quieted them was Inspector Cramer getting to his feet and showing a palm, officially.

“I would like,” he barked, “before going, to say three things. First, Mr. Dexter, I can assure you that Wolfe has not helped to tail your personnel or explore their lives, because there’s not enough money in that kind of work. Second, Mr. Erskine and you other gentlemen, the police are aware that jealousy and things like that are often behind a murder, and we are not apt to forget it. Third, Mr. Kates, I have known Wolfe for twenty years, and I can tell you why you were invited here this evening. We were invited because he wanted to learn all he could as quick as he could, without leaving his chair and without Goodwin’s buying gas and wearing out his tires. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was a sucker to come.”

He turned. “Come on, Sergeant. You coming, Spero?”

Of course that ended it. The BPR didn’t want any more anyhow, and though the NIA, or part of it, showed an inclination to stay and make suggestions, Wolfe used his veto power on that. With everyone out of their chairs, Ed Erskine crossed the lines again and tried another approach on Nina, but it appeared, from where I stood, that she disposed of that without even opening her mouth. I did much better, in spite of my being associated with Wolfe, who was in the pay of the NIA. When I told her that it was impossible to get a taxi in that part of town and offered to drive her and her aunt to their hotel, she said:

“Mr. Dexter is taking us.”

A frank, friendly statement, and I appreciated it.

But after they had all gone and Wolfe and I were alone in the office, it appeared that I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it even if she had accepted. I remarked to Wolfe:

“Too bad Cramer bollixed it up like that. If we had been able to keep them here a while, say two weeks, we might have got started somewhere. Too bad.”

“It was not too bad,” he said testily.

“Oh.” I gestured, and sat down. “Okay, then it was a screaming success. Of all our guests, which do you think was the most interesting?”

To my surprise, he answered, “The most interesting was Miss Gunther.”

“Yeah? Because?”

“Because she didn’t come. You have her address.”

“Sure. I sent the telegram-”

“Go and bring her here.”

I stared at him, looked at my wrist, and stared at him again. “It is now twenty minutes past eleven.”

He nodded. “The streets are less dangerous at night, with the reduced traffic.”

“I won’t argue.” I stood up. “You are in the pay of the NIA, and I am in the pay of you. So it goes.”