The Silent Speaker

Chapter 8

WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG that afternoon right on the dot at three-ten and I left my chair to answer it, I remarked to Wolfe:

“These people are apt to be the kind that you often walk out on or, even worse, tell me to eject. It may be necessary to control yourself. Remember the payroll. There is much at stake. Remember Fritz, Theodore, Charley, and me.”

He didn’t even grunt.

The catch was above expectations, for in the delegation of four we got not one Erskine but two. Father and son. Father was maybe sixty and struck me as not imposing. He was tall and bony and narrow, wearing a dark blue ready-made that didn’t fit, and didn’t have false teeth but talked as if he had. He handled the introductions, first himself and then the others. Son was named Edward Frank and addressed as Ed. The other two, certified as members of the NIA Executive Committee, were Mr. Breslow and Mr. Winterhoff. Breslow looked as if he had been born flushed with anger and would die, when the time came, in character. If it had not been beneath the dignity of a member of the NIA Executive Committee, Winterhoff could have snagged a fee posing as a Man of Distinction for a whisky ad. He even had the little gray mustache.

As for Son, not yet Ed to me, who was about my age, I reserved judgment because he apparently had a hangover and that is no time to file a man away. Unquestionably he had a headache. His suit had cost at least three times as much as Father’s.

When I had got them distributed on chairs, with Father on the red leather number near the end of Wolfe’s desk, at his elbow a small table just the right size for resting a checkbook on while writing in it, Father spoke:

“This may be time wasted for us, Mr. Wolfe. It seemed impossible to get any satisfactory information on the telephone. Have you been engaged by anyone to investigate this matter?”

Wolfe lifted a brow a sixteenth of an inch. “What matter, Mr. Erskine?”

“Uh-this-the death of Cheney Boone.”

Wolfe considered. “Let me put it this way. I have agreed to nothing and accepted no fee. I am committed to no interest.”

“In a case of murder,” Breslow sputtered angrily, “there is only one interest, the interest of justice.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” son Ed growled.

Father’s eyes moved. “If necessary,” he said emphatically, “the rest of you can leave and I’ll do this alone.” He returned to Wolfe. “What opinion have you formed about it?”

“Opinions, from experts, cost money.”

“We’ll pay you for it.”

“A reasonable amount,” Winterhoff put in. His voice was heavy and flat. He couldn’t have been cast as a Man of Distinction with a sound-track.

“It wouldn’t be worth even that,” Wolfe said, “unless it were expert, and it wouldn’t be expert unless I did some work. I haven’t decided whether I shall go that far. I don’t like to work.”

“Who has consulted you?” Father wanted to know.

“Now, sir, really.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “It is indiscreet of you to ask, and I would be a blatherskite to answer. Did you come here with the notion of hiring me?”

“Well-” Erskine hesitated. “That has been discussed as a possibility.”

“For you gentlemen as individuals, or on behalf of the National Industrial Association?”

“It was discussed as an Association matter.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I would advise strongly against it. You might be wasting your money.”

“Why? Aren’t you a good investigator?”

“I am the best. But the situation is obvious. What you are concerned about is the reputation and standing of your Association. In the public mind the trial has already been held and the verdict rendered. Everyone knows that your Association was bitterly hostile to the Bureau of Price Regulation, to Mr. Boone, and to his policies. Nine people out of ten are confident that they know who murdered Mr. Boone. It was the National Industrial Association.” Wolfe’s eyes came to me. “Archie. What was it the man at the bank said?”

“Oh, just that gag that’s going around. That NIA stands for Not Innocent Atall.”

“But that’s preposterous!”

“Certainly,” Wolfe agreed, “but there it is. The NIA has been convicted and sentence has been pronounced. The only possible way of getting that verdict reversed would be to find the murderer and convict him. Even if it turned out that the murderer was a member of the NIA, the result would be the same; the interest and the odium would be transferred to the individual, if not altogether, at least to a great extent, and nothing else would transfer any of it.”

They looked at one another. Winterhoff nodded gloomily and Breslow kept his lips compressed so as not to explode. Ed Erskine glared at Wolfe as if that was where his headache had come from.

“You say,” Father told Wolfe, “that the public has convicted the NIA. But so have the police. So has the FBI. They are acting exactly like the Gestapo. The members of such an old and respectable organization as the NIA might be supposed to have some rights and privileges. Do you know what the police are doing? In addition to everything else, do you know that they are actually communicating with the police in every city in the United States? Asking them to get a signed statement from local citizens who were in New York at that dinner and have returned home?”

“Indeed,” Wolfe said politely. “But I imagine the local police will furnish paper and ink.”

“What?” Father stared at him.

“What the hell has that got to do with it?” Son wanted to know.

Wolfe skipped it and observed, “The deuce of it is that the probability that the police will catch the murderer seems somewhat thin. Not having studied the case thoroughly, I can’t qualify as an expert on it, but I must say it looks doubtful. Three days and nights have passed. That’s why I advise against your hiring me. I admit it would be worth almost any amount to your Association to have the murderer exposed, even if he proved to be one of you four gentlemen, but I would tackle the job, if at all, only with the greatest reluctance. I’m sorry you had your trip down here for nothing.-Archie?”

The implication being that I should show them what good manners we had by taking them to the front door, I stood up. They didn’t. Instead they exchanged glances.

Winterhoff said to Erskine, “I would go ahead, Frank.”

Breslow demanded, “What else can we do?”

Ed growled, “Oh, God, I wish he was alive again. That was better than this.”

I sat down.

Erskine said, “We are businessmen, Mr. Wolfe. We understand that you can’t guarantee anything. But if we persuade you to undertake this matter, exactly what would you engage to do?”

It took them nearly ten minutes to persuade him, and they all looked relieved, even Ed, when he finally gave in. It was more or less understood that the clinching argument was Breslow’s, that they must not let justice down. Unfortunately, since the NIA had a voucher system, the check-writing table did not get used. As a substitute I typed a letter, dictated by Wolfe, and Erskine signed it. The retainer was to be ten thousand dollars, and the ultimate charge, including expenses, was left open. They certainly were on the ropes.

“Now,” Erskine said, handing me back my fountain pen, “I suppose we had better tell you all we know about it.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Not right now. I have to get my mind adjusted to this confounded mess. It would be better for you to return this evening, say at nine o’clock.”

They all protested. Winterhoff said he had an appointment he couldn’t break.

“As you please, sir. If it is more important than this. We must get to work without delay.” Wolfe turned to me: “Archie, your notebook. A telegram. ‘You are invited to join in a discussion of the Boone murder at the office of Nero Wolfe at nine o’clock this evening Friday March twenty-ninth.’ Sign it with my name. Send it at once to Mr. Cramer, Mr. Spero, Mr. Kates, Miss Gunther, Mrs. Boone, Miss Nina Boone, Mr. Rohde, and perhaps to others, we’ll see later.-Will you gentlemen be here?”

“My God,” Ed grumbled, “with that mob, why don’t you hold it in the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf?”

“It seems to me,” Erskine said in a grieved tone, “that this is a mistake. The first principle-”

“I,” Wolfe said, in a tone used by NIA men only to people whose names were never on the letterhead, “am handling the investigation.”

I started banging the typewriter, and since the telegrams were urgent, and since Wolfe took long walks only in emergencies, Fritz was sent for to escort them to the door. All I was typing was the text of the telegram and a list of the names and addresses, because the phone was the quickest way to send them. Some of the addresses were a problem. Wolfe was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, not to be bothered about trivialities, so I called Lon Cohen on the city desk at the Gazette and got the addresses from him. He knew everything. They had come up from Washington for the big speech that was never delivered and had not gone back. Mrs. Boone and the niece were at the Waldorf, Alger Kates was staying with friends on Eleventh Street, and Phoebe Gunther, who had been Boone’s confidential secretary, had a room-and-bath on East Fifty-fifth Street.

When I had that job done I asked Wolfe who else he wanted to invite. He said no one. I stood up and stretched, and looked at him.

“I presume,” I observed, “that the rest is merely routine collection of evidence. Ed Erskine has calluses on his hands. Will that help?”

“Confound it.” He sighed clear down. “I was going to finish that book this evening. Now this infernal mishmash.”

He heaved the bulk forward and rang for beer.

I, standing at the cabinet filing the germination records that Theodore had brought down from the plant rooms, was compelled to admit that he had earned my admiration. Not for his conception of the idea of digging up a paying customer; that was merely following precedent in times of drought. Not for the method he had adopted for the digging; I could have thought that up myself. Not for the execution, his handling of the NIA delegation; that was an obvious variation of the old hard-to-get finesse. Not for the gall of those telegrams; admiring Wolfe’s gall would be like admiring ice at the North Pole or green leaves in a tropical jungle. No. What I admired was his common sense. He wanted to get a look at those people. What do you do when you want to get a look at a man? You get your hat and go where he is. But what if the idea of getting your hat and going outdoors is abhorrent to you? You ask the man to come where you are. What makes you think he’ll come? That was where the common sense entered. Take Inspector Cramer. Why would he, the head of the Homicide Squad, come? Because he didn’t know how long Wolfe had been on the case or how deep he was in it, and therefore he couldn’t afford to stay away.

At four sharp Wolfe had downed the last of his beer and taken the elevator up to the plant rooms. I finished the filing and gathered up miscellaneous loose ends around the office, expecting to be otherwise engaged for at least a day or two, and then settled down at my desk with a stack of newspaper clippings to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important in my typed summary of the Boone situation. I was deep in that when the doorbell rang, and I went to the front and opened up, and found confronting me a vacuum cleaner salesman. Or anyhow he should have been. He had that bright, friendly, uninhibited look. But some of the details didn’t fit, as for example his clothes, which were the kind I would begin buying when my rich uncle died.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully. “I’ll bet you’re Archie Goodwin. You came to see Miss Harding yesterday. She told me about you. Aren’t you Archie Goodwin?”

“Yep,” I said. It was the easiest way out. If I had said no or tried to evade he would have cornered me sooner or later.

“I thought so,” he was gratified. “May I come in? I’d like to see Mr. Wolfe. I’m Don O’Neill, but of course that doesn’t mean anything to you. I’m president of O’Neill and Warder, Incorporated, and a member of that godforsaken conglomeration of antiques, the NIA. I was Chairman of the Dinner Committee for that affair we had at the Waldorf the other evening. I guess I’ll never live that one down. Chairman of a Dinner Committee, and let the main speaker get murdered!”

Of course my reaction was that I had got along fairly well for something like thirty years without knowing Don O’Neill and saw no reason for a change in policy, but my personal feelings could not be permitted to dominate. So I let him in and steered him to the office and into a chair before I even explained that he would have to wait half an hour because Wolfe was engaged. For a brief moment he seemed irritated, but he realized instantly that that was no way to sell vacuum cleaners and said sure, that was all right, he didn’t mind waiting.

He was delighted with the office and got up and went around looking. Books-what a selection! The big globe was marvelous, just what he had always wanted and never took the trouble to get one, now he would…

Wolfe entered, saw him, and gave me a dirty look. It was true that I was supposed to inform him in advance of any waiting caller and never let him come in cold like that, but it was ten to one that if I had told him about O’Neill he would have refused to see him and had me invite him for the nine o’clock party, and I saw no necessity for another three-hour rest for Wolfe’s brains. He was so sore that he pretended he didn’t believe in shaking hands, acknowledged the introduction with a nod that wouldn’t have spilled a drop if he had had a jar of water on his head, sat down and regarded the visitor unsympathetically, and asked curtly:

“Well, sir?”

O’Neill wasn’t at all taken aback. He said, “I was admiring your office.”

“Thank you. But I assume that wasn’t what you came for.”

“Oh, no. Being the Chairman of that Dinner Committee, I’m in the middle of this thing whether I like it or not-this business of Boone’s murder. I wouldn’t say I’m involved, that’s too strong a word-make it concerned. I’m certainly concerned.”

“Has anyone suggested that you are involved?”

“Suggested?” O’Neill looked surprised. “That’s putting it mildly. The police are taking the position that everyone connected with the NIA is involved. That’s why I claim that the line the Executive Committee is taking is sentimental and unrealistic. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Wolfe.” He took time out for a friendly glance at me, to include me in the Society of United Citizens for Not Getting Don O’Neill Wrong. “I am one of the most progressive members of the NIA. I was a Willkie man. But this idea of co-operating with the police the way they’re acting, and even spending our own money to investigate, that’s unrealistic. We ought to say to the police, all right, there’s been a murder, and as good citizens we hope you catch the guilty man, but we had nothing to do with it and it’s none of our business.”

“And tell them to quit bothering you.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” O’Neill was pleased to find a kindred spirit. “I was at the office when they came back an hour ago with the news that they had engaged you to investigate. I want to make it plain that I am not doing anything underhanded. I don’t work that way. We had another argument, and I told them I was coming to see you.”

“Admirable.” Wolfe’s eyes were open, which meant that he was bored and was getting nothing out of it. Either that, or he was refusing to turn on the brain until nine o’clock. “For the purpose of persuading me to call it off?”

“Oh, no. I saw that was hopeless. You wouldn’t do that. Would you?”

“I’m afraid not without some excellent reason. As Mr. Breslow put it, the interest of justice is paramount. That was his position. Mine is that I need the money. Then what did you come for?”

O’Neill grinned at me, as if to say, your boss is really a card, isn’t he? He shifted the grin intact to Wolfe. “I’m glad to see you stick to the point. With me you need to, the way I go floundering around. What brought me down here, frankly, was a sense of my responsibility as Chairman of the Dinner Committee. I’ve seen a copy of the letter Frank Erskine gave you, but I didn’t hear the conversation you had, and ten thousand dollars as a retainer on a straight inquiry job is away above the clouds. I hire detectives in my business, things like labor relations and so on, and I know what detectives get, so naturally the question occurs to me, is it really a straight inquiry job? I asked Erskine point-blank, have you hired Wolfe to protect the NIA members by-uh-getting attention shifted to other directions, and he said no. But I know Frank Erskine, and I wasn’t satisfied, and I told him so. The trouble with me is I’ve got a conscience and a sense of responsibility. So I came to ask you.”

Wolfe’s lips twitched, but whether with amusement or fierce indignation I couldn’t tell. The way he takes an insult never depends on the insult but on how he happens to be feeling. At the peak of one of his lazy spells he wouldn’t have exerted himself to bat an eyelash even if someone accused him of specializing in divorce evidence.

His lips twitched. “I also say no, Mr. O’Neill. But I’m afraid that won’t help you much. What if Mr. Erskine and I are both lying? I don’t see what you can do about it, short of going to the police and charging us with obstructing justice, but then you don’t like the police either. You’re really in a pickle. We have invited some people to meet here this evening at nine o’clock and talk it over. Why don’t you come and keep an eye on us?”

“Oh, I’m coming. I told Erskine and the others I’m coming.”

“Good. Then we won’t keep you now.-Archie?”

It wasn’t as simple as that. O’Neill was by no means ready to go, on account of his sense of responsibility. But we finally got him out without resorting to physical violence. After wrangling him to the stoop, I returned to the office and asked Wolfe:

“Exactly what did he really come here for? Of course he killed Boone, I understand that, but why did he waste his time and mine-”

“You let him in,” Wolfe said icily. “You did not notify me. You seem to forget-”

“Oh, well,” I broke in cheerfully, “it all helps in studying human nature. I helped get him out, didn’t I? Now we have work to do, getting ready for the party. How many will there be, around twelve not counting us?”

I got busy on the chair problem. There were six there in the office, and the divan would hold four comfortably, except that in a murder case three days old you don’t often find four people connected with it who are still in a frame of mind to sit together on the same piece of furniture. It would be better to have plenty of chairs, so I brought five more in from the front room, the one facing on the street, and scattered them around, not in rows, which would have been too stiff, but sort of staggered and informal. Big as the room was, it made it look pretty crowded. I backed against the wall and surveyed it with a frown.

“What it needs,” I remarked, “is a woman’s touch.”

“Bah,” Wolfe growled.