The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

Chapter 14

TEN HOLLOW BLACK CYLINDERS, about three inches in diameter and six inches long, stood on end in two neat rows on Wolfe’s desk. Beside them, with the lid open, was the case, of good heavy leather, somewhat battered and scuffed. On the outside of the lid a big figure four was stamped. On its inside a label was pasted:

BUREAU OF PRICE REGULATION

POTOMAC BUILDING

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Before pasting in the label someone had typed on it in caps: OFFICE OF CHENEY BOONE, DIRECTOR.

I was at my desk and Wolfe was at his. Don O’Neill was walking up and down with his hands in his pants pockets. The atmosphere was not hail-fellow-well-met. I had given Wolfe a full report, including O’Neill’s last-minute offer to me of five grand, and Wolfe’s self-esteem was such that he always regarded any attempt to buy me off as a personal affront, not to me but to him. I have often wondered who he would blame if I sold out once, himself or me.

He had repudiated without discussion O’Neill’s claim to a moral right to hear what was on the cylinders before anyone else, and when O’Neill had seen it was hopeless the look on his face was such that I had decided to make sure and had given him a good frisking. He was not packing any tools, but that had not improved the atmosphere. The question then arose, how were we to make the cylinders perform? The next day, a business day, it would have been easy, but this was Sunday. It was O’Neill who solved the problem. The President of the Stenophone Company was a member of the NIA and O’Neill knew him. He lived in Jersey. O’Neill phoned him and, without disclosing any incriminating details, got him to phone the manager of his New York office and showroom, who lived in Brooklyn, and instruct him to go to the showroom, get a Stenophone and bring it to Wolfe’s office. That was what we were sitting there waiting for-that is, Wolfe and I were sitting and O’Neill was walking.

“Mr. O’Neill.” Wolfe opened his eyes enough to see. “That tramping back and forth is extremely irritating.”

“I’m not going to leave this room,” O’Neill declared without halting.

“Shall I tie him up?” I offered.

Wolfe, ignoring me, told O’Neill, “It will probably be another hour or more. What about your statement that you got possession of this thing innocently? Your word. Do you want to explain that now? How you got it innocently?”

“I’ll explain it when I feel like it.”

“Nonsense. I didn’t take you for a nincompoop.”

“Go to hell.”

That always annoyed Wolfe. He said sharply, “Then you are a nincompoop. You have only two means of restraining Mr. Goodwin and me: your own physical prowess or an appeal to the police. The former is hopeless; Mr. Goodwin could fold you up and put you on a shelf. You obviously don’t like the idea of the police, I can’t imagine why, since you’re innocent. So how do you like this: when that machine has arrived and we have learned how to run it and the manager has departed, Mr. Goodwin will carry you out and set you on the stoop, and come back in and shut the door. Then he and I will listen to the cylinders.” O’Neill stopped walking, took his hands from his pockets and put them flat on the desk to lean on them, and glowered at Wolfe.

“You won’t do that!”

“I won’t. Mr. Goodwin will.”

“Damn you!” He held the pose long enough for five takes, then slowly straightened up. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where you got this thing.”

“All right, I’ll tell you. Last evening-”

“Excuse me. Archie. Your notebook. Go ahead, sir.”

“Last evening around eight-thirty I got a phone call at home. It was a woman. She said her name was Dorothy Unger and she was a stenographer at the New York office of the Bureau of Price Regulation. She said she had made a bad mistake. She said that in an envelope addressed to me she had enclosed something that was supposed to be enclosed in a letter to someone else. She said that she had remembered about it after she got home, and that she might even lose her job if her boss found out about it. She asked me when I received the envelope to mail the enclosure to her at her home, and she gave me her address. I asked her what the enclosure was and she said it was a ticket for a parcel that had been checked at Grand Central Station. I asked her some more questions and told her I would do what she asked me to.”

Wolfe put in, “Of course you phoned her back.”

“I couldn’t. She said she had no phone and was calling from a booth. This morning I received the envelope and the enclosure was-”

“This is Sunday,” Wolfe snapped.

“Damn it, I know it’s Sunday! It came special delivery. It contained a circular about price ceilings, and the enclosure. If it had been a weekday I would have communicated with the BPR office, but of course the office wasn’t open.” O’Neill gestured impatiently. “What does it matter what I would have done or what I thought? You know what I did do. Naturally, you know more about it than me, since you arranged the whole thing!”

“I see.” Wolfe put up a brow. “You think I arranged it?”

“No.” O’Neill leaned on the desk again. “I know you arranged it! What happened? Wasn’t Goodwin right there? I admit I was dumb when I came here Friday. I was afraid you had agreed to frame Boone’s murder on someone in the BPR, or at least someone outside the NIA. And already, you must have been, you were preparing to frame someone in the NIA! Me! No wonder you think I’m a nincompoop!”

He jerked erect, glared at Wolfe, turned to glare at me, went to the red leather chair and sat down, and said in a completely different voice, calm and controlled:

“But you’ll find that I’m not a nincompoop.”

“That point,” Wolfe said, frowning at him, “is relatively unimportant. The envelope you received this morning special delivery-have you got it with you?”

“No.”

“Where is it, at your home?”

“Yes.”

“Telephone and tell someone to bring it here.”

“No. I’m going to have some detective work done on that envelope and not by you.”

“Then you won’t hear what those cylinders have to say,” Wolfe explained patiently. “Must I keep repeating that?”

This time O’Neill didn’t try to argue. He used the phone on my desk, dialed, got his party, and told someone whom he called Honey to get the envelope as described from the top of his chiffonier and send it by messenger to Nero Wolfe’s office. I was surprised. I would have made it five to one that there was no such envelope, and it was still even money with me that it would be gone from the chiffonier because it must have dropped to the floor and the maid thought it was trash.

When O’Neill was back in the red leather chair Wolfe said, “You’re going to find it a little difficult to get anyone to believe that you suspect Mr. Goodwin and me of arranging this. For if that’s true, why didn’t you insist on going to the police? He wanted to.”

“He did not want to.” O’Neill was keeping calm. “He merely threatened to.”

“But the threat worked. Why did it work?”

“You know damn well why it worked. Because I wanted to hear what’s on those cylinders.”

“You did indeed. Up to five thousand dollars. Why?”

“Do I have to tell you why?”

“No. You don’t have to. You know how it stands.”

O’Neill gulped. He had probably swallowed “Go to hell” thirty times in thirty minutes. “Because I have reason to suppose, and so have you, that they are confidential dictation by Cheney Boone, and they may have something to do with what happened to him, and if so I want to know it.”

Wolfe shook his head reproachfully. “You’re inconsistent. Day before yesterday, sitting in that same chair, your attitude was that you of the NIA had nothing to do with it and it was none of your business. Another thing: you didn’t try to bribe Mr. Goodwin to let you hear the cylinders. You tried to bribe him to give you four hours alone with them. Were you trying to scoop all of us-the police, the FBI, and me?”

“Yes, I was, if you want to call it scoop. I didn’t trust you before, and now…”

Now, from his tone, we were something scraped off the under side of a bridge.

I could report it all, since it’s still in the notebook, but it isn’t worth it. Wolfe decided, apparently more to kill time than anything else, to put the microscope on the episode of the phone call from Dorothy Unger and the receipt of the envelope. He took O’Neill over it, back and forth and up and down, and O’Neill stayed with him, against his strongest instincts and inclinations, because he knew he had to if he wanted to hear those cylinders. I got so fed up with the repetitions that when the doorbell rang the interruption was welcome in more ways than one.

O’Neill sprang from his chair and came along to the front door. On the stoop was a middle-aged square-faced woman in a purple coat. He greeted her as Gretty, took the envelope she handed him, and thanked her.

Back in the office he let Wolfe and me handle it to look it over, but stayed close. It was a regulation BPR envelope, New York office, with his name and home address typed. Right in the corner, over the penalty clause, was a three-cent stamp, and a couple of inches to the left were five more three-cent stamps. Beneath them was printed by hand with a blue pencil: SPECIAL DELIVERY. Inside was a mimeographed BPR circular, dated March 27th, regarding price ceilings on a long list of copper and brass items.

When Wolfe handed it back to O’Neill and he stuck it in his pocket I remarked, “The post-office employees get more careless all the time. With that stamp in the corner canceled and the others not.”

“What?” O’Neill got it from his pocket and glared at it. “What of it?”

“Nothing,” Wolfe said shortly. “Mr. Goodwin likes to brag. It proves nothing.”

I saw no reason why I shouldn’t help to kill time, and I resent Wolfe’s habit of making personal remarks in front of strangers, especially when he’s an enemy, so I was opening my mouth to go on with it when the bell rang again. When I went to answer it O’Neill came along. You might have thought he was training for the job.

It was the Stenophone man. O’Neill did the honors, mentioning the president and apologizing for ruining his Sunday and so on, and I helped with the machine. It didn’t amount to much, for O’Neill had explained on the phone that we didn’t need a recorder. The chassis of the player had casters, and didn’t weigh over sixty pounds anyhow. The Stenophone man wheeled it into the office, and was introduced to Wolfe, and in less than five minutes had us all instructed. Then, since he didn’t seem disposed to linger, we let him go.

When I returned to the office after showing the visitor out, Wolfe sent me a certain type of glance to alert me and said:

“Now, Archie, if you’ll get Mr. O’Neill’s hat and coat, please. He is leaving.”

O’Neill stared at him a second and then laughed, or at least made a noise. It was the first downright ugly noise he had made.

Just to try him for size I took two quick steps toward him. He took three quick steps back. I stopped and grinned at him. He tried to look at both Wolfe and me at once.

“So that’s how it is,” he said, extremely ugly. “You think you can double-cross Don O’Neill. You’d better not.”

“Pfui.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “I have given you no assurance that you would be permitted to hear these things. It would be manifestly improper to permit an official of the NIA to listen to confidential dictation of the Director of the BPR, even after the Director has been murdered. Besides, you’re inconsistent again. A while ago you said you didn’t trust me. That could only have been because you considered me untrustworthy. Now you profess to be shocked to find that I am untrustworthy. Utterly inconsistent.” The finger wiggled again. “Well, sir? Do you prefer to be self-propelled?”

“I’m not leaving this room.”

“Archie?”

I moved to him. This time he didn’t budge. From the look on his face, if he had had anything at all useful on him he would have used it. I took him by the arm and said, “Come on, come with Archie. You must weigh a hundred and eighty. I don’t want to carry you.”

He started a right for my jaw, or at least it seemed that that was what he thought he was doing, but it was too slow to hit anything that wasn’t nailed down. Ignoring it, I started to spin him to attack from the rear, and the son of a gun hauled off and kicked me. He tried to kick high and got my knee. I am not claiming that it hurt much, but I do not like kickers. So I plugged him, with my left because it was handiest, on his soft neck just below the ear, and he teetered over against the bookshelves. I supposed that would explain things to him, but he teetered right back and tried another kick, so I used the right with more in it, also to the neck for the sake of knuckles, and he teetered again and tumbled.

I told Wolfe to buzz Fritz to open the door, saw that Fritz was already there, took my fallen foe by the ankles, and dragged him across to the hall, down the hall to the door, and on out to the stoop. Fritz handed me his coat and hat and I dropped them on him, re-entered the hall, and shut the door.

In the office I asked Wolfe, “Is he on the Executive Committee too, or was he just Chairman of the Dinner Committee? I was trying to remember while I was dragging him.”

“I dislike commotion,” Wolfe said peevishly. “I didn’t tell you to hit him.”

“He tried to kick me. He did kick me. Next time you do it.”

Wolfe shuddered. “Start that machine going.”