The Twisted Scarf

IV

Mrs. Homer N. Carlisle came in with all her belongings: her caracul coat, her gaily colored scarf, and her husband. Perhaps I should say that her husband brought her. As soon as he was through the door he strode across to the dining table and delivered a harangue. I don’t suppose Cramer had heard that speech, with variations, more than a thousand times. This time it was pretty offensive. Solid and broad-shouldered, Mr. Carlisle looked the part. His sharp dark eyes flashed, and his long gorilla-like arms were good for gestures. At the first opening Cramer, controlling himself, said he was sorry and asked them to sit down.

Mrs. Carlisle did. Mr. Carlisle didn’t.

“We’re nearly two hours late now,” he stated. “I know you have your duty to perform, but citizens have a few rights left, thank God. Our presence here is purely adventitious.” I would have been impressed by the adventitious if he hadn’t had so much time to think it up. “I warn you that if my name is published in connection with this miserable affair, a murder in the house of a private detective, I’ll make trouble. I’m in a position to. Why should it be? Why should we be detained? What if we had left five or ten minutes earlier, as others did?”

“That’s not quite logical,” Cramer objected.

“Why not?”

“No matter when you left it would have been the same if your wife had acted the same. She discovered the body.”

“By accident!”

“May I say something, Homer?” the wife put in.

“It depends on what you say.”

“Oh,” Cramer said significantly.

“What do you mean, oh?” Carlisle demanded.

“I mean that I sent for your wife, not you, but you came with her, and that tells me why. You wanted to see to it that she wasn’t indiscreet.”

“What the hell has she got to be indiscreet about?”

“I don’t know. Apparently you do. If she hasn’t, why don’t you sit down and relax while I ask her a few questions?”

“I would, sir,” Wolfe advised him. “You came in here angry, and you blundered. An angry man is a jackass.”

It was a struggle for the executive vice-president, but he made it. He clamped his jaws and sat. Cramer went to the wife.

“You wanted to say something, Mrs. Carlisle?”

“Only that I’m sorry.” Her bony hands, the fingers twined, were on the table before her. “For the trouble I’ve caused.”

“I wouldn’t say you caused it exactly — except for yourself and your husband.” Cramer was mild. “The woman was dead, whether you went in there or not. But, if only as a matter of form, it was essential for me to see you, since you discovered the body. That’s all there is to it as far as I know. There’s no question of your being involved more than that.”

“How the hell could there be?” Carlisle blurted.

Cramer ignored him. “Goodwin here saw you standing in the hall not more than two minutes, probably less, prior to the moment you screamed and ran out of the office. How long had you then been downstairs?”

“We had just come down. I was waiting for my husband to get his things.”

“Had you been downstairs before that?”

“No — only when we came in.”

“What time did you arrive?”

“A little after three, I think—”

“Twenty past three,” the husband put in.

“Were you and your husband together all the time? Continuously?”

“Of course. Well — you know how it is — he would want to look longer at something, and I would move on a little—”

“Certainly we were,” Carlisle said irritably. “You can see why I made that remark about it depending on what she said. She has a habit of being vague. This is no time to be vague.”

“I am not actually vague,” she protested with no heat, not to her husband but to Cramer. “It’s just that everything is relative. There would be no presence if there were no absence. There would be no innocence if there were no sin. Nothing can be cut off sharp from anything else. Who would have thought my wish to see Nero Wolfe’s office would link me with a horrible crime?”

“My God!” Carlisle exploded. “Hear that? Link. Link!”

“Why did you want to see Wolfe’s office?” Cramer inquired.

“Why, to see the globe.”

I gawked at her. I had supposed that naturally she would say it was curiosity about the office of a great and famous detective. Apparently Cramer reacted the same as me. “The globe?” he demanded.

“Yes, I had read about it and I wanted to see how it looked. I thought a globe that size, three feet in diameter, would be fantastic in an ordinary room — Oh!”

“Oh what?”

“I didn’t see it!”

Cramer nodded. “You saw something else instead. By the way, I forgot to ask, did you know her? Had you ever seen her before?”

“You mean — her?”

“Yes. Her name was Cynthia Brown.”

“We had never known her or seen her or heard of her,” the husband declared.

“Had you, Mrs. Carlisle?”

“No.”

“Of course she came as the guest of a Mrs. Orwin; she wasn’t a member of this flower club. Are you a member?”

“My husband is.”

“We both are,” Carlisle stated. “Vague again. It’s a joint membership. In my greenhouse at my country home I have over four thousand plants, including several hundred orchids.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Isn’t this about enough?”

“Plenty,” Cramer conceded. “Thank you, both of you. We won’t bother you again unless we have to. Levy, pass them out.”

Mrs. Carlisle got to her feet and moved off, but halfway to the door she turned. “I don’t suppose — would it be possible for me to look at the globe now? Just a peek?”

“For God’s sake!” Her husband took her by the arm. “Come on. Come on!”

When the door had closed behind them Cramer glared at me and then at Wolfe. “This is sure a sweet one,” he said grimly. “Say it’s within the range of possibility that Carlisle is it, and the way it stands right now, why not? So we look into him. We check back on him for six months, and try doing it without getting roars out of him — a man like that, in his position. However, it can be done — by three or four men in two or three weeks. Multiply that by what? How many men were here?”

“Around a hundred and twenty,” I told him. “Ten dozen. But you’ll find that at least half of them are disqualified one way or another. As I told you, I took a survey. Say sixty.”

“All right, multiply it by sixty. Do you care for it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.” Cramer took the cigar from his mouth, removed a nearly severed piece with his fingers and put it in an ashtray, and replaced the cigar with a fresh tooth-hold. “Of course,” he said sarcastically, “when she sat in there telling you about him the situation was different. You wanted her to enjoy being with you. You couldn’t reach for the phone and tell us you had a self-confessed crook who could put a quick finger on a murderer and let us come and take over — hell no! You had to save it for a fee for Wolfe! You had to sit and admire her legs!”

“Don’t be vulgar,” I said severely.

“You had to go upstairs and make a survey! You had to— Well?”

Lieutenant Rowcliff had opened the door and entered. There were some city employees I liked, some I admired, some I had no feeling about, some I could have done without easy — and one whose ears I was going to twist someday. That was Rowcliff. He was tall, strong, handsome, and a pain in the neck.

“We’re all through in there, sir,” he said importantly. “We’ve covered everything. Nothing is being taken away, and it is all in order. We were especially careful with the contents of the drawers of Wolfe’s desk, and also we—”

“My desk!” Wolfe roared.

“Yes, your desk,” Rowcliff said precisely, smirking.

The blood was rushing into Wolfe’s face.

“She was killed there,” Cramer said gruffly. “She was strangled with something, and murderers have been known to hide things. Did you get anything at all?”

“I don’t think so,” Rowcliff admitted. “Of course the prints have to be sorted, and there’ll be lab reports. How do we leave it?”

“Seal it up and we’ll see tomorrow. You stay here and keep a photographer. The others can go. Tell Stebbins to send that woman in — Mrs. Irwin.”

“Orwin, sir.”

“I’ll see her.”

“Yes, sir.” Rowcliff turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Seal what up? The office?”

“Certainly,” Rowcliff sneered.

I said firmly, to Cramer, not to him, “You don’t mean it. We work there. We live there. All our stuff is there.”

“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Cramer told Rowcliff, and he wheeled and went.

I set my jaw. I was full of both feelings and words, but I knew they had to be held in. This was not for me. This was far and away the worst Cramer had ever pulled. It was up to Wolfe. I looked at him. The blood had gone back down again; he was white with fury, and his mouth was pressed to so tight a line that there were no lips.

“It’s routine,” Cramer said aggressively.

Wolfe said icily, “That’s a lie. It is not routine.”

“It’s my routine — in a case like this. Your office is not just an office. It’s the place where more fancy tricks have been played than any other spot in New York. When a woman is murdered there, soon after a talk with Goodwin for which we have no word but his, I say sealing it is routine.”

Wolfe’s head came forward an inch, his chin out. “No, Mr. Cramer. I’ll tell you what it is. It is the malefic spite of a sullen little soul and a crabbed and envious mind. It is the childish rancor of a primacy too often challenged and offended. It is the feeble wriggle—”

The door came open to let Mrs. Orwin in.