The Zero Clue

5

Although my stay in Heller’s waiting room that morning had been brief, I have long been trained to see what I look at and to remember what I see, and I would hardly have recognized Mrs. Albert Tillotson. She had lost five pounds and gained twice that many wrinkles, and the contrast between her lipstick and her drained-out skin made her look more like a woman-hater’s pin-up than an overfed matron.

“I wish to speak with you privately,” she told Inspector Cramer.

She was one of those. Her husband was president of something, and therefore it was absurd to suppose that she was not to expect privileges. It took Cramer a good five minutes to get it into her head that she was just one of the girls, and it was such a shock that she had to take time out to decide how to react to it.

She decided on a barefaced lie. She demanded to know if the man who had brought her there was a member of the police force, and Cramer replied that he was.

“Well,” she declared, “he shouldn’t be. You may know that late this afternoon a police officer called at my residence to see me. He told me that Leo Heller had been killed, murdered, and wanted to know for what purpose I had gone to his office this morning. Naturally I didn’t want to be involved in an ugly thing like that, so I told him I hadn’t gone to see Leo Heller, but he convinced me that that wouldn’t do, so I said I had gone to see him, but on an intimate personal matter that I wouldn’t tell — Is that man putting down what I’m saying?”

“Yes. That’s his job.”

“I wouldn’t want it. Nor yours either. The officer insisted that I must tell why I had gone to see that Heller, and I refused, and he insisted, and I refused. When he said he would have to take me to the district attorney’s office, under arrest if necessary, and I saw that he meant it, I told him. I told him that my husband and I have been having some difficulty with our son, especially his schooling, and I went to Heller to ask what college would be best for him. I answered the officer’s questions, within reason, and finally he left. Perhaps you knew all this.”

Cramer nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, after the officer had gone I began to worry, and I went to see a friend and ask her advice. The trouble was that I had given Heller many details about my son, some of them very intimate and confidential, and since he had been murdered the police would probably go through all his papers, and those details were private and I wanted to keep them private. I knew that Heller had made all his notes in a personal shorthand that no one else could read — anyhow he had said so, but I couldn’t be sure, and it was very important. After I had discussed it with my friend a long time, for hours, I decided to go to Heller’s place and ask whoever was in charge to let me have any papers relating to my family affairs, since they were not connected with the murder.”

“I see,” Cramer assured her.

“And that’s what I did. And the officer there pretended to listen to me, he pretended to be agreeing with me, and then suddenly he arrested me for trying to bribe an officer; and when I indignantly denied it, as of course I did, and started to leave, he detained me by force, and he actually was going to put handcuffs on me! So I came with him, and here I am, and I hope you realize I have a complaint to make and I am making it!”

Cramer was eying her. “Did you try to bribe him?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“You didn’t offer him money?”

“No!”

Purley Stebbins permitted a low sound, half growl and half snort, to escape him. Cramer, ignoring that impertinence from a subordinate, took a deep breath and let it out again.

“Shall I take it?” Wolfe inquired.

“No, thank you,” Cramer said acidly. He was keeping his eyes at Mrs. Tillotson. “You’re making a mistake, madam,” he told her. “All these lies don’t do you any good. They just make it harder for you. Try telling the truth for a change.”

She drew herself up, but it wasn’t very impressive because she was pretty well fagged after her hard day. “You’re calling me a liar,” she accused Cramer, “and in front of witnesses.” She pointed a finger at the police stenographer. “You get that down just the way he said it!”

“He will,” Cramer assured her. “Look, Mrs. Tillotson. You admit you lied about going to see Heller until you saw it wouldn’t work, when you realized that the doorman would swear that you were there not only this morning but also previously. Now about your trying to bribe an officer. That’s a felony. If we charge you with it, and you go to trial, I can’t say who the jury will believe, you or the officer, but I know who I believe. I believe him, and you’re lying about it.”

“Get him in here,” she challenged. “I want to face him.”

“He wants to face you too, but that wouldn’t help any. I’m satisfied that you’re lying, and also that you’re lying about what you wanted to get from Heller’s files. He made his notes in a private code that it will take a squad of experts to decipher, and you knew that, and I do not believe that you took the risk of going there and trying to bribe an officer just to get his notes about you and your family. I believe there is something in his files that can easily be recognized as pertaining to you or your family, and that’s what you were after. In the morning we’ll have men going through the contents of the files, item by item, and if anything like that is there they’ll spot it. Meanwhile I’m holding you for further questioning about your attempt to bribe an officer. If you want to telephone a lawyer, you may — one phone call, with an officer present.”

Cramer’s head swiveled. “Stebbins, take her in to Lieutenant Rowcliff, and tell Rowcliff how it stands.”

Purley arose. Mrs. Tillotson was shrinking, looking less overfed every second, right in front of our eyes. “Will you wait a minute?” she demanded.

“Two minutes, madam. But don’t try cooking up any more lies. You’re no good at it.”

“That man misunderstood me. I wasn’t trying to bribe him.”

“I said you may phone a lawyer—”

“I don’t want a lawyer.” She was sure about that. “If they go through those files they’ll find what I was after, so I might as well tell you. It’s some letters in envelopes addressed to me. They’re not signed, they’re anonymous, and I wanted that Heller to find out who sent them.”

“Are they about your son?”

“No. They’re about me. They threaten me with something, and I was sure it was leading up to blackmail.”

“How many letters?”

“Six.”

“What do they threaten you with?”

“They — they don’t exactly threaten. They’re quotations from things. One of them says, ‘He that cannot pay, let him pray.’ Another one says, ‘He that dies pays all debts.’ Another one says, ‘So comes a reckoning when the banquet’s o’er.’ The others are longer, but that’s what they’re like.”

“What made you think they were leading up to blackmail?”

“Wouldn’t you? ‘He that cannot pay, let him pray.’ ”

“And you wanted Heller to identify the sender. How many times had you seen him?”

“Twice.”

“Of course you had given him all the information you could. We’ll get the letters in the morning, but you can tell us now what you told Heller. As far as possible, everything that was said by both of you.”

I permitted myself to grin, not discreetly, and glanced at Wolfe to see if he was properly appreciative of Cramer’s adopting his approach, but he was just sitting there looking patient.

It was hard to tell, for me at least, how much Mrs. Tillotson was giving and how much she was covering. If there was something in her past that someone might have felt she should pay for or give a reckoning of, either she didn’t know what it was, or she had kept it from Heller, or she had told him but certainly didn’t intend to let us in on it. It went on and on, with her concentrating hard on remembering her conversations with Heller and all the data she had given him for factors of his formulas, and with Cramer playing her back and forth until she was so tied up in contradictions that it would have taken a dozen mathematical wizards to make head or tail of it.

Wolfe finally intervened. He glanced up at the wall clock, shifted in his chair to get his seventh of a ton bearing on another spot, and announced, “It’s after midnight. Thank heaven you have an army to start sorting this out and checking it. If your Lieutenant Rowcliff is still here, let him have her, and let’s have some cheese. I’m hungry.”

Cramer, as ready for a recess as anybody, had no objection. Purley Stebbins removed Mrs. Tillotson. The stenographer went on a private errand. I went to the kitchen to give Fritz a hand, knowing that he was running himself ragged furnishing trays of sandwiches to flocks of Homicide personnel distributed all over the premises. When I returned to the office with a supply of provender, Cramer was riding Wolfe, pouring it on, and Wolfe was leaning back in his chair with his eyes shut. I passed around plates of Fritz’s il pesto and crackers, with beer for Wolfe and the stenographer, coffee for Cramer and Stebbins, and milk for me.

In four minutes Cramer inquired, “What is this stuff?”

Wolfe told him. “Il pesto.”

“What’s in it?”

“Canestrato cheese, anchovies, pig liver, black walnuts, chives, sweet basil, garlic, and olive oil.”

“Good God.”

In another four minutes Cramer addressed me in the tone of one doing a gracious favor. “I’ll take some more of that, Goodwin.”

But while I was gathering the empty plates he started in on Wolfe again. Wolfe didn’t bother to counter. He waited until Cramer halted for breath and then growled, “It’s nearly one o’clock, and we have three more.”

Cramer sent Purley for another scared citizen. This time it was the thin tall bony specimen who, entering the lobby on Thirty-seventh Street that morning, had stopped to aim a rude stare at Susan Maturo and me seated on the bench by the fireplace. Having read his statement, I now knew that his name was Jack Ennis, that he was an expert diemaker, at present unemployed, that he was unmarried, that he lived in Queens, and that he was a born inventor who had not yet cashed in. His brown suit had not been pressed.

When Cramer told him that questions from Wolfe were to be considered a part of the official inquiry into Leo Heller’s death, Ennis cocked his head to appraise Wolfe, as if deciding whether or not such a procedure deserved his okay.

“You’re a self-made man,” he told Wolfe. “I’ve read about you. How old are you?”

Wolfe returned his gaze. “Some other time, Mr. Ennis. Tonight you’re the target, not me. You’re thirty-eight, aren’t you?”

Ennis smiled. He had a wide mouth with thin colorless lips, and his smile wasn’t especially attractive. “Excuse me if you thought I was being fresh, asking how old you are, but I don’t really give a damn. I know you’re right at the top of your racket, and I wondered how long it took you to get started up. I’m going to the top too, before I’m through, but it’s taking me a hell of a time to get a start, and I wondered about you. How old were you when you first got your name in the paper?”

“Two days. A notice of my birth. I understand that your call on Leo Heller was connected with your determination to get a start as an inventor?”

“That’s right.” Ennis smiled again. “Look. This is all a lot of crap. The cops have been at me now for seven hours, and where are they? What’s the sense in going on with it? Why in the name of God would I want to kill that guy?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Well, search me. I’ve got patents on six inventions, and none of them is on the market. One of them is not perfect — I know damn well it’s not — but it needs only one more trick to make it an absolute whiz. I can’t find the trick. I’ve read about this Heller, and it seemed to me that if I gave him all the dope, all the stuff he needed for one of his formulas, there was a good chance he would come up with the answer. So I went to him. I spent three long sessions with him. He finally thought he had enough to try to work up a formula, and he was taking a crack at it, and I had a date to see him this morning and find out how it was going.”

Ennis stopped for emphasis. “So I’m hoping. After all the sweating I’ve done and the dough I’ve spent, maybe I’m going to get it at last. So I go. I go upstairs to his office and shoot him dead, and then I go to the waiting room and sit down and wait.” He smiled. “Listen. If you want to say there are smarter men than me, I won’t argue. Maybe you’re smarter yourself. But I’m not a lunatic, am I?”

Wolfe’s lips were pursed. “I won’t commit myself on that, Mr. Ennis. But you have by no means demonstrated that it is fatuous to suppose you might have killed Heller. What if he devised a formula from the data you supplied, discovered the trick that would transform your faulty contraption into a whiz, as you expressed it, and refused to divulge it except on intolerable terms? That would be a magnificent motive for murder.”

“It sure would,” Ennis agreed without reservation. “I would have killed him with pleasure.” He leaned forward and was suddenly intense and in dead earnest. “Look. I’m headed for the top. I’ve got what I need in here” — he tapped his forehead — “and nothing and nobody is going to stop me. If Heller had done what you said, I might have killed him, I don’t deny it; but he didn’t.” He jerked to Cramer. “And I’m glad of a chance to tell you what I’ve told those bozos that have been grilling me. I want to go through Heller’s papers to see if I can find the formula he worked up for me. Maybe I can’t recognize it, and if I do I doubt if I can figure it out, but I want to look for it, and not next year either.”

“We’re doing the looking,” Cramer said dryly. “If we find anything that can be identified as relating to you, you’ll see it, and eventually you may get it.”

“I don’t want it eventually, I want it now. Do you know how long I’ve been working on that thing? Four years! It’s mine, you understand that, it’s mine!” He was getting upset.

“Calm down, bud,” Cramer advised him. “We’re right with you in seeing to it that you get what’s yours.”

“Meanwhile,” Wolfe said, “there’s a point or two. When you entered that building this morning, why did you stop and gape at Mr. Goodwin and Miss Maturo?”

Ennis’s chin went up. “Who says I did?”

“I do, on information. Archie. Did he?”

“Yes,” I stated. “Rudely.”

“Well,” Ennis told Wolfe, “he’s bigger than I am. Maybe I did, at that.”

“Why? Any special reason?”

“It depends on what you call special. I thought I recognized her, a girl I knew once, and then saw I was wrong. She was much too young.”

“Very well. I would like to explore my suggestion, which you reject, that Heller was trying to chouse you out of your invention as perfected by his calculations. I want you to describe the invention as you described it to him, particularly the flaw which you had tried so persistently to rectify.”

I won’t attempt to report what followed, and I couldn’t anyhow, since I understood less than a tenth of it. I did gather that the invention was a gadget intended to supersede all existing X-ray machines, but beyond that I got lost in a wilderness of cathodes and atomicity and coulombs, and if you ask me, Wolfe and Cramer were no better off. If talking like a character out of space-science fiction proves you’re an inventor, that bird was certainly one. He stood up to make motions to illustrate, and grabbed a pad and pencil from Wolfe’s desk to explain with drawings, and after a while it began to look as if it would be impossible to stop him. They finally managed it, with Sergeant Stebbins lending a hand by marching over and taking his elbow. On his way out he turned at the door to call back, “I want that formula, and don’t you forget it!”