The Zero Clue

6

The female of an executive type was still in mink, or rather she had it with her, but she was not so brisk. As I said before, that morning I would have classified her as between twenty and sixty, but the day’s experiences had worn her down closer to reality, and I would now have put her at forty-seven. However, she was game. With all she had gone through, at that late hour she still let us know, as she deposited the mink on a chair, sat on another, crossed her legs, got out a cigarette and let me light it, and thanked me for an ashtray, that she was cool and composed and in command.

My typing her as an executive had been justified by the transcripts. Her name really was Agatha Abbey, and she was executive editor of a magazine, Mode, which I did not read regularly. After Cramer had explained the nature of the session, including Wolfe’s status, Wolfe took aim and went for the center of the target.

“Miss Abbey. I presume you’d like to get to bed — I know I would — so we won’t waste time flouncing around. Three things about you.” He held up a finger. “First. You claim that you never saw Leo Heller. It is corroborated that you had not visited his place before today, but whether you had seen him elsewhere will be thoroughly investigated by men armed with pictures of him. They will ask people at your place of business, at your residence, and at other likely spots. If it is found that you had in fact met him and conferred with him, you won’t like it.”

He raised two fingers. “Second. You refused to tell why you went to see Heller. That does not brand you as a miscreant, since most people have private matters which they innocently and jealously guard, but you clung to your refusal beyond reason, even after it was explained that that information had to be given by all of the six persons who called on Heller this morning, and you were assured that it would be revealed to no one unless it proved to be an item of evidence in a murder case. You finally did give the information, but only when you perceived that if you didn’t there would be a painstaking investigation into your affairs and movements.”

He raised three fingers. “Third. When the information was wormed out of you, it was almost certainly flummery. You said that you wanted to engage Heller to find out who had stolen a ring from a drawer of your desk some three months ago. That was childish nonsense. I grant that even though the ring was insured you may have been intent on disclosing the culprit, and the police had failed you; but if you have enough sense to get and hold a well-paid job in a highly competitive field, as you have, surely you would have known that it was stupid to suppose Heller could help you. Even if he were not a humbug, if he were honestly applying the laws of probability to complex problems with some success, singling out a sneak thief from among a hundred possibilities was plainly an operation utterly unsuited to his technique, and even to his pretensions.”

Wolfe moved his head an inch to the left and back again. “No, Miss Abbey, it won’t do. I want to know whether you saw Leo Heller before today, and in any case what you wanted of him.”

The tip of her tongue had appeared four times, to flick across her lips. She spoke in a controlled, thin, steely voice. “You make it sound overwhelming, Mr. Wolfe.”

“Not I. It is overwhelming.”

Her sharp dark eyes went to Cramer. “You’re an inspector, in charge of this business?”

“That’s right.”

“Do the police share Mr. Wolfe’s — skepticism?”

“You can take what he said as coming from me.”

“Then no matter what I tell you about why I went to see Heller, you’ll investigate it? You’ll check it?”

“Not necessarily. If it fits all right, and if we can’t connect it with the murder, and if it’s a private confidential matter, we’ll let it go at that. If we do check any, we’ll be careful. There are enough innocent citizens sore at us already.”

Her eyes darted back to Wolfe. “What about you, Mr. Wolfe? Will you have to check?”

“I sincerely hope not. Let Mr. Cramer’s assurance include me.”

Her eyes went around. “What about these men?”

“They are trained confidential assistants. They hold their tongues or they lose their jobs.”

The tip of her tongue came out and went in. “I’m not satisfied, but what can I do? If my only choice is between this and the whole New York detective force pawing at me, the Lord knows I take this. I phoned Leo Heller ten days ago, and he came to my office and spent two hours there. It was a business matter, not a personal one. I’m going to tell you exactly what it was, because I’m no good at ad libbing a phony. I was a damn fool to say that about the stolen ring.”

She was hating it, but she went on. “You said I have sense enough to get and hold a well-paid job in a highly competitive field, but if you only knew. It’s not a field, it’s a corral of wild beasts. There are six female tigers trying to get their claws on my job right now, and if they all died tonight there would be six others tomorrow. If it came out what I went to Leo Heller for, that would be the finish of me.”

The tip of her tongue flashed out and in. “So that’s what this means to me. A magazine like Mode has two main functions, reporting and predicting. American women want to know what is being made and worn in Paris and New York, but even more they want to know what is going to be made and worn next season. Mode’s reporting has been good enough — I’ve been all right on that — but for the past year our predictions have been utterly rotten. We’ve got the contacts, but something has gone haywire, and our biggest rival has made monkeys of us. Another year like that, even another season, and good-by.”

Wolfe grunted. “To the magazine?”

“No, to me. So I decided to try Leo Heller. We had carried a piece about him, and I had met him. The idea was to give him everything we had — and we had plenty — about styles and colors and trends for the past ten years, and have him figure the probabilities six months ahead. He thought it was feasible, and I don’t think he was a faker. He had to come to the office to go through our stuff, and of course I had to camouflage it, what he was there for, but that wasn’t hard. Do you want to know what I told them he was doing?”

“I think not,” Wolfe muttered.

“So he came. I phoned him the next day, and he said it would take him at least a week to determine whether he had enough information to make up a probability formula. Yesterday I phoned again, and he said he had something to discuss and asked me to call at his place this morning. I went. You know the rest of it.”

She stopped. Wolfe and Cramer exchanged glances. “I would like,” Wolfe said, “to have the name of the six female tigers who are after your job.”

She turned white. I have never seen the color leave a face faster or more completely. “Damn you,” she said in bitter fury. “So you’re a rat like everybody else!”

Wolfe showed her a palm. “Please, madam. Mr. Cramer will speak for himself, but I have no desire to betray you to your enemies. I merely want—”

He saved his breath, because his audience was leaving. She got up, retrieved her mink from the other chair, draped it over her arm, turned, and headed for the door. Stebbins looked at Wolfe, Wolfe shook his head, and Stebbins trailed after her.

As he left the room at her heels, Cramer called to him, “Bring Busch!” Then he turned on Wolfe to protest. “What the hell, you had her open. Why give her a breath?”

Wolfe made a face. “The wretch. The miserable wretch. Her misogyny was already in her bones; now her misandry is too. She was dumb with rage, and it would have been futile to keep at her. But you’re keeping her?”

“You’re right we are. For what?” He was out of his chair, glaring down at Wolfe. “Tell me for what! Except for dragging that out of that woman, there’s not one single ...”

He was off again. I miss no opportunity of resenting Inspector Cramer — I enjoy it, and it’s good for my appetite — but I must admit that on that occasion he seemed to me to have a point. I still had seen or heard no indication whatever that Wolfe’s statement that he had a lead was anything but a stall, and it was half-past two in the morning, and five of them had been processed, with only one to go. So as Cramer yapped at my employer I did not cheer him on or offer him an orchid, but I had a private feeling that some of the sentiments he expressed were not positively preposterous. He was still at it when the door opened to admit Stebbins with the sixth customer.

The sergeant, after conducting this one to the seat the others had occupied, facing Wolfe and Cramer, did not go to the chair against the wall, which he had favored throughout the evening. Instead, he lowered his bulk onto one at Cramer’s left, only two arms’ lengths from the subject. That was interesting because it meant that he was voting for Karl Busch as his pick of the lot, and while Stebbins had often been wrong I had known him, more than once, to be right.

Karl Busch was the slick, sly, swarthy little article with his hair pasted to his scalp. In the specifications on his transcript I had noted the key NVMS, meaning No Visible Means of Support, but that was just a nod to routine. The details of the report on him left no real doubt as to the sources he tapped for jack. He was a Broadway smoothie, third grade. He was not in the theater or sports or the flicks or any of the tough rackets, but he knew everyone who was, and as the engraved lettuce swirled around the midtown corners and got trapped in the nets of the collectors, legitimate and otherwise, he had a hundred little dodges for fastening onto a specimen for himself.

To him Cramer’s tone was noticeably different. “This is Nero Wolfe,” he rasped. “Answer his questions. You hear, Busch?”

Busch said he did. Wolfe, who was frowning, studying him, spoke. “Nothing is to be gained, Mr. Busch, by my starting the usual rigmarole with you. I’ve read your statement, and I doubt if it would be worth while to try to pester you into a contradiction. But you had three conversations with Leo Heller, and in your statement they are not reported, merely summarized. I want the details of those conversations, as completely as your memory will furnish. Start with the first one, two months ago. Exactly what was said?”

Busch slowly shook his head. “Impossible, mister.”

“Word by word, no. Do your best.”

“Huh-uh.”

“You won’t try?”

“It’s this way. If I took you to the pier and ast you to try to jump across to Brooklyn, what would you do? You’d say it was impossible and why get your feet wet. That’s me.”

“I told you,” Cramer snapped, “to answer his questions.”

Busch extended a dramatic hand in appeal. “What do you want me to do, make it up?”

“I want you to do what you were told, to the best of your ability.”

“Okay. This will be good. I said to him, ‘Mr. Heller, my name’s Busch, and I’m a broker.’ He said broker of what, and I said of anything people want broken, just for a gag, but he had no sense of humor and I saw he didn’t, so I dropped that and explained. I told him there was a great demand among all kinds of people to know what horse was going to win a race the day before the race was run or even an hour before, and I had read about his line of work and was thinking that he could help to meet that demand. He said that he had thought several times about using his method on horse races, but he didn’t care himself to use the method for personal bets because he wasn’t a betting man, and for him to make up one of his formulas for just one race would take an awful lot of research and it would cost so much it wouldn’t be worth it for any one person unless that person made a high-bracket plunge.”

“You’re paraphrasing it,” Wolfe objected. “I’d prefer the words that were used.”

“This is the best of my ability, mister.”

“Very well. Go on.”

“I said I wasn’t a high-bracket boy myself, but anyway that wasn’t here or there or under the rug, because what I had in mind was a wholesale setup. I had figgers to show him. Say he did ten races a week. I could round up at least twenty customers right off the bat. He didn’t need to be any God Almighty always right; all he had to do was crack a percentage of forty or better, and it would start a fire you couldn’t put out if you ran a river down it. We could have a million customers if we wanted ’em, but we wouldn’t want ’em. We would hand-pick a hundred and no more, and each one would ante one C per week, which if I can add at all would make ten grand every sennight. That would—”

“What?” Wolfe exploded. “Ten grand every what?”

“Sennight.”

“Meaning a week?”

“Sure.”

“Where the deuce did you pick up that fine old word?”

“That’s not old. Some big wit started it around last summer.”

“Incredible. Go on.”

“Where was — Oh, yeah. That would make half a million little ones per year, and Heller and me would split it. Out of my half I would expense the operating, and out of his half he would expense the dope. He would have to walk on his nose to cut under a hundred grand all clear, and I wouldn’t do so bad. We didn’t sign no papers, but he could smell it, and after two more talks he agreed to do a dry run on three races. The first one he worked on, his answer was the favorite, a horse named White Water, and it won, but what the hell, it was just exercise for that rabbit. The next one, there were two sweethearts in a field of nine, and it was heads or tails between those two, and Heller had the winner all right, a horse named Short Order, but on a fifty-fifty call you don’t exactly panic. But get this next one.”

Busch gestured dramatically for emphasis. “Now get it. This animal was forty to one, but it might as well have been four hundred. It was a musclebound sore-jointed hyena named Zero. That alone, a horse named Zero, was enough to put the curse of six saints on it, but also it was the kind of looking horse which if you looked at it would make you think promptly of canned dog food. When Heller came up with that horse, I thought oh-oh, he’s a loon after all, and watch me run. Well, you ast me to tell you the words we used, me and Heller. If I told you some I used when that Zero horse won that race, you would lock me up. Not only was Heller batting a thousand, but he had kicked through with the most — What are you doing, taking a nap?”

We all looked at Wolfe. He was leaning back with his eyes shut tight, and was motionless except for his lips, which were pushing out and in, and out and in, and again out and in. Cramer and Stebbins and I knew what that meant: something had hit his hook, and he had yanked and had a fish on. A tingle ran up my spine. Stebbins arose and took a step to stand at Busch’s elbow. Cramer tried to look cynical but couldn’t make it; he was as excited as I was. The proof of it was that he didn’t open his trap; he just sat with his eyes on Wolfe, along with the rest of us, looking at the lip movements as if they were something really special.

“What the hell!” Busch protested. “Is he having a fit?”

Wolfe’s eyes opened, and he came forward in his chair. “No, I’m not,” he snapped, “but I’ve been having one all evening. Mr. Cramer. Will you please have Mr. Busch removed? Temporarily.”

Cramer, with no hesitation, nodded at Purley, and Purley touched Busch’s shoulder, and they went. The door closed behind them, but it wasn’t more than five seconds before it opened again and Purley was back with us. He wanted as quick a look at the fish as his boss and me.

“Have you ever,” Wolfe was asking Cramer, “called me, pointblank, a dolt and a dotard?”

“Those aren’t my words, but I’ve certainly called you.”

“You may do so now. Your opinion of me at its lowest was far above my present opinion of myself.” He looked up at the clock, which said five past three. “We now need a proper setting. How many of your staff are in my house?”

“Fourteen or fifteen.”

“We want them all in here, for the effect of their presence. Half of them should bring chairs. Also, of course, the six persons we have interviewed. This shouldn’t take too long — possibly an hour, though I doubt it. I certainly won’t prolong it.”

Cramer was looking contrary. “You’ve already prolonged it plenty. You mean you’re prepared to name him?”

“I am not. I haven’t the slightest notion who it is. But I am prepared to make an attack that will expose him — or her — and if it doesn’t, I’ll have no opinion of myself at all.” Wolfe flattened his palms on his desk, for him a violent gesture. “Confound it, don’t you know me well enough to realize when I’m ready to strike?”

“I know you too damn well.” Cramer looked at his sergeant, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. “Oh, nuts. Okay, Purley. Collect the audience.”