Three Witnesses /collection/

The Next Witness

I

I HAD HAD PREVIOUS contacts with Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, but had never seen him perform in a courtroom. That morning, watching him at the chore of trying to persuade a jury to clamp it on Leonard Ashe for the murder of Marie Willis, I thought he was pretty good and might be better when he had warmed up. A little plump and a little short, bald in front and big-eared, he wasn’t impressive to look at, but he was businesslike and self-assured without being cocky, and he had a neat trick of pausing for a moment to look at the jury as if he half expected one of them to offer a helpful suggestion. When he pulled it, not too often, his back was turned to the judge and the defense counsel, so they couldn’t see his face, but I could, from where I sat in the audience.

It was the third day of the trial, and he had called his fifth witness, a scared-looking little guy with a pushed-in nose who gave his name, Clyde Bagby, took the oath, sat down, and fixed his scared brown eyes on Mandelbaum as if he had abandoned hope.

Mandelbaum’s tone was reassuring. “What is your business, Mr. Bagby?”

The witness swallowed. “I’m the president of Bagby Answers Ink.”

“By ‘Ink’ you mean ‘Incorporated’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you own the business?”

“I own half the stock that’s been issued, and my wife owns the other half.”

“How long have you been operating that business?”

“Five years now-nearly five and a half.”

“And what is the business? Please tell the jury about it.”

Bagby’s eyes went left for a quick, nervous glance at the jury box but came right back to the prosecutor. “It’s a telephone-answering business, that’s all. You know what that is.”

“Yes, but some members of the jury may not be familiar with the operation. Please describe it.”

The witness licked his lips. “Well, you’re a person or a firm or an organization and you have a phone, but you’re not always there and you want to know about calls that come in your absence. So you go to a telephone-answering service. There are several dozen of them in New York, some of them spread all over town with neighborhood offices, big operations. My own operation, Bagby Answers Ink, it’s not so big because I specialize in serving individuals, houses and apartments, instead of firms or organizations. I’ve got offices in four different exchange districts-Gramercy, Plaza, Trafalgar, and Rhinelander. I can’t work it from one central office because-”

“Excuse me, Mr. Bagby, but we won’t go into technical problems. Is one of your offices at six-eighteen East Sixty-ninth Street, Manhattan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Describe the operation at that address.”

“Well, that’s my newest place, opened only a year ago, and my smallest, so it’s not in an office building, it’s an apartment-on account of the labor law. You can’t have women working in an office building after two a.m. unless it’s a public service, but I have to give my clients all-night service, so there on Sixty-ninth Street I’ve got four operators for the three switchboards, and they all live right there in the apartment. That way I can have one at the boards from eight till two at night, and another one from two o’clock on. After nine in the morning three are on, one for each board, for the daytime load.”

“Are the switchboards installed in one of the rooms of the apartment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the jury what one of them is like and how it works.”

Bagby darted another nervous glance at the jury box and went back to the prosecutor. “It’s a good deal like any board in a big office, with rows of holes for the plugs. Of course it’s installed by the telephone company, with the special wiring for connections with my clients’ phones. Each board has room for sixty clients. For each client there’s a little light and a hole and a card strip with the client’s name. When someone dials a client’s number his light goes on and a buzz synchronizes with the ringing of the client’s phone. How many buzzes the girl counts before she plugs in depends on what client it is. Some of them want her to plug in after three buzzes, some want her to wait longer. I’ve got one client that has her count fifteen buzzes. That’s the kind of specialized individualized service I give my clients. The big outfits, the ones with tens of thousands of clients, they won’t do that. They’ve commercialized it. With me every client is a special case and a sacred trust.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bagby.” Mandelbaum swiveled his head for a swift sympathetic smile at the jury and swiveled it back again. “But I wasn’t buzzing for a plug for your business. When a client’s light shows on the board, and the girl has heard the prescribed number of buzzes, she plugs in on the line, is that it?”

I thought Mandelbaum’s crack was a little out of place for that setting, where a man was on trial for his life, and turned my head right for a glance at Nero Wolfe to see if he agreed, but one glimpse of his profile told me that he was sticking to his role of a morose martyr and so was in no humor to agree with anyone or anything.

That was to be expected. At that hour of the morning, following his hard-and-fast schedule, he would have been up in the plant rooms on the roof of his old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, bossing Theodore for the glory of his celebrated collection of orchids, even possibly getting his hands dirty. At eleven o’clock, after washing his hands, he would have taken the elevator down to his office on the ground floor, arranged his oversized corpus in his oversized chair behind his desk, rung for Fritz to bring beer, and started bossing Archie Goodwin, me. He would have given me any instructions he thought timely and desirable, for anything from typing a letter to tailing the mayor, which seemed likely to boost his income and add to his reputation as the best private detective east of San Francisco. And he would have been looking forward to lunch by Fritz.

And all that was “would-have-been” because he had been subpoenaed by the State of New York to appear in court and testify at the trial of Leonard Ashe. He hated to leave his house at all, and particularly he hated to leave it for a trip to a witness-box. Being a private detective, he had to concede that a summons to testify was an occupational hazard he must accept if he hoped to collect fees from clients, but this cloud didn’t even have that silver lining. Leonard Ashe had come to the office one day about two months ago to hire him, but had been turned down. So neither fee nor glory was in prospect. As for me, I had been subpoenaed too, but only for insurance, since I wouldn’t be called unless Mandelbaum decided Wolfe’s testimony needed corroboration, which wasn’t likely.

It was no pleasure to look at Wolfe’s gloomy phiz, so I looked back at the performers. Bagby was answering. “Yes, sir, she plugs in and says, ‘Mrs. Smith’s residence,’ or, ‘Mr. Jones’s apartment,’ or whatever she has been told to say for that client. Then she says Mrs. Smith is out and is there any message, and so on, whatever the situation calls for. Sometimes the client has called and given her a message for some particular caller.” Bagby flipped a hand. “Just anything. We give specialized service.”

Mandelbaum nodded. “I think that gives us a clear picture of the operation. Now, Mr. Bagby, please look at that gentleman in the dark blue suit sitting next to the officer. He is the defendant in this trial. Do you know him?”

“Yes, sir. That’s Mr. Leonard Ashe.”

“When and where did you meet him?”

“In July he came to my office on Forty-seventh Street. First he phoned, and then he came.”

“Can you give the day in July?”

“The twelfth. A Monday.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked how my answering service worked, and I told him, and he said he wanted it for his home telephone at his apartment on East Seventy-third Street. He paid cash for a month in advance. He wanted twenty-four-hour service.”

“Did he want any special service?”

“He didn’t ask me for any, but two days later he contacted Marie Willis and offered her five hundred dollars if she-”

The witness was interrupted from two directions at once. The defense attorney, a champion named Jimmy Donovan whose batting average on big criminal cases had topped the list of the New York bar for ten years, left his chair with his mouth open to object; and Mandelbaum showed the witness a palm to stop him.

“Just a minute, Mr. Bagby. Just answer my questions. Did you accept Leonard Ashe as a client?”

“Sure, there was no reason not to.”

“What was the number of his telephone at his home?”

“Rhinelander two-three-eight-three-eight.”

“Did you give his name and that number a place on one of your switchboards?”

“Yes, sir, one of the three boards at the apartment on East Sixty-ninth Street. That’s the Rhinelander district.”

“What was the name of the employee who attended that board-the one with Leonard Ashe’s number on it?”

“Marie Willis.”

A shadow of stir and murmur rippled across the packed audience, and Judge Corbett on the bench turned his head to give it a frown and then went back to his knitting.

Bagby was going on. “Of course at night there’s only one girl on the three boards-they rotate on that -but for daytime I keep a girl at her own board at least five days a week, and six if I can. That way she gets to know her clients.”

“And Leonard Ashe’s number was on Marie Willis’s board?”

“Yes, sir.”

“After the routine arrangements for serving Leonard Ashe as a client had been completed, did anything happen to bring him or his number to your personal attention?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What and when? First, when?”

Bagby took a second to make sure he had it right before swearing to it. “It was Thursday, three days after Ashe had ordered the service. That was July fifteenth. Marie phoned me at my office and said she wanted to see me privately about something important. I asked if it could wait till she was off the board at six o’clock, and she said yes, and a little after six I went up to Sixty-ninth Street and we went into her room at the apartment. She told me Ashe had phoned her the day before and asked her to meet him somewhere to discuss some details about servicing his number. She told him such a discussion should be with me, but he insisted-”

A pleasant but firm baritone cut in. “If Your Honor pleases.” Jimmy Donovan was on his feet. “I submit that the witness may not testify to what Marie Willis and Mr. Ashe said to each other when he was not present.”

“Certainly not,” Mandelbaum agreed shortly. “He is reporting what Marie Willis told him had been said.”

Judge Corbett nodded. “That should be kept clear. You understand that, Mr. Bagby?”

“Yes, sir.” Bagby bit his lip. “I mean Your Honor.”

“Then go ahead. What Miss Willis said to you and you to her.”

“Well, she said she had agreed to meet Ashe because he was a theatrical producer and she wanted to be an actress. I hadn’t known she was stage-struck but I know it now. So she had gone to his office on Forty-fifth Street as soon as she was off the board, and after he talked some and asked some questions he told her- this is what she told me-he told her he wanted her to listen in on calls to his home number during the daytime. All she would have to do, when his light on her board went on and the buzzes started, if the buzzes stopped and the light went off-that would mean someone had answered the phone at his home-she would plug in and listen to the conversation. Then each evening she would phone him and report. That’s what she said Ashe had asked her to do. She said he counted out five hundred dollars in bills and offered them to her and told her he’d give her another thousand if she went along.”

Bagby stopped for wind. Mandelbaum prodded him. “Did she say anything else?”

“Yes, sir. She said she knew she should have turned him down flat, but she didn’t want to make him sore, so she told him she wanted to think it over for a day or two. Then she said she had slept on it and decided what to do. She said of course she knew that what Ashe was after was phone calls to his wife, and aside from anything else she wouldn’t spy on his wife, because his wife was Robina Keane, who had given up her career as an actress two years ago to marry Ashe, and Marie worshiped Robina Keane as her ideal. That’s what Marie told me. She said she had decided she must do three things. She must tell me about it because Ashe was my client and she was working for me. She must tell Robina Keane about it, to warn her, because Ashe would probably get someone else to do the spying for him. It occurred to me that her real reason for wanting to tell Robina Keane might be that she hoped-”

Mandelbaum stopped him. “What occurred to you isn’t material, Mr. Bagby. Did Marie tell you the third thing she had decided she must do?”

“Yes, sir. That she must tell Ashe that she was going to tell his wife. She said she had to because at the start of her talk with him she had promised Ashe she would keep it confidential, so she had to warn him she was withdrawing her promise.”

“Did she say when she intended to do those three things?”

The witness nodded. “She had already done one of them, telling me. She said she had phoned Ashe and told him she would be at his office at seven o’clock. That was crowding it a little, because she had the evening shift that day and would have to be back at the boards at eight o’clock. It crowded me too because it gave me no time to talk her out of it. I went downtown with her in a taxi, to Forty-fifth Street, where Ashe’s office was, and did my best but couldn’t move her.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I tried to get her to lay off. If she went through with her program it might not do any harm to my business, but again it might. I tried to persuade her to let me handle it by going to Ashe and telling him she had told me of his offer and I didn’t want him for a client, and then drop it and forget it, but she was dead set on warning Robina Keane, and to do that she had to withdraw her promise to Ashe. I hung on until she entered the elevator to go up to Ashe’s office, but I couldn’t budge her.”

“Did you go up with her?”

“No, that wouldn’t have helped any. She was going through with it, and what could I do?”

So, I was thinking to myself, that’s how it is. It looked pretty tough to me, and I glanced at Wolfe, but his eyes were closed, so I turned my head the other way to see how the gentleman in the dark blue suit seated next to the officer was taking it. Apparently it looked pretty tough to Leonard Ashe too. With deep creases slanting along the jowls of his dark bony face from the corners of his wide full mouth, and his sunken dark eyes, he was certainly a prime subject for the artists who sketch candidates for the hot seat for the tabloids, and for three days they had been making the most of it. He was no treat for the eyes, and I took mine away from him, to the left, where his wife sat in the front row of the audience.

I had never worshiped Robina Keane as my ideal, but I had liked her fine in a couple of shows, and she was giving a good performance for her first and only courtroom appearance-either being steadfastly loyal to her husband or putting on an act, but good in either case. She was dressed quietly and she sat quietly, but she wasn’t trying to pretend she wasn’t young and beautiful. Exactly how she and her older and unbeautiful husband stood with each other was anybody’s guess, and everybody was guessing. One extreme said he was her whole world and he had been absolutely batty to suspect her of any hoop-rolling; the other extreme said she had quit the stage only to have more time for certain promiscuous activities, and Ashe had been a sap not to know it sooner; and anywhere in between. I wasn’t ready to vote. Looking at her, she might have been an angel. Looking at him, it must have taken something drastic to get him that miserable, though I granted that being locked up two months on a charge of murder would have some effect.

Mandelbaum was making sure the jury had got it. “Then you didn’t go up to Ashe’s office with Marie Willis?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you go up later, at any time, after she had gone up?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you see Ashe at all that evening?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you speak to him on the telephone that evening?”

“No, sir.”

Looking at Bagby, and I have looked at a lot of specimens under fire, I decided that either he was telling it straight or he was an expert liar, and he didn’t sound like an expert. Mandelbaum went on. “What did you do that evening, after you saw Marie Willis enter the elevator to go up to Ashe’s office?”

“I went to keep a dinner date with a friend at a restaurant-Hornby’s on Fifty-second Street-and after that, around half-past eight, I went up to my Trafalgar office at Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. I have six boards there, and a new night girl was on, and I stayed there with her a while and then took a taxi home, across the park to my apartment on East Seventieth Street. Not long after I got home a phone call came from the police to tell me Marie Willis had been found murdered in my Rhinelander office, and I went there as fast as I could go, and there was a crowd out in front, and an officer took me upstairs.”

He stopped to swallow, and stuck his chin out a little. “They hadn’t moved her. They had taken the plug cord from around her throat, but they hadn’t moved her, and there she was, slumped over on the ledge in front of the board. They wanted me to identify her, and I had-”

The witness wasn’t interrupted, but I was. There was a tug at my sleeve, and a whisper in my ear- “We’re leaving, come on.” And Nero Wolfe arose, sidled past two pairs of knees to the aisle, and headed for the rear of the courtroom. For his bulk he could move quicker and smoother than you would expect, and as I followed him to the door and on out to the corridor we got no attention at all. I was assuming that some vital need had stirred him, like phoning Theodore to tell him or ask him something about an orchid, but he went on past the phone booths to the elevator and pushed the down button. With people all around I asked no questions. He got out at the main floor and made for Centre Street. Out on the sidewalk he backed up against the granite of the courthouse and spoke.

“We want a taxi, but first a word with you.”

“No, sir,” I said firmly. “First a word from me. Mandelbaum may finish with that witness any minute, and the cross-examination may not take long, or Donovan might even reserve it, and you were told you would follow Bagby. If you want a taxi, of course you’re going home, and that will just-”

“I’m not going home. I can’t.”

“Right. If you do you’ll merely get hauled back here and also a fat fine for contempt of court. Not to mention me. I’m under subpoena too. I’m going back to the courtroom. Where are you going?”

“To six-eighteen East Sixty-ninth Street.”

I goggled at him. “I’ve always been afraid of this. Does it hurt?”

“Yes. I’ll explain on the way.”

“I’m going back to the courtroom.”

“No. I’ll need you.”

Like everyone else, I love to feel needed, so I wheeled, crossed the sidewalk, flagged a taxi to the curb, and opened the door. Wolfe came and climbed in, and I followed. After he had got himself braced against the hazards of a carrier on wheels and I had given the driver the address, and we were rolling, I said, “Shoot. I’ve heard you do a lot of explaining, but this will have to be good.”

“It’s preposterous,” he declared.

“It sure is. Let’s go back.”

“I mean Mr. Mandelbaum’s thesis. I will concede that Mr. Ashe might have murdered that girl. I will concede that his state of mind about his wife might have approached mania, and therefore the motive suggested by that witness might have been adequate provocation. But he’s not an imbecile. Under the circumstances as given, and I doubt if Mr. Bagby can be discredited, I refuse to believe he was ass enough to go to that place at that time and kill her. You were present when he called on me that day to hire me. Do you believe it?”

I shook my head. “I pass. You’re explaining. However, I read the papers too, and also I’ve chatted with Lon Cohen of the Gazette about it. It doesn’t have to be that Ashe went there for the purpose of killing her. His story is that a man phoned him-a voice he didn’t recognize-and said if Ashe would meet him at the Bagby place on Sixty-ninth Street he thought they could talk Marie out of it, and Ashe went on the hop, and the door to the office was standing open, and he went in and there she was with a plug cord tight around her throat, and he opened a window and yelled for the police. Of course if you like it that Bagby was lying just now when he said it wasn’t him that phoned Ashe, and that Bagby is such a good businessman that he would rather kill an employee than lose a customer-”

“Pfui. It isn’t what I like, it’s what I don’t like. Another thing I didn’t like was sitting there on that confounded wooden bench with a smelly woman against me. Soon I was going to be called as a witness, and my testimony would have been effective corroboration of Mr. Bagby’s testimony, as you know. It was intolerable. I believe that if Mr. Ashe is convicted of murder on the thesis Mr. Mandelbaum is presenting it will be a justicial transgression, and I will not be a party to it. It wasn’t easy to get up and go because I can’t go home. If I go home they’ll come and drag me out, and into that witness-box.”

I eyed him. “Let’s see if I get you. You can’t bear to help convict Ashe of murder because you doubt if he’s guilty, so you’re scooting. Right?”

The hackie twisted his head around to inform us through the side of his mouth, “Sure he’s guilty.”

We ignored it. “That’s close enough,” Wolfe said.

“Not close enough for me. If you expect me to scoot with you and invite a stiff fine for running out on a subpoena, which you will pay, don’t try to guff me. Say we doubt if Ashe is guilty, but we think he may get tagged because we know Mandelbaum wouldn’t go to trial without a good case. Say also our bank account needs a shot in the arm, which is true. So we decide to see if we can find something that will push Mandelbaum’s nose in, thinking that if Ashe is properly grateful a measly little fine will be nothing. The way to proceed would be for you to think up a batch of errands for me, and you go on home and read a book and have a good lunch, but that’s out because they’d come and get you. Therefore we must both do errands. If that’s how it stands, it’s a fine day and I admit that woman was smelly, but I have a good nose and I think it was Tissot’s Passion Flower, which is eighty bucks an ounce. What are we going to do at Sixty-ninth Street?”

“I don’t know.”

“Good. Neither do I.”