Too Many Women

CHAPTER Thirty-Four

She sat in the red leather chair. That day her coat was mink and her dress was tightly woven brown wool with an elegant black check. She had never met Miss Livsey, she had said, and had offered a hand which Hester had not taken. That had not disconcerted her. Nothing, as far as could be told from her appearance, had disconcerted her, though her mind was sufficiently occupied to keep her from making any personal remarks to me. She sat in the red leather chair and told Wolfe: “This would not have happened if you had done what I asked you to. My brother would not have been killed. He would have stopped his foolishness. Everything would have been all right.” “No,” Wolfe said, “it wouldn’t. It seems clear that your brother would never have abandoned his determination to become president of the firm. Nor would the death of Mr. Moore have been cleared up, but that didn’t interest you. I wish you would start with that Friday evening. Why did you tell me your husband was home in bed when he wasn’t?” “Because I saw no-what are you doing there, Archie?” “Shorthand,” I told her. “I’m good at it.” “Then stop it. I won’t have any record of this.” “I will,” Wolfe said curtly. He wiggled a finger at her. “I intend, madam, to be in a position to satisfy your Board of Directors that I have done the job they hired me for. As far as I’m concerned that’s all the record will be used for, but I’m going to have it. And I don’t need to make any pretenses to you. At this moment I know barely what I need to know and that’s all. For example, I had nothing but a surmise, a mere assumption, that your husband was not in bed asleep when you said he was, until you reacted as you did to my request to speak with your servants. That of course made the surmise a certainty. Why did you lie about it?” “I didn’t.” “Pah. You didn’t?” “I didn’t intend to.” Cecily kept glancing in my direction, but at the notebook, not at me. “When you phoned I was in my sitting-room. My husband’s room is some distance away, and I thought he had gone to bed. When I went to see, he wasn’t there. I didn’t know he had gone out. I merely didn’t care to tell you that, not that it mattered, not at the time, so I said he was asleep. He came in a little while after you phoned-” “How long after?” “I don’t know-twenty minutes or half an hour. Then, later, when the news came that my brother had been killed, I knew that my husband had killed him.” “How did you know? Did he tell you?” “Not that night. But I knew, and the next day I talked with him and he told me.” Her hand fluttered. “My husband told me everything sooner or later, after he learned that that was the best way.” “When did he tell you that he killed Mr. Moore?” She shook her head. “I’m not going to talk about that. I have decided that I don’t have to.” She had stopped glancing at my notebook and was sticking to Wolfe. “I know what this is for and I’m willing to say enough to satisfy you. I realize there are some things I have to tell you or you will turn it over to the police, but I don’t have to go beyond that. It is true that my husband killed Waldo, but that had nothing to do with me. He killed him because Miss Livsey had fallen in love with him and was going to marry him.” I wasn’t as good as Wolfe was. I jerked my head up at her. Wolfe merely murmured at her, “Jealousy.” She nodded. “My husband had completely lost his head about her-but I suppose she has told you all about that?” “Not all. I need your version. Go ahead.” “He met her at the company’s annual dinner and dance for employees over a year ago now, and he was a very passionate man. He told me about it, and he wanted to get a divorce. As time went on it got worse with him. She wouldn’t let him see her much, and not at all openly. She was extremely clever about it, she wouldn’t let him give her a better position at the office, and when I insisted that the only thing to do was to make her his mistress, he said she wouldn’t.” Cecily twisted around in her chair to look at Hester. “That was very clever of you, Miss Livsey,” she said without resentment, “but it made it very difficult for me.” Hester stayed motionless and had nothing to say.

“He wanted a divorce,” Wolfe prompted.

“Yes, and I wouldn’t give him one. It would have upset all my life’s arrangements-among other things, I had made him president of the firm. He was even willing to forfeit his career for her. So I persuaded Waldo Moore to take a job there.” She nodded, to herself. “You didn’t know Waldo. He was the most charming person I have ever known, until he got tiresome, which of course everyone does in time.

I doubt if there was a woman on earth who could have resisted him. So I got him to take a job in the stock department, where Miss Livsey worked, and to-well, to divert her. It worked splendidly, as I was sure it would. He had her completely in hand within-I forget, but it couldn’t have been-” “You’re lying!” Hester had spoken.

Cecily twisted to her. “Oh, you have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Livsey! No, indeed! You’re the only woman he ever asked to marry him.” She went back to Wolfe. “So there was no longer any reason for my husband to want a divorce, or so I thought, but I might have known, with the drive he had to get anything he wanted enough, that he wouldn’t accept defeat as easily as that. What happened was that Waldo Moore was killed. I’m not going to talk about that. It wouldn’t do you any good, and I don’t have to. Anyway, the blame was not mine, it didn’t happen because of any mistake of mine.” “Merely bad luck,” Wolfe murmured.

She nodded. “But I had made a mistake, a very bad one. I had confided in my brother. He was older than me, and I had formed the habit in childhood, and I kept it even after we had grown up and I had become aware that he was a peculiar man and not to be taken seriously. That was a mistake too, to think he was not to be taken seriously. I didn’t realize how much, clear to the bottom of his soul, he wanted to be the head of the business our father had founded. I was shocked when I learned he was using things, things I had told him in confidence from a sister to a brother, to put pressure on my husband to let him become president. I had taken possession of some letters my husband had received from Miss Livsey, and my brother stole them from me.” “Did you tell him your husband had killed Mr. Moore?” Cecily looked annoyed. “I said I wouldn’t talk about that,” she declared to settle it. “But my brother-he thought that, yes. He threatened my husband with it, and me too. That was another mistake, or part of the same one-thinking my brother was not to be taken seriously. I told him he didn’t have the ability to direct the affairs of the business and he should abandon the idea forever. Then he-you know about the report he sent in, stating that Waldo had been murdered.” Wolfe nodded.

Cecily fluttered a hand. “It couldn’t be simply ignored, because my brother had let it become known and gossiped about by the employees. My husband didn’t dare to keep it from the executives, and when most of them were in favor of hiring an investigator he didn’t dare oppose it. I think that was extremely clever of my brother; I had never thought he was as intelligent as that. Wasn’t that really clever?” “Very,” Wolfe agreed. “It got him killed.” “But he didn’t know that,” she protested. “It was clever to think of that way to bring pressure on my husband. I was determined, of course, to stop it, and I still think I would have succeeded if you had done what I asked-if you had stopped the investigation. It only stimulated my brother to go on. If you had quit I still think I could have persuaded my brother to give it up. But then he told Archie that he knew who had killed Waldo, and he saw he had gone too far, because what he wanted wasn’t to have my husband arrested for murder but to get his job. If Archie hadn’t been there he certainly wouldn’t have told him that, and he wouldn’t have told anybody that. I saw him that day and made him understand what he was doing, and he denied he had said it. But it may have been too late. My husband thought it was. He knew then that my brother had the letters he had received from Miss Livsey, and he thought it had gone so far that my brother couldn’t draw back even if he wanted to, and anyway he didn’t trust my brother and didn’t think he wanted to. So-that night-” She turned her palms up and lifted her shoulders.

“Yes,” Wolfe agreed, “that night. When your husband was not home in bed, and when you learned that your brother had been killed, there was only one assumption for you. How did he do it? Where was your brother killed and with what?” “I don’t know.” “Nonsense. Certainly you know. Your husband told you everything.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. “Come, madam. You know what this is for.” “Does it matter?” “Not to you. To you nothing matters. But I’m going to earn my fee, and you know what the alternative is.” “My brother and my husband were much alike in one way,” Cecily said. “They were both excessively conceited. When my brother met him that evening, to talk things over, and rode in his car with him, I doubt if he was at all alarmed even when my husband stopped the car in a secluded street. He was too conceited. He thought he could take care of himself. Probably he never thought otherwise, for when my husband reached over the back of the seat to the tonneau to get his brief case, what he really got was a chunk of petrified wood he had put there, and my brother was stunned by the first blow, or possibly killed-my husband wasn’t sure, but he made sure.” Cecily’s hand fluttered. “Of course,” she conceded, “something had to be done, since it was my husband’s own car, but only a supremely confident and conceited man would have proceeded as he did. He actually kept the piece of petrified wood and later brought it home and cleaned it and put it back on the desk in his study. Just ahead of my husband’s car where he had stopped it at the curb another car was parked-it was the one he had stolen and put there. He transferred the body to it. His reason for driving to Thirty-ninth Street and repeating, exactly repeating, his performance with Waldo’s body last December, every detail of it-his reason was that it would be supposed that the same person had killed both of them, and that would be to his advantage because he wouldn’t be suspected of killing Waldo. That was the reason he gave me, but it was nothing but a reason. He really did it because he had to do something with the body, and he was confident and conceited, and it was a difficult and complicated gesture of assurance and contempt-for you and me and everyone else.” Cecily turned her head. “Except you, Miss Livsey. As far as I know you are the one person toward whom it was impossible for my husband to feel contemptuous. It made me quite curious about you.” Hester had nothing to say.

Wolfe grunted, “About Miss Livsey, by the way, there is a detail. For over an hour, earlier that Friday evening, your brother walked the streets with her, talking. What were they talking about?” Cecily looked surprised. “I have no idea.” She twisted around. “What was it, Miss Livsey?” Hester was silent.

Wolfe tried it. He opened his eyes at her. “Surely you’re not going to stick to that lie now? If you do, I warn you I’ll resent it. This will be left with either my witness a liar or you, and I don’t intend it to be him. What were you discussing with Mr. Naylor?” Hester spoke, to Wolfe, emphatically not to Cecily. “He wanted to see me. He asked me to meet him.” “What did he want?” “He thought I had letters that Mr. Pine had written me, and he wanted them.” “Did you give them to him?” “I didn’t have them. I had destroyed them.” Hester swallowed. “He didn’t believe me. He had asked for them before, and he threatened to dismiss me-from my job -if I didn’t give them to him.” “Good God!” I blurted. I couldn’t help it. “Why didn’t you say so long ago?” She was on speaking terms with me too, for her eyes came my way. “How could I?

And have it all come out-about Mr. Pine?” “Does Hoff know all this?” “No. He just knows I need help.” “Did you know Pine had killed Moore? And Naylor?” “No, I-I didn’t really know anything. How could I? What I thought-what does that matter?” Wolfe wasn’t interested. He took over, asking Cecily, “What about the letters your husband got from Miss Livsey? Your brother had them. They weren’t found among his papers. Where are they?” “They were destroyed too,” she said. “My husband destroyed them. He got them- that Friday evening.” She was frowning. “But isn’t that enough? I have trusted you further than I have ever trusted any man. I admit I had to. What assurance have I that it won’t go to the police?” I gawked at her. Was she, in addition to everything else, a ninny?

“None at all,” Wolfe said. “You have done what you could to straighten it out, but there is the matter of your husband to be taken care of. Surely you can’t expect-” The phone rang. I transferred my notebook to my right hand and picked up the receiver.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.” “Archie, get this!” It was Bill Gore’s voice.

“Okay, give it to me.” He did so. It was a straight factual report of an event. I listened, asked a question or two, hung up, and turned to tell Wolfe.

“News from Bill Gore. Mr. Jasper Pine fell from a window of his office on the thirty-sixth floor. Bill has seen him, and from his description I would say that he is in worse shape than if a car had run over him. Dead on arrival.” A little gasp had come from Hester’s corner. Cecily made no sound and no move.

Wolfe heaved a sigh. He spoke to Cecily.

“You didn’t spend all your time dressing, did you, Mrs. Pine? A telephone call was enough, was it? Naturally I am not surprised. I was quite aware that you would have been much more discreet with me otherwise.” No, it wasn’t a ninny that she was. Protect your woman? Not that one. She didn’t need it.