Trouble in Triplicate

VIII

Lieutenant Rowcliff of Homicide was one of the reasons why I doubted if the world would ever reach the point of universal brotherhood. It didn’t seem feasible as long as opinions were still loose like mine of Rowcliff.

At ten minutes to three in the morning, in a torture chamber at the 19^th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street, where he had established emergency headquarters, Rowcliff said to me, “Very well.” He never used vulgar expressions like okay. “Very well, we’ll lock you up.”

I was yawning, and had to wait till it was finished before answering him. Then I remarked, “You’ve said that four times. I don’t like the idea, and neither will Mr. Wolfe or his lawyer, but I prefer it to more of this. Proceed.”

He merely sat and scowled at me, but no vulgar scowl, a Rowcliff scowl.

“Let me summarize it,” I offered. “Dazy Perrit came to see Mr. Wolfe, to consult him. If I had information for you on that, which I haven’t, it would be only secondhand. The place for you to get that is from Mr. Wolfe.”

“I have told you,” Rowcliff said coldly, “that I have sent a man to see Wolfe, twice, two men, and they were not allowed to enter. The door is bolted, as usual. That man Brenner talked through a crack and said that Wolfe was asleep and he wouldn’t disturb him. That is the impudent and arrogant attitude to be expected.”

“Try him after breakfast,” I suggested. “Say, eleven o’clock.” I was pleased to learn that my undelivered message to Fritz had not been necessary. “Of course I won’t be there to let you in if I’m in a cell. Then, at eleven-forty, twenty minutes before midnight, Perrit’s daughter arrived, apparently to consult Mr. Wolfe about the same thing as her father. You can get that from Mr. Wolfe too. When they were through I escorted Miss Perrit home, with her driving her car. We arrived about twelve-thirty. I glanced at both my wristwatch and the dash clock at Columbus Circle, and it was twelve-twenty-six. We were standing-”

“That’s all down.”

“Okay, and so is this. The man in the car had a handkerchief tied-”

“How do you know it was a handkerchief?”

“Oh, my God, we’re off again. Something white then, possibly torn from his shirttail, which is why I wouldn’t know him from Adam, because most of his face was behind it. I don’t know whether he was after her or me or both, though I admit it was her he hit. There was a license plate on the car but I couldn’t make it out, or didn’t, which is unimportant since I understand it was hot, having been liberated less than a mile away an hour or so earlier. And found less than six blocks away, near the Eighty-sixth Street subway station. I would like to know if any of my bullets-”

“Where’s Dazy Perrit?”

“You mean now?”

“Now.”

“I have no idea.”

“Is he holed up in Wolfe’s house?”

“Good lord, no. It makes my teeth chatter just to think of it.”

“Did your teeth chatter yesterday, when he was there arranging things with Wolfe?”

“Look, Lieutenant,” I said grimly. “It will soon be dawn. I’ve told it over and over, all I know. I am now going to clam up. I knew a man once who insisted on hunting ducks with a shotgun with a recoil that knocked him flat on his prat every time he pulled the trigger. He seemed to love it. In a way you remind me of him. You know damn well the man to tell you what Perrit and his daughter wanted is Mr. Wolfe. You know damn well I can’t tell you. You also know that if you hold me Mr. Wolfe will resent it and you won’t be able to depend on a thing he says. What do you want to do, get in another jab in a private feud or solve a murder? I warn you I’m going to take a nap, either in a chair, on a cot, or home in bed.”

“Get out of here,” Rowcliff commanded. “Go on, get.”

He pushed a button and passed the word, and a minute later I was on the sidewalk. What had restrained Rowcliff, I was well aware, was nothing said by me, but his uncertainty regarding the amount of cooperation his superior officer, Inspector Cramer, would be wanting from Wolfe.

Anyhow, as I voted against trying to flush a taxi and headed for the subway, it wasn’t Rowcliff I was concentrating on, it was Dazy Perrit. I had come within an ace of spilling it to Rowcliff to give the cops a good start, but knew that wouldn’t do before seeing Wolfe. I also, on my way home to Wolfe’s house, did some useless wondering, like wondering if it was the face named Archie who had done the job.

But mostly I was trying to add it up, and couldn’t even begin. The starting point was this, that Perrit had decided to erase Violet without delay. That much was a cinch. But what was the big idea of dragging Wolfe in, not to mention me?

How could he use the Wolfe part as a cover, either for the police or for anyone else, without letting it out that Violet was a phony? And wasn’t that supposed to be the one thing he didn’t want? The reason I particularly wanted those and other questions answered was because I had a certain idea. I am no one-man pestilence; the only times I have shot people it has been purely ad lib, to meet an urgent contingency; but I had decided I would have to shoot Dazy Perrit. It wasn’t merely a hangover from my sensation as I had stood with Violet gripping my arm, watching that gun blaze away at us; it was a realization of where Wolfe and I were sitting and would go on sitting. The risks we took in the cases we worked on, that was all right, that was just part of it. But to be tangled up with the inside affairs of the Perrits and Meekers wasn’t taking a risk, it was simply checking out, with the date of departure the only thing still to be settled.

So as I transferred to the shuttle at Grand Central I was going to shoot Perrit the first chance I got. Four minutes later, when I was transferring again at Times Square, shooting Perrit was obviously the very worst thing I could do. In another four minutes, as I emerged into Thirty-fourth Street, anything and everything was the worst thing I could do. As I felt then, the guy I really wanted to shoot was Wolfe, for having opened that window and yelled to me to bring Perrit in, in a frantic snatch at a pork chop. Turning up Ninth Avenue to Thirty-fifth and then west again, I let the brain float. I was getting close to bed and having a letdown, after all the excitement, followed by two hours of tight feelings at the precinct station with the city employees. As I neared our stoop I changed my mind again about going to Wolfe’s room for a bedside chat. It could wait till morning. I was getting some satisfaction out of that as I lifted my foot for the first step up to our door, and then instantaneously the satisfaction was gone. What chased it was two men. They came out of the dark corner behind the stone wall of the stoop, and there they were, close enough to touch.

The one on the right was the face named Archie. The one on the left, and a little back, was Dazy Perrit. The face had a gun showing, in his hand. Perrit’s hands were in his coat-pockets. My guns hadn’t been taken from me, since I had tickets for them, but the one in my coat-pocket wasn’t loaded, and my armpit holster might as well have been up in Yonkers, since my topcoat was buttoned.

“I want to ask you about tonight,” Perrit said. “My car’s around the corner on Eleventh Avenue. Go ahead. We’ll come behind.”

“We can talk here,” I told him. “I’ve often talked to people here.” This was certainly my chance to shoot him, a perfect set-up for self-defense, but I postponed it. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Get going,” he said, in a tone a little different. It was a cockeyed situation.

If I refused to budge I didn’t think they would drill me, because that would have been silly. If that was what they had in mind they wouldn’t have started conversing. If I went up the stoop and put the key in the door I still didn’t think they would drill me, but there were two objections to it. First, they might start operations short of drilling and one thing leads to another; and second, the door was bolted on the inside and I would have to rouse Fritz. Not to mention, third, that with Fritz roused and the door open they would probably decide to come in for a visit.

I decided to stand pat. “I like it-” I started, and stopped, hearing the sound of a car coming. I turned my head to look, because the sound of a car coming got on my nerves after my recent experience with it, and also because it might be a police car if Rowcliff had decided not to wait till eleven o’clock for another try at Wolfe. But it was only a taxicab. They often came through there late at night, on their way to the nest, a company garage around the corner.

I turned back to them. “I like it here. Even if I had ideas, which I haven’t, my gun’s empty, so relax. I emptied it-”

I didn’t duck or dive, I just dropped, flat on the sidewalk, and started rolling. I was thinking I mustn’t bang my head against the stone of the stoop.

This time I didn’t see the man in the taxicab at all, even enough of a glimpse to see if he had something white over his face, I was moving too fast, rolling to get around the corner. I had, as I remember it, no sign of an impulse to reach for my gun. If I thought at all I suppose I was thinking that if a man in a taxicab wanted to make holes in Perrit and the face it was nothing to me. I had, and have, no notion what they were doing, but later examination showed that some of the noise I heard was made by them, using their own ammunition.

That noise stopped. The noise of the taxi moving from the scene tapered off. I stuck my head around the corner of the stoop, saw a form as flat as mine had been and much quieter, and scrambled to my feet. There were two forms, the other one around the other corner of the stoop, and it was twitching a little. I saw it still had a gun in its hand, so I stepped over and kicked it out and away. I knelt, first to one and then to the other, for a brief inspection, and finding it likely that no one would ever again consider it dangerous to turn his back on them, mounted the stoop to the front door and pushed the button for Fritz, my private rings. But the rings weren’t needed. Before my finger left the button the door opened for the crack of two inches allowed by the chain of the bolt and a voice came through.

“Archie?”

“Me, Fritz. Open-”

“Do you need help?”

“I need help to get in. Open up.”

He slid the bolt and I pushed and entered. “Did you kill somebody?” he inquired.

Wolfe’s bellow sounded from the hall one flight up. “Archie! What the devil is it now?”

His tone implied that I owed him apologies, past due, for interfering with his sleep.

“Corpses on the sidewalk in front, and it might have been me!” I called to him bitterly, and went to the office and dialed Rhinelander 4-1445, the 19^th Precinct Station House.