And Be a Villain (19 page)

“Not to me. He never gets within ten miles of me. The handling of the money is an important detail and you may be sure it has been well organized. Only one man ever gets close enough to me to bring me money. It shouldn’t take me long to build up a fine list of subscribers to
Track Almanac
—certainly a hundred, possibly five hundred. Let us be moderate and say two hundred. That’s two thousand dollars a week. If Mr. Orchard keeps half, he can pay all expenses and have well over thirty thousand a year for his net. If he has any sense, and he has been carefully chosen and is under surveillance, that will satisfy him. For me, it’s a question of my total volume. How many units do I have? New York is big enough for four or five, Chicago for two or three, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles for two each, at least a dozen cities for one. If I wanted to stretch it I could easily get twenty units working. But we’ll be moderate again and stop at twelve. That would bring me in six hundred thousand dollars a year for my share. My operating costs shouldn’t be more than half that; and when you consider that my net is really net, with no income tax to pay, I am doing very well indeed.”

Cramer started to say something, but Wolfe put up a hand:

“Please. As I said, all that is fairly clever, especially the avoidance of real threats about real secrets, but what makes it a masterpiece is the limitation of the tribute. All blackmailers will promise that this time is the last, but I not only make the promise, I keep it. I have an inviolable rule never to ask for a subscription renewal.”

“You can’t prove it.”

“No, I can’t. But I confidently assume it, because it is the essence, the great beauty, of the plan. A man can put up with a pain—and this was not really a pain, merely a discomfort, for people with good incomes—if he thinks he knows when it will stop, and if it stops when the time comes. But if I make them pay year after year, with no end in sight, I invite sure disaster. I’m too good a businessman for that. It is much cheaper and safer to get four new subscribers a week for each unit; that’s all that is needed to keep it at a constant two hundred subscribers.”

Wolfe nodded emphatically. “By all means, then, if I am to stay in business indefinitely, and I intend to, I must make that rule and rigidly adhere to it; and I do so. There will of course be many little difficulties, as there are in any enterprise, and I must also be prepared for an unforeseen contingency. For example, Mr. Orchard may get killed. If so I must know of it at once, and I must have a man in readiness to remove all papers from his office, even though there is nothing there that could possibly lead to me. I would prefer to have no inkling of the nature and extent of my operations reach unfriendly parties. But I am not panicky; why should I be? Within two weeks one of my associates—the one who makes the phone calls for my units that are managed by females—begins phoning the
Track Almanac
subscribers to tell them that their remaining payments should be made to another publication called
What to Expect
. It would have been better to discard my
Track Almanac
list and take my loss, but I don’t know that. I only find it out when Miss Poole also gets killed. Luckily my surveillance is excellent. Again an office must be cleaned out, and this time under hazardous conditions and with dispatch. Quite likely my man has seen the murderer, and can even name him; but I’m not interested in catching a murderer; what I want is to save my business from these confounded interruptions. I discard both those cursed lists, destroy them, burn them, and start plans for two entirely new units. How about a weekly sheet giving the latest shopping information? Or a course in languages, any language? There are numberless possibilities.”

Wolfe leaned back. “There’s your connection, Mr. Cramer.”

“The hell it is,” Cramer mumbled. He was rubbing the side of his nose with his forefinger. He was sorting things out. After a moment he went on, “I thought maybe you were going to end up by killing both of them yourself. That would be a connection too, wouldn’t it?”

“Not a very plausible one. Why would I choose that time and place and method for killing Mr. Orchard? Or even Miss Poole—why there in her office? It wouldn’t be like me. If they had to be disposed of surely I would have made better arrangements than that.”

“Then you’re saying it was a subscriber.”

“I make the suggestion. Not necessarily a subscriber, but one who looked at things from the subscriber’s viewpoint.”

“Then the poison was intended for Orchard after all.”

“I suppose so, confound it. I admit that’s hard to swallow. It’s sticking in my throat.”

“Mine too.” Cramer was skeptical. “One thing you overlooked. You were so interested in pretending it was you, you didn’t mention who it really is. This patient ruthless bird that’s pulling down over half a million a year. Could I have his name and address?”

“Not from me,” Wolfe said positively. “I strongly doubt if you could finish him, and if you tried he would know who had named him. Then I would have to undertake it, and I don’t want to tackle him. I work for money, to make a living, not just to keep myself alive. I don’t want to be reduced to that primitive extremity.”

“Nuts. You’ve been telling me a dream you had. You can’t stand it for anyone to think you don’t know everything, so you even have the brass to tell me to my face that you know his name. You don’t even know he exists, any more than Orchard did.”

“Oh, yes I do. I’m much more intelligent than Mr. Orchard.”

“Have it your way,” Cramer conceded generously. “You trade orchids with him. So what? He’s not in my department. If he wasn’t behind these murders I don’t want him. My job is homicide. Say you didn’t dream it, say it’s just as you said, what comes next? How have I gained an inch or you either? Is that what you got me here for, to tell me about your goddam units in twelve different cities?”

“Partly. I didn’t know your precinct sergeant had been reminded of something. But that wasn’t all. Do you feel like telling me why Miss Koppel tried to get on an airplane?”

“Sure I feel like it, but I can’t because I don’t know. She says to see her sick mother. We’ve tried to find another reason that we like better, but no luck. She’s under bond not to leave the state.”

Wolfe nodded. “Nothing seems to fructify, does it? What I really wanted was to offer a suggestion. Would you like one?”

“Let me hear it.”

“I hope it will appeal to you. You said that you have had men working in the circles of the Orchard subscribers you know about, and that there have been no results on Professor Savarese or Miss Fraser. You might have expected that, and probably did, since those two have given credible reasons for having subscribed. Why not shift your aim to another target? How many men are available for that sort of work?”

“As many as I want.”

“Then put a dozen or more onto Miss Vance—or, rather, onto her associates. Make it thorough. Tell the men that the object is not to learn whether anonymous letters regarding Miss Vance have been received. Tell them that that much had been confidently assumed, and that their job is to find out what the letters said, and who got them and when. It will require pertinacity to the farthest limit of permissible police conduct. The man good enough actually to secure one of the letters will be immediately promoted.”

Cramer sat scowling. Probably he was doing the same as me, straining for a quick but comprehensive flashback of all the things that Elinor Vance had seen or done, either in our presence or to our knowledge. Finally he inquired:

“Why her?”

Wolfe shook his head. “If I explained you would say I was telling you another dream. I assure you that in my opinion the reason is good.”

“How many letters to how many people?”

Wolfe’s brows went up. “My dear sir! If I knew that would I let you get a finger in it? I would have her here ready for delivery, with evidence. What the deuce is wrong with it? I am merely suggesting a specific line of inquiry on a specific person whom you have already been tormenting for over three weeks.”

“You’re letting my finger in now. If it’s any good why don’t you hire men with your clients’ money and sail on through?”

Wolfe snorted. He was disgusted. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll do that. Don’t bother about it. Doubtless your own contrivances are far superior. Another sergeant may be reminded of something that happened at the turn of the century.”

Cramer stood up. I thought he was going to leave without a word, but he spoke. “That’s pretty damn cheap, Wolfe. You would never have heard of that sergeant if I hadn’t told you about him. Freely.”

He turned and marched out. I made allowances for both of them because their nerves were on edge. After three weeks for Cramer, and more than two for Wolfe, they were no closer to the killer of Cyril Orchard than when they started.

I
HAVE TO ADMIT that for me the toss to Elinor Vance was a passed ball. It went by me away out of reach. I halfway expected that now at last we would get some hired help, but when I asked Wolfe if I should line up Saul and Fred and Orrie he merely grunted. I wasn’t much surprised, since it was in accordance with our new policy of letting the cops do it. It was a cinch that Cramer’s first move on returning to his headquarters would be to start a pack sniffing for anonymous letters about Elinor Vance.

After lunch I disposed of a minor personal problem by getting Wolfe’s permission to pay a debt, though that wasn’t the way I put it. I told him that I would like to call Lon Cohen and give him the dope on how subscriptions to
Track Almanac
and
What to Expect
had been procured, of course without any hint of a patient ruthless master mind who didn’t exist, and naming no names. My arguments were (a) that Wolfe had fished it up himself and therefore Cramer had no copyright, (b) that it was desirable to have a newspaper under an obligation, (c) that it would serve them right for the vicious editorial they had run, and (d) that it might possibly start a fire somewhere that would give us a smoke signal. Wolfe nodded, but I waited until he had gone up to the plant rooms to phone Lon to pay up. If I had done it in his hearing he’s so damn suspicious that some word, or a shade of a tone, might have started him asking questions.

Another proposal I made later on didn’t do so well. He turned it down flat. Since it was to be assumed that I had forgotten the name Arnold Zeck, I used Duncan instead. I reminded Wolfe that he had told Cramer that it was likely that an employee of Duncan’s had seen the killer of Beula Poole, and could even name him. What I proposed was to call the Midland number and leave a message for Duncan to phone Wolfe. If and when he did so Wolfe would make an offer: if Duncan would come through on the killer, not for quotation of course, Wolfe would agree to forget that he had ever heard tell of anyone whose name began with Z—pardon me, D.

All I got was my head snapped off. First, Wolfe would make no such bargain with a criminal, especially a dysgenic one; and second, there would be no further communication between him and the nameless buzzard unless the buzzard started it. That seemed shortsighted to me. If he didn’t intend to square off with the bird unless he had to, why not take what he could get? After dinner that evening I tried to bring it up again, but he wouldn’t discuss it.

The following morning, Friday, we had a pair of visitors that we hadn’t seen for quite a while: Walter B. Anderson, the Hi-Spot president, and Fred Owen, the director of public relations. When the doorbell rang a little before noon and I went to the front and saw them on the stoop, my attitude was quite different from what it had been the first time. They had no photographers along, and they were clients in good standing entitled to one hell of a beef if they only knew it, and there was a faint chance that they had a concealed weapon, maybe a hatpin, to stick into Wolfe. So without going to the office to check I welcomed them across the threshold.

Wolfe greeted them without any visible signs of rapture, but at least he didn’t grump. He even asked them how they did. While they were getting seated he shifted in his chair so he could give his eyes to either one without excessive exertion for his neck muscles. He actually apologized:

“It isn’t astonishing if you gentlemen are getting a little impatient. But if you are exasperated, so am I. I had no idea it would drag on like this. No murderer likes to be caught, naturally; but this one seems to have an extraordinary aversion to it. Would you like me to describe what has been accomplished?”

“We know pretty well,” Owens stated. He was wearing a dark brown double-breasted pin-stripe that must have taken at least five fittings to get it the way it looked.

“We know too well,” the president corrected him. Usually I am tolerant of the red-faced plump type, but every time that geezer opened his mouth I wanted to shut it and not by talking.

Wolfe frowned. “I’ve admitted your right to exasperation. You needn’t insist on it.”

“We’re not exasperated with you, Mr. Wolfe,” Owen declared.

“I am,” the president corrected him again. “With the whole damn thing and everything and everyone connected with it. For a while I’ve been willing to string along with the idea that there can’t be any argument against a Hooper in the high twenties, but I’ve thought I might be wrong and now I know I was. My God, blackmail! Were you responsible for that piece in the
Gazette
this morning?”

“Well …” Wolfe was being judicious. “I would say that the responsibility rests with the man who conceived the scheme. I discovered and disclosed it—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Anderson waved it aside. “What does matter is that my company and my product cannot and will not be connected in the public mind with blackmail. That’s dirty. That makes people gag.”

“I absolutely agree,” Owen asserted.

“Murder is moderately dirty too,” Wolfe objected.

“No,” Anderson said flatly. “Murder is sensational and exciting, but it’s not like blackmail and anonymous letters. I’m through. I’ve had enough of it.”

He got a hand in his breast pocket and pulled out an envelope, from which he extracted an oblong strip of blue paper. “Here’s a check for your fee, the total amount. I can collect from the others—or not. I’ll see. Send me a bill for expenses to date. You understand, I’m calling it off.”