Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24 (23 page)

“Let me hold his chin,” Neill requested. “I’ll fix his goddam chin.”

“Shut up,” Eston told him. “It’s a moral question.”

Kinney’s fist was still propping Durkin’s chin. “I think,” he said, “the boys ought to have a look at you. They won’t be sleeping anyhow, not tonight. Con, get on the phone and find them. You too, Lew—the one in the clubroom. Get ’em here, and get all of ’em you can. They’ll come all right. Tell them not to spill it; we don’t want any cops around until we get—”

“No!” Durkin squawked.

“No what, Beaky?” Kinney removed his fist.

“I didn’t mean to kill Nick.” He was slobbering. “I swear I didn’t, Art. He suspected—he asked me—he found out I bet a grand against us, and he threw it at me, and I brought him in here to explain, but he wouldn’t believe me and he was going to tell you, and he got sore and came at me, and I grabbed the bat just to stop him, and when I saw he was dead—my God, Art, I didn’t want to kill Nick!”

“You got more than a grand for doping the drinks. How much did you get?”

“I’m coming clean, Art. You can check me, and I’m coming clean. I got five grand, and I’ve got five more coming. I had to have it, Art, because the bookies had me down and I was sunk. I was listed good if I didn’t come through. I had it on me, but with the cops coming I knew we’d be frisked, so I ditched it. You can see I’m coming clean, Art. I ditched it there in the radio.”

“What radio?”

“There in the corner. I stuffed it in through a slot.”

There was a scramble and a race. Prentiss tangled with a chair and went down with it, sprawling. Nat Neill won. He jerked the radio around and started clawing at the back, but the panel was screwed on.

“Here,” I said, “I’ve got a—”

He hauled off and swung with his bare fist, getting his plug out of his system, though not on Durkin. Grabbing an edge of the hole his fist had made, he yanked, and half the panel came. He looked inside and started to stick his hand in, but I shouldered him good and hard and sent him sideways. The others were there, three of them, surrounding me. “We don’t touch it, huh?” I instructed them, and bent down for a look in the radio, and there it was, lodged between a pair of tubes.

“Well?” Wolfe called as I straightened up.

“A good fat roll,” I told him and the world. “The one on the outside is a C. Do you—”

Beaky Durkin, left to himself on the table, suddenly moved fast. He was on his feet and streaking for the door. Joe Eston, who had claimed it was a moral issue, leaped for him as if he had been a blazing line drive trying to
get by, got to him in two bounds, and landed with his right. Durkin went down all the way, slamming the floor with his head, and lay still.

“That will do,” Wolfe said, as one who had earned the right to command. “Thank you, gentlemen. I needed help. Archie, get Mr. Hennessy.”

I went to Kinney’s desk and reached for the phone. At the instant my fingers touched it, it rang. So instead of dialing I lifted it and, feeling cocky, told it, “Nero Wolfe’s uptown office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“That you, Goodwin?”

I said yes.

“This is Inspector Hennessy. Is Durkin there?”

I said yes.

“Fine. Hold him, and hold him good. We cracked Gale, and he spilled his guts. Durkin is it. Gale got to him and bought him. You’ll get credit for getting Gale, and that’ll be all right, but I’ll appreciate it if you’ll hold off and let it be announced officially. We’ll be there for Durkin in five minutes. Hold him good.”

“We’re already holding him good. He’s stretched out on the floor. Mr. Wolfe hung it on him. Also we have found a roll of lettuce he cached in the radio.”

Hennessy laughed. “You’re an awful liar, Goodwin. But you’re a privileged character tonight, I admit that. Have your fun. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

I hung up and turned to Wolfe. “That was Hennessy. They broke Gale, and he unloaded. He gave them Durkin, and they’re coming for him. Hennessy doesn’t believe we already got him, but of course on that we’ve got witnesses. The trouble is this: which of us crossed the plate first—you with your one little fact, or me with my druggist? You can’t deny that Hennessy’s call came before I started to dial. How can we settle it?”

We can’t. That was months ago, and it’s not settled yet.

R
EX
S
TOUT
, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel,
Fer-de-Lance
, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them,
Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang
and
Please Pass the Guilt
, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty” and as a member of several national committees. After the war, he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. All together, his Nero Wolfe novels have been translated into twenty-two languages and have sold more than forty-five million copies. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death, he published his forty-sixth Nero Wolfe novel,
A Family Affair
.