Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 (4 page)

“We have considered it. That wouldn’t even be risky, it would be certain. By tomorrow morning it
would have got out that the answers to the contest had been stolen, and it would be a national scandal, and LBA would have a black eye that they might never recover from.”

Wolfe was stubborn. “I must be sure you have thought it through. Even if I get the culprit before the deadline it will likewise come out that the answers were stolen.”

“Yes, but then we will have the thief, and we’ll have arranged to decide the contest in a way agreed to by everybody else concerned. A totally different situation. LBA will be admired and congratulated for dealing with a crisis promptly, boldly, and brilliantly.”

“Not by the police.”

“No. But by the advertising and business world, the press, and the American people.”

“I suppose so.” Wolfe’s head turned. “I would like to make sure of the decision to dodge with the police. You concur in it, Mr. Buff?”

Buff’s big red face had been getting redder, and his brow was moist. “I do,” he said. “Because I have to.”

“Mr. O’Garro?”

“Yes. We had that out before we came to you.”

“Mr. Assa?”

“Yes. You’re wasting time!”

“No. If it were a simple matter of catching a murderer—but it isn’t. This is full of complexities, and I must know things.” Wolfe turned a palm up. “For example. If I were sure that the one who took the wallet actually got the paper with the answers, that would help. But what if he didn’t? What if the paper Dahlmann displayed was something else, and it was in fact a hoax, and the thief got nothing for his pains?
That would make my job much more difficult and would require a completely different procedure.”

“Don’t worry,” O’Garro assured him. “It was the answers all right. I was there and saw him. Vern?”

“I would say twenty to one,” Assa declared. “Louis would get a kick out of showing them the paper with the answers, but just faking it, no. What do you think, Oliver?”

“You know quite well what I think.” Buff was grim. “It was strictly in character. At the age of thirty-two Louis Dahlmann was a great creative genius, and in another ten years he would have been a dominant figure in American advertising, another Lasker. That’s what we all thought, didn’t we? But he had that lunatic streak in him. Of course that paper was the answers; there’s not the slightest doubt. After you phoned me last night, Pat, I would have gone down to his place myself, but what was the use? Even if he had destroyed the paper to humor me, after I left he could have sat down and written another one just like it, and he probably would have. But now I wish I had. Right now the future of LBA is in more danger than at any time in the thirty-eight years I’ve been with it. On account of him! If he were here now, alive, I tell you it would be hard for me to—” He tightened his lips and let the sentence hang.

Wolfe went to the lawyer. “Are you also convinced, Mr. Hansen, that it was no hoax?”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll proceed on that assumption until it is disproved. I must first see the five contestants, preferably not together, even though time is pressing.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “They may already be engaged with the police, but we’ll try. One of you will
phone and arrange for one of them to be here at twelve-thirty, and arrange also for the others—one at three, one at six, one at—”

“Why six?” Assa demanded. “Good God, you won’t need three hours!”

“I hope not. One should be plenty. But from four to six I’ll be occupied with other matters, and—”

“There are no other matters! That’s preposterous!”

Wolfe eyed him. “Your firm hasn’t hired me by the hour, Mr. Assa. My schedule isn’t subject to direction. I work as I work. One of them at three o’clock, one at six, one at seven, and one at eight. You can tell them that their detention in the city has created certain problems in connection with the contest and that you would like them to confer with me as your firm’s representative. You will of course not mention the paper Mr. Dahlmann displayed last evening. I’ll have dinner at nine o’clock, and any time after ten-thirty you may call on me for a report.”

“I’d like to be present at the interviews,” Hansen said. “But I can’t at twelve-thirty.”

“You can’t at all, sir. They’re going to be ticklish enough as it is, and I may even banish Mr. Goodwin. He will have an errand, by the way. Where is the safe deposit vault in which the answers were placed?”

“The Forty-seventh Street office of the Continental Trust Company.”

“One of you will please meet Mr. Goodwin there at two-thirty, take him to the vault, open the envelopes containing the last five verses and the last five answers, and let him copy them and bring the copies to me. Return the originals to the vault.”

“Impossible,” O’Garro said positively. “Those envelopes must not be opened.”

“Nonsense.” Wolfe was beginning to get touchy, as usual when he was compelled to start things moving in his skull. “Why not? Those verses and answers are done for. No matter what happens, they can’t possibly be the basis for awarding the prizes. They might, if we could get apodictic proof that there was no paper in Dahlmann’s wallet containing the answers, but we can’t. Can any of you describe any circumstances in which those verses and answers can now be used? Try it.”

They exchanged glances. Wolfe waited.

“You’re right,” Buff admitted for the firm.

“Then it can do no harm for me to have them, provided Mr. Goodwin and I keep them to ourselves, and it may do some good. I have an idea for using them which may be worth developing. Will one of you meet him at two-thirty?”

“Yes,” Buff agreed. “Probably two of us. Those envelopes have been untouchable. Mr. Heery will have to know about it. He may want to be present.”

“As you please. By the way, since his firm is as deeply concerned as yours, what about him? Does he know you’re hiring me? Does he approve your strategy?”

“Completely.”

“Then that will do for now. Please use the phone on Mr. Goodwin’s desk. Do you want him to get a number for you?”

They didn’t, which was the best proof yet of how desperate they were. Since those birds were up around the top, the top numbers in one of the three biggest agencies in the country, with corner rooms at least twenty by twenty and incomes in six figures, it had of course been years since any of them had personally dialed a number in an office. To expect them to
would be against all reason. But when I vacated my chair O’Garro came and took it, asked me for the number of the Churchill, and went ahead and dialed it as if it were a natural and normal procedure. I thought, There you are, a man with eyes as clever as that can do anything.

It took a while. After the rest of us had sat and listened for some minutes he finally hung up and told us, “Two of them were out. Rollins was just leaving for an appointment at Homicide West. Miss Frazee will be here at twelve-thirty.”

Hansen, on his feet, said, “We must go, we’ll be half an hour late. We’ll get them later.”

But Wolfe kept them for one more thing, information about the five contestants. They only had enough to fill one page of my notebook, which wasn’t much to go on. I went to the hall with them to see that nobody took my topcoat by mistake, let them out, and returned to the office. Wolfe was sitting with his eyes closed and his palms flattened on the desk. I went to my desk and wheeled the machine to me and got out paper, to type the meager dope on the suspects. At the sound of footsteps I turned to see Fritz enter with beer on a tray.

“No,” I said firmly. “Take it back, Fritz.”

“A woman is coming!” Wolfe bellowed.

“That’s only an excuse. The real trouble is that you hate a job with a deadline, especially when you stand about one chance in four thousand. I admit that before midnight April twentieth is one hell of an order, but on January nineteenth at three-twenty-seven p.m. you told me that if you ever rang for beer before lunch I should cancel it and disregard your protests, if any. I don’t blame you for losing control, since we’re
almost certainly going to get our noses bumped, but no beer until after lunch. However, we don’t want to embarrass Mr. Brenner.”

I went and took the tray from Fritz and convoyed it to the kitchen.

I
f I had known what was on the way to him in the shape of Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles, founder and president of the Women’s Nature League, I wouldn’t have had the heart to hijack the beer. And if Wolfe had known, he probably would have refused the case and sent LBA and their counselor on their way.

I should try to describe her outfit, but I won’t; I will only say she had swiped it from a museum. As for describing her, it’s hard to believe. The inside corners of her eyes were trying to touch above a long thin nose, and nearly made it. Only an inch of brow was visible because straggles of gray hair flopped down over the rest. The left half of her mouth slanted up and the right half slanted down, and that made you think her chin was lower on one side than on the other, though maybe it wasn’t. She was exactly my height, five feet eleven, and she strode.

She sat halfway back in the red leather chair, with both hands on her bag in her lap and her back straight and stiff. “I fail to see,” she told Wolfe, “that the death of that man has any effect on the contest. Murder or
not. There was nothing in the rules about anybody dying.”

When she spoke her lips wanted to move perpendicular to the slant, but her jaw preferred straight up and down. You might have thought that after so many years, at least sixty, they would have come to an understanding, but nothing doing.

Wolfe was taking her in. “Certainly, madam, the rules did not contemplate sudden and violent death, and made no provision for it. The contest is affected, not by the death itself, but by the action of the police in asking the contestants not to leave the city until further—”

“They didn’t ask me! They told me! They said if I left I would be brought back and arrested for murder!”

I shook my head. So she was that kind. No homicide cop and no assistant DA could possibly have said anything of the sort.

“They are sometimes ebullient,” Wolfe told her. “Anyhow, I wanted to discuss not only the contest, but also you. After the prizes are awarded there will be great demand for information about the winners, and my clients want to be able to supply it. The enforced delay gives us this opportunity. My assistant, Mr. Goodwin, will take notes. I assume that you have never married, Miss Frazee?”

“I have not. And I won’t.” Her eyes took in my notebook. “I want to see anything that’s going to be printed about me.”

“You will. Have you ever won a prize in a contest?”

“I have never entered a contest. I despise contests.”

“Indeed. Didn’t you enter this one?”

“Of course I did. That’s a stupid question.”

“No doubt.” Wolfe was polite. “But surely that’s an interesting paradox—you despise contests, but you entered one. There must have been a compelling motive?”

“I fail to see that my motive is anybody’s business, but I certainly am not ashamed of it. Ten years ago I founded the Women’s Nature League of America. We have many thousand members, too many to count. What is your opinion of women who smear themselves with grease and soot and paint and stink themselves up with stuff made from black tar and decayed vegetable matter and tumors from male deer?”

“I haven’t formulated one, madam.”

“Of course you have. You’re a male.” Her eyes darted to me. “What’s yours, young man?”

“It depends,” I told her. “The tumor part sounds bad.”

“It smells bad. It’s been used for thirty centuries. Musk. In the Garden of Eden, when Eve’s face was dirty what did she do? She washed it with good clean water. What do women do today? They rub it in with grease! Look at their lips and fingernails and toes and eyelashes—and other places. The Women’s Nature League is the champion and the friend of the natural woman, and the natural woman was Eve, Eve the way God made her. The only true beauty is natural beauty, and I know, because I was denied that wondrous gift. I am not merely unlovely, I am ugly. The well-favored ones have no right to pollute the beauty of nature. I know!”

Her back had bowed a little, and she straightened it. “That knowledge came to me early, and it has been my staff and my banner all my life. I have always had to work for my bread, but I saved some money, and
ten years ago I used some of it to start the League. We have many members, over three thousand, but the dues are small and we are severely limited. Last fall, last September, when I saw the advertisement of the contest, I thought again what I had thought many times before, that it was hopeless because there was too much money against us, millions and millions, and then, sitting there looking at the advertisement, the idea came to me. Why not use
their
money for
us?
I considered it and approved of it. A majority of our members live in or near Los Angeles, and most of them are cultured and educated women. I phoned to some and asked them to phone others, and all of them were enthusiastic about it and wanted to help. I organized it, and you don’t have to be beautiful to know how to organize. Within two weeks there were over three hundred of us working at it. We had no serious trouble with any of the original twenty, the twenty that were published—except Number Eighteen, and we finally got that. With the second group, to break the tie, with those we had to get five in less than a week, which was unfair because the verses were all mailed at the same time in New York and it took longer for them to get to me, and they were harder, much harder, but we got them, and I mailed them ten hours before the deadline. We’re going to get these too.” She tapped her bag, in her lap. “No question about it. No question at all. We’re going to get it, no matter how hard they are. Half a million dollars. For the League.”

Wolfe was regarding her, trying not to frown and nearly succeeding. “Not necessarily half a million, madam. You have four competitors.”

“The first prize,” she said confidently. “Half a million.”
Suddenly she leaned forward. “Do you ever have a flash?”

The frown won. “Of what? Anger? Wit?”