Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 (6 page)

“I ought to tell you,” she said in a low even voice, “that I didn’t want to come here, but Mr. O’Garro said it was absolutely necessary. I have decided I shouldn’t say anything to anybody. But if you have something to tell me—go ahead.”

Wolfe was glowering at her, and I would have liked to tell her that it meant nothing personal, it was only that the sight of a hungry human was painful to him, and the sight of one who must have been hungry for months was intolerable. He spoke. “You understand, Mrs. Wheelock, that I am acting for the firm of
Lippert, Buff and Assa, which is handling the contest for Heery Products, Incorporated.”

“Yes, Mr. O’Garro told me.”

“I do have a little to tell you, but not much. For one item, I have had a talk with one of the contestants, Miss Gertrude Frazee. You may know that she is the founder and president of an organization called the Women’s Nature League. She says that some three hundred of its members have helped her in the contest, which is not an infraction of the rules. She does not say that she has telephoned to them the verses that were distributed last evening, and that they are now working on them, but it wouldn’t be fanciful to assume that she has and they are. Have you any comment?”

She was staring at him, her mouth working.

“Three hundred,” she said.

Wolfe nodded.

“That’s cheating. That’s—she can’t do that. You can’t let her get away with it.”

“We may be helpless. If she has violated no rule and nothing that was agreed upon last evening, what then? This is one aspect of the grotesque situation created by the murder of Louis Dahlmann.”

“I’ll see the others.” The fire behind her eyes was showing through. “We won’t permit it. We’ll refuse to go ahead with those verses. We’ll insist on new ones when we’re allowed to go home.”

“That would suit Miss Frazee perfectly. She would send in her answers before the agreed deadline and demand the first prize, and if she didn’t get it she could sue and probably collect. You’ll have to do better than that if you want to head her off—emulate her, perhaps. Of course you’ve had help too—your husband, your friends; get them started.”

“I’ve had no help.”

She started to tremble, first her hands and then her shoulders, and I thought we were in for it, but she pulled one that I had never expected to see. Women of all ages and shapes and sizes have started to have a fit in that office. Some I have caught in time with a good shot of brandy, some I have stopped with a smack or other physical contact, and some I have had to ride out—with Wolfe gone because he can’t stand it. I left my chair and started for her, but she stuck her tongue out at me. So I thought, but that wasn’t it. She was only getting the tongue between her teeth and clamping down on it. Its end bulged and curled up and was purple, but she only clamped harder. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. She stopped trembling, opened her fists and closed them and opened them again, and got her shoulders set, rigid. Then she retrieved her tongue. I had a notion to give her a pat before returning to my chair, in recognition of an outstanding performance, but decided that a woman who could stand off a fit like that in ten seconds flat probably didn’t care for pats.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

“Brandy,” Wolfe told me.

“No,” she said, “I’m all right. I couldn’t drink brandy. I guess what did it was what you said about help. I haven’t had any. The first few weeks weren’t bad, but after that they got harder, and later, when they got really hard … I don’t know how I did it. I said I wasn’t going to say anything, but after what you said about Miss Frazee having three hundred women helping her … well. I’m thirty-two years old, and I have two children, and my husband is a bookkeeper and makes fifty dollars a week. I was a schoolteacher before I married. I had been going
along for years, just taking it, and I saw this contest and decided to win it. I’m going to have a nice home and a car—two cars, one for my husband and one for me—and I’m going to have some clothes, and I’m going to send my husband to school and make him a CPA if he has it in him. That day I saw the contest, I took charge that day. You know what I mean.”

“Indeed I do,” Wolfe muttered.

“So when they got hard there was no one I could ask for help, and anyway, if I had got help I would have had to share the prize. I didn’t do much eating or sleeping the last seven weeks of the main contest, but the worst was when they sent us five to do in a week to break the tie. I didn’t go to bed that week, and I was afraid I had one of them wrong, and I didn’t get them mailed until just before midnight—I went to the post office and made them let me see them stamp the envelope. After all that, do you think I’m going to let somebody get it by cheating? With three hundred women working at it while we’re not allowed to go home?”

After seeing her handle the fit I didn’t think she was going to let somebody get anything she had made up her mind to have, with or without cheating.

“It is manifestly unfair,” Wolfe conceded, “but I doubt if it can be called cheating, at least in the legal sense. And as for cheating, it’s conceivable that someone else had a bolder idea than Miss Frazee and acted upon it. By killing Mr. Dahlmann in order to get the answers.”

“I’m not going to say anything about that,” she declared. “I’ve decided not to.”

“The police have talked with you, of course.”

“Yes. They certainly have. For hours.”

“And they asked you what you thought last evening
when Mr. Dahlmann displayed a paper and said it contained the answers. What did you tell them?”

“I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Did you tell the police that? That you wouldn’t talk about it?”

“No. I hadn’t decided then. I decided later.”

“After consultation with someone?”

She shook her head. “With whom would I consult?”

“I don’t know. A lawyer. A phone call to your husband.”

“I haven’t got a lawyer. I wouldn’t call my husband—I know what he’d say. He thinks I’m crazy. I couldn’t pay a lawyer anyway because I haven’t got any money. They paid for the trip here, and the hotel, but nothing for incidentals. I was late for my appointment with you because I got on the wrong bus. I haven’t consulted anybody. I made the decision myself.”

“So you told the police what you thought when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not tell me? I assure you, madam, that I have only one interest in the matter, on behalf of my clients, to make sure that the prizes are fairly and honestly awarded. You see, of course, that that will be extremely difficult if in fact one of the contestants took that paper from Mr. Dahlmann and it contains the answers. You see that.”

“Yes.”

“However, it is the belief of my clients—and their contention—that the paper did not contain the answers, that Mr. Dahlmann was only jesting; and that therefore the secrecy of the answers is still intact. Do you challenge that contention?”

“No.”

“You accept it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must have told the police that when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper you regarded it as a joke, and the sequel is plain: it would be absurd to suspect you of going to his apartment and killing him to get it. So it is reasonable to suppose that you are not suspected.—Archie, your phone call from the corner. Did you see anyone?”

“Yes, sir. Art Whipple. He was here on the Heller case.”

“Tell Mrs. Wheelock about it.”

I met her eyes. “I was hanging out up the street when you came, and a Homicide detective was following you. I exchanged a few words with him. If you want to spot him when you leave, he’s about my size, drags his feet a little, and is wearing a dark gray suit and a gray snap-brim hat.”

“He was following me?”

“Right.”

Her eyes left me for Wolfe. “Isn’t that what they do?” But her left hand had started to tremble, and she had to grasp it with the other one and squeeze it. Wolfe shut his eyes, probably expecting some more tongue control. Instead, she arose abruptly and asked, “May I have—a bathroom?”

I told her certainly, and went and opened the door of the one partitioned off in the far corner, to the left of my desk, and she came and passed through, closing the door behind her.

She was in there a good quarter of an hour without making a sound. The partitions, like all the inner walls on the ground floor, are soundproofed, but I have sharp ears and heard nothing whatever. I said
something to Wolfe, but he only grunted. After a little he looked up at the clock: twenty to four. Thereafter he looked at it every two minutes; at four sharp he would leave for the plant rooms. There were just nine minutes to go when the door in the partition opened and she was back with us.

She came and stood at Wolfe’s desk, across from him. “I beg your pardon,” she said in her low even voice. “I had to take some pills. The food at the hotel is quite good, but I simply can’t eat. I haven’t eaten much for quite a while. Do you want to tell me anything else?”

“Milk toast,” Wolfe said gruffly. “My cook, Fritz Brenner, makes it superbly. Sit down.”

“I couldn’t swallow it. Really.”

“Then hot bouillon. Our own. It can be ready in eight minutes. I have to leave you, but Mr. Goodwin—”

“I couldn’t. I’m going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee—I think I am—I’ll think about it on the bus. That’s cheating.” She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.

Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn’t break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it. When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.

“You put the answers in the safe,” he stated.

“Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O’Garro and Talbott Heery were there, but I didn’t report that Heery brought me
downtown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him—”

“Verbatim, please.”

I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon’s interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, “For a footnote, Heery couldn’t knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?”

He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn’t been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.

I was in the middle of the Frazee notes when the phone interrupted me, and when I told it, “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking,” a male voice said, “I want to speak to Mr. Wolfe. This is Patrick O’Garro.”

They were certainly popping the precedents. He should have told his secretary, and she should have got me and spent five minutes trying to lobby me into putting Wolfe on. The best explanation was that they were playing it so close to their chins they were even keeping it from the staff that they had hired Nero Wolfe.

“He’s engaged,” I said, “and if I disengage him for a phone call it would have to be good. Can’t you use me for a relay?”

“I want to ask him if he’s made any progress.”

“If he has it’s in his head. He told you he would report later this evening. He has seen Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock. How about the others?”

“That’s why I’m calling. Susan Tescher will be there at six, and Harold Rollins at seven, but Younger can’t come. He’s in bed at the hotel with heart flutters. They sent him up from the District Attorney’s office in an ambulance. He wouldn’t go to a hospital. My doctor saw him and says it’s not serious, but he’s staying in bed until the doctor sees him tomorrow.”

I said I’d tell Wolfe and got the number of Younger’s room. After I hung up I got at the house phone and buzzed the plant rooms, and in a minute Wolfe’s voice blurted at me, “Well?”

“O’Garro just phoned. One’s coming at six and one at seven, but at the DA’s office Philip Younger’s heart began to flutter and he’s at the hotel in bed. Shall I go up and sit with him?”

“You must be back by six o’clock.”

I said I would and the connection went.

There was a slight problem. Years before, after a certain episode, I had made myself promise that I would never go on any errand connected with a murder case without a gun, but this wasn’t a murder case by the terms agreed upon. The job was to nail a thief. I decided that was quibbling, got my shoulder holster from the drawer and put it on, got the Marley .32 and loaded it and slipped it into the holster, went to the hall, and called to Fritz to come and bolt the door after me.

I
t was safe to assume that the floor clerk on the eighteenth floor of the Churchill would be stubborn about it, since journalists were certainly stalking the quintet, so I anticipated her by first finding Tim Evarts, the hotel’s first assistant security officer, not to be called a house dick, who owed me a little courtesy from past events. He obliged by phoning her, after I promised to set no fires and find no corpses, and all she did was look at both sides of my card and one side of me and wave me on.

Eighteen-twenty-six was about halfway down a long corridor. There was no one in sight anywhere except a chambermaid with towels, and I concluded that the city employees hadn’t invaded the hotel itself for surveillance. My first knock on the door of eighteen-twenty-six got me an invitation to come in, not too audible, and I opened the door and entered, and saw that LBA had done well by their guests. It was the fifteen-dollar size, with the twin beds headed against the wall at the left. On one of them, under the covers, was Old King Cole with a hangover, his mop of white hair tousled and his eyes sick.