Some Buried Caesar (23 page)

In 5 minutes, in spite of the exposition traffic, we were pulling up at the courthouse. Instead of entering at the front, as with Osgood when calling on Waddell the day before, we went around to a side entrance that was on the ground level. The hall was dark and smelled of disinfectant and stale tobacco juice. The trooper preceding us turned the knob of a door marked SHERI F, with one F gone, and I followed him in with Barrow at my rear. It was a big dingy room with decrepit desks and chairs, at one desk in a corner being the only occupant, a bald-headed gentleman with a red face and gold-rimmed specs who nodded at us and said nothing.

“We’re going through you,” Barrow announced.

I nodded indifferently and struck a pose. I know that the whole included all its parts and that that was one of the parts, and it had been necessary for Wolfe to toss me to the dogs so that he could have a private interview with the district attorney’s coat pocket. So I tolerated it, and got additional proof that they had been to police school. They did everything but rip my seams. When they had finished I returned the various items to their proper places, and sat down. Barrow stood and gazed down at me. I was surprised he didn’t go and wash his face, because that nicotine and soap must have stung. Tough as they come, those weather-beaten babies.

“The mistake you made,” I told him, “was coming in there breathing fire. Nero Wolfe and I are respectable law-abiding detectives.”

He grunted. “Forget it. I’d give a month’s pay to know how you did it, and maybe I’ll find out sometime, but not now. I’m not going to try any hammering. Not at present.” He glanced to see that the trooper was ready at a desk with notebook and pencil. “I just want to know a few things. Do you maintain that you took nothing from Bronson at any time?”

“I do.”

“Did you suspect him of being implicated in the murder of Clyde Osgood?”

“You’ve got the wrong party. Mr. Wolfe does all the suspecting for the firm, ask him. I’m the office boy.”

“Do you refuse to answer?”

“No indeed. If you want to know whether I personally suspected Bronson of murder, the reply is no. No known motive.”

“Wasn’t there anything in his relations with Clyde that might have supplied a motive?”

“Search me. You’re wasting time. Day before yesterday at 2 o’clock the Osgoods and Pratts and Bronson were all complete strangers to Mr. Wolfe and me. Our only interest in any of them is that Osgood hired us to investigate the murder of his son. You started investigating simultaneously. If you’re discouraged with what you’ve collected and want our crop as a handout, you’ll have to go to Mr. Wolfe. You said you wanted to question me in connection with the murder of Howard Bronson.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Go ahead.”

He kicked a chair around and sat down. “Wolfe interviewed Bronson last night. What was said at that interview?”

“Ask Mr. Wolfe.”

“Do you refuse to answer?”

“I do, you know. I’m a workingman and don’t want to lose my job.”

“Neither do I. I’m working on a murder, Goodwin.”

“So am I.”

“Were you working on it when you entered the shed this afternoon where Bronson was killed?”

“No, not at that moment. I was waiting for Lew Bennett to tear himself away from the judging lot. I happened to see Nancy Osgood going into the shed and followed her out of curiosity. I found her in there in the stall talking to Jimmy Pratt. I knew her old man would be sore if he heard of it, which would have been too bad under the circumstances, so I advised them to postpone it and scatter, and they did so, and I went back to the Methodist tent where my employer was.”

“How did they and you happen to pick the spot where Bronson’s body was?”

“I didn’t pick it, I found them there. I don’t know why they picked it, but it would seem likely that it wasn’t cause and effect. I imagine they would have chosen some other spot if they had known what was under the pile of straw.”

“Did you know what was under it?”

“I’ll give you three guesses.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Why were you so eager to get them out of there in a hurry?”

“I wouldn’t say I was eager. It struck me they were fairly dumb to feed gossip at this particular time.”

“You wouldn’t say that you were eager to keep it quiet that they had been there, and you had?”

“Eager? Nope. Put it that I was inclined to feel it was desirable.”

“Then why did you bribe the shed attendant?”

Of course he had telegraphed it again. But even so it was an awkward and undesirable question.

“I was waiting for that,” I told him. “Now you have got me where it hurts, because the only explanation I can offer, which is the true one, is loony. There are times when I feel kittenish, and that was one. I’ll give it to you verbatim.” I did so, words and music, repeating the conversation just as it had occurred, up to the departure of the beneficiary. “There,” I said, “Robin Hood, his sign. And when a corpse was discovered there, the louse thought I had been bribing him with a measly tenspot, and so did you. I swear to God I’ll lay for him tonight and take it away from him.”

Barrow grunted. “You’re good at explanations. The fingerprints on the wallet. I suppose a man like Bronson would leave a wallet containing two thousand dollars lying around on a veranda. Now this. Do you realize how good you are?”

“I told you it was loony. But lacking evidence to the contrary, you might assume that I’m sane. Do I look like a goof who would try to gag a stranger in a case of murder with a ten dollar note? Should I start serious bribing around here, the per capita income of this county would shoot up like a skyrocket. And by
the way, does that clodhopper say that I made any suggestions about silence or even discretion?”

“We’re all clodhoppers around here. You try telling a jury of clodhoppers that you’re in the habit of tossing out ten dollar bills for the comic effect.”

I snorted. “Unveil it, brother. What jury? My peers sitting on my life? Honest, are you as batty as that?”

“No.” The Captain squinted at me and rubbed a spot on the side of his neck. “No, Goodwin, I’m not. I’m not looking forward to the pleasure of hearing a jury’s opinion of you. Nor do I bear any grudge because you and your boss started the stink on the Osgood thing. I don’t care how slick you are or where you come from or how much you soak Osgood for, but now that the bag has been opened it is going to be emptied. Right to the bottom. Do you understand that?”

“Go ahead and jiggle it.”

“I’m going to. And nothing’s going to roll out of my sight while I’m not looking. You say ask Wolfe, and I’m going to, but right now I’m asking you. Are you going to talk or not?”

“My God, my throat’s sore now.”

“Yeah. I’ve got the wallet with your prints all over it. I’ve got the bill you gave the shed attendant. Are you going to tell me what you got from Bronson and where it is?”

“You’re just encouraging me to lie, Captain.”

“All right, I’ll encourage you some more. This morning a sheriffs deputy was in the hotel lobby when Bronson entered. When Bronson went to a phone booth and put in a New York call, the deputy got himself plugged in on another line. He heard
Bronson tell somebody in New York that a man named Goodwin had poked him in the jaw and taken the receipt from him, but that he expected to pull it off anyway. Well?”

“Gee,” I said, “that’s swell. All you have to do is have the New York cops grab the somebody and run him through the coffee grinder—”

“Much obliged. What was the receipt for and where is it?”

I shook my head. “The deputy must have heard wrong. Maybe the name was Doodwin or Goldstein or DiMaggio—”

“I
would
like to clip you. Jesus, I would enjoy stretching you out.” Barrow breathed. “Are you going to spill it?”

“Sorry, nothing to spill.”

“On the hotel register you wrote your first name as Archie. Is that correct?”

“Yep.”

He turned to his colleague. “Bill, you’ll find Judge Hutchins waiting upstairs. Run up and swear out a material witness commitment. Archie Goodwin. Hurry down with it, we’ve got to shake a leg.”

I raised the brows. The cossack made it snappy. I asked, “How’s the accommodations?”

“Fair. A little crowded on account of the exposition. Any time you’re ready to talk turkey—”

“No speak English. This will get you a row of ciphers and the finger of scorn and a bellyache.”

He merely looked unflinching. We sat. In a few minutes his pal returned with a document, and I asked to see it and was obliged. Barrow took it and asked me to come on, and I went between them down the dark hall, around a corner and along another hall,
and into another office smaller than the one we had left but not so dingy, with WARDEN on the door. A sleepy-looking plump guy sat at a desk which had a vase of flowers on it besides miscellany. He let out a low growl when he saw us, like a dog being disturbed in the middle of comfort. Barrow handed him the paper and told him:

“Material witness in the Bronson case. We’ve gone through him; I suppose you’ll want to take his jack-knife. I’ll stop in later for my copy or get it in the morning. Any time he asks for me, day or night, I want to see him.”

The warden pushed a button on his desk, ran his eyes over the paper, looked at me, and cackled. “By golly, bud, you should have put on some old clothes. The valley service here is terrible.”

I
t was certainly an antique. Apparently it was a whole wing of the ground floor of the courthouse. The cells faced each other, two rows of them, one on either side of a long corridor. Mine was two doors from the far end. My cellmate was a chap in a dark blue suit with a pointed nose and sharp brown eyes and a thick mop of well-brushed hair. At the time I was locked in, which was around 6 o’clock, he was sitting on one of the cots brushing the hair. The dim light from the little barred window, too high to see out of, made things seem gloomy. We exchanged greetings and he went on brushing. Pretty soon he asked:

“Got any cards or dice with you?”

“Nope.”

“They didn’t strip you, did they?”

“They took my knife.”

He put the brush down and nodded. “You can’t kick on that. Were you working out at the grounds? I’ve never seen you around before.”

“You wouldn’t. My name is Archie Goodwin, and I’m from New York and am being squeezed.” I waved
a hand and sat down on the other cot, which was covered with a dirty gray blanket. “Forget it. Were you working out at the grounds?”

“I was until yesterday afternoon. Spoon-bean. Are you hungry?”

“I could eat. But I hesitate to send in an order—”

“Oh, not on the house. No. They feed at 5, and it’s the usual. But if you’re hungry and happen to have a little jack …”

“Go ahead.”

He went over to the door and tapped three times with his fingernail on one of the iron bars, waited a second, and tapped twice. In a couple of minutes slow footsteps sounded in the corridor, and as they got to our apartment my mate said in a tone restrained but not particularly secretive, “Here, Slim.”

I got up and ambled across. It wasn’t the keeper who had escorted me in, but a tall skinny object with an Adam’s apple as big as a goose egg. I got out the Nero Wolfe expense wallet, extracted a dollar bill, and told him that I required two ham sandwiches and a chocolate egg malted. He took it but shook his head and said it wasn’t enough. I told him I knew that but hadn’t wanted to spoil him, and parted from another one, and asked him to include 5 evening papers in the order.

By the time he returned, in a quarter of an hour, my mate and I were old friends. His name was Basil Graham, and his firsthand knowledge of geography and county jails was extensive. I spread my lunch out on the cot with a sheet of the newspaper for a tablecloth, and it wasn’t until the last crumb had disappeared that he made a proposal which might have withered the friendship in the bud if I hadn’t been
firm. His preparations were simple but interesting. From under the blanket of his cot he produced three teaspoons of the five and dime variety, and a small white bean. Then he came over and picked up one of my newspapers and asked, “May I?” I nodded. He put the newspaper on the floor and sat on it, and in front of him, on the concrete, ranged the three teaspoons in a row, bottoms up. He had nifty fingers. Under one of the spoons he put the bean and then looked up at me like the friend he was.

“You understand,” he said, “I’m just showing you how it’s done. It will pass the time. Sometimes the hand is quicker, sometimes the eye is quicker. It’s not a game of chance, but a game of skill. Your eye against my hand. Your eye may be quicker than my hand, and we can only tell by trying. It never hurts to try. Which spoon is the bean under?”

I told him, and it was. He tried again, his fingers darting, and again it was. The next time it wasn’t. The next three times it was, and he began to act flustered and surprised and displeased with himself.

I shook my head. “Don’t do it, Basil,” I said regretfully. “I’m not a wise guy exactly, but I’m a tightwad. If you go on working up indignation at yourself because my eye is so much quicker than your hand, you might get so upset you would actually offer to make a bet on it, and I would have to refuse. As a matter of fact, you are extremely good, both at manipulating the bean and at getting upset, but the currency you saw in the wallet is not my own, and even if it was I’m a tightwad.”

“It don’t hurt to try, does it? I just want to see—”

“No, I don’t lather.”

He cheerfully put the spoons and the bean away, and the friendship was saved.

It began to get dark in the cell, and after a while the lights were turned on. Somehow that only made it gloomier, since there was no light in the cell itself. The only way I could have read the paper, except for the headlines, which were screaming murder, would have been to hold it up against the bars of the door to catch the light from the corridor, so I gave it up and devoted myself to Basil. He was certainly a good-natured soul, for he had been nabbed after only one day’s work at the exposition and expected to be fined 50 samoleons on the morrow, but I suppose if you embrace spoonbean as a career you have to be a philosopher to begin with. The inside of my nose was beginning to smart from the atmosphere. In a cell across the corridor someone started to sing in a thin tenor,
I’m wearing my heart away for you, it cries out may your love be true
, and from further down the line groans sounded, interrupted by a voice like a file growling, “Let him sing, let him sing, what the hell, it’s beautiful.”