Some Buried Caesar (40 page)

“Either way would do.”

“I like it better up from the ground.” A pause. “What did you say about lending you some money? I beg your pardon, but my mind got onto the raining up.”

I was ready to admit she was too much for me, but I struggled on. I abandoned the rain. “If you’ll pay me five thousand dollars I’ll tell you what Mrs. Fromm told Mr. Wolfe. Cash in advance.”

Her eyes widened. “Was that what you said? I guess I didn’t understand.”

“I made it fancy by dragging in the rain. Sorry. It’s better that way, plain.”

She shook her pretty head. “It’s not better for me, Mr. Goodwin. It sounds absolutely crazy, unless—oh, I see! You mean she told him something awful about me! That doesn’t surprise me any, but what was it?”

“I didn’t say she said anything about you. I merely—”

“But of course she did! She would! What was it?”

“No.” I was emphatic. “Maybe I didn’t make it plain enough.” I stuck up a finger. “First you give me money.” Another finger. “Second, I give you facts. I’m offering to sell you something, that’s all.”

She nodded regretfully. “That’s the real trouble.”

“What is?”

“Why, you don’t really mean it. If you offered to
tell me for twenty dollars that might be different, and of course I’d love to know what she said—but five thousand! Do you know what I think, Mr. Goodwin?”

“I do not.”

“I think you’re much too fine a person to use this kind of tactics to stir up my curiosity just to get me talking. When you walked in I wouldn’t have dreamed you were like that, especially your eyes. I go by eyes.”

I also go by eyes up to a point, and hers didn’t fit her performance. Though not the keenest and smartest I had ever seen, they were not the eyes of a scatterbrain. I would have liked to stay an hour or so to make a stab at tagging her, but my instructions were to put it bluntly, note the reaction, and move on; and besides, I wanted to get in as many as possible before funeral time. So I arose to leave. She was sorry to see me go; she even hinted that she might add ten to her counteroffer of twenty bucks; but I let her know that her remark about my tactics had hurt my feelings and I wanted to be alone.

Down on the street I found a phone booth to report to Wolfe and then took a taxi to Forty-second Street.

I had been informed by Lon Cohen that I shouldn’t mark it against the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons that they sported an elegant sunny office on the twenty-sixth floor of one of the newer midtown commercial palaces, because Mrs. Fromm owned the building and they paid no rent. Even so, it was a lot of dog for an outfit devoted to the relief of the unfortunate and oppressed. There in the glistening reception room I had an example before my eyes. At one end of a brown leather settee,
slumped in weariness and despair, wearing an old gray suit two sizes too large for him, was a typical specimen. As I shot him a glance I wondered how it impressed him, but then I glanced again and quit wondering. It was Saul Panzer. Our eyes met, then his fell, and I went to the woman at the desk, who had a long thin nose and a chin to match.

She said Miss Wright was engaged and was available only for appointments. After producing a card and persuading her to relay not only my name but the message under it, I was told I would be received, but she didn’t like it. She made it clear, with her tight lips and the set of her jaw, that she wanted no part of me.

I was shown into a large corner room with windows on two sides, giving views of Manhattan south and east. There were two desks, but only one of them was occupied, by a brown-haired female executive who looked almost as weary as Saul Panzer but wasn’t giving in to it and didn’t intend to.

She greeted me with a demand. “May I see your card, please?”

It had been read to her on the phone. I crossed and handed it over. She looked at it and then up at me. “I’m very busy. Is this urgent?”

“It won’t take long, Miss Wright.”

“What good will it do to discuss it with me?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to leave that open, whether it does any good or not. I’m speaking strictly for myself, not for Nero Wolfe, and there’s no—”

“Didn’t Nero Wolfe send you here?”

“No.”

“Did the police?”

“No. This is my idea. I’ve had some bad luck and
I need some cash, and I’ve got something to sell. I know this is a bad day for you, with Mrs. Fromm’s funeral this afternoon, but this won’t keep—at least I can’t count on it—and I need five thousand dollars as soon as I can get it.”

She smiled with one side of her mouth. “I’m afraid I haven’t that much with me, if this is a stickup. Aren’t you a reputable licensed detective?”

“I try to be. As I said, I’ve had some bad luck. All I’m doing, I’m offering to sell you something, and you can take it or leave it. It depends on how much you would like to know exactly what Mrs. Fromm told Mr. Wolfe. At five thousand dollars it might be a swell bargain for you, or it might not. You would be a better judge of that than I am, but of course you can’t know until after you hear it.”

She regarded me. “So that’s it,” she said.

“That’s it,” I concurred.

Her brown eyes were harder to meet than Jean Estey’s had been, or Claire Horan’s. My problem was to have the look of a man with a broad streak of rat in him, but also one who could be depended on to deliver as specified. Her straight hard gaze gave me a feeling that I wasn’t dressed right for the part, and I was trying to give orders to my face not to show it. The face felt as if it might help to be doing something, so I used my mouth. “You understand, Miss Wright, this is a bona fide offer. I can and will tell you everything they said.”

“But you would want the money first.” Her voice was as hard as her eyes.

I turned a hand over. “I’m afraid that’s the only way we could do it. You could tell me to go soak my head.”

“So I could.” Her mind was working. “Perhaps
we can arrange a compromise.” She got a pad of paper from a drawer and pushed her desk pen across. “Pull up a chair, or use the other desk, and put your offer in writing, briefly. Put it like this: ‘Upon payment to me by Angela Wright of five thousand dollars in cash, I will relate to her, in full and promptly, the conversation that took place between Laura Fromm and Nero Wolfe last Friday afternoon.’ And date it and sign it, that’s all.”

“And give it to you?”

“Yes. I’ll return it as soon as you have kept your side of the bargain. Isn’t that fair?”

I smiled down at her. “Now really, Miss Wright. If I were as big a sap as that how long do you think I would have lasted with Nero Wolfe?”

She smiled back. “Would you like to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“I think that if you were capable of selling secrets you learned in Wolfe’s office he would have known it long ago and would have thrown you out.”

“I said I had some bad luck.”

“Not that bad. I’m not a sap either. Of course you’re right about one thing—that is, Mr. Wolfe is—I would like very much to know what Mrs. Fromm consulted him about. Naturally. I wonder what would actually happen if I scraped up the money and handed it over?”

“There’s an easy way of finding out.”

“Perhaps there’s an easier one. I could go to Mr. Wolfe and ask him.”

“I’d call you a liar.”

She nodded. “Yes, I suppose you would. He couldn’t very well admit he had sent you with such an offer.”

“Especially if he didn’t.”

The brown eyes flashed for an instant and then were hard again. “Do you know what I resent most, Mr. Goodwin? I resent being taken for a complete fool. That’s my vanity. Tell Mr. Wolfe that. Tell him that I don’t mind his trying this little trick on me, but I do mind his underrating me.”

I grinned at her. “You like that idea, don’t you?”

“Yes, it appeals to me strongly.”

“Okay, hang onto it. For that there’s no charge.”

I turned and went. As I passed through the reception room and saw Saul there on the settee I would have liked to warn him that he was up against a mind-reader, but of course had to skip it.

Down in the lobby I found a phone booth and reported to Wolfe and then went to a fountain for a Coke, partly because I was thirsty and partly because I wanted time out for a post-mortem. Had I bungled it, or was she too damn smart for me, or what? As I finished the Coke I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn’t practical. Anyhow, Wolfe hadn’t seemed to think it mattered, since I had made her the offer and that was the chief point.

It was a short walk to my next stop, an older and dingier office building on Forty-third Street west of Fifth Avenue. After taking the elevator to the fourth floor and entering a door that was labeled
Modern Thoughts
, I got a pleasant surprise. Having on Sunday bought a copy of the magazine that Vincent Lipscomb edited, and looked through it before passing it to Wolfe, I had supposed that any female employed by it would have all her points of interest, if
any, inside her skull; but a curvy little number with dancing eyes, seated at a switchboard, gave me one bright glance and then welcomed me with a smile which indicated that the only reason she had taken the job was that she thought I would show up someday.

I would have enjoyed cooperating by asking her what kind of orchids she liked, but it would soon be noon, so I merely returned the smile, told her I wanted to see Mr. Lipscomb, and handed her a card.

“A card?” she said appreciatively. “Real style, huh?” Seeing what was on it, she gave me a second look, still friendly but more reserved, inserted a plug with lively fingers, pressed a button, and in a moment spoke into the transmitter.

She pulled out the plug, handed me the card, and said, “Through there and third door on the left.”

I didn’t have to count to three because as I started down the dark narrow hall a door opened and a man appeared and bellowed at me as if I had been across a river, “In here!” Then he went back in. When I entered he was standing with his back to a window with his hands thrust into his pants pockets. The room was small, and the one desk and two chairs could have been picked up on Second Avenue for the price of a pair of Warburton shoes.

“Mr. Lipscomb?”

“Yes.”

“You know who I am.”

“Yes.”

His voice, though below a bellow, was up to five times as many decibels as were needed. It could have been to match his stature, for he was two inches above me, with massive shoulders that much wider; or it could have been in compensation for his
nose, which was wide and flat and would have spoiled any map no matter what the rest of it was.

“This is a confidential matter,” I told him. “Personal and private.”

“Yes.”

“And between you and me only. My proposition is just from me and it’s just for you.”

“What is it?”

“An offer to exchange information for cash. Since you’re a magazine editor, that’s an old story to you. For five thousand dollars I’ll tell you about the talk Mrs. Fromm had with Mr. Wolfe last Friday. Authentic and complete.”

He removed a hand from a pocket to scratch a cheek, then put it back. When he spoke his voice was down to a reasonable level. “My dear fellow, I’m not Harry Luce. Anyway, magazines don’t buy like that. The procedure is this: you tell me in confidence what you have, and then, if I can use it, we agree on the amount. If we can’t agree, no one is out anything.” He raised the broad shoulders and let them drop. “I don’t know. I shall certainly run a piece on Laura Fromm, a thoughtful and provocative piece; she was a great woman and a great lady; but at the moment I don’t see how your information would fit in. What’s it like?”

“I don’t mean for your magazine, Mr. Lipscomb, I mean for you personally.”

He frowned. If he wasn’t straight he was good. “I’m afraid I don’t get you.”

“It’s perfectly simple. I heard that talk, all of it. That evening Mrs. Fromm was murdered, and you’re involved, and I have—”

“That’s absurd. I am not involved. Words are my specialty, Mr. Goodwin, and one difficulty with them
is that everybody uses them, too often in ignorance of their proper meaning. I’m willing to assume that you used that word in ignorance—otherwise it was slanderous. I am not involved.”

“Okay. Are you concerned?”

“Of course I am. I wasn’t intimate with Mrs. Fromm, but I esteemed her highly and was proud to know her.”

“You were at the party at Horan’s Friday evening. You were one of the last to see her alive. The police, who specialize in words too in a way, have asked you a lot of questions and will ask you more. But say you’re concerned. Everything considered, including what I heard Mrs. Fromm tell Mr. Wolfe, I thought you might be concerned five thousand dollars’ worth.”

“This begins to sound like blackmail. Is it?”

“Search me. You’re the word specialist. I’m ignorant.”

His hands abruptly left his pockets, and for a second I thought he was going to make contact, but he only rubbed his palms together. “If it’s blackmail,” he said, “there must be a threat. If I pay, what then?”

“No threat. You get the information, that’s all.”

“And if I don’t pay?”

“You don’t get it.”

“Who does?”

I shook my head. “I said no threat. I’m just trying to sell you something.”

“Of course. A threat doesn’t have to be explicit. It has been published that Wolfe is investigating the death of Mrs. Fromm.”

“Right.”

“But she didn’t engage him to do that, since
surely she wasn’t anticipating her death. This is how it looks. She paid Wolfe to investigate something or somebody, and that evening she was killed. He considered himself under obligation to investigate her death. You can’t be offering to sell me information that Wolfe regards as being connected with her death, because you couldn’t possibly suppress such evidence without Wolfe’s connivance, and you’re not claiming that, are you?”

“No.”

“Then what you’re offering is information, something Mrs. Fromm told Wolfe, that need not be disclosed as related to her death. Isn’t that correct?”

“No comment.”

He shook his head. “That won’t do. Unless you tell me that, I couldn’t possibly deal with you. I don’t say I
will
deal if you do tell me, but without that I can’t decide.”