The Final Deduction (6 page)

He took me down a wide hall to an open door and motioned me in. I crossed the sill and stopped, thinking for a second I had crashed a party, but then I saw that only five of the people in the room were alive, the rest were bronze or stone, and I remembered a picture I had seen years ago of Harold F. Tedder’s library. This was it. It was a big room, high-ceilinged, but it looked a little crowded with a dozen life-sized statues standing around here and there. If he liked company he sure had it. Mrs. Vail’s voice came, “Over here, Mr. Goodwin,” and I moved. The five live ones were in a group, more or less, at the far end, where there was a fireplace but no fire. As I approached, Mrs. Vail said, “Well?”

“It was Dinah Utley,” I said.

“What—how—”

I glanced around. “I’m not intruding?”

“It’s all right,” Jimmy Vail said. He was standing with his back to the fireplace. “They know about it. My wife’s daughter, Margot Tedder. Her brother, Ralph Purcell. Her attorney, Andrew Frost.”

“They know about Nero Wolfe,” Mrs. Vail said. “My children and my brother were asking questions, and we thought we had better tell them. Then when this—Dinah—and we’ll be asked where we were last night … I decided my lawyer ought to know about it and about Nero Wolfe. It was Dinah?”

“Yes.”

“She was run over by a car?” From Andrew Frost, the lawyer. He looked a little like the man of bronze who was standing behind his chair, Abraham Lincoln, but he had no beard and his hair was gray; and on his feet probably he wasn’t quite as tall. Presumably he had learned how
Dinah had died by phoning White Plains, or from a broadcast.

“She was run over by
her
car,” I said.

“Her own car?”

I faced Mrs. Vail, who was sitting on a couch, slumped against cushions. “On behalf of Mr. Wolfe,” I told her, “I owe you two pieces of information. One, I looked at the corpse and identified it as Dinah Utley. Two, I told the District Attorney that I saw her yesterday afternoon when she came to Mr. Wolfe’s office in connection with a matter you had consulted him about. That’s all. I refused to tell him what the matter was or anything about it. That’s all I owe you, but if you want to know how and when and where Dinah died I’ll throw that in. Do you want it?”

“Yes. First when.”

“Between nine o’clock last evening and three o’clock this morning. That may be narrowed down later. It was murder, because her own car ran across her chest and was there, nosed into a roadside opening, when the body was found. There was a bruise on the side of her head; she was probably hit with something and knocked out before the car was run over her. Then the—”

I stopped because she had made a sound, call it a moan, and shut her eyes. “Do you have to be utterly brutal?” Margot Tedder asked. The daughter, a couple of years younger than her brother Noel, was at the other end of the couch. From hearsay, she was a pain in the neck who kept her chin up so she could look down her nose; from my personal knowledge, she was a nice slender specimen with real possibilities if she would round out a little and watch the corners of her mouth, and, seeing her walk or dance, you might have thought her hips were in a cast.

“I didn’t do it,” I told her. “I’m just telling it.”

“You haven’t said where,” Jimmy Vail said. “Where was it?”

Mrs. Vail’s eyes had opened, and I preferred to tell her, since she was the client. “Iron Mine Road. That’s a narrow rocky lane off of Route One Twenty-three. Route One Twenty-three goes into Route Thirty-five seven miles east of Katonah, not far from the state line.”

Her eyes had widened. “My God,” she said, staring at
me. “
They
killed her.” She turned to Andrew Frost. “The kidnapers. They killed her.” Back to me. “Then you were right, what Mr. Wolfe said about suspecting her. That’s where—”

“Wait a minute, Althea,” Frost commanded her. “I must speak with you privately. This is dangerous business, extremely dangerous. You should have told me Monday when you got that note. As your counselor, I instruct you to say nothing more to anyone until you have talked with me. And I don’t—Where are you going?”

She had left the couch and was heading for the door. She said over her shoulder, “I’ll be back,” and kept going, on out. Jimmy moved. He went halfway to the door, stopped and stood, his back to us, and then came back to the fireplace. Ralph Purcell, Mrs. Vail’s brother, said something to Frost and got no response. I had never seen Purcell and knew next to nothing of him, either hearsay or personal knowledge. Around fifty, take a couple of years either way, with not much hair left and a face as round as his sister’s, he had a habit I had noticed: when someone started to say something he looked at someone else. If he was after an effect he got it; it made you want to say something to him and see if you could keep his eye.

Noel Tedder, who was leaning against George Washington, asked me, “What’s this about suspecting her? Suspecting her of what?” The lawyer shook his head at him, and Margot said, “What’s the difference now? She’s dead.” Purcell was looking at me, and I was deciding what to say to him and try to hold his eye when Mrs. Vail came in. She had an envelope in her hand. She came back to the couch, sat on the edge, and took papers from the envelope. Frost demanded, “What have you got there? Althea, I absolutely insist—”

“I don’t care what you insist,” she told him. “You’re a good lawyer, Andy, Harold thought so and so do I, and I trust your advice on things you know about, you know I do, but this is different. I told you about it because you could tell me about the legal part of it, but now I don’t need just
legal
advice, now that I know Dinah was killed there on Iron Mine Road. I think I need something more
than legal advice, I think I need Nero Wolfe.” She turned to me. “Would he come here? He wouldn’t, would he?”

I shook my head. “He never leaves the house on business. If you want to see him he’ll be available at six—”

“No. I don’t feel like—no. I can tell you. Can’t I?”

“Certainly.” I got my notebook and pen from a pocket, went to a chair near the end of the couch, and sat.

She looked around. “I want you to hear it, all of you. You all knew Dinah. I’m sure you all thought of her as highly as I did—I don’t mean you all liked her, that’s not it, but you thought she was very competent and completely reliable. But apparently she—but wait till you hear it.” She fingered in the papers, extracted one, handed it to me, and looked around again. “I’ve told you about the note I got Monday morning saying they had Jimmy and I would get a phone call from Mr. Knapp. Nero Wolfe has it. And I’ve told you, haven’t I—yes, I did—that when the phone call came Monday afternoon Dinah listened in and took it down. Later she typed it from her notes, and that’s it. Read it aloud, Mr. Goodwin.”

A glance had shown me that the typing was the same as the note, the same faint letters, but on a better grade of paper and a different size, 8½ by 11. I read it to them:

I looked up. “That’s all.”

“But my God, Mom,” Noel Tedder blurted, “if you had told me!”

“Or me,” Andrew Frost said grimly.

“Well?” Mrs. Vail demanded. “What could you have done? Jimmy’s here, isn’t he? He’s here alive and well. I went to Nero Wolfe, I’ve told you about that, and what he did may have helped, I don’t know and I don’t care now.”

“I think you were extremely wise,” Margot Tedder said, “not to tell either of them. Mr. Frost would have tried to make you wait until he looked it up in the books. Noel would have gone to Fowler’s Inn in disguise, probably with a false beard. You went, Mother? To Fowler’s Inn?”

Mrs. Vail nodded. “I did exactly what he told me to. Of course Mr. Graham at the bank was suspicious—no, not suspicious, curious—and he wanted me to tell him what the money was for, but I didn’t. It was my money. I got to Fowler’s Inn too early, and sat in the car until ten o’clock, and then went in. I tried not to show how nervous I was, but I suppose I did; I kept looking at my
watch, and at twenty after ten I was called to the phone. It was in a booth. The voice sounded like the other one, Mr. Knapp, but he didn’t say. He told me to look in the Manhattan phone book where Z begins, and hung up. I looked in the phone book, and there was a note. I have it.” She extracted another sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Read it, Mr. Goodwin.”

“Wait a minute.” It was Jimmy Vail. He had moved and was standing looking down at his wife. “I think you’d better call a halt, Al. You and I had better have a talk. Telling Goodwin all this, telling Frost—it’s not Friday yet.”

She lifted a hand to touch his arm. “I have to, Jimmy. I
have
to, now that Dinah—my God, they killed her! Read it, Mr. Goodwin.”

It was the same typing, and on the same cheap paper as the note that had come in the mail. I read it aloud.

“I’ll take that,” Jimmy Vail said. “And the other one.” His hand was there for them. From his tone, it seemed likely that if I tried to argue that I wanted to show them to Wolfe I would lose the debate, so I got the texts in my notebook in shorthand. That wasn’t really necessary, since after years of practice I can report long conversations verbatim, but with such documents as those it was desirable. Transferring typed text to shorthand was practically automatic, so my ears could take in what Mrs. Vail was saying:

“I did what the note said. I think a car was following me all the time, but I wasn’t sure. I think I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to be sure. The same thing happened at The Fatted Calf, the same as Fowler’s Inn. At ten minutes after eleven I was called to the phone, and the same voice told me to look in the phone book where U begins,
and there was another note.” She handed it to me. “Read it.”

Same typing, same paper. I read:

“He did,” Mrs. Vail said. “He told me to drive straight back to New York, here, without stopping. He told me not to tell anyone anything until Jimmy came back or he would never come back. He said he would be back within twenty-four hours. And he was! He is! Thank God!” She put out a hand to touch her Jimmy, but had to stretch because he was sticking with me to get the notes. I was getting the last one in my notebook. The Tedder son and daughter were saying something, and so was Andrew Frost. Finishing with my shorthand, I reached around Jimmy to hand the papers to Mrs. Vail. He had a hand there, but I ignored it, and she took them. She spoke to me.

“You see why I had to tell Nero Wolfe. Or you.”

“I can guess,” I told her. “Mr. Wolfe told you we suspected that Dinah Utley was implicated in the kidnaping. Now I tell you that her body was found on Iron Mine Road, at the spot where you turned over the suitcase, or near there. That complicates your problem when Westchester County comes to ask you about Dinah Utley and why you had her go to see Mr. Wolfe, especially if you and your husband still want to save it until Friday. Haven’t they been here yet?”

“No.”

“They soon will be. As for Mr. Wolfe and me, we’ll stand pat until eleven o’clock Friday morning. He made it eleven o’clock because that’s when he comes down from the plant rooms. As for you and your husband, and now
also your son and daughter and brother and lawyer, you’ll have to decide for yourselves. It’s risky to withhold information material to a murder, but if it’s for self-protection from a real danger, if you think Mr. Knapp meant business when he told your husband he’d regret it if he or you spilled it before Friday, I doubt if you’ll have any serious trouble. Is that what you want from Mr. Wolfe or me?”