The Red Box (22 page)

Rowcliff grunted. “You were ready with another one all right. When did you think this up?”

“I didn’t have to. Fact is stranger than fiction. You shouldn’t be always suspecting everybody. If you want me to I’ll call them out and you can ask them; they were all three here. I would say that an umbrella that’s worth going in a window after is worth asking questions about.”

“Uh-huh. And you were calling this guy Jerry and
trying to smuggle him out. Where to? How would you like to come down and look over some umbrellas yourself?”

That disgusted me. I wasn’t any too pleased anyhow, letting go of Gebert. I said, “Poop and pooh. Both for you. You sound like a flatfoot catching kids playing wall ball. Maybe I wanted the glory of taking him to headquarters myself. Or maybe I wanted to help him escape from the country by putting him on a subway for Brooklyn, where I believe you live. You’ve got him, haven’t you, with a handle I gave you to hold him by? Poops and poohs for all of youse. It’s past my bedtime.”

I strode through the cordon, brushing them aside like flies, went to the roadster and got in, backed out through the gate, circling into the road and missing the fender of the troopers’ chariot by an inch, and rolled off the ruts and bumps. I was so disgruntled with the complexion of things that I beat my former time between Brewster and 35th Street by two minutes.

Of course I found the house dark and quiet. There was no note from Wolfe on my desk. Upstairs, in my room, whither I carried the glass of milk I had got in the kitchen, the pilot light was a red spot on the wall, showing that Wolfe had turned on his switch so that if anyone disturbed one of his windows or stepped in the hall within eight feet of his door, a gong under my bed would start a hullabaloo that would wake even me. I hit the hay at 2:19.

I
swiveled my chair to face Wolfe. “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. This may strike a chord. That lawyer Collinger said that they are proceeding with McNair’s remains as instructed in his will. Services are being held at nine o’clock this evening at the Belford Memorial Chapel on 73rd Street, and tomorrow he’ll be cremated and the ashes sent to his sister in Scotland. Collinger seems to think that naturally the executor of McNair’s estate will attend the services. Will we go in the sedan?”

Wolfe murmured, “Puerile. You are no better than a gadfly. You may represent me at the Belford Memorial Chapel.” He shuddered. “Black and white. Dreary and hushed obeisance to the grisly terror. His murderer will be there. Confound it, don’t badger me.” He resumed with the atlas, doing the double page spread of Arabia.

It was noon Friday. I had had less than six hours’ sleep, having held my levee at eight in order to be ready, without skimping breakfast, to report to Wolfe at nine o’clock in the plant rooms. He had asked me first off if I had got the red box, and beyond that had listened with his back as he examined a bench of
cattleya seedlings. The news about Gebert appeared to bore him, and he could always carry that off without my being able to tell whether it was a pose or on the level. When I reminded him that Collinger was due at ten to discuss the will and the estate, and asked if there were any special instructions, he merely shook his head without bothering to turn around. I left him and went down to the kitchen and ate a couple more pancakes so as to keep from taking a nap. Fritz was friendly again, forgiving and forgetting that I had jerked Wolfe back from the brink of the Wednesday relapse. He never toted a grudge.

Around 9:30 Fred Durkin phoned from Brewster. After my departure from Glennanne the night before the invaders had soon left, and our trio had had a restful night, but they had barely finished their stag breakfast when dicks and troopers had appeared again, armed with papers. I told Fred to tell Saul to keep an eye on the furniture and other portable objects.

At ten o’clock Henry H. Barber, our lawyer, came, and a little later Collinger. I sat and listened to a lot of guff about probate and surrogate and so forth, and went upstairs and got Wolfe’s signature to some papers, and did some typing for them. They were gone before Wolfe came down at eleven. He had arranged the orchids in the vase, rung for beer, tried his pen, looked through the morning mail, made a telephone call to Raymond Plehn, dictated a letter, and then gone to the bookshelves and returned with the atlas; and settled down with it. I had never been able to think of more than one possible advantage to be expected from Wolfe’s atlas work: If we ever got an international case we would certainly be on familiar ground, no matter where it took us to.

I went ahead with a lot of entries from Theodore Horstmann’s slips into the plant records.

Around a quarter to one Fritz knocked on the door and followed it in with a cablegram in his hand. I opened it and read it:

I got out the code book and did some looking, and scribbled in my book. Wolfe stayed in Arabia. I cleared my throat like a lion and his eyes flickered at me.

I told him, “If no news is good news, here’s a treat from Hitchcock. He says that in Scotland there are no results yet because the subject refuses to furnish help or information but that efforts are being continued. In Cartagena likewise no results on account of destruction in riots two years ago, and likewise efforts are being continued. I might add on my own hook that Scotland and Cartagena have got it all over 35th Street in one respect anyhow. Gamut. Efforts are being continued.”

Wolfe grunted.

Ten minutes later he closed the atlas. “Archie. We need that red box.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, we do. I phoned Mr. Hitchcock in London again, at the night rate, after you left last evening, and I fear got him out of bed. I learned that Mr. McNair’s sister is living on an old family property, a small place near Camfirth, and thought it possible that he had concealed the red box there during one of his
trips to Europe. I requested Mr. Hitchcock to have a search made for it, but apparently the sister—from this cable—will not permit it.”

He sighed. “I never knew a plaguier case. We have all the knowledge we need, and not a shred of presentable evidence. Unless the red box is found—are we actually going to be forced to send Saul to Scotland or Spain or both? Good heavens! Are we so inept that we must half encircle the globe to demonstrate the motive and the technique of a murder that happened in our own office in front of our eyes? Pfui! I sat for two hours last evening considering the position, and I confess that we have an exceptional combination of luck and adroitness against us; but even so, if we are driven to the extreme of buying steamship tickets across the Atlantic we are beneath contempt.”

“Yeah.” I grinned at him; if he was getting sore there was hope. “I’m beneath yours and you’re beneath mine. At that, it may be one of those cases where nothing but routine will do it. For instance, one of Cramer’s hirelings may turn the trick by trailing a sale of potassium cyanide.”

“Bah.” Wolfe upturned a whole palm; he was next door to a frenzy. “Mr. Cramer does not even know who the murderer is. As for the poison, it was probably bought years ago, possibly not in this country. We have to deal not only with adroitness, but also with forethought.”

“So I suspected. You’re telling me that you do know who the murderer is. Huh?”

“Archie.” He wiggled a finger at me. “I dislike mystification and never practice it for diversion. But I shall load you with no burdens that will strain your powers. You have no gift for guile. Certainly I know who the murderer is, but what good does that do me?
I am in no better boat than Mr. Cramer. By the way, he telephoned last evening a few minutes after you left. In a very ugly mood. He seemed to think we should have told him of the existence of Glennanne instead of leaving him to discover it for himself from an item among Mr. McNair’s papers; and he hotly resented Saul’s holding it against beleaguerment. I presume he will cool off now that you have made him a gift of Mr. Gebert.”

I nodded. “And I presume I would look silly if he squeezed enough sap out of Gebert to make the case jell.”

“Never. No fear, Archie. Mr. Gebert is not likely, under any probable pressure, to surrender the only hold on the cliff of existence he has managed to cling to. It would have been useless to bring him here; he has his profit and loss calculated. —Yes, Fritz? Ah, the soufflé chose to ignore the clock? At once, certainly.”

He gripped the edge of the desk to push back his chair.

We did not ignore the soufflé.

My lunch was interrupted once, by a phone call from Helen Frost. Ordinarily Wolfe flatly prohibited my disturbing a meal to go to the phone, letting it be handled by Fritz on the kitchen extension, but there were exceptions he permitted. One was a female client. So I went to the office and took it, not with any overflow of gaiety, for all morning I had been thinking that we might get word from her any minute that the deal was off. Up there alone with her mother, there was no telling what she might be talked into. But all she wanted was to ask about Perren Gebert. She said that her mother had phoned the Chesebrough at breakfast time and had learned that Gebert had not
been there for the night, and after phoning and fussing all morning, she had finally been informed by the police that Gebert was being detained at headquarters, and they had told her mother something about Gebert being held on information furnished by Mr. Goodwin of Nero Wolfe’s office, and what about it?

I told her, “It’s all right. We caught him trying to get in a window out at Glennanne, and the cops are asking him what for. Just a natural sensible question. After a while he’ll either answer it or he won’t, and they’ll either turn him loose or keep him. It’s all right.”

“But they won’t …” She sounded harassed. “You see, I told you, it’s true there are things about him I don’t like, but he is an old friend of mother’s and mine too. They won’t do anything to him, will they? I can’t understand what he was doing at Glennanne, trying to get in. He hasn’t been there … I don’t think he ever was there … you know he and Uncle Boyd didn’t like each other. I don’t understand it. But they can’t do anything to him just for trying to open a window. Can they?”

“They can and they can’t. They can sort of annoy him. That won’t hurt him much.”

“It’s terrible.” The shiver was in her voice. “It’s terrible! And I thought I was hard-boiled. I guess I am, but … anyway, I want you and Mr. Wolfe to go on. Go right on. Only I thought I might ask you—Perren is really mother’s oldest friend—if you could go down there and see where he is and what they’re doing … I know the police are very friendly with you …”

“Sure.” I made a face at the phone. “Down to headquarters? Surest thing you know. Bless your heart, I’d be glad to. It won’t take me long to finish my
lunch, and I’ll take it on the jump. Then I’ll phone you and let you know.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Thank you ever so much. If I’m not at home mother will be. I … I’m going out to buy some flowers …”

“Okay. I’ll phone you.”

I went back to the dining room and resumed with my tools and told Wolfe about it. He was provoked, as always when business intruded itself on a meal. I took my time eating, on to the coffee and through it, because I knew if I hurried and didn’t chew properly it would upset Wolfe’s digestion. It didn’t break his heart if I was caught out in the field at feeding time and had to grab what I could get, but if I once started a meal at that table I had to complete it like a gentleman. Also, I wasn’t champing at the bit for an errand I didn’t fancy.

It was after two when I went to the garage for the roadster, and there I got another irritation when I found that the washing and polishing job had been done by a guy with one eye.

Downtown, on Centre Street, I parked at the triangle, and went in and took the elevator. I walked down the upstairs corridor as if I owned it, entered the anteroom of Cramer’s office as cocky as they come, and told the hulk at the desk:

“Tell the inspector, Goodwin of Nero Wolfe’s office.”

I stood up for ten minutes, and then was nodded in. I was hoping somewhat that Cramer would be out and my dealings would be with Burke, not on account of my natural timidity, but because I knew it would be better for everyone concerned if Cramer had a little more time to cool off before resuming social intercourse with us. But he was there at his desk when I
entered, and to my surprise he didn’t get up and take a bite at my ear. He snarled a little:

“So it’s you. You walk right in here. Burke made a remark about you this morning. He said that if you ever wanted a rubdown you ought to get Smoky to do it for you. Smoky is the little guy with a bum leg that polishes the brass railings downstairs at the entrance.”

I said, “I guess I’ll sit down.”

“I guess you will. Go ahead. Want my chair?”

“No, thanks.”

“What
do
you want?”

I shook my head at him wistfully. “I’ll be doggoned, Inspector, if you’re not a hard man to please. We do our best to help you find that red box, and you resent it. We catch a dangerous character trying to make an illegal entry, and hand him over to you, and you resent that. If we wrap this case up and present you with it, I suppose you’ll charge us as accessories. You may remember that in that Rubber Band affair—”

“Yeah, I know. Past favors have been appreciated. I’m busy. What do you want?”

“Well …” I tilted my head back so as to look down on him. “I represent the executor of Mr. McNair’s estate. I came to invite Mr. Perren Gebert to attend the funeral services at the Belford Memorial Chapel at nine o’clock this evening. If you would kindly direct me to his room?”

Cramer gave me a nasty look. Then he heaved a deep sigh, reached in his pocket for a cigar, bit off the end and lit it. He puffed at it and got it established in the corner of his mouth. Abruptly he demanded:

“What have you got on Gebert?”

“Nothing. Not even passing a red light. Nothing at all.”

“Did you come here to see him? What does Wolfe want you to ask him?”

“Nothing. As Tammany is my judge. Wolfe says he’s just clinging to the cliff of existence or something like that and he wouldn’t let him in the house.”