Trio For Blunt Instruments (3 page)

'My chastity doesn't matter. I mean that's not it.'

'But your father's innocence is.'

'Yes. Yes!'

Wolfe wiggled a finger at the stack of dollar bills, held by rubber bands. 'Your money. Take it. It is, as you say, nothing for a job like this, and if I am quixotic enough to undertake it I don't want a tip. I make no commitment. If I said yes or no now it would be no; it's midnight, bedtime, and I'm tired. I'll tell you in the morning. You will sleep here. There's a spare bedroom, adequate and comfortable.' He pushed his chair back and rose.

'But I don't want& I have no things& '

'You have your skin.' He frowned down at her. 'Suppose this. Suppose the assumptions of the police are correct: that Mr. Ashby had in fact seduced you, that your father learned about it and killed him, and that, fearing exposure, he then killed himself; and suppose that under that burden of knowledge you go home to face the night alone. What would you do?'

'But it's not true! He didn't!'

'I told you to suppose. Suppose it were true. What would you do?'

'Why& I would kill myself. Of course.'

Wolfe nodded. 'I assume you would. And if you die tonight or tomorrow in circumstances which make it plausible that you committed suicide, others, including the police, will make that assumption. The murderer knows that, and since his attempt to have Ashby's death taken for suicide might have succeeded, and his attempt to have your father's death taken for suicide apparently has succeeded, he will probably try again. If he knows you he knows that you are not without spirit, as you have shown by coming here, and you will be a mortal threat to him as long as you live. You will sleep here. I shall not be available before eleven in the morning, but Mr. Goodwin will, and you will tell him everything you know that may be useful. If I decide to help you, as a service to your father, I'll need all the information I can get. Don't try withholding anything from Mr. Goodwin; his understanding of attractive young women is extremely acute. Good night.' He turned to me. 'You'll see that the South Room is in order. Good night.' He went.

As the sound came of the elevator door closing the client told me, 'Take the money, Mr. Goodwin. I don't want-' She started to shake, her head dropped, and her hands came up to cover her face. It was a good thing she had fought it off until the great man had left.

AT A QUARTER TO ELEVEN Wednesday morning I was at my desk, typing. When I had knocked on the door of the South Room, which is on the third floor, directly above Wolfe's room, at seven forty-five, Elma had been up and dressed. She said she had slept pretty well, but she didn't look it. I eat breakfast in the kitchen, but Fritz wouldn't want her to, so he served us in the dining room, and she did all right-all her orange juice, two griddle cakes, two slices of bacon, two shirred eggs with chives, and two cups of coffee. Then to the office, and for nearly an hour, from eight-forty to nine-thirty, I had asked questions and she had answered them.

Since she had started to work for Mercer's Bobbins, Inc., two years back, their office space had doubled and their office staff had tripled. That is, their sales and executive office in the Eighth Avenue building; she didn't know what the increase had been in the factory in New Jersey, but it had been big. It was understood by everybody that the increase had been due to the ability and effort of one man, Dennis Ashby, who had been put in charge of sales and promotion three years ago. He had boosted more than bobbins; the firm now made more than twenty items used in the garment industry.

Of the dozen members of the staff she named and described, here are some samples:

JOHN MERCER, president. There had been an office party, with cake and punch, on his sixty-first birthday in September. He had inherited the business from his father; it was generally understood that he owned most of the stock of the corporation. He spent most of his time at the factory and was at the New York office only two days a week. The firm had been about to go under when he had made Ashby vice-president and put him in charge of sales and promotion. He called the employees by their first names and they all liked him. They called him, not to his face, the Big M. He had children and grandchildren, Elma didn't know how many. None of them was active in the business.

ANDREW BUSCH, secretary of the corporation and office manager, was in his early thirties, not married. Up to a year ago he had been merely the head bookkeeper, and when the office manager had died of old age Mercer had promoted him. He had a room of his own, but three or four times a day he would appear in the rumpus and make the rounds of the desks. (The rumpus was the big room where twenty-eight girls did the work. One of them had called it the rumpus room and it had been shortened to rumpus.) He had instructed the stenographers that when Ashby sent for one of them she was to stop at his room and tell him where she was going, so they called him, not to his face, Paladin.

PHILIP HORAN, salesman, in his middle thirties, married, two or three children. I include him because a) he was seldom at the office before four in the afternoon but had been seen there Monday morning by one of the girls, b) he had expected to get the job Mercer had given Ashby and was known to be sore about it, and c) he had asked one of the girls, an old-timer who had been with the firm as long as he had, to find out what had happened and was happening between Ashby and Elma Vassos, and had kept after her about it.

FRANCES COX, receptionist. Elma said she was thirty, so she was probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight. I do know a few things about women. I include her because if she had seen Pete entering Ashby's room she might have seen someone else on the move, and that might be useful.

DENNIS ASHBY, dead. He had told Elma a year back that he was thirty-eight. Had started with Mercer's Bobbins long ago, Elma didn't know how long, as a stock clerk. Small and not handsome. When I asked Elma to name the animal he was most like, she said a monkey. He had spent about half of his time out of the office, out promoting. He had had no secretary; when he had wanted a stenographer he had called one in from the rumpus, and he had handled his appointments himself, with the assistance of Frances Cox, the receptionist. He had kept a battery of files in his own room. The girls had called him the Menace, naturally, with his name Dennis, but also because they meant it. Elma had no knowledge of any seduction he had actually achieved, but there had been much talk.

JOAN ASHBY, the widow. I include her because the widow of a murdered man must always be included. She had once worked at Mercer's Bobbins, but had quit when she married Ashby, before Elma had got her job there. Elma had never seen her and knew next to nothing about her. Ashby had told Elma across a restaurant table that his marriage had been a mistake and he was trying to get his wife to agree to a divorce.

ELMA VASSOS. One point: when I asked her why she had gone to dinners and shows with a married man she said, 'I told my father he had asked me, and he told me to go. He said every girl is so curious about married men she wants to be with one somewhere, and she does, and I might as well go ahead and have it over with. Of course, my father knew me.'

As for Monday morning, Elma had been in Busch's room from nine-forty to ten-fifteen, taking dictation from him, and then in the rumpus with the crew. About half past eleven John Mercer had entered with a man, a stranger, and called them together, and the man had asked if any of them had been in Ashby's room that morning, or had seen anyone entering or leaving it, and had got a unanimous no; and then Mercer had told them what had happened.

Even with my extremely acute understanding of attractive young women, I didn't suspect that she was holding out on me, except maybe on one detail, near the end, when I asked who she thought had lied to the cops about her and Ashby. She wouldn't name anyone even as a wild guess. I told her that was ridiculous, that any man or woman alive, knowing that someone or ones of a group had smeared him, would darned well have a notion who it was, but nothing doing. If any of them had it in for her she didn't know it, except Ashby, and he was dead.

At a quarter of eleven I was at my desk typing that part, nearly finished, when the house phone buzzed and I turned and got it. Wolfe rarely interrupts himself in the plant rooms to buzz me. Since he eats breakfast in his room and goes straight up to the roof, I hadn't seen him, so I said good morning.

'Good morning. What are you doing?'

'Typing my conference with Miss Vassos. The substance. Not verbatim. About done.'

'Well?'

'Nothing startling. Some facts that might help. As for believing her, it's now fifty to one.'

He grunted. 'Or better. What could conceivably have led her to come to me with her story if it weren't true'Confound it. Where is she?'

'In her room. Of course she isn't going to work.'

'Has she eaten'A guest, welcome or not, must not starve.'

'She won't. She ate. She phoned the DA's office to ask when she can have the body. She'll do.'

'The account in the Times supports her conclusion that the police assume that her father killed Ashby and committed suicide-not, of course, explicitly. You have read it?'

'Yes. So has she.'

'But the Times may be wrong, and certainly she may be. It's possible that Mr. Cramer is finessing, and if so we can leave it to him. You'll have to find out. Conclusively.'

'Lon Cohen may know.'

'That won't do. You'll have to see Mr. Cramer. Now.'

'If he's finessing he won't show me his hand.'

'Certainly not. It will take dexterity. Your intelligence, guided by experience.'

'Yeah. That's me. I'll go as soon as I finish typing this-five minutes. You'll find it in your drawer.' I hung up, beating him to it.

It took only three minutes. I put the original in his desk drawer and the carbon in mine, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving, got my coat from the hall rack, and departed. It's a good distance for a leg-stretcher from the old brownstone to Homicide South, but my brain likes to take it easy while I'm walking and I had to consult it about approaches, so I went to Ninth Avenue and flagged a taxi.

The dick at the desk, who was not my favorite city employee, said Cramer was busy but Lieutenant Rowcliff might spare me a minute, and I said no thank you and sat down to wait. It was close to noon when I was escorted down the hall to Cramer's room and found him standing at the end of his desk. As I entered he rasped, 'So your client bought a one-way ticket. Want to see him?'

It seldom pays to prepare an approach. It depends on the approachee. The frame of mind he was in, it was hopeless to try smoothing him, so I switched. 'Nuts,' I said offensively. 'If you mean Vassos, he wasn't a client, he was just a bootblack. You owe Mr. Wolfe something and he wants it. Elma Vassos, the daughter, slept in his house last night.'

'The hell she did. In your room?'

'No. I snore. She came and fed him a line that her life was in danger. Whoever killed Ashby and her father, she didn't know who, was going to kill her. Then the morning paper has it different. Not spelled out, but it's there, that Vassos killed Ashby and when you started breathing down his neck he found a cliff and jumped off. So you knew about it when you came to see Mr. Wolfe Monday, you knew then about Ashby and Elma Vassos. Why didn't you say so'If you had, when she came last night she wouldn't have got in. So you owe him something. When he turns her out he wants to make a little speech to her, and he wants to know who gave you the dope on her and Ashby. Off the record, and you won't be quoted.'

He threw his head back and laughed. Not an all-out laugh, just a ha-ha. He stretched an arm to touch my chest with a forefinger. 'Slept in his house, huh'Wonderful! I'd like to hear his speech, what will he call her'Not trollop or floozy, he'll have some fancy word for it. And he has the nerve-on out, Goodwin.'

'He wants to know-'

'Nuts. Beat it.'

'But dammit-'

'Out.'

I went; and since there was now nothing to work the brain on, I walked back to 35th Street. Wolfe was at his desk with the book he was on, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer. A tray on his desk held beer bottles and a glass, and beside it was the report I had typed of my talk with Elma. I went to my desk and sat, and waited until he finished a paragraph and looked up.

'We'll have to bounce her,' I said. 'You will. I would prefer to marry her and reform her, but Cramer would take my license away. Do you want it in full?'

He said yes, and I gave it to him. At the end I said, 'As you see, it didn't take any dexterity. The first thing he said, 'So your client bought a one-way ticket,' was enough. He is not finessing. You can't blame him for laughing, since he honestly believes that you have a floozy for a house guest. As for his refusing to name-'

'Shut up.'

I leaned back and crossed my legs. He glowered at me for five seconds, then closed his eyes. In a moment he opened them. 'It's hopeless,' he said through his teeth.

'Yes, sir,' I agreed. 'I suppose I could disguise myself as a bootblack and take Pete's box and try to-'

'Shut up! I mean it's intolerable. Mr. Cramer cannot be permitted to flout& ' He put the book down without marking his place, which he never did. 'There's no way out. I could have shined my shoes myself. I considered this possibility after reading your report, and here it is. Get Mr. Parker.'

I didn't have to look at the book for the number of Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer. I turned to the phone and dialed it, and got him, and Wolfe lifted his receiver.

'Good morning, sir. Afternoon. I need you. I am going to advise a young woman who has consulted me to bring actions against a corporation and five or six individuals, asking for damages, say a million dollars from each of them, on account of defamatory statements they have made. Slander, not libel, since as far as I know the statements have been made orally and not published. She is here in my house. Can you come to my office?& No, after lunch will do. Three o'clock?& Very well, I'll expect you.'

He hung up and turned to me. 'We'll have to keep her. You will go with her to her home to get whatever she needs-not now, later. Mr. Cramer expects me to turn her out, does he'Pfui. She would be dead within twenty-four hours, and that would clean the slate for him. Tell Fritz to take her lunch to her room. I will not be rude to a guest at my table, and the effort to control myself would spoil the meal.'