Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 45 (2 page)

He went to the red leather chair, sat, met Wolfe’s eyes, and said, “If you could see it, if
you
could actually
see
it.”

As I went to my chair at my desk I glanced at the jar of pencils; it was in position.

Wolfe nodded. “But I can’t. If Dr. Vollmer has described the situation accurately it must be assumed that you are either obtuse or deranged. In your right mind, if you have one, you couldn’t possibly expect the people at the clinic to help you unless you supplied some facts. Are you going to tell me your name?”

“No.” It wasn’t a mumble.

“Are you going to tell me anything at all? Where you live, where you work, where you have seen blood that other people saw or could have seen?”

“No.” His jaw worked a little. “I explained to Dr. Ostrow that I couldn’t. I knew that that clinic had done some remarkable things for people. I had been—I had heard about it. I thought it was just possible—I thought it was worth trying.”

Wolfe turned to me. “How much did his suit cost?”

“Two hundred or more. Probably more. The shoes, at least forty.”

“How much would a magazine or newspaper pay him for an article about that clinic?”

“My god,” Ronald Seaver blurted, “that’s not—” He bit it off and clamped his jaw.

“It’s merely one of the valid conjectures.” Wolfe shook his head. “I don’t like to be imposed on, and I doubt if Dr. Ostrow does. The simplest way to learn if you are an impostor is to discover who and what you are. For Mr. Goodwin to follow you when you leave would take time and trouble, and it isn’t necessary. —Archie?”

I picked up the jar and told Ronald Seaver, “Candid camera inside.” I removed a couple of the pencils and held them up; they were only two-inch stubs. “Leaving room for the camera below. It now has eight shots of you. Tomorrow I’ll show them to people I know—a newspaper man, a couple of cops—”

When you are sitting in a chair and a man comes at you, your reaction depends on what he has in mind. If he has an idea of hurting you, with or without a weapon, you get on your feet fast. But if he merely intends to take something from you, for instance a jar of pencils, and if you have decided that you are stronger and quicker than he is, you merely pull your feet back. Actually he didn’t even come close. He stopped three steps short, turned to Wolfe, and said, “You can’t do that. Dr. Ostrow wouldn’t permit it.”

Wolfe nodded. “Of course he wouldn’t, but this office is not in his jurisdiction. You have presumed to take an evening of my time, and I want to know why. Are you desperately in need of help, or are you playing some silly game? I’ll soon know, probably tomorrow, depending on how long it takes Mr. Goodwin to get you identified from the photographs. I hope it won’t be prolonged; I am merely doing a favor for a friend. Good evening, sir. I’ll communicate with Dr. Ostrow, not with you.”

With me it had been a tossup whether the guy was in some kind of bad jam or was merely on a complicated caper. His long, pointed nose, which didn’t go well with his wide, square chin, had twitched a couple of times, but that didn’t prove anything. Now, however, he gave evidence. His half-closed, unblinking eyes, steady at me, with a deep crease across his forehead, showed that something was really hurting.

“I don’t believe it,” he said louder than necessary, since he was only two arm’s lengths away.

Without letting my eyes leave him, I reached for the jar, which I had put back on my desk, stood, removed the top that held the pencil stubs, tilted the jar to show him what was inside, and said, “Autophoton, made in Japan. Electronic control. One will get you ten I’ll have you tagged by sundown tomorrow.”

His lips parted to let words out, but none came. His head turned to Wolfe, then back to me, and then he turned clear around and took a slow, short step, and another, and I thought he was heading out. But he veered to the right, toward the big globe near the book shelves, stopped halfway to it, and stood. Apparently he wanted his face to himself while he decided something. It took him a good two minutes, maybe three. He turned, got a leather case from his breast pocket, took things from it, selected one—a card—went to Wolfe’s desk, and handed it to him. By the time Wolfe had given it a look, I was there, and he passed it to me. It was a New York driver’s license: Kenneth Meer, 5 feet 11, age 32, 147 Clover Street, New York 10012.

“Saving you the trouble of asking questions,” he said, and extended a hand. I gave him the card and he put it back in the case and the case in his pocket; and he turned and went. Not slow short steps; he marched. I followed out to the hall, and when he had opened the front door and crossed the sill and pulled the door shut, not banging it, I went back to my desk, sat, cocked my head at Wolfe, and spoke:

“You told Doc Vollmer yesterday that you read to learn what your fellow beings are up to. Well?”

He scowled. “I have told you a dozen times that ‘Doc’ is an obnoxious vulgarism.”

“I keep forgetting.”

“Pfui. You never forget anything. It was deliberate. As for Kenneth Meer, there has been no picture of him in the
Times
. Has there been one in the
Gazette
?”

“No. His name several times, but no picture. Nor any report that he got blood on his hands, but of course he saw plenty. I suppose, since it’s a favor for a friend, I’ll have to see a couple of people and find out—”

“No. Get Dr. Vollmer.”

“But shouldn’t I—”

“No.”

I swiveled and swung the phone around. Of Vollmer’s three numbers, the most likely one at that hour was the unlisted one on the third floor of his house, and when I dialed it he answered himself. Wolfe got at his phone and I stayed on.

“Good evening, doctor. That man came, half an hour late, and has just left. He refused to give us any information, even his name, and we had to coerce him by a ruse with a concealed camera. Under constraint he identified himself by showing us his motor vehicle operator’s license, and then departed without a word. His name has recently been in the news in connection with a murder, but only as one of those present at the scene; there has been no published indication that he is under suspicion or is likely to be. Do you want his name, for Dr. Ostrow?”

“Well.” Silence for at least ten seconds. “You got it by—uh—coercion?”

“Yes. As I said.”

“Then I don’t think—” Another silence, shorter. “I doubt if Irwin would want it. He never uses coercion. May I ask him and let you know?”

“Certainly.”

“Do you intend—Are you interested in the murder? Professionally?”

“Only as a spectator. I am not involved and don’t expect to be.”

Vollmer thanked him for the favor, not enthusiastically, and they hung up. Wolfe looked at the wall clock—five past ten—and reached for his current book,
Grant Takes Command
, by Bruce Catton. I went to the hall and up the two flights to my room, to catch the last inning or two at Shea Stadium on television.

3

w
e keep both the
Times
and the
Gazette
for three weeks, sometimes longer, and even if the bank balance had been at a record high I would probably have had another go at the accounts of the Odell murder just for curiosity, since I had now met one of the cast of characters. But we needed a job. In the past five months, the first five of 1969, we had had only six cases, and the fee had gone to five figures in only one of them—getting a damn fool out of a nasty mess with a bunch of smoothies he should have been on to at the first contact. So the checking account balance had lost a lot of weight, and to meet the upkeep of the old brownstone, including the weekly payroll for Theodore and Fritz and me, by about the middle of July Wolfe would have to turn some documents into cash, and that should be prevented if possible. So it wasn’t just curiosity that sent me to the basement Thursday morning for old newspapers.

The murder was two weeks old, but what had happened, and how, had been plain and clear in the first reports and had not been substantially revised or amended. At 3:17
P.M.
on Tuesday, May 20, a man named Peter J. Odell had entered a room on the sixth floor of the CAN building on West Fifty-fourth Street, pulled open the bottom drawer of a desk, and died instantly. The bomb that shredded him was so powerful that it not only blew the metal desk up to the ceiling but even buckled two of the walls. CAN stood for Continental Air Network, which occupied the whole building, and Peter J. Odell had been its vice-president in charge of development. The room and desk were not his; they belonged to Amory Browning, the vice-president in charge of programming.

All right, that was what happened, but in addition to the main question, who had put the bomb in the drawer, there were others that had still not been answered, at least not for publication. It wasn’t unheard of for a vice-president to enter another vice-president’s room, but why had Odell opened that drawer?
That
drawer. It was known to enough people at CAN to get into both the
Times
and the
Gazette
that that drawer had rarely, possibly never, been opened by anyone but Browning himself because nothing was kept in it but a bottle or bottles of twelve-year-old Ten-Mile Creek bourbon. It had almost certainly been known to Odell.

No one had admitted seeing Odell enter Browning’s room. Helen Lugos, Browning’s secretary, whose room adjoined his, had been down the hall in a file room. Kenneth Meer, Browning’s chief assistant, had been down on the ground floor in conference with some technicians. Browning himself had been with Cass R. Abbott, the president of CAN, in his office—the corner office on that floor. If anyone knew why Odell had gone to Browning’s room, he wasn’t saying. So the answer to the question, Who put the bomb in the drawer? depended partly on the answer to another question: Whom did he expect to open the drawer?

Rereading the accounts in fifteen copies of the
Times
and fifteen of the
Gazette
, I was impressed by how well I had absorbed the details of an event we had not been involved in, and by nothing else. There was nothing to give me a nudge on a start of what I had in mind. It was after eleven o’clock when I finished, so Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms, and I went up to the phone in my room to dial a number—the switchboard of the
Gazette
. It was an afternoon paper and Lon Cohen’s line was usually busy from 10
A.M.
to 4:20
P.M.
, but I finally got him. I told him I wanted thirty seconds and he said I could have five.

“Then,” I said, “I won’t tell you about the steer that grew the Chateaubriands that Felix is saving for us. Can you meet me at Rusterman’s at a quarter past six?”

“I can if I have to. Bringing what?”

“Just your tongue. And of course plenty of lettuce for later.”

The “later” meant the poker game at Saul Panzer’s apartment which started at eight o’clock Thursday evenings. Lon made an appropriate retort about lettuce and hung up, and I dialed another number I didn’t have to look up and got Felix, and told him that this time my request for the small room upstairs was strictly personal, not on behalf of Wolfe, and that if he was short on Chateaubriands, tournedos would be fine. He asked what kind of flowers would be preferred, and I said my guest would be a man from whom I hoped to get some useful information, so instead of flowers make it four-leaf clovers for luck.

An announcement to Wolfe that I wouldn’t be there for dinner was not required, since I never was on Thursdays. Since his dinner time was 7:15, I couldn’t eat at his table and be at Saul’s poker table at eight. I merely mentioned casually, after we had finished with the morning mail, that I would be leaving around a quarter to six, before he came down from the plant rooms. I did not mention Kenneth Meer, and neither did he, but around the middle of the afternoon Vollmer phoned to say that Dr. Ostrow didn’t want to know what Ronald Seaver’s name was. Which of course was a polite lie. Dr. Ostrow would certainly have liked to know the name, but not from Wolfe if he had got it by a trick.

The small room upstairs at Rusterman’s had many memories for me, back to the days when Marko Vukcic was still alive and making it the best restaurant in New York, with frequent meals with his old friend Nero Wolfe helping to keep it the best. It was still better than good, as Lon Cohen remarked that evening after his third spoonful of Germiny à l’Oseille, and again after his second bite of Chateaubriand and his first sip of the claret.

With about his fourth sip he said, “I’d be enjoying this more—or less, I don’t know which—if I knew the price. Of course you want something, or Nero Wolfe does. What?”

I swallowed meat. “Not Nero Wolfe. Me. He doesn’t know about it and I don’t want him to. I need some facts. I spent two hours this morning reading everything two great newspapers have printed about the murder of Peter J. Odell and I still don’t know enough for my personal satisfaction. I thought a chat with you might be helpful.”

He squinted at me. “How straight is that? That Wolfe doesn’t know you’re feeding me.”

“As straight as from a ten to an ace.”

His eyes aimed about a foot above my head, as they often did when he was deciding whether to call or raise, stayed there while I buttered a bite of roll, and leveled down to mine. “Well, well,” he said. “You could just put an ad in the
Gazette
. Of course with a box number since Wolfe mustn’t know you’re drumming.”

Just looking at Lon you would never guess, from his neat little face and his slick black hair, how sharp he is. But people who know him know, including the publisher of the
Gazette
, which is why he has a room to himself two doors down the hall from the publisher’s room.

I shook my head. “The kind of people I want to reach don’t read
Gazette
ads. To be perfectly frank, I’m going stale and I need exercise. There must be plenty about that crowd that isn’t fit to print. This room isn’t bugged and neither am I. Have Cramer and the DA got a lead that they’re saving?”