Death Times Three SSC (22 page)

"No client. He's not interested. Have you--" "Come off it! Give!"

"Not a crumb. You know damn well I've given you plenty of breaks, and I'll hand you another one if and when. If you run a paragraph that Nero Wolfe is asking about Hattie Annis I'll chew your ear personally. Have you got a description of the driver?"

"No. But now that you've called we'll sure try to get one."

"Man or woman?"

"Not even that. Look, Archie, just a helpful hint. I'll put horseradish on my ear."

I told him I didn't like horseradish, which wasn't true, hung up, stood a minute, and stepped to the window. The snowflakes were getting reinforcements. I was deciding how to take it. I had liked her even before I had learned from Tammy Baxter that she was a screwball, and we could use more screwballs. Not that I was blaming myself. It was true that if I had postponed my trip to the bank and kept her there she might still be alive, but what the hell, you can't base your actions on the theory that anyone you don't keep your eye on is apt to get killed. That wasn't it. But I admit my feelings were personal. Even at the minimum, I was sore because I had gone out of my way to maneuver Wolfe into seeing her, and at five minutes past eleven, exactly when I was picking the right words and tone to get him, some skunk was smashing her just three blocks away.

Having settled for that as a minimum, I got rubber gloves from a drawer of my desk, put them on, went to the front room, knelt to reach under the couch for the package, took it to the office, to my desk, untied the string, and, without touching more than I had to, removed the wrapping paper. No Hope diamond. It was a stack of new twenty-dollar bills. I picked it up and flipped the corners, the whole stack. All twenties. I got a ruler from a drawer and measured its thickness--one and seven-eighths inches. New bills run 250 to the inch. Nine thousand dollars.

It was a comedown. Nine grand is not hay, but it is less than one percent of a million; and besides, nothing is more uninteresting than a stack of currency when it's not yours and not going to be. I picked off the top one and gave it a look. B67380945B. Of course they would be more interesting if. . . . I went and got a new twenty from the safe and put them side by side for inspection, first just with my eyes, which are good, and then with a glass Wolfe keeps in his desk. Three minutes with the glass settled it, and I took the bill from the bottom of the stack and one from the middle, and used the glass on them, with the same result. They were phonies.

I returned the three bills to the stack, rewrapped it as before, tied it with the string, also as before, went upstairs to my room, put it in the back of my shirt drawer, went back down to the office, took off the rubber gloves and put them away, sat, and considered matters.

There were a lot of aspects. For instance, the essential thing about counterfeit money is to keep it out of circulation. I was doing so. As for having it in my possession, nobody could prove I didn't still think it was the Hope diamond or the secret Pentagon war plans or used typewriter ribbons.

Take the Wolfe aspect. Consulting him was out. Since there was no prospect of a client and a fee, he would merely instruct me to call the Treasury Department and tell them to come and get it.

Or the conflict-of-interest aspect. The T-men would rather see the skunk get five years for passing phonies than the chair for murder, naturally. Homicide, specifically Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins, the reverse, also naturally. Not that they are not on speaking terms, but they jostle. I had heard the inside dope on how the Lorber case had been messed up a couple of years ago. I was for Homicide, but if I took the package to West 20th Street and reported my chats with Hattie Annis and Tammy Baxter they would have to call the Treasury within an hour after they opened the package, and the jostling would start.

Or the personal aspect. She had entrusted the package to me. Any reward coming to her now would be in a different jurisdiction, but she had hated cops, and as her trustee it was my duty to see that they didn't horn in on her estate. If there actually was a reward, which was doubtful, I could turn it over to the Actors' Fund. As for my position, no one but Wolfe knew she had come, and even he didn't know she had left a package with me.

Or the logical aspect. Since she had rarely left her house and never went more than a block away, it was a fair assumption that she had found the. bills there and that one of her tenants had put them there, probably in his or her room. That was enough to start; going on to assume that he had followed her downtown could wait.

Those were the main aspects. After looking them over, along with a few minor ones, I got the address by finding Annis, Hattie, in the phone book, buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to tell Wolfe I was going out on an errand, went to the hall for my coat and hat, and left. With the snow coming down thicker and the wind swirling it around there would be no such thing as an empty taxi at that time of day, so I walked, twelve short blocks uptown and one long one across.

It was a dump all right, like hundreds of others in that part of town. I stood across the street for a survey through the snow, blinking it from my lashes. I didn't care to bump into Sergeant Purley Stebbins or any of the others, but of course it wasn't likely that Homicide was around, since it was probably being handled as a routine hit-and-run. There was no police car in sight, and I crossed over and entered the vestibule. It had never been converted for multiple tenancy--only one mailbox, and one button, on the jamb. I pressed it and waited for a click, but none came. Instead, after half a minute, the door opened and a tall thin guy with a marvelous mane of wavy white hair was there, boring a hole through me with deep-set blue-gray eyes.

"You a reporter?" he boomed. It almost blew me back out of the vestibule.

"Not guilty," I told him. "I would like to see Miss Baxter. My name's Goodwin."

"Do you recognize me?" he demanded.

"No. I have a feeling that I would in a better light, but no."

"Raymond Dell."

"Sure. Of course. Certainly."

He turned on his heel and strode down the dim and dingy hall. I entered and shut the door. He kept going, to a door at the end of the hall and on through, and, since he hadn't told me to wait, I followed. As I crossed the sill he was saying, "For you, Tammy. A Philistine. Goodman."

It was the kitchen. Tammy Baxter and another girl, and two men, were seated at a big table with a linoleum top, dining or maybe teaing--sandwiches on paper plates and coffee in big white heavy cups. There was a fifth chair and the white-maned Raymond Dell was taking it and picking up what remained of a sandwich.

"Hi," Tammy said. "Not Goodman, Ray. Goodwin. Archie Goodwin. I met him somewhere. A Philistine but not a barbarian. Martha Kirk, Mr. Goodwin. Raymond Dell. Noel Ferris. Paul Hannah. I don't ask what you want . . . because I may not have it. I hope it's not a sandwich?"

It was neat. She had used only four words, "I met him somewhere," to tell me that she didn't want them to know of her call at Wolfe's office. I humored her. "No, thanks," I said. "It's not urgent. I'll wait somewhere till you finish if you'll tell me where."

"You phoned," Noel Ferris said.

He was looking at me. I met his lazy brown eyes. "I phoned?"

He nodded, a lazy nod. "Around noon." His voice changed: "My name is Buster. I want to speak to Miss Annis. Then I'll speak to Miss Baxter, please." His voice changed back. "Will that pass?"

It would indeed. On a tape recording my voice doesn't sound like me at all, but he had it to a T, and he had only heard me once on the phone. "Perfect," I said. "I wish I could do it. It's a gift."

"That's nothing." He was bored. He was younger than me, but probably he had been born bored. "But your-name's Archie Goodwin. I seem to have heard it. Are you in the theatre?" He waved it away with a lazy hand. "It doesn't matter. Don't bother."

I opened my mouth to bother, but closed it when Tammy Baxter pushed her chair back and got up. As she headed for the door I moved, but stopped when she said, "I'm just going for my lipstick. I'll be back." Paul Hannah was telling Noel Ferris, "Of course you've heard it." Hannah was still younger than Ferris. For a juvenile lead he would have to do something about his chubby cheeks. He was regarding me. "Aren't you the Archie Goodwin that works with Nero Wolfe?"

"For him," I said.

"A detective."

"Right."

"A snoop," Raymond Dell rumbled. "Worse than a Philistine. A monster."

"That's not very polite," Martha Kirk said. She was an ornamental little number, not long out of high school, with a dimple in her chin. I no longer had any
illusions about dimples. The most attractive and bestplaced ones I had ever seen were on the cheeks of a woman who had fed arsenic to three husbands in a row. "If Ray knew how to be polite," Noel Ferris drawled, "he would have had his name at the top of a marquee long ago." His eyes moved lazily to me. "Since you're a detective, maybe you can help us. As a service to the arts. We're having a conference, but it's a farce. Just a guessing match. We want to know what's going to happen to this castle of culture now that our Lady Bountiful has been slain."

"By a fiend," Raymond Dell declared. "Worse than a monster!"

"People who steal cars," Paul Hannah said, "and run them over people ought to have their hands and feet cut off."

"How horrible," Martha Kirk said. She had a full rich contralto, enough for one twice her size. "That's brutal, Paul."

"It's not polite," Noel Ferris drawled. "But you might agree if you had seen her, Martha darling. It was my luck to be here when they came to get someone to identify her. That was horrible. I would be for one hand and one foot, at least."

Raymond Dell boomed at me, "Is that what you're snooping about?"

"No," I said, "it's after hours. I only snoop from eight to four. I know about Miss Annis because it happened only three blocks from Nero Wolfe's place and the cop on the beat told me, but that's a police matter. I'm just a Philistine trying to rub up against culture."

"So Tammy is culture," Noel Ferris said. "I don't deny that she--but here she is. Tammy, you're culture."

"Sit down," Dell commanded me. "I'll explain why it's hopeless. Utterly hopeless."

"Later, Ray." Tammy Baxter was in the doorway. "Maybe Rodgers and Hammerstein sent him to beg me to take a lead. If I like it I'll buy the house and have the plumbing fixed. Come on, Mr. Goodwin."

She started down the hall and I followed. Toward the front she opened a door on the left, entered and flipped a light switch, and, when I was in, closed the door. It was the parlor, at least it had been the parlor fifty years back, and it was the same furniture. Dark red plush or velvet or whatever it was. An upright piano. The window blinds were down. I dropped my coat and hat on a sofa. She took hold of a chair to move it and found it was heavy, and I helped, and we sat. She didn't sit like an actress. Actresses sit with their knees together and to one side a little, and their feet drawn in, but she kept hers straight front and at a right angle, with her feet flat.

She cocked her head. "I've been trying to guess what brought you. It would be flattering to think it's a social call, but no such luck. When you phoned you asked for Miss Annis first."

"That Noel Ferris is a wonderful mimic," I said. "When I was a boy I could croak like a bullfrog, but I've lost it. I'm more than willing to make it social. If you can stand a drink on top of a sandwich Sardi's is only a six-minute walk."

She shook her head. "I think not. You did ask for Miss Annis?"

"Yes. The fact is, I'm under suspicion. I suspect myself of wanting to see you again, I have no idea why. I suspect my asking for Miss Annis was a trick. After I had spoken with her I would have an excuse to ask for you, and you wouldn't suspect what I was really after. Not a bad idea."

"A grand idea. And now?"

"Now I admit there's another element. You heard me say how I happened to hear-about Miss Annis, from the cop on the beat--no, you weren't there."

"No. From the cop on the beat?"

I nodded. "Right in the neighborhood, only three blocks away. And she had told you she was going to see Nero Wolfe. Have you told the police that?"

"I haven't told them anything. They haven't asked me. I was out and wasn't here until nearly four o'clock. They had talked with Noel Ferris and Raymond Dell, and Noel had gone and identified the body. There's nothing I can tell them. It was just a moron or a maniac, or both, with a stolen car. Wasn't it?"

"Evidently." I was looking relieved. "But there's still a chance they may check with everyone here, sometimes they're pretty thorough, and that's the other element. If the police learn that she had said she was going to see Nero Wolfe they'll pester him. It won't make any sense since she didn't see him, but they'll grab at the excuse to pester him, and anyhow they may think she did see him. He has been known to reserve facts. Since, as you say, it was just a moron or maniac with a stolen car, it won't help any for them to know she had said she was going to see Nero Wolfe, so there's no point in your mentioning it. Of course it's not vital, he's been pestered before, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to suggest it. And I still suspect myself. There's the possibility that I've merely cooked up an excuse to see you again."