Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 02 (30 page)

I thought I was releasing the lever about the right time, but the first thing I knew the elevator hit bottom like a ton of brick and shook me loose from the wall. I picked myself up and opened the door and saw there was a dark hall about two feet above my level. I climbed out and got myself up. It was the basement. I turned right, which seemed to be correct, and for a change it was. I came to a door and went through, and through a gate, and there I was outdoors with nothing between me and the sidewalk but a flight of concrete steps. I negotiated them, and crossed the street and found the roadster and got in.

I don’t believe yet that I drove that car from Perry Street to Thirty-sixth, to the garage. I might possibly have done it by caroms, bouncing back from the buildings first on one side of the street and then on the other, but the trouble with that theory is that next day the roadster didn’t have a scratch on it. If anyone is keeping a miracle score, chalk one up for me. I got there, but I stopped out in front, deciding not to try for the door. I blew my horn and Steve came out. I described my condition in round figures and told him I hoped there was someone there he could leave in charge of the joint, because he had to get in the sedan and drive me to the Bronx. He asked if I wanted a drink and I snarled at him. He grinned and went inside, and I transferred to the sedan, standing at the curb. Pretty soon he came back with an overcoat on, and got in and shoved off. I told him where to go and let my head fall back in the corner against the cushion, but I didn’t dare to let my eyes shut. I stretched them open and kept on stretching them every time I blinked. My window was down and the cold air slapped me, and it seemed we were going a million miles a minute in a swift sweeping circle and it was hard to keep up with my breathing.

Steve said, “Here we are, mister.”

I grunted and lifted my head up and stretched my eyes again. We had stopped. There it was, Bronx River Inn, just across the sidewalk. I had a feeling it had come to us instead of us to it. Steve asked, “Can you navigate?”

“Sure.” I set my jaw again, and opened the door and climbed out. Then after crossing the sidewalk I tried to walk through a lattice, and set my jaw some more and detoured. I crossed the porch, with cold bare tables around and no one there, and opened the
door and went inside to the main room. There some of the tables had cloths on them and a few customers were scattered here and there. The customer I was looking for was at a table in the far corner, and I approached it. There sat Nero Wolfe, all of him, on a chair which would have been economical for either half. His brown greatcoat covered another chair, beside him, and across the table from him I saw the bandages on the back of Dora Chapin’s neck. She was facing him, with her rear to me. I walked over there.

Wolfe nodded at me. “Good evening, Archie. I am relieved again. It occurred to me after I phoned you that you were probably in no condition to pilot a car through this confounded labyrinth. I am greatly relieved.—You have met Mrs. Chapin.—Sit down. You don’t look as if standing was very enjoyable.”

He lifted his glass of beer and took a couple of swallows. I saw the remains of some kind of a mess on his plate, but Dora Chapin had cleaned hers up. I moved his hat and stick off a chair and sat down on it. He asked me if I wanted a glass of milk and I shook my head. He said:

“I confess it is a trifle mortifying, to set out to rescue you and end by requesting you to succor me, but if that is Mr. Scott’s taxicab he should get new springs for it. If you get me home intact—and no doubt you will—that will not be your only triumph for this day. By putting me in touch with Mrs. Chapin in unconventional circumstances, though it seems inadvertently, you have brought us to the solution of our problem. I tell you that at once because I know it will be welcome news. Mrs. Chapin has been kind enough to accept my assurances—”

That was the last word I heard. The only other thing I remembered was that a tight wire which had
been stretched between my temples, holding them together, suddenly parted with a twang. Wolfe told me afterwards that when I folded up my head hit the edge of the table with a loud thud before he could catch me.

M
onday morning when I woke up I was still in bed. That sounds as if I meant something else, but I don’t. When I got enough awake to realize where I was I had a feeling that I had gone to bed sometime during Lent and here it was Christmas. Then I saw Doc Vollmer standing there beside me.

I grinned at him. “Hello, doc. You got a job here as house physician?”

He grinned back. “I just stopped in to see how it went with what I pumped into you last night. Apparently—”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Good God.” It struck me that the room seemed full of light. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to twelve.”

“No!” I twisted to see the clock. “Holy murder!” I jerked myself upright, and someone jabbed a thousand ice-picks into my skull. “Whoa, Bill.” I put my hands up to it and tried moving it slowly. I said to Vollmer, “What’s this I’ve got here, my head?”

He laughed. “It’ll be all right.”

“Yeah. You’re not saying when. Wowie! Is Mr. Wolfe down in the office?”

He nodded. “I spoke to him on the way up.”

“And it’s noon.” I slid to my feet. “Look out, I might run into you.” I started for the bathroom.

I began soaping up, and he came to the bathroom door and said he had left instructions with Fritz for my breakfast. I told him I didn’t want instructions, I wanted ham and eggs. He laughed again, and beat it. I was glad to hear him laugh, because it seemed likely that if there really were ice-picks sticking in my head he, being a doctor, would be taking them out instead of laughing at me.

I made it as snappy as I could with my dizziness, cleansing the form and assuming the day’s draperies, and went downstairs in pretty good style but hanging onto the banister.

Wolfe, in his chair, looked up and said good morning and asked me how I felt. I told him I felt like twin colts and went to my desk. He said:

“But, Archie. Seriously. Should you be up?”

“Yeah. Not only should I be up, I should have been up. You know how it is, I’m a man of action.”

His cheeks unfolded. “And I, of course, am super-sedentary. A comical interchange of roles, that you rode home last evening from the Bronx River Inn, a matter of ten miles or more, with your head on my lap all the way.”

I nodded. “Very comical. I told you a long while ago, Mr. Wolfe, that you pay me half for the chores I do and half for listening to you brag.”

“So you did. And if I did not then remark, I do so now—but no. We can pursue these amenities another time, now there is business. Could you take some notes, and break your fast with our lunch?—Good. I spoke on the telephone this morning with Mr. Morley, and with the District Attorney himself. It has been arranged that I shall see Mr. Chapin at the Tombs at
two-thirty this afternoon. You will remember that on Saturday evening I was beginning to dictate to you the confession of Paul Chapin when we were interrupted by news from Fred Durkin which caused a postponement. If you will turn to that page we can go on. I’ll have to have it by two o’clock.”

So as it turned out I not only didn’t get to tie into the ham and eggs I had yearned for, I didn’t even eat lunch with Wolfe and Hibbard. The dictating wasn’t done until nearly one, and I had the typing to do. But by that time the emptiness inside had got to be a vacuum, or whatever it may be that is emptier than emptiness, and I had Fritz bring some hot egg sandwiches and milk and coffee to my desk. I wanted this typed just right, this document that Paul Chapin was to sign, and with my head not inclined to see the importance of things like spelling and punctuation I had to take my time and concentrate. Also, I wasted three minutes phoning the garage to tell them to bring the sedan around, for I supposed of course I would take Wolfe in it; but they said they already had instructions from Wolfe, and that the instructions included a driver. I thought maybe I ought to be sore about that, but decided not to.

Wolfe ate a quick lunch, for him. When he came into the office at a quarter to two I barely had the thing finished and was getting the three copies clipped into brown folders. He took them and put them in his pocket and told me to take my notebook and started on the instructions for my afternoon. He explained that he had asked for a driver from the garage because I would be busy with other things. He also explained that on account of the possibility of visitors he had procured from Hibbard a promise that he would spend
the entire afternoon in his room, until dinner time. Hibbard had gone there from the lunch-table.

Fritz came to the door and said the car was there, and Wolfe told him he would be ready in a few minutes.

What gave me a new idea of the dimensions of Wolfe’s nerve was the disclosure that a good part of the arrangements had been completed for a meeting of the League of the White Feather, in the office that evening at nine o’clock. Before he had seen Chapin at all! Of course I didn’t know what Dora might have told him, except a couple of details that had been included in the confession, but it wasn’t Dora that was supposed to sign on the dotted line, it was her little crippled husband with the light-colored eyes; and that was a job I was glad Wolfe hadn’t bestowed on me, even if it did mean his sashaying out of the house twice in two days, which was an all-time record. But he had gone ahead and telephoned Boston and Philadelphia and Washington, and six or eight of them in New York, after we got home Sunday evening and from his room early that morning, and the meeting was on. My immediate job was to get in touch with the others, by phone if possible, and ensure as full an attendance as we could get.

He gave me another one more immediate, just before he left. He told me to go and see Mrs. Burton at once, and dictated two questions to ask her. I suggested the phone, and he said no, it would be better if I saw the daughter and the maids also. Fritz was standing there holding his coat. Wolfe said:

“And I was almost forgetting that our guests will be thirsty. Fritz, put the coat down and come here, and we shall see what we need.—Archie, if you don’t mind you had better start, you should be back by
three.—Let us see, Fritz. I noticed last week that Mr. Cabot prefers Aylmer’s soda—”

I beat it. I walked to the garage for the roadster, and the sharp air glistened in my lungs. After I got the roadster out into the light I looked it over and couldn’t find a scratch on it, and it was then I reflected on miracles. I got back in and headed uptown.

I was worried about Wolfe. It looked to me like he was rushing things beyond reason. It was true that Andrew Hibbard’s parole was up that evening, but probably he could have been persuaded to extend it, and besides it certainly wasn’t vital to produce him at the meeting as a stunt. But it was like Wolfe not to wait until the confession was actually in the bag. That sort of gesture, thumbing his nose at luck, was a part of him, and maybe an important part; there were lots of things about Wolfe I didn’t pretend to know. Anyhow, there was no law against worrying, and it didn’t make my head feel any better to reflect on the outcome of the meeting that evening if Paul Chapin stayed mule. So that was what I reflected on, all the way to Ninetieth Street.

Wolfe had said that both of the questions I was to ask Mrs. Burton were quite important. The first was simple:
Did Dr. Burton telephone Paul Chapin between 6:50 and 7:00 o’clock Saturday evening and ask him to come to see him?

The second was more complicated:
At 6:30 Saturday evening a pair of gray gloves was lying on the table in the Burton foyer, near the end towards the double doors. Were the gloves removed between then and 7:20 by anyone in the apartment?

I got a break. Everybody was home. The housekeeper had me wait in the drawing-room and Mrs. Burton came to me there. She looked sick, I thought,
and had on a gray dress that made her look sicker, but the spine was still doing its stuff. The first question took about nine seconds; the answer was no, definitely. Dr. Burton had done no telephoning after 6:30 Saturday evening. The second question required more time. Mrs. Kurtz was out of it, since she hadn’t been there. The daughter, having left before 6:30, seemed out of it too, but I asked Mrs. Burton to call her in anyhow, to make sure. She came, and said she had left no gloves on the foyer table and had seen none there. Mrs. Burton herself had not been in the foyer between the time she returned home and around six, and 7:33 when the sound of the shots had taken her there on the run. She said she had left no gloves on that table, and certainly had removed none. She sent for Rose. Rose came, and I asked her if she had removed a pair of gloves from the foyer table between 6:30 and 7:20 Saturday evening.

Rose looked at Mrs. Burton instead of me. She hesitated, and then she spoke: “No, ma’am, I didn’t take the gloves. But Mrs. Chapin—”

She stopped. I said, “You saw some gloves there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When?”

“When I went to let Mrs. Chapin in.”

“Did Mrs. Chapin take them?”

“No, sir. That’s when I noticed them, when she picked them up. She picked them up and then put them down again.”

“You didn’t go back later and get them?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

That settled that. I thanked Mrs. Burton, and left. I wanted to tell her that before tomorrow noon we would have definite news for her that might help a
little, but I thought Wolfe had already done enough discounting for the firm and I’d better let it ride.

It was after three when I got back to the office, and I got busy on the phone. There were eight names left for me, that Wolfe hadn’t been able to get. He had told me the line to take, that we were prepared to mail our bills to our clients, the signers of the memorandum, but that before doing so we would like to explain to them in a body and receive their approval. Which again spoke fairly well for Wolfe’s nerve, inasmuch as our clients knew damn well that it was the cops who had grabbed Chapin for Burton’s murder and that we had had about as much to do with it as the lions in front of the library. But I agreed that it was a good line, since the object was to get them to the office.