Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 17 (25 page)

Donald toppled his father to his knees more by bodily impact than by his swinging fists, kicked him down the rest of the way, and bent over him screaming, “You thought I was no man! But I was with her! I loved her! For the first time—I loved her! And you wouldn’t let me and she was going away and now I know! By God, if I could kill her I can kill you too! I can! I can!”

It looked as if he might try to prove it, so I went and grabbed him, and Saul came to help.

“Oh, my son,” Mrs. Pitcairn moaned.

Wolfe looked at her and growled, “Mr. Krasicki is a woman’s son too, madam.” I didn’t think he had it in him.

At six o’clock the next afternoon but one I was at my desk in the office, catching up on neglected details, when I heard the sound of Wolfe’s elevator descending from the plant rooms, and a moment later he entered, got himself comfortable in his chair back of his desk, rang for beer, leaned back, and sighed with deep satisfaction.

“How’s Andy making out?” I asked.

“Considering the blow he got, marvelously.”

I put papers in a drawer and swiveled to face him.

“I was just thinking,” I said, not offensively, “that if it hadn’t been for you Dini Lauer might still be alive and giving males ideas. Ben Dykes told me an hour ago on the phone that Donald has admitted, along with other things, that her telling him she was leaving and going to get married was what put him into a mood to murder. If you hadn’t offered Andy a job he wanted to take he might not have got keyed up enough to talk her into marrying him—or anyhow saying she would. So in a way you might say you killed her.”

“You
might,” Wolfe conceded, taking the cap from one of the bottles of beer Fritz had brought.

“By the way,” I went on, “Dykes said that ape Noonan is still trying to get the DA to charge you for
destroying evidence. Burning that letter you wrote to Pitcairn, signing Dini’s name.”

“Bah.” He was pouring and watching the foam. “It wasn’t evidence. No one ever saw what was on it. It could have been blank. I merely read it to them—ostensibly.”

“Yeah, I know. Anyhow the DA is in no position to charge you with anything, let alone destroying evidence. Not only has Donald told it and signed it, how she was his first and only romance, how his parents threatened to cross him off the list if he married her, how he begged her not to marry Andy and she laughed at him, how he got her to split a bottle of midnight beer with him and put morphine in hers, and even how he lugged her into the greenhouse to make it nice for Andy—not only that, but Vera Imbrie has contributed details of some contacts between Donald and Dini which she saw.”

Wolfe put down the empty glass and got out his handkerchief to wipe his lips. “That of course will help,” he said complacently.

I grunted. “Help is no word for it. Would it do any good to ask you exactly what the hell you would have done if they had all simply sneered when you read that letter?”

“Not much.” He poured more beer. “I knew one of them was toeing a thin and precarious line, and probably more than one. I thought a good hard jolt would totter him or her, no matter who it was, and possibly others. That was why I had Saul find it in the Imbries’ room; they had to be jolted too. If all of them had simply sneered, it would at least have eliminated Mr. Pitcairn and his son, and I would have proceeded from there. That would have been a measurable advance,
since up to that point a finger pointed nowhere and I had eliminated no one but Andy, who—”

He stopped abruptly, pushed his chair back, arose, muttered, “Good heavens, I forgot to tell Andy about those Miltonia seedlings,” and marched out.

I got up and went to the kitchen to chin with Fritz.

Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen, never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in “The Rex Stout Library” will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.

Three Doors to Death

Rex Stout worked and corresponded with many of the top American writers of the twentieth century; among them, Pulitzer Prize-winnning poet Carl Sandburg. A 1958 note from Sandburg to Stout is reproduced here.