Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24 (15 page)

The sergeant, after conducting this one to the seat the others had occupied, facing Wolfe and Cramer, did not go to the chair against the wall, which he had favored throughout the evening. Instead, he lowered his bulk onto one at Cramer’s left, only two arms’ lengths from the subject. That was interesting because it meant that he was voting for Karl Busch as his pick of the lot, and while
Stebbins had often been wrong I had known him, more than once, to be right.

Karl Busch was the slick, sly, swarthy little article with his hair pasted to his scalp. In the specifications on his transcript I had noted the key NVMS, meaning No Visible Means of Support, but that was just a nod to routine. The details of the report on him left no real doubt as to the sources he tapped for jack. He was a Broadway smoothie, third grade. He was not in the theater or sports or the flicks or any of the tough rackets, but he knew everyone who was, and as the engraved lettuce swirled around the midtown corners and got trapped in the nets of the collectors, legitimate and otherwise, he had a hundred little dodges for fastening onto a specimen for himself.

To him Cramer’s tone was noticeably different. “This is Nero Wolfe,” he rasped. “Answer his questions. You hear, Busch?”

Busch said he did. Wolfe, who was frowning, studying him, spoke. “Nothing is to be gained, Mr. Busch, by my starting the usual rigmarole with you. I’ve read your statement, and I doubt if it would be worth while to try to pester you into a contradiction. But you had three conversations with Leo Heller, and in your statement they are not reported, merely summarized. I want the details of those conversations, as completely as your memory will furnish. Start with the first one, two months ago. Exactly what was said?”

Busch slowly shook his head. “Impossible, mister.”

“Word by word, no. Do your best.”

“Huh-uh.”

“You won’t try?”

“It’s this way. If I took you to the pier and ast you to try to jump across to Brooklyn, what would you do? You’d say it was impossible and why get your feet wet. That’s me.”

“I told you,” Cramer snapped, “to answer his questions.”

Busch extended a dramatic hand in appeal. “What do you want me to do, make it up?”

“I want you to do what you were told, to the best of your ability.”

“Okay. This will be good. I said to him, ‘Mr. Heller, my
name’s Busch, and I’m a broker.’ He said broker of what, and I said of anything people want broken, just for a gag, but he had no sense of humor and I saw he didn’t, so I dropped that and explained. I told him there was a great demand among all kinds of people to know what horse was going to win a race the day before the race was run or even an hour before, and I had read about his line of work and was thinking that he could help to meet that demand. He said that he had thought several times about using his method on horse races, but he didn’t care himself to use the method for personal bets because he wasn’t a betting man, and for him to make up one of his formulas for just one race would take an awful lot of research and it would cost so much it wouldn’t be worth it for any one person unless that person made a high-bracket plunge.”

“You’re paraphrasing it,” Wolfe objected. “I’d prefer the words that were used.”

“This is the best of my ability, mister.”

“Very well. Go on.”

“I said I wasn’t a high-bracket boy myself, but anyway that wasn’t here or there or under the rug, because what I had in mind was a wholesale setup. I had figgers to show him. Say he did ten races a week. I could round up at least twenty customers right off the bat. He didn’t need to be any God Almighty always right; all he had to do was crack a percentage of forty or better, and it would start a fire you couldn’t put out if you ran a river down it. We could have a million customers if we wanted ’em, but we wouldn’t want ’em. We would hand-pick a hundred and no more, and each one would ante one C per week, which if I can add at all would make ten grand every sennight. That would—”

“What?” Wolfe exploded. “Ten grand every what?”

“Sennight.”

“Meaning a week?”

“Sure.”

“Where the deuce did you pick up that fine old word?”

“That’s not old. Some big wit started it around last summer.”

“Incredible. Go on.”

“Where was—Oh, yeah. That would make half a million
little ones per year, and Heller and me would split it. Out of my half I would expense the operating, and out of his half he would expense the dope. He would have to walk on his nose to cut under a hundred grand all clear, and I wouldn’t do so bad. We didn’t sign no papers, but he could smell it, and after two more talks he agreed to do a dry run on three races. The first one he worked on, his answer was the favorite, a horse named White Water, and it won, but what the hell, it was just exercise for that rabbit. The next one, there were two sweethearts in a field of nine, and it was heads or tails between those two, and Heller had the winner all right, a horse named Short Order, but on a fifty-fifty call you don’t exactly panic. But get this next one.”

Busch gestured dramatically for emphasis. “Now get it. This animal was forty to one, but it might as well have been four hundred. It was a musclebound sore-jointed hyena named Zero. That alone, a horse named Zero, was enough to put the curse of six saints on it, but also it was the kind of looking horse which if you looked at it would make you think promptly of canned dog food. When Heller came up with that horse, I thought oh-oh, he’s a loon after all, and watch me run. Well, you ast me to tell you the words we used, me and Heller. If I told you some I used when that Zero horse won that race, you would lock me up. Not only was Heller batting a thousand, but he had kicked through with the most—What are you doing, taking a nap?”

We all looked at Wolfe. He was leaning back with his eyes shut tight, and was motionless except for his lips, which were pushing out and in, and out and in, and again out and in. Cramer and Stebbins and I knew what that meant: something had hit his hook, and he had yanked and had a fish on. A tingle ran up my spine. Stebbins arose and took a step to stand at Busch’s elbow. Cramer tried to look cynical but couldn’t make it; he was as excited as I was. The proof of it was that he didn’t open his trap; he just sat with his eyes on Wolfe, along with the rest of us, looking at the lip movements as if they were something really special.

“What the hell!” Busch protested. “Is he having a fit?”

Wolfe’s eyes opened, and he came forward in his chair.
“No, I’m not,” he snapped, “but I’ve been having one all evening. Mr. Cramer. Will you please have Mr. Busch removed? Temporarily.”

Cramer, with no hesitation, nodded at Purley, and Purley touched Busch’s shoulder, and they went. The door closed behind them, but it wasn’t more than five seconds before it opened again and Purley was back with us. He wanted as quick a look at the fish as his boss and me.

“Have you ever,” Wolfe was asking Cramer, “called me, pointblank, a dolt and a dotard?”

“Those aren’t my words, but I’ve certainly called you.”

“You may do so now. Your opinion of me at its lowest was far above my present opinion of myself.” He looked up at the clock, which said five past three. “We now need a proper setting. How many of your staff are in my house?”

“Fourteen or fifteen.”

“We want them all in here, for the effect of their presence. Half of them should bring chairs. Also, of course, the six persons we have interviewed. This shouldn’t take too long—possibly an hour, though I doubt it. I certainly won’t prolong it.”

Cramer was looking contrary. “You’ve already prolonged it plenty. You mean you’re prepared to name him?”

“I am not. I haven’t the slightest notion who it is. But I am prepared to make an attack that will expose him—or her—and if it doesn’t, I’ll have no opinion of myself at all.” Wolfe flattened his palms on his desk, for him a violent gesture. “Confound it, don’t you know me well enough to realize when I’m ready to strike?”

“I know you too damn well.” Cramer looked at his sergeant, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. “Oh, nuts. Okay, Purley. Collect the audience.”

The office is a good-sized room, but there wasn’t much unoccupied space left when that gathering was fully assembled. There were twenty-seven of us all told. The biggest assortment of Homicide employees I had ever gazed upon extended from wall to wall in the rear of the six subjects, with four of them filling the couch. Cramer was planted in
the red leather chair, with Stebbins on his left, and the stenographer was hanging on at the end of my desk.

The six citizens were in a row up front, and none of them looked merry. Agatha Abbey was the only person present who rated two chairs, one for herself and one for her mink, but no one was bothering to resent it in spite of the crowding. Their minds were on other matters.

Wolfe’s eyes went from right to left and back again, taking them in. He spoke. “I’ll have to make this somewhat elaborate, so that all of you will clearly understand the situation. I could not at the moment hazard even a venturesome guess as to which of you killed Leo Heller, but I now know how to find out, and I propose to do so.”

The only reaction visible or audible was John R. Winslow clearing his throat.

Wolfe interlaced his fingers in front of his middle mound. “We have from the first had a hint that has not been imparted to you. Yesterday—Tuesday, that is—Heller telephoned here to say that he suspected that one of his clients had committed a serious crime and to hire me to investigate. I declined, for reasons we needn’t go into, but Mr. Goodwin, who is subordinate only when it suits his temperament and convenience, took it upon himself to call on Heller this morning to discuss the matter.”

He shot me a glance, and I met it. Merely an incivility. He went on to them, “He entered Heller’s office but found it unoccupied. Tarrying there for some minutes, and meanwhile exercising his highly trained talent for observation, he noticed, among other details, that some pencils and an eraser from an overturned jar were arranged on the desk in a sort of pattern. Later that same detail was of course noted by the police, after Heller’s body had been found and they had been summoned; and it was a feature of that detail which led Mr. Cramer to come to see me. He assumed that Heller, seated at his desk and threatened with a gun, knowing or thinking he was about to die, had made the pencil pattern to leave a message, and that the purpose of the message was to give a clue to the identity of the murderer. On that point I agreed with Mr. Cramer. Will you all approach, please, and look at this arrangement on my desk? These pencils and the eraser are placed approximately the same as those on Heller’s desk, with you,
not me, on Heller’s side of the desk. From your side you are seeing them as Heller intended them to be seen.”

The six did as requested, and they had company. Not only did most of the homicide subordinates leave their chairs and come forward for a view, but Cramer himself got up and took a glance—maybe just curiosity, but I wouldn’t put it past him to suspect Wolfe of a shenanigan. However, the pencils and eraser were properly placed, as I ascertained by arising and stretching to peer over shoulders.

When they were all seated again Wolfe resumed. “Mr. Cramer had a notion about the message which I rejected and will not bother to expound. My own notion of it, conceived almost immediately, came not as a
coup d’éclat
, but merely a stirring of memory. It reminded me vaguely of something I had seen somewhere; and the vagueness disappeared when I reflected that Heller had been a mathematician, academically qualified and trained. The memory was old, and I checked it by going to my shelves for a book I had read some ten years ago. Its title is
Mathematics for the Million
, by Hogben. After verifying my recollection, I locked the book in a drawer because I thought it would be a pity for Mr. Cramer to waste time leafing through it.”

“Let’s get on,” Cramer growled.

Wolfe did so. “As told in Mr. Hogben’s book, more than two thousand years ago what he calls a matchstick number script was being used in India. Three horizontal lines stood for three, two horizontal lines stood for two, and so on. That was indeed primitive, but it had greater possibilities than the clumsy devices of the Hebrews and Greeks and Romans. Around the time of the birth of Christ some brilliant Hindu improved upon it by connecting the horizontal lines with diagonals, making the units unmistakable.” He pointed to the arrangement on his desk. “These five pencils on your left form a three exactly as the Hindus formed a three, and the three pencils on your right form a two. These Hindu symbols are one of the great landmarks in the history of number language. You will note, by the way, that our own forms of the figure three and of the figure two are taken directly from these Hindu symbols.”

A couple of them got up to look, and Wolfe politely waited until they were seated again. “So, since Heller had
been a mathematician, and since those were famous patterns in the history of mathematics, I assumed that the message was a three and a two. But evidence indicated that the eraser was also a part of the message and must be included. That was simple. It is the custom of an academic mathematician, if he wants to scribble ‘four times six,’ or ‘seven times nine,’ to use for the ‘times’ not an X, as we laymen do, but a dot. It is so well-known a custom that Mr. Hogben uses it in his book without thinking it necessary to explain it, and therefore I confidently assumed that the eraser was meant for a dot, and that the message was three times two, or six.”

Wolfe compressed his lips and shook his head. “That was an impetuous imbecility. During the whole seven hours that I sat here poking at you people, I was trying to find some connection with the figure six that would either set one of you clearly apart, or relate you to the commission of some crime, or both. Preferably both, of course, but either would serve. In the interviews the figure six did turn up with persistent monotony, but with no promising application, and I could only ascribe it to the mischief of coincidence.

“So at three o’clock in the morning I was precisely where I had been when I started. Without a fortuitous nudge, I can’t say how long it would have taken me to become aware of my egregious blunder; but I got the nudge, and I can at least say that I responded promptly and effectively. The nudge came from Mr. Busch when he mentioned the name of a horse, Zero.”