Some Buried Caesar (50 page)

“By now of course I am a moral idiot, an egomaniacal sow with boar’s tusks. Friday morning Mrs. Fromm gets the spider earrings and leaves the house wearing them. When she came home late that afternoon she talked with me, and told me among other things that she had hired Nero Wolfe to investigate. That was very imprudent; she should at least have suspected how dangerous I was. That night she got proof of it, though she never knew it. I went and found her car parked not far from the Horan apartment and hid behind the front seat, armed with a tire wrench. Horan came down with her, but—”

“Hold it!” Cramer snapped. “You’re charging Jean Estey with murder, with no evidence. I said you’re responsible for what you say, but I got them here, and there’s a limit. Give me a fact, or you’re through.”

Wolfe made a face. “I have only one fact, Mr. Cramer, and that hasn’t been established.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Very well, Archie, get them.”

As I got up to go to the connecting door to the front room I saw Purley Stebbins pay Wolfe one of
the biggest tributes he ever got. He turned his head and dropped his eyes to Jean Estey’s hands. All Wolfe had done was make a speech. As Cramer had said, he hadn’t produced a sliver of evidence. And Jean Estey’s face showed no sign of funk. But Purley, next to her, fastened his eyes on her hands.

I pulled the door open and called, “Okay, Orrie!”

Some heads turned and some didn’t as they entered. Orrie stayed in the rear, and I conducted Levine through the crowd to a chair that was waiting for him at the corner of my desk, from which he had an unobstructed view of the front row. He was trying not to show how nervous he was, but when he sat he barely got onto the edge of the chair, and I had to tell him to get more comfortable.

Wolfe addressed him. “Your name is Bernard Levine?”

“Yes, sir.” He licked his lips.

“This gentleman near the end of my desk is Inspector Cramer of the New York Police Department. He is here on duty, but as an observer. My questions are my own, and you answer at your discretion. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My name is Nero Wolfe. Have you ever seen me before this moment?”

“No, sir. Of course I’ve heard of you—”

“What is your business, Mr. Levine?”

“I’m a partner in B. and S. Levine. My brother and I have a men’s clothing store at Five-fourteen Fillmore Street in Newark.”

“Why are you here? How did it happen? Just tell us.”

“Why, there was a phone call at the store, and a man said—”

“Please. When?”

“This afternoon about four o’clock. He said his wife had bought a felt hat and a brown suit at our store last week, last Wednesday, and did we remember about it. I said sure I remembered, I waited on her. Then he said so there wouldn’t be any mistake would I describe her, and I did. Then he—”

“Please. Did he describe his wife or ask you to describe the customer?”

“Like I said. He didn’t do any describing. He asked me to, and I did.”

“Go ahead.”

“Then he said he wanted to come and maybe exchange the hat and would I be there and I said yes. In about half an hour, maybe a little more, in he came. He showed me a New York detective license with his picture on it and his name, Orvald Cather, and he said it wasn’t his wife that bought the suit, he was investigating something. He said he was working for Nero Wolfe, the great detective, and something had come up about the suit and hat, and he wanted me to come to New York with him. Well, that was a problem. My brother and I don’t like any trouble. We’re no Brooks Brothers, but we try to run a nice honest little business—”

“Yes. But you decided to come?”

“My brother and I decided. We decide everything together.”

“Did Mr. Cather give you any inducement? Did he offer to pay you?”

“No, he just talked us into it. He’s a good talker, that man. He’d make a good salesman. So we came together on the tube, and he brought me here.”

“Do you know what for?”

“No, he didn’t say exactly. He just said it was something very important about the suit and hat.”

“He didn’t give you any hint that you were going to be asked to identify the woman who bought the suit and hat?”

“No, sir.”

“He hasn’t shown you any photographs, any kind of pictures, of anyone?”

“No, sir.”

“Or described anyone?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you should have an open mind, Mr. Levine. I’m asking you about the woman who bought a brown suit and a felt hat at your store last Wednesday. Is there anyone in this room who resembles her?”

“Sure, I saw her as soon as I sat down. The woman there on the end.” He pointed at Jean Estey. “That’s her.”

“Are you positive?”

“One hundred percent.”

Wolfe’s head swiveled. “Will that do for a fact, Mr. Cramer?”

Of course Jean Estey, sitting there between the sergeant and the policewoman, had had four or five minutes to chew on it. The instant she saw Levine she knew she was cooked on buying the outfit, since S. Levine would certainly corroborate B. Levine. So she was ready, and she didn’t wait for Cramer to answer Wolfe’s question, but answered it herself.

“All right,” she said, “it’s a fact. I was an utter fool. I bought the suit and hat for Claire Horan. She asked me to, and I did it. I took the package—”

The seating arrangement worked out fine, with
the policewomen sandwiched among the civilian females. When Mrs. Horan shot out of her chair to go for Jean Estey, she got stopped so promptly and rudely that she was tossed clear to the lap of the policewoman on the other side, who made an expert catch. In the row behind them some of the males were on their feet, and several voices were raised, among them Inspector Cramer’s. Purley Stebbins, now naturally a little confused, left Jean Estey to his female colleague and concentrated on Dennis Horan, who was out of his chair to rescue his wife from the clutches of the lady official who had caught her on the fly. Horan, feeling Purley’s heavy hand on his shoulder, jerked away, drew himself up, and spoke to whom it might concern.

“That’s a lie,” he squeaked. He pointed a shaking finger at Jean Estey. “She’s a liar and a murderer.” He turned to direct the finger at Lips Egan. “You know it, Egan. You know Birch found out she was hogging it, she was giving him the short end, and you know what Birch meant when he said he would handle her. He was a damn fool to think he could. Now she’s trying to hang a murder on me, and she’ll suck you in too. Are you going to take it?”

“I am not,” Egan croaked. “I’ve been sucked in enough. She can fry, the crazy bitch.”

Horan turned. “You’ve got me, Wolfe, damn you. I know when I’m through. My wife knew nothing about this, absolutely nothing, and I knew nothing about the murders. I may have suspected, but I didn’t know. Now you can have all I do know.”

“I don’t want it,” Wolfe said grimly. “I’m through too. Mr. Cramer? Will you get these vermin out of my house?” He turned to the assemblage and
changed his tone. “That applies, ladies and gentlemen, only to those who have earned it.”

I was opening the bottom drawer of my desk to get out a camera; Lon Cohen of the
Gazette
had earned, I thought, a good shot of Bernard Levine sitting in Nero Wolfe’s office.

A
t eleven in the morning three days later, a Friday, I was at my desk typing a letter to an orchid collector when Wolfe came down from the plant rooms and entered. But instead of proceeding to his desk he went to the safe, opened it, and took something out. I swiveled to look because I don’t like to have him monkeying with things. What he took was Lips Egan’s notebook. He closed the safe door and started out.

I got up to follow, but he turned on me. “No, Archie. I don’t want to make you accessory to a felony—or is it a misdemeanor?”

“Nuts. I’d love to share a cell with you.”

He went to the kitchen, got the big roasting pan from the cupboard, put it on the table, and lined it neatly with aluminum foil. I sat on a stool and watched. He opened the looseleaf notebook, removed a sheet, crumpled it, and dropped it into the pan. When a dozen or more sheets were in the pile he applied a match, and then went on adding fuel to the flame, sheet after sheet, until the book was empty.

“There,” he said in a satisfied tone, and went to
the sink to wash his hands. I tossed the book cover in the trash basket.

I thought at the time he was rushing things a little, since it was still possible they would need some extra evidence. But that was many weeks ago, and now that Horan and Egan had been duly tried, convicted, and sentenced, and it took a jury of seven men and five women only four hours to hang the big one on Jean Estey—what the hell.

R
EX
S
TOUT
, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel,
Fer-de-Lance
, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them,
Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang
, and
Please Pass the Guilt
, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery,
A Family Affair
. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in
Death Times Three
.