The Silent Speaker (15 page)

I shook my head. Probably a thousand ergs. 'That wouldn't be fair. Would you want me to tell him what you wanted me to do?'

He was strongly tempted to insist, there was no doubt about his thirst for knowledge, but his belief in the conservation of energy, coupled with the opinion he had formed of me, won the day. He gave it up without another try and returned to Wolfe.

'Even if Goodwin couldn't give it,' he said, 'there is still a good chance of testimony to that effect being available.'

'Not from Mr. Breslow,' Wolfe declared. 'He would be a wretched witness. Mr. Winterhoff would do fairly well. Mr. Erskine Senior would be admirable. Young Mr. Erskine-I don't know, I rather doubt it. Miss Harding would be the best of all. Could you get her?'

'You're going too fast again.'

'Not at all. Fast'Such details are of the greatest importance.'

'I know they are. After you are committed. Are you accepting my suggestion about O'Neill?'

'Well.' Wolfe leaned back, opened his eyes to a wider slit, and brought his finger tips together at the apex of his central bulk. 'I'll tell you, Mr. Smith. The best way to put it, I think, is in the form of a message, or rather messages, for Mr. Erskine. Tell Mr. Erskine-'

'I'm not representing Erskine. I have mentioned no names.'

'No'I thought I heard you mention Mr. O'Neill, and Mr. Dexter and Mr. Kates. However, the difficulty is this, that the police or the FBI may find that tenth cylinder at any moment, and in all likelihood that would make fools of all of us.'

'Not if we have-'

'Please, sir. You have talked. Let me talk. On the hypothesis that you may run across Mr. Erskine. Tell him, that I am grateful for this suggestion regarding the size of the fee I may ask for without shocking him. I'll remember it when I make out my bill. Tell him that I appreciate his effort to pay the fee in a way that would keep it off my income tax report, but that form of skullduggery doesn't appeal to me. It's a matter of taste, and I happen not to like that. Tell him that I am fully aware that every minute counts; I know that the death of Miss Gunther has increased the public resentment to an unprecedented outburst of fury; I read the editorial in today's Wall Street Journal; I heard Raymond Swing on the radio this evening; I know what's happening.'

Wolfe opened his eyes still wider. 'Especially tell him this. If this idiotic flimflam is persisted in there will probably be the devil to pay and I'll be helpless, but I'll send in a bill just the same, and I'll collect it. I am now convinced that he is either a murderer or a simpleton, and possibly both. He is not, thank God, my client. As for you-no, I won't bother. As you say, you are merely an errand boy, and I suppose a reputable lawyer, of the highest standing. Therefore you are a sworn officer of the law. Pfui!-Archie. Mr. Smith is going.'

He had indeed left his chair and was upright. But he wasn't quite going. He said, in precisely the same tone he had used at the door when telling me he would like to see Mr. Wolfe:

'I would like to know whether I can count on this being treated as confidential. I merely want to know what to expect.'

'You're a simpleton too,' Wolfe snapped. 'What's the difference whether I say yes or no-to you'I don't even know your name. Wouldn't I do as I please?'

'You think-' Smith said, and didn't finish it. Probably the sentence as conceived might have betrayed a trace of some emotion, like sizzling rage for instance, and that wasn't to be permitted under any circumstances. So I don't think it is exaggerating to say that he was rendered speechless. He stayed that way clear out to the stoop, not even telling me good night.

By the time I got back to the office Wolfe had already rung for beer. I knew that by deduction when Fritz entered almost immediately with the tray. I blocked him off and told him:

'Mr. Wolfe has changed his mind. Take it back. It's after ten o'clock, he had only two hours' sleep last night, and he's going to bed. So are you and either me or I or both.'

Wolfe said nothing and made no sign, so Fritz beat it with the tray.

'It reminds me,' I remarked, 'of that old picture, there was one in our dining room out in Ohio, of the people in the sleigh throwing the baby out to the wolves that were chasing them. That may not strictly apply to Dexter or Kates, but it certainly does to O'Neill. Esprit de corps my eye. Good God, he was the Chairman of the Dinner Committee. I used to worry about that picture. One way of looking at it, it was heartless to toss out the baby, but on the other hand if they hadn't the wolves would eventually have got the whole works, baby, horses, and all. Of course the man could have jumped out himself, or the woman could. I remember I decided that if it was me I would kiss the woman and baby good-by and then jump. I was eight years old at the time, a minor, and I don't regard myself as still committed to that. What do you think of the lousy bastards, anyhow?'

'They're in a panic.' Wolfe stood up and pulled his vest down, and maneuvered himself into motion toward the door. 'They're desperate. Good night, Archie.' From the threshold he rumbled, without turning, 'For that matter, so am I.'

THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, here came the envelopes from Bascom. There were four in the morning mail, three in the one o'clock delivery (as I was later informed for bookkeeping purposes, since I was not there at the time), and in late afternoon nine more arrived by messenger. At that time I hadn't the slightest idea what line the Bascom battalion was advancing on, nor did I know what Saul Panzer and Bill Gore were doing, since their telephoned reports were taken by Wolfe, with me instructed to disconnect. The Bascom envelopes were delivered to Wolfe unopened, as ordered.

I was being entrusted with nothing but the little chores, as for example a phone call I was told to make to the Stenophone Company to ask them to deliver a machine to us on a daily rental basis-one equipped with a loudspeaker, like the one the manager had brought us on Sunday and sent for on Monday. They weren't very affable about it and I had to be persuasive to get a promise of immediate delivery. I followed instructions and got the promise, though it was clear over my head, since we had nothing to play on it. An hour later the machine came and I stuck it in a corner.

The only other Wednesday morning activity in which I had a share was a phone call to Frank Thomas Erskine. I was told to make it, and did so, informing Erskine that expenses were skyrocketing and we wanted a check for another twenty thousand at his early convenience. He took that as a mere routine detail and came back at me for an appointment with Wolfe at eleven o'clock, which was made.

The most noteworthy thing about that was that when they-Breslow, Winterhoff, Hattie Harding, and the two Erskines-arrived, sharp at eleven, they had Don O'Neill with them! That was a fair indication that they had not come to take up where John Smith had left off, since Smith's central idea had been to frame O'Neill for a pair of murders, unless they were prepared to sweeten it up with an offer of a signed confession by O'Neill in triplicate, one copy for our files, and I felt that I knew O'Neill too well to expect anything like that, since he had tried to kick me.

Erskine brought the check with him. They stayed over an hour, and it was hard to guess why they had bothered to come, unless it was to show us in the flesh how harassed they were. No comment remotely touching on the errand of John Smith was made by anyone, including Wolfe. Half of their hour was used up in trying to get from Wolfe some kind of a progress report, which meant it was wasted, and they spent most of the other half in an attempt to pry a prognosis out of him. Twenty-four hours'Forty-eight'Three days'For God's sake, when'Erskine stated categorically that each additional day's delay meant untold damage to the most vital interests of the Republic and the American people.

'You're breaking my heart, Pop,' young Erskine said sarcastically.

'Shut up!' his father barked at him.

They scratched and pulled hair right in front of us. The pressure was too much for them, and the NIA was no longer a united front. I sat and looked them over, having in mind Smith's offer of testimony regarding the placing of the scarf in Kates's overcoat pocket, and came to the conclusion that it might be had from any one of them with respect to any other of them, with the possible exception of Erskine vs. Erskine, and even that was not unthinkable. Their only constructive contribution was the announcement that the next day, Thursday, over two hundred morning and evening papers in a hundred towns and cities would run a full page ad offering a reward of one hundred thousand dollars to anyone furnishing information leading to the arrest and trial of the murderer of either Cheney Boone or Phoebe Gunther, or both.

'There should be a healthy reaction to that, don't you think?' Erskine asked plaintively but not too hopefully.

I missed Wolfe's answer, and the rest of it, because I was leaving at that moment, on my way upstairs to run a comb through my hair and maybe wash my hands. I barely had time enough to get the car and be parked at the Forty-ninth Street entrance of the Waldorf at twelve-fifty, and since once in a million years a girl is early instead of late I didn't want to take a chance.

NINA BOONE SHOWED UP at fourteen minutes past one, which was par and therefore called for no comment one way or the other. I met her as she emerged, steered her to where I was parked just west of the entrance, and opened the door. She climbed in. I turned to observe, and, as I expected, there one was, looking left and right. He was not an acquaintance and I didn't know his name, but I had seen him around. I crossed to him and said:

'I'm Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's handy man. If you'd been on her heels you'd have seen her get in my car there. I can't ask you to ride with us because I'm working on her, but here's some choices. I'll wait till you get a taxi, and I'll bet you a finiff I lose you in less than ten minutes; or I'll grease you to miss the trail right here. Two bits. Fifteen cents now and the other dime when I see a copy of your report. If-'

'I've been told,' he said, 'that there are only two ways to deal with you. One is to shoot you, and this is too public. The other-give me the fifteen cents.'

'Okay.' I fished for three nickels and handed them to him. 'It's on the NIA. Actually I don't care. We're going to Ribeiro's, the Brazilian restaurant on Fifty-second Street.'

I went and got in the car beside my victim, started the engine, and rolled.

A corner table in the side room at Ribeiro's is a good place to talk. The food is no great treat to one who gets fed by Fritz Brenner three times a day, but it goes down all right, there is no music, and you can wave a fork in any direction without stabbing anybody except your own companion.

'I don't believe,' Nina said after we had ordered, 'that anyone has recognized me. Anyhow no one is staring at me. I guess all obscure people think it would be wonderful to be a celebrity and have people look at you and point you out in restaurants and places. I know I did. Now I simply can't stand it. It makes me want to scream at them. Of course I might not feel that way if my picture had been in the papers because I was a movie star or because I had done something worth while-you know, remarkable.'

So, I thought, she wanted someone besides Aunt Luella to talk to. Okay, let her talk.

'And yet,' I told her, 'you must have had your share of staring before this happened. You're not actually unsightly.'

'No?' She didn't try to smile. 'How do you know'The way I look now.'

I inspected her. 'It's a bad time to judge,' I admitted. 'Your eyes are puffy and you've been clamping your jaw so much that your chin juts. But still there's enough to go by for an estimate. The cheekbone curve is very nice, and the temples and forehead are way above the average. The hair, of course, has not been affected at all. Seeing you from behind on the sidewalk, one man out of three would walk faster to get a look at you from the side or the front.'

'Oh'And the other two?'

'My lord,' I protested, 'what do you want for nothing'One out of three is tremendous. I was piling it on, merely because your hair happens to appeal to me and I might go so far as to break into a trot.'

'Then next time I'll sit with my back to you.' She moved her hand to her lap to make room for the waiter. 'I've been wanting to ask you, and you've got to tell me, who was it that told you to ask me where Ed Erskine was?'

'Not yet. My rule with a girl is to spend the first fifteen minutes discussing her looks. There's always a chance I'll say something that appeals to her, and then it's smooth sailing. Besides, it wouldn't be in good taste to start working on you while we're eating. I'm supposed to drag everything out of you, so that's what I'll have to do, but I shouldn't start on it until the coffee, and by that time, if I'm any good, I'll have you in a frame of mind to let me even copy down your Social Security number.'

'I would hate to miss that.' She did try to smile. 'It would be interesting to see you do it. But I promised my aunt I'd be back at the hotel by two-thirty-and by the way, I promised to bring you with me. Will you come?'

My brows went up. 'To see Mrs. Boone?'

'Yes.'

'She wants to see me?'

'Yes. Maybe only for fifteen minutes to discuss her looks. She didn't say.'

'With girls over fifty, five is enough.'

'She's not over fifty. She's forty-three.'

'Five is still enough. But if we only have till two-thirty I'm afraid we'd better start without taking time to break down your resistance. How do you feel'Have you noticed any inclination to melt or relax or put your head on my shoulder?'

'Not the slightest.' Her tone carried conviction. 'The only impulse I've had was to pull your hair.'

'Then it'll be a wonder,' I said regretfully, 'if you loosen up enough to tell me what size shoes you wear. However we'll see, as soon as he gets through serving. You haven't finished your cocktail.'

She did so. The waiter gave us each a steaming plate of shrimps, cooked with cheese and covered with a spicy sauce, and individual bowls of salad on which he had just sprinkled a thin dressing. Nina speared a shrimp with her fork, decided it was too hot to go in whole, halved it, and conveyed a portion to her mouth. She was in no mood for tasting food, but she tasted that, and immediately got some more on her fork.

'I like this,' she said. 'Go on and drag things out of me.'

I finished chewing my second shrimp and swallowed it. 'My technique is a little unusual,' I told her. 'For instance, not only are all ten of you people being followed around, to see what you're up to now, but also your pasts are being drained through cheesecloth. How do you like this cheese?'

'I like it. I love it.'

'Good. We'll come here often. There are probably a hundred men-no, more than that, I forgot how important this case is-investigating your people's pasts, to find out, for example, if Mrs. Boone was having secret trysts with Frank Thomas Erskine on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, or if you and Breslow are champing at the bit until he can get his wife to give him a divorce. That takes time and money, and my technique is different. I prefer to ask you and settle it. Are you?'

'Am I what'Champing?'

'At the bit.'

'No. I'm champing shrimps.'

I swallowed another one. 'You see,' I explained, 'they're all up a stump, including Nero Wolfe. They're not trying to make it more complicated just for the hell of it. The most satisfactory way out of it, the way that would please nearly everybody most, including the investigators themselves, would be the simplest way, namely that one of those six NIA people killed Cheney Boone for the obvious motive, and then killed Phoebe Gunther for some related reason. But the trouble is that if that's how it was, how are you ever going to find out which one of the six did it, let alone prove it'Apparently not a chance in a billion. The New York police and the FBI have been working on it over a week now, giving it all they've got, and where are they'Tailing you!'

'Well.' She herded cheese and sauce with her fork. 'You're buying me a lunch.'

'Certainly, and I'm telling you why, aside from your hair and other personal details. We're all sunk unless we can find a new angle. I came to you because there's a possibility that you know something about such an angle without realizing it. Naturally I'm assuming that you want the murderer found and punished. Otherwise-'

'I do. Of course I do.'

'Then suppose we try the direct approach and see how it sounds. Did you know any of these NIA birds personally?'

'No.'

'None of those six?'

'No.'

'How about any NIA people at all'There were around fifteen hundred of them at that dinner.'

'This seems perfectly silly.'

'Then let's get it over with. Did you?'

'Maybe a few-or rather, their sons and daughters. I graduated from Smith a year ago, and you meet a lot of people. But if we went back over every minute of it, every word of every conversation, we wouldn't find anything remotely resembling an angle.'

'You don't think it would do me any good to probe?'

'No.' She glanced at her wrist watch. 'Anyway, we haven't time.'

'Okay. We can go back to it. How about your aunt'Those trysts with Erskine. Did she have trysts?'

Nina made a noise which, under the circumstances, was a fair substitute for a laugh. 'Ask her. Maybe that's what she wants to see you about. If all the pasts are being investigated as you say they are, I should think it would be established by now that Aunt Luella was utterly and exclusively devoted to my uncle, and to everything he did and everything he stood for.'

I shook my head. 'You don't get it. That's just the point. To illustrate: what if Boone learned something in Washington that Tuesday afternoon about something Winterhoff had done, or something that made him decide to take a certain step affecting Winterhoff's line of business, and what if he told his wife about it when he saw her in their hotel room (which you might also have heard since you were there too), and what if Mrs. Boone happened to know Winterhoff, not for trysting purposes but just knew him, and what if later, in the reception room, she was talking with Winterhoff during her third cocktail, and what if unintentionally she gave him an idea of what was up'That's what I mean by a new angle. I could invent a thousand of them just as I invented that one, but what is needed is one that really happened. So I'm asking about your aunt's circle of acquaintance. Is that malevolent?'

She had been making steady progress with the shrimps, which had now cooled off enough to permit it. 'No,' she admitted, 'but you'd better ask her. All I can tell you is about me.'

'Sure. You're virtuous and noble. It shows in your chin. The herald angels sing. A in deportment.'

'What do you want?' she demanded. 'Do you want me to tell you that I saw my aunt sneaking into a corner with Winterhoff or with any of those apes and whispering to him'Well, I didn't. And if I had-' She stopped.

'If you had would you tell me?'

'No. In spite of the fact that in my opinion my aunt is a pain in the neck.'

'You don't like her?'

'No. I don't like her and I disapprove of her and I regard her as a grotesque relic. That's spread all over my past, but it's strictly personal.'

'You don't go so far as to accept Breslow's suggestion that Mrs. Boone killed her husband on account of jealousy of Phoebe Gunther, and later, at Wolfe's house, finished up?'

'No, does anybody?'

'I couldn't say.' Having disposed of the last shrimp, I started on the salad. 'I don't. But it does seem to be a sound idea that Mrs. Boone was jealous of Phoebe Gunther.'

'Certainly she was. There are several thousand girls and women working for the BPR, and she was jealous of all of them.'

'Yeah. Chiefly on account of her nose, of course. But Phoebe Gunther wasn't just one of thousands. Wasn't she special?'

'She was indeed.' Nina flashed me a quick glance which I failed to interpret. 'She was extremely special.'

'Was she going to do anything as trite as having a baby?'

'Oh, good lord.' Nina pulled her salad over. 'You pick up all the crumbs, don't you?'

'Was she?'

'No. And my aunt had just as little reason to be jealous of her as of anybody else. Her idea that my uncle had wolf in him was simply silly.'

'How well did you know Miss Gunther?'

'I knew her pretty well. Not intimately.'

'Did you like her?'

'I-yes, I guess I liked her. I certainly admired her. Of course I envied her. I would have liked to have her job, but I wasn't foolish enough to think I could fill it. I'm too young for one thing, but that's only part of it, she wasn't such a lot older than me. She did field work for a year or so and made the best record in the whole organization, and then she was brought to the main office and before long she was on the inside of everything. Usually when an organization like that gets a new Director he does a great deal of shifting around, but when my uncle was appointed there wasn't any shifting of Phoebe except that she got a raise in pay. If she had been ten years older and a man she would have been made Director when my uncle- died.'

'How old was she?'

'Twenty-seven.'

'Did you know her before you went to work for the BPR?'

'No, but I met her the first day I went there, because my uncle asked her to keep an eye on me.'

'Did she do so?'

'In a way she did, yes, as much as she had time for. She was very important and very busy. She had BPR fever.'

'Yeah?' I stopped a forkload of salad on its way to my mouth. 'Bad?'

'One of the most severe cases on record.'

'What were the main symptoms?'

'It varies with character and temperament. In its simplest form, a firm belief that whatever the BPR does is right. There are all kinds of complications, from bitter and undying hatred of the NIA to a messianic yen to educate the young, depending on whether you are primarily a do-gooder or a fighter.'

'Have you got it?'

'Certainly I have, but not in its acute form. With me it was mostly a personal matter. I was very fond of my uncle.' Her chin threatened to get out of control for a moment, and she paused to attend to that and then explained, 'I never had a father, to know him, and I loved Uncle Cheney. I don't really know an awful lot about it, but I loved my uncle.'

'Which complications did Phoebe have?'

'All of them.' The chin was all right again. 'But she was a born fighter. I don't know how much the enemies of the BPR, for instance the heads of the NIA, really knew about the insides of it, but if their intelligence was any good they must have known about Phoebe. She was actually more dangerous to them than my uncle was. I've heard my uncle say that. A political shake-up might have got him out, but as long as she was there it wouldn't have mattered much.'

'That's a big help,' I grumbled, 'I don't think. It gives precisely the same motive, to the same people, for her as for him. If you call that a new angle& '

'I don't call it anything. You asked me.'

'So I did. How about dessert?'

'I don't think so.'

'You'd better. You're going to have to help me out with your aunt maybe all afternoon, and that will take extra energy since you don't like her. A good number here is walnut pudding with cinnamon.'