Rex Stout - The League of Frightened Men

“I don’t want the police.” That woman could certainly pin her eyes. “Do you think I want my husband arrested? With his standing and position... all the publicity... do you think I want that? That’s why I came to you... to tell you about it.”

“But, Mrs. Chapin.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. “You see, you came to the wrong place. Unfortunately for you, you came to the one man in New York, the one man in the world, who would at once understand what really happened at your home this morning. It was unavoidable, I suppose, since it was precisely that man, myself, whom you wished to delude. The devil of it is; from your standpoint, that I have a deep aversion to being deluded. Let’s just call it quits. You really do need rest and quiet, after your nervous tension and your loss of blood. Go on home.”

Of course, as had happened a few times before, I had missed the boat; I was swimming along behind trying to keep up. For a minute I thought she was going to get up and go. She started to. Then she was back again, looking at him. She said:

“I’m an educated woman, Mr. Wolfe. I’ve been in service, and I’m not ashamed of that, but I’m educated. You’re trying to talk so I won’t understand you, but I do.”

“Good. Then there is no need—”

She snapped at him suddenly and violently. “You’re a fat fool!”

Wolfe shook his head. “Fat visibly, though I prefer Gargantuan. A fool only in the broader sense, as a common characteristic of the race. It was not magnanimous of you, Mrs. Chapin, to blurt my corpulence at me, since I had spoken of your fatuity only in general terms and had refrained from demonstrating it. I’ll do that now.” He moved a finger to indicate the knife which still lay on the newspaper on the desk. “Archie, will you please clean that homely weapon.”

I didn’t know, I thought maybe he was bluffing her. I picked up the knife and stood there with it, looking from her to him. “Wash off the evidence?”

“If you please.”

I took the knife to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, rubbed the blood off with a piece of gauze, and wiped it. Through the open door I couldn’t hear any talking. I went back.

“Now,” Wolfe instructed me, “grip the handle firmly in your right hand. Come towards the desk, so Mrs. Chapin can see you better; turn your back. So. Elevate your arm and pull the knife across your neck; kindly be sure to use the back of the blade, not to carry the demonstration too far. You noted the length and the position of the cuts on Mrs. Chapin? Duplicate them on yourself.—Yes. Yes, quite good. A little higher for that one. Another, somewhat lower. Confound you, be careful. That will do.—You see, Mrs. Chapin? He did it quite neatly, don’t you think? I am not insulting your intelligence by hinting that you expected us to think the wounds could not have been self-inflicted in the position you chose for them. More likely, you selected it purely as a matter of precaution, knowing that the front, the neighborhood of the anterior jugular...”

He stopped, because he had no one to talk to except me. When I turned around after my demonstration she was already getting up from her chair, holding her head stiff and a clamp on her mouth. Without a word, without bothering to make any passes at him with her little gray glass eyes, she just got up and went; and he paid no attention, he went on with his speech until she had opened the office door and was through it. I noticed she was leaving her knife, but thought we might as well have it in our collection of odds and ends. Then all of a sudden I jumped for the hall.

“Hey, lady, wait a minute! Your fur!”

I got it from Fritz and caught her at the front door and put it around her. Pitney Scott got out of his cab and came over to help her down the stoop, and I went back in.

Wolfe was glancing through a letter from Hoehn and Company that had come in the morning mail. When he had finished he put it under a paperweight — a piece of petrified wood that had once been used to bust a guy’s skull — and said:

“The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself. The woman—”

He was just trying to keep me from annoying him about business. I cut in. “Yeah. I know. The woman was a witch you had caught riding around in the curl of a pig’s tail. In spite of all that, it’s time for me to brush up a little on this case we’ve got. You can give me a shove by explaining in long words how you knew Dora Chapin did her own manicuring.”

Wolfe shook his head. “That would not be a shove, Archie; it would be a laborious and sustained propulsion. I shall not undertake it. I remind you merely: I have read all of Paul Chapin’s novels. In two of them Dora Chapin is a character. He of course appears in all. The woman who married Dr. Burton, Paul Chapin’s unattainable, seems to be in four out of five; I cannot discover her in the latest one. Read the books, and I shall be more inclined to discuss the conclusions they have led me to. But even then, of course, I would not attempt to place plain to your eyes the sights my own have discerned. God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.”

Fritz came to the door and said lunch was ready.

Sometimes I thought it was a wonder Wolfe and I got on together at all. The differences between us, some of them, showed up plainer at the table than anywhere else. He was a taster and I was a swallower. Not that I didn’t know good from bad; after seven years of education from Fritz’s cooking I could even tell, usually, superlative from excellent. But the fact remained that what chiefly attracted Wolfe about food in his pharynx was the affair it was having with his taste buds, whereas with me the important point was that it was bound for my belly. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that Wolfe was never disconcerted by the problem of what to do with it when he was through tasting it. He could put it away. I have seen him, during a relapse, dispose completely of a ten-pound goose between eight o’clock and midnight, while I was in a corner with ham sandwiches and milk hoping he would choke. At those times he always ate in the kitchen.

It was the same in business, when we were on a case. A thousand times I’ve wanted to kick him, watching him progress leisurely to the elevator on his way to monkey with the plants upstairs, or read a book tasting each phrase, or discuss with Fritz the best storage place for dry herbs, when I was running around barking my head off and expecting him to tell me where the right hole was. I admit he was a great man. When he called himself a genius he had a right to mean it whether he did or not. I admit that he never lost us a bet by his piddling around. But since I’m only human, I couldn’t keep myself from wanting to kick him just because he was a genius. I came awful close to it sometimes, when he said things like, “Patience, Archie; if you eat the apple before it’s ripe your only reward is a bellyache.”

Well, this Wednesday afternoon, after lunch, I was sore. He went indifferent on me; he even went contrary. He wouldn’t cable the guy in Rome to get into converse with Santini; he said it was futile and expected me to take his word for it. He wouldn’t help me concoct a loop we could use to drag Leopold Elkus into the office; according to him, that was futile too. He kept trying to read in a book while I was after him. He said there were only two men in the case whom he felt any inclination to talk to: Andrew Hibbard and Paul Chapin; and he wasn’t ready yet for Chapin and he didn’t know where Hibbard was, or whether he was alive or dead. I knew Saul Panzer was going to the morgue every morning and afternoon to look over the stiffs, but I didn’t know what else he was doing. I also knew that Wolfe had talked with Inspector Cramer on the phone that morning, but that was nothing to get excited about; Cramer had shot his bolt a week ago at Paul Chapin and all that was keeping him awake was the routine of breathing.