Rex Stout - The League of Frightened Men

I started out with Hibbard, but Wolfe’s voice came again and we returned. “You understand the arrangement, sir; you are to communicate with no one whatever. Away from your masquerade, the desire to reassure your niece will be next to irresistible.”

“I’ll resist it.”

Since it was two flights up, I took him to Wolfe’s elevator. The door of the south room stood open, and the room was nice and warm. I looked around: the bed had been made, comb and brush and nail file were on the dresser, orchids were in the bowl on the table; fresh towels were in the bathroom. Not bad for a strictly male household. I went out, but at the door was stopped by Hibbard:

“Say. Do you happen to have a dark brown necktie?”

I grinned and went to my room and picked out a genteel solid-color, and took it up to him.

Down in the office Wolfe sat with his eyes shut. I went to my desk. I was sore as hell. I was still hearing the tone of Wolfe’s voice when he said, “Sixty-five hours,” and though I knew the reproach had been for himself and not for me, I didn’t need a whack on the shins to inform me that I had made a bad fumble. I sat and considered the general and particular shortcomings of my conduct. Finally I said aloud, as if to myself, not looking at him:

“The one thing I won’t ever do again is believe a cripple. It was all because I believed that damn warning. If it hadn’t been imbedded in my nut that Andrew Hibbard was dead, I would have been receptive to a decent suspicion no matter where it showed up. I suppose that goes for Inspector Cramer too, and I suppose that means that I’m of the same general order as he is. In that case—”

“Archie.” I glanced at Wolfe enough to see that he had opened his eyes. He went on, “If that is meant as a defense offered to me, none is needed. If you are merely rubbing your vanity to relieve a soreness, please defer it. There is still eighteen minutes before dinner, and we might as well make use of them. I am suffering from my habitual impatience when nothing remains but the finishing touches. Take your notebook.”

I got it out, and a pencil.

“Make three copies of this, the original on the good bond. Date it tomorrow, November eleventh — ha, Armistice Day! Most appropriate. It will have a heading in caps as follows: CONFESSION OF PAUL CHAPIN REGARDING THE DEATHS OF WILLIAM R. HARRISON AND EUGENE DREYER AND THE WRITING AND DISPATCHING OF CERTAIN INFORMATIVE AND THREATENING VERSES. It is a concession to him to call them verses, but we should be magnanimous somewhere, let us select that for it. There will then be divisions, properly spaced and subheaded. The subheadings will also be in caps. The first one is DEATH OF WILLIAM R. HARRISON. Then begin... thus—”

I interrupted. “Listen, wouldn’t it be fitting to type this on the machine from the Harvard Club? Of course it’s crummy, but it would be a poetic gesture...”

“Poetic? Oh. Sometimes, Archie, the association of your ideas reminds me of a hummingbird. Very well, you may do that. Let us proceed.” When he was giving me a document Wolfe usually began slow and speeded up as he went along. He began, “I, Paul Chapin, of 203 Perry Street, New York City, hereby confess that—”

The telephone rang.

I put my notebook down and reached for it. My practice was to answer calls by saying crisp but friendly, “Hello, this is the office of Nero Wolfe.” But this time I didn’t get to finish it. I got about three words out, but the rest of it was stopped by an excited voice in my ear, excited but low, nearly a whisper, fast but trying to make it plain:

“Archie, listen. Quick, get it, I may be pulled off. Get up here as fast as you can — Doc Burton’s, Ninetieth Street. Burton’s croaked. The lop got him with a gat, pumped him full. They got him clean, I followed him—”

There were noises, but no more words. That was enough to last a while, anyway. I hung up and turned to Wolfe. I suppose my face wasn’t very placid, but the expression on his didn’t change any as he looked at me. I said, “That was Fred Durkin. Paul Chapin has just shot Dr. Burton and killed him. At his apartment on Ninetieth Street. They caught him red-handed. Fred invites me up to see the show.”

Wolfe sighed. He murmured, “Nonsense.”

“Nonsense hell. Fred’s not a genius, but I never saw him mistake a pinochle game for a murder. He’s got good eyes. It looks like tailing Chapin wasn’t such a bad idea after all, since it got Fred there on the spot. We’ve got him—”

“Archie. Shut up.” Wolfe’s lips were pushing out and in as fast as I had ever seen them. After ten seconds he said, “Consider this, please. Durkin’s conversation was interrupted?”

“Yeah, he was pulled off.”

“By the police, of course. The police take Chapin for murdering Burton; he is convicted and executed, and where are we? What of our engagements? We are lost.”

I stared at him. “Good God. Damn that cripple—”

“Don’t damn him. Save him. Save him for us. The roadster is in front? Good. Go there at once, fast. You know what to do, get it, the whole thing. I need the scene, the minutes and seconds, the participants — I need the facts. I need enough of them to save Paul Chapin. Go and get them.”

I jumped.

I kept on the west side as far as Eighty-sixth Street and then shot crosstown and through the park. I stepped on it only up to the limit, because I didn’t want to get stopped. I felt pretty good and pretty rotten, both. She had cracked wide open and I was on my way, and that was all sweetness and light, but on the other hand Fred’s story of the event decorated by Wolfe’s comments looked like nothing but bad weather. I swung left into Fifth Avenue, with only five blocks to go.

I pulled up short of the Burton number on Ninetieth Street, locked the ignition and jumped to the sidewalk. There were canopies and entrances to big apartment houses all around. I walked east. I was nearly to the entrance I was headed for when I saw Fred Durkin. From somewhere he came trotting toward me. I stopped, and he jerked his head back and started west, and I went along behind him. I followed him to the corner of Fifth, and around it a few feet.

I said, “Am I poison? Spill it.”

He said, “I didn’t want that doorman to see you with me. He saw me getting the bum’s rush. They caught me phoning you and kicked me out.”

“That’s too bad. I’ll complain at headquarters. Well?”

“Well, they’ve got him, that’s all. We followed him up here, the town dick and me, got here at seven-thirty. It was nice and private, without Pinkie. Of course we knew who lived here, and we talked it over whether we ought to phone and decided not to. We decided to go inside the lobby, and when the hall flunky got unfriendly Murphy — that’s the town dick — flashed his badge and shut him up. People were going and coming, there’s two elevators. All of a sudden one of the elevator doors bangs open and a woman comes running out popeyed and yells where’s Dr. Foster, catch Dr. Foster, and the hall flunky says he just saw him go out, and the woman runs for the street yelling Dr. Foster, and Murphy nabs her by the arm and asks why not try Dr. Burton, and she looks at him funny and says Dr. Burton’s been shot. He turns her loose and jumps for the elevator, and on the way up to the fifth floor discovers that I’m in it with him. He says—”

“Come on, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okay. The door of Burton’s apartment is open. The party’s in the first room we go into. Two women is there, one of them whining like a sick dog and jiggling a telephone, and the other one kneeling by a guy laying on the floor. The lop is sitting in a chair looking like he’s waiting his turn in a barber shop. We got busy. The guy was dead. Murphy got on the phone and I looked around. A gat, a Colt automatic, was on the floor by the leg of a chair next to a table in the middle of the room. I went over and gave Chapin a rub to see if he had any more tools. The woman that was kneeling by the meat began to heave and I went and got her up and led her away. Two men came in, a doctor and a house guy. Murphy got through on the phone and came over and slipped some irons on Chapin. I stayed with the woman, and when a couple of precinct cops came loping in I took the woman out of the room. The woman that had gone for Dr. Foster came back, she came running through the place and took the other woman away from me and took her off somewhere. I went into another room and saw books and a desk and a telephone, and called you up. One of the precinct men came snooping around and heard me, and that’s when I left. He brought me downstairs and gave me the air.”