Rex Stout: Instead of Evidence

I growled at him, “So it’s in the bag. A complete stranger named Arthur Howell. After snitching the capsules from Beck Products and making the cigars and getting them into Poor’s home God knows how, he was overcome by remorse and went to an orchard and took his clothes off and lay down and ran a car over himself with radio control—”

“Archie. Shut up. We are ready to act in any case, but it will make things a little simpler if that corpse proves to be Mr. Howell, so it is worth waiting for a report on it.” He glanced at the clock, which said seven minutes to four, and put the catalogue down. “We might as well prepare it now. Get that capsule from the safe.”

I thought to myself, this time it may not miss him, but as for me, I’m going outdoors. However, it appeared that he was going to try some new gag instead of repeating with the percolator. By the time I got the capsule from the safe and convoyed it to him, he had taken two articles from a drawer and put them on his desk. One was a roll of Scotch tape. The other was a medium-sized photograph of a man, mounted on gray cardboard. I gave it a glance, then picked it up and did a thorough job of looking. It was unquestionably Eugene R. Poor.

“Goody,” I said enthusiastically. “No wonder you’re pleased. Even if Saul had to pay two hundred bucks for it—”

“Archie. Let me have that. Here, hold this thing.”

I helped. What I was to hold was the capsule, flat on the cardboard near a corner, while he tore off a piece of tape and fastened it there. When he lifted the photo and jiggled it to see if the fastening was firm, the thread dangled over Poor’s right eye.

“Put it in an envelope and in the safe,” he said, glanced at the clock, and made for the hall and the elevator.

That was all for the present. I sat at my desk and went over the case again, testing my logic point by point. The conclusion I reached an hour later was that there were two distinct kinds of logic, Wolfe’s and mine, and that they were destined to clash. I wasn’t dumb enough not to have a general idea of where his was headed for, but where he got the notion that we were ready to act was way beyond me. It looked to me as if we were barely ready to start wondering what to do.

At six o’clock he returned to the office, rang for Fritz to bring beer, and took up where he had left off with the catalogues. At eight o’clock Fritz summoned us to dinner. At nine-thirty we returned to the office. At a quarter to ten a phone call came from District Attorney Fraser. The body had been identified. It was Arthur Howell. An assistant district attorney and a pair of detectives were on their way to Thirty-fifth Street to ask Wolfe, how come and would he please supply all necessary details, including the present address of the murderer.

Wolfe hung up, leaned back and sighed, and muttered at me, “Archie. You’ll have to pay a call on Mrs. Poor.”

I objected, “She’s probably in bed, tired out. The funeral was today.”

“It can’t be helped. Saul will go with you.”

I stared. “Saul?”

“Yes. He’s up in my room asleep. He didn’t get to bed last night. You will take her that photograph of her husband. You should leave as soon as possible, before that confounded Westchester lawyer gets here. I don’t want to see him. Tell Fritz to bolt the door after you go. Ring my room and tell Saul to come down at once. Then I’ll give you your instructions.”

The appearance of the living room in the Poor apartment on Eighty-fourth Street was not the same as it had been when I had arrived there three evenings before. Not only was there no army of city employees present and no man of the house with his face gone huddled on the floor, but the furniture had been moved around. The chair Poor had sat in when he lit his last cigar was gone, probably to the cleaners on account of spots, the table Cramer had used for headquarters had been shifted to the other side of the room, and the radio had been moved to the other end of the couch.

Martha Poor was sitting on the couch, and I was on a chair I had pulled around to face her. She was wearing something that wasn’t a bathrobe and wasn’t exactly a dress, modest, with sleeves and only a proper amount of throat showing.

“I’m here under orders,” I told her. “I said this morning that if anything happened that it would help you to know about I’d see that you knew, but this isn’t it. This is different. Nero Wolfe sent me with orders. I just want to make that clear. Item number one is to hand you this envelope and invite you to look at the contents.”

She took it from me. With steady fingers, slow-moving rather than hurried, she opened the flap and pulled out the photograph.

I informed her, “That decoration may look like something by Dali, but it was Nero Wolfe’s idea. I am not authorized to discuss it or the picture from any angle Just there it is, except to remark that it is a very good likeness of your husband. I only saw him that one time, the other afternoon at the office, but of course I had a long and thorough look at him. Wednesday we could have sold that photo to a newspaper for a nice amount, but of course we didn’t have it Wednesday.”

She had put the photo beside her on the couch and was pinching an edge of the cardboard between her index finger and thumbnail, with the nail sinking in. She was looking straight at me. The muscles of her throat had tightened, which no doubt accounted for the change in her voice when she spoke.

“Where did you get it?”

I shook my head. “Out of bounds. As I said, I’m under orders. Item number two is just a piece of information to the effect that a man named Saul Panzer is out in the back hall on this floor, standing by the door of the service elevator. Saul is not big but he just had a nap and is alert. Number three: that naked body found up in Westchester with the head smashed by running a car over it, in an orchard not more than ten minutes’ drive from either Monty’s Tavern or Blaney’s place, has been identified as formerly belonging to a man named Arthur Howell, an employee of the Beck Products Corporation.”

Her eyes hadn’t moved. I hadn’t even seen the lashes blink. She said in a faraway voice, “I don’t know why you tell me about that. Arthur Howell? Did you say Arthur Howell?”

“Yep, that’s right. Howell, Arthur. Head flattened to a pancake, but enough left for the dentist. As for telling you about it, I’m only obeying orders.” I glanced at my wrist. “Number four: it is now twenty past ten. At a quarter to eleven I am supposed either to arrive back at the office or phone. If I do neither, Nero Wolfe will phone Inspector Cramer and then here they’ll come. Not as many as Tuesday evening I suppose, because they won’t need all the scientists, but plenty.”

I stopped, still meeting her eyes, and then went on, “Let’s see. Photo and capsule, Saul out back, Howell, cops at a quarter to eleven... that’s all.”

She got up, with the photo in her hand, and started for a door to the right, the one she had retreated through Tuesday when Blaney had arrived on the scene.

It was up to me to decide. If she wanted to be alone to get her mind arranged, or anything else arranged, that was all right with me, but the one detail which I thought had not been sufficiently considered was fire escapes. So although I would have much preferred to stay where I was, I went along.

That game of follow the leader was one of my experiences that can stay unique and suit me fine. She might have been a deaf-and-dumb renting agent showing me the apartment, and me a deaf-and-dumb prospective tenant. First we did the master bedroom, her in front and me right behind. She went and opened a closet door, looked in a moment, and shut it again. Then she crossed to another door that was standing open. I had never seen a fire escape with an entrance through a bathroom window, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to look so I did. Seeing it was okay, I backed out and she shut the door, staying inside. I went to a window and frowned out at the dark for maybe three minutes, and apparently I forgot to breathe, for when the door opened and she came out I pulled in enough oxygen to fill a barrel. Observing that she no longer was carrying the photograph, I let her go on being it. Her next destination was the back door, leading from the kitchen to the service hall. With me at her elbow, she pulled the door wide open, and we were both looking at Saul, standing there reading a newspaper.