Rex Stout - Prisoner's Base

“Dear Perry:

I hope you won’t be too mad at me for standing you up. I’m not going to do anything loony. I just want to be sure where I stand. I doubt if you will hear from me before June 30th, but you will then all right. Please, and I mean this, please don’t try to find me.

He folded the paper and returned it to his pocket. “In my opinion, the tone and substance of that communication do not indicate that Miss Eads had decided to repay my many years of safeguarding and advancing her interests in the manner described by Miss Duday. She was neither an ingrate nor a fool. I decline to offer justification of the amount paid to me by the corporation as counsel, but will say only that it was for services rendered. The business is by no means confined solely to making and selling towels, as Miss Duday sneeringly implied. Its varied activities and wide interests require constant and able supervision.”

He sent a cold, straight glance at Viola Duday and went back to Wolfe. “However, even if Miss Eads had decided to act as Miss Duday suggests, I would certainly not have been desperate. My income from my law practice, exclusive of the payments from Softdown, is adequate for my needs. And even if I had been desperate I would not have resorted to murder. The idea that a man of my training and temperament would, to gain any conceivable objective, perform so vicious a deed and incur so tremendous a risk is repugnant to every reputable theory of human conduct. That’s all.”

He clamped his jaw.

“Not quite,” Wolfe objected. “You leave too much untouched. If there was no question of desperation, if you had no thought that you were about to be squeezed out, why did you offer me five thousand dollars to find Miss Eads within six days, and double that to produce her, as you put it, alive and well?”

“I told you why. I thought it likely that she had gone, or was going, to Venezuela to see her former husband, and I wanted, if possible, to stop her before she reached him. I had had that letter from him, claiming a half-interest in her property, and she was greatly disturbed over it, and I was afraid she might do something foolish. My using that hackneyed phrase, ‘alive and well’ had no significance. I told you that the first thing to do would be to check all airplane passengers to Venezuela.” He pointed a straight, stern, bony finger. “And you had her here, in this house, and kept it from me. And after I left, you sent her to her death!”

Wolfe, no doubt aware that the finger wasn’t loaded, did not counter. He asked, “Then you’re conceding that the document Mr. Hagh was waving around is authentic? That his wife signed it?”

“No.”

“But she surely knew whether she had signed it or not. If she hadn’t, if it was a fake, why would she go flying off to Venezuela?”

“She was — wild sometimes.”

Wolfe shook his head. “You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Helmar. Let’s get it straight. You had shown Miss Eads the letter from Mr. Hagh and the photostat of the document. What did she say? Did she acknowledge she had signed it, or deny it?”

Helmar took his time replying. Finally he said, “I’ll reserve my answer to that.”

“I doubt if aging will help it,” Wolfe said dryly. “Now that you know that Miss Eads had not gone to Venezuela, and I assure you she had no intention of going, how do you explain her backing out from her appointment with you, her departure, her asking you not to try to find her?”

“I don’t have to explain it.”

“Do you decline to try?”

“I don’t see that it needs more explanation than you already have. She knew that I was coming that evening with documentary proof that Miss Duday was utterly incompetent to direct the affairs of the corporation. I told her so that morning on the phone. I think it likely that she was already aware that she would have to abandon her idea of putting Miss Duday in control, and she didn’t want to face me and admit it. Also she knew that Miss Duday would not give her a moment’s peace for the week that was left.”

“What a monstrous liar you are, Perry,” Viola Duday said in her clear, pleasant voice.

He looked at her. That was the first time I had seen him give her a direct and explicit look, and, since she was just off the line from him to me, I had a good view of it. It demolished one detail of his exposition — the claim that a man of his training and temperament couldn’t possibly commit a murder. His look at her was perfect for a guy about to put a cord around a neck and pull tight. It was just one swift, ugly flash, and then he returned to Wolfe.

“I should think,” he said, “that would explain her leaving and her note to me. Whether it also explains what she said to you I can’t say, because I don’t know what that was.”

“What about Miss O’Neil?”

“I have nothing to say about Miss O’Neil.”

“Oh, come. She may be a mere voluptuous irrelevance, but I need to know. What was her manner of play? Was she intimate with both Mr. Brucker and you, or neither? What was she after — diversion, treasure, or a man?”

Helmar’s jaw worked. It jutted anyway, and when he gave it muscle it was as outstanding as the beak of a bulldozer. He spoke. “It was stupid to submit to this at all. With the police it’s unavoidable, there’s no help for it, but with you it’s absurd — your ignorant and malicious insinuations about a young woman whom you are not fit to touch. In her innocence and modest merit she is so far above all this depravity — no! I was a fool to come!” He set the jaw for good.

I was gawking at him. It was hard to believe. It is not unheard of for a Wall Street lawyer to find relaxation in the companionship of a well-made female grabber, but when you hear one with his mind still working blathering like that about it, you wonder. Such a man is a menace to healthy and normal dealings between the sexes. After hearing Helmar emit that blah about a specimen like Daphne O’Neil, for weeks I got suspicious whenever I heard myself addressing a young woman in anything more sociable than a defiant snarl.

Wolfe said, “I take it you’re through, Mr. Helmar?”

“I am.”

Wolfe turned. “Mr. Brucker?”

Brucker was the one I favored. It will sometimes happen, when a group of people are under the blazing light of a murder job, that they all look alike to you, but not often. Usually, sometimes for a reason you can name and sometimes not, you have a favorite, and mine in this case was Jay L. Brucker, the president. I didn’t know why, but it could have been his long pale face and long thin nose, which reminded me of a bird I had once worked for during summer vacation in Ohio in my high school days, who had diddled me out of forty cents; or again it could have been the way he had looked at Daphne O’Neil, Tuesday afternoon in the Softdown conference room. There is no law against a man showing his admiration for works of nature, but it had been only a few hours since he had heard of the death of Priscilla Eads, and it wouldn’t have hurt him any to wait till sundown to start gloating.

He wasn’t gloating now. He was the only one who had had three drinks — a good shot of rye each time, with a splash of water — and I had noticed that when he conveyed the glass to his lips his hand trembled.

“I would like to tell—” he started. It didn’t come through well, and he cleared his throat twice and started over. “I would like to tell you, Mr. Wolfe, that I regard this action by Mrs. Jaffee as completely justified. My opinion was that the stock should be placed in escrow until the matter of Miss Eads’s death has been satisfactorily cleared up, but the others objected that sometimes a murder is not solved for months or even years, and sometimes never. I had to admit that their position had some validity, but so has Mrs. Jaffee’s, and it should be possible to arrive at a compromise. I do not resent the interest you are taking in the matter. I would welcome and appreciate your assistance in arranging a compromise.”