Rex Stout - Prisoner's Base

Wolfe shook his head. “You’re wasting time, sir. I’m an investigator, not a negotiator. I’m after a murderer. Is it you? I don’t know, but you do. I ask you to speak to that.”

“I would be glad to” — he cleared his throat again — “if I thought I knew anything that would help you to arrive at the truth. I’m just a plodding, hard-working businessman, Mr. Wolfe; there’s nothing brilliant or spectacular about me the way there is about you. I remember a day back in nineteen thirty-two, the worst year for American business in this century. I was an awkward young fellow, had been with Softdown just three years, had started there when I finished college. It was a cold December day, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and I was in a gloomy frame of mind. Word had got around that on account of business conditions further retrenchment had been decided on, and at the end of the year several of us in my section would be dropped.”

“If you think this is pertinent,” Wolfe muttered.

“I do, yes, sir. On that cold December day Mrs. Eads had come to the office to see Mr. Eads about something, and had brought with her Priscilla, their little five-year-old daughter, a lovely little girl. Priscilla remained out on the floor while her mother went into her father’s office, walking around looking at people and things, as children will; and I happened to be there, and she came up to me and asked what my name was, and I told her, Jay. Do you know what she said?”

He waited for a reply, and Wolfe, coerced, said, “No.”

“She said, ‘Jay? You don’t look like a bluejay!’ She was simply irresistible. I had been busy that morning with some tests of a new yarn we were considering, and I had a little of it in my pocket, just a few short strands of bright green, and I took it and tied it loosely around her neck and told her that was a beautiful necklace I was giving her for Christmas, and I took her to a mirror on the wall and held her up so she could look at it.”

He had to clear his throat some more. “She was delighted, clapping her hands and making little childish cries of glee, and then her mother came, coming to get her, and with her was the husband and father, Mr. Nathan Eads. And little Priscilla ran to him, to her father, displaying her beautiful green necklace, and do you know what she said to him?”

“No.”

“She said, ‘Daddy, look what Jay gave me! Oh, Daddy, you can’t make Jay go with the others! Daddy, you must keep Jay!’ And I was kept! I was the youngest man in my section, and some of my seniors had to go, but I was kept! That, Mr. Wolfe, was the first time I ever saw Priscilla Eads. You can imagine how I felt about her. You can imagine how I have felt about her ever since, through all the years, in spite of all the difficulties and frictions and disagreements. That green necklace, just a scrap of yarn, I put around her little neck! I have of course told this to the police, and they have verified it. You can imagine how I feel now, knowing that I am actually suspected of being capable of killing Priscilla Eads.” He extended his hands, and they fluttered. “With these hands! These hands that tied that necklace on her twenty years ago!”

He got up and went to the refreshment table and used the hands, one to hold a glass and the other to pour rye and splash in a little water. Returning to his chair, he gulped half of it down.

“Well, sir?” Wolfe prodded him.

“I have no more to say,” he declared.

“You’re not serious.” Wolfe was flabbergasted.

“Oh, yes, he is.” Viola Duday was grimly gratified. “For three years he has written most of the copy for Softdown advertising — but I don’t suppose you read advertisements.”

“Not ardently.” Wolfe eyed Brucker. “Manifestly, sir, either your mental processes are badly constipated or you think mine are. Let’s jump twenty years to day before yesterday. Tuesday afternoon you told Mr. Goodwin that you five people — Mr. Helmar was not present, but Miss O’Neil was — had been discussing the murder and had entertained the notion that Miss Eads had been killed by her former husband, Mr. Hagh. You mentioned—”

“Who said that?” Eric Hagh was reacting. He passed between Pitkin and Miss Duday to confront them, and his blue eyes swept the arc as he repeated his challenge. “Who said that?”

Wolfe told him to sit down and was ignored. I got up and headed for him, as Irby, his lawyer, called something to him. I suppose I was more on edge than I realized, with the long session dragging out and obviously getting nowhere, and it must have shown on my face that I was ready to plug someone and why not Eric Hagh, for Wolfe called my name sharply.

“Archie!”

It brought me to. I stopped short of Hagh and told him, “Back up. You were to take part only if and when invited.”

“I’ve been accused of murder!”

“Why not? So has everyone else. If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from. Sit down and listen and start cooking up a defense.”

Irby was there with a hand on his arm, and the big handsome chiseling ex-husband let himself be urged back to his seat in the rear.

Wolfe resumed to Brucker: “Regarding Mr. Hagh, you said that he wouldn’t even have had to come to New York, that he could have hired someone to kill his former wife. What was the significance of your suggestion that the deed had been done by a hired assassin?”

“I don’t know.” Brucker was frowning. “Was it significant?”

“I think it may have been. In any case, I am impressed by your enterprise in hustling off to Venezuela for a candidate when there was no lack of eligibles near at hand. But the question arises, what was in it for Mr. Hagh? Why did he want her dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone would have to know. Miss Duday offered the singular suggestion, to Mr. Goodwin, that Miss Eads had denied she had signed the document, or Mr. Hagh thought she was going to, and so he had to destroy her. That is doubly puerile. First, she had acknowledged that she had signed the document. Second, she had offered, through Mr. Irby, to pay one hundred thousand dollars in settlement of the claim — just last week. Whereupon Mr. Hagh, in a fit of pique, dashes to the airport for a plane to New York, flies here and kills her, after first lolling her maid to get a key, and flies back again. Does that sound credible?”

“No.”

“Then arrange it so it does. Why did Mr. Hagh kill his former wife?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“That’s a pity, since the simplest way for you people to make me doubt your guilt would be to offer an acceptable substitute. Have you one?”

“No.”

“Have you anything else to offer?”

“No.”

“Do you wish to make any comment on what has been said about Miss O’Neil?”

“I do not.”

Wolfe’s gaze went left. “Mr. Quest?”

During the fifty-some hours that had passed since my call at the Softdown building on Collins Street, I had had plenty of spare moments for research, and one of the items I had collected was Bernard Quest’s age. He was eighty-one. Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times.

He told Wolfe, in a low but firm and strong voice, “In a long life I have had to swallow only two really bitter pills. This affair is one of them. I don’t mean the murder, the violent death of Priscilla Eads, though that was shocking and regrettable. I mean that it is thought possible that I, Bernard Quest, was involved in it. Not only by you, I don’t care about you, but by the official and responsible investigators of crime.”