Rex Stout - Cordially Invited to Meet Death

“Mister?” Maryella asked.

“I don’t think so. He never goes in there. I didn’t dare ask the servants.”

But apparently at the Huddleston place there was no such thing as settling down for a social quarter of an hour, whether Mister was drunk or sober, only the next disturbance wasn’t his fault, except indirectly. The social atmosphere was nothing to brag about anyhow, because it struck me that certain primitive feelings were being felt and not concealed with any great success. I’m not so hot at nuances, but it didn’t take a Nero Wolfe to see that Maryella was working on Larry Huddleston, that the sight of the performance was giving Dr. Brady the fidgets in his facial muscles, that Janet was embarrassed and trying to pretend she didn’t notice what was going on, and that Daniel was absentmindedly drinking too much because he was worrying about something. Bess Huddleston had her ear cocked to hear what I was saying to Dr. Brady, but I was merely dating him to call at the office. He couldn’t make it that evening, but tomorrow perhaps... his schedule was very crowded...

The disturbance came when Bess Huddleston said she guessed she had better go and see if there was going to be any dinner or anyone to serve it, and sat up and put on her slippers. That is, she put one on; the second one, she stuck her foot in, let out a squeak, and jerked the foot out again.

“Damn!” she said. “A piece of glass in my slipper! Cut my toe!”

Mister bounced over to her, and the rest of us gathered around. Since Brady was a doctor, he took charge of matters. I didn’t amount to much, a shallow gash half an inch long on the bottom of her big toe, but it bled some, and Mister started whining and wouldn’t stop. Brother Daniel brought first-aid materials from the living room, and after Brady had applied a good dose of iodine, he did a neat job with gauze and tape.

“It’s all right, Mister,” Bess Huddleston said reassuringly. “You don’t — hey!”

Mister had swiped the iodine bottle, uncorked it, and was carefully depositing the contents, drop by drop, onto one of the strips of turf. He wouldn’t surrender it to Brady or Maryella, but he gave it to his mistress on demand, after re-corking it himself, and she handed it to her brother.

It was after six o’clock, and I wasn’t invited to dinner, and anyway I had had enough zoology for one day, so I said good-bye and took myself off. When I got the roadster onto the highway and was among my fellows again, I took a long deep breath of the good old mixture of gasoline and air and the usual odors.

When I got back to the office Wolfe, who was making marks on a big map of Russia he had bought recently, said he would take my report later, so, after comparing the type on my sample with that on the Horrocks letter and finding they were written on the same machine, I went up to my room for a shower and a change. After dinner, back in the office, he told me to make it a complete recital, leaving out nothing, which meant that he had made no start and formed no opinion. I told him I preferred a written report, because when I delivered it verbally he threw me off the track by making faces and irritating me, but he leaned back and shut his eyes and told me to proceed.

It was nearly midnight when I finished, what with the usual interruptions. When he’s doing a complete coverage, he thinks nothing of asking such a question as, “Did the animal pour the iodine on the grass with its right paw or its left?” If he were a movable object and went places himself it would save me a lot of breath, but then that’s what I get paid for. Partly.

He stood up and stretched, and I yawned. “Well,” I asked offensively, “got it sewed up? Including proof?”

“I’m sleepy,” he said, starting off. At the door he turned. “You made the usual quantity of mistakes, naturally, but probably the only one of importance was your failure to investigate the matter of the broken bottle in Miss Huddleston’s bathroom.”

“Pah,” I said. “If that’s the best you can do. It was not a bottle of anonymous letters. Bath salts.”

“All the same it’s preposterous. It’s even improbable. Break a bottle and simply go off, leaving it scattered around? No one would do that.”

“You don’t know that orangutan. I do.”

“Not orangutan. Chimpanzee. It might have done it, yes. That’s why you should have investigated. If the animal did not do it, there’s something fishy about it. Highly unnatural. If Dr. Brady arrives by eight fifty-nine, I’ll see him before I go up to the plant rooms. Good night.”

That was Tuesday night, August 19th. On Friday the 22nd Bess Huddleston got tetanus. On Monday the 25th she died. To show how everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked when he was discussing the case with a friend the other day, if there had been a heavy rainfall in Riverdale between the 19th and 26th it would have been impossible to prove it was murder, let alone catch the murderer. Not that he showed any great — oh, well.

On Wednesday the 20th Dr. Brady came to the office for an interview with Wolfe, and the next day brother Daniel and nephew Larry came. About all we got out of that was that among the men nobody liked anybody. In the meantime, upon instructions from Wolfe, I was wrapping my tentacles about Janet, coaxing her into my deadly embrace. It really wasn’t an unpleasant job, because Wednesday afternoon I took her to a ball game and was agreeably surprised to find that she knew a bunt from a base on balls, and Friday evening we went to the Flamingo Roof and I learned that she could dance nearly as well as Lily Rowan. She was no cuddler and a little stiff, but she went with the music and always knew what we were going to do. Saturday morning I reported to Wolfe regarding her as follows:

1. If she was toting a grievance against Bess Huddleston, it would take a smarter man than me to find out what it was.

2. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with her except that she would rather live in the country than the city.

3. She had no definite suspicion about who had sent the anonymous letters or anyone’s motive for sending them.

Wolfe said, “Try Miss Timms for a change.”

I didn’t try to date Maryella for Saturday or Sunday, because Janet had told me they were all going to Saratoga for the weekend. Monday morning, I thought, was no time to start a romance, so I waited until afternoon to phone, got Maryella, and got the news. I went up to the plant rooms, where Wolfe was a sight to behold in his undershirt, cutting the tops from a row of vandas for propagation, and told him:

“Bess Huddleston is dead.”

“Let me alone,” he said peevishly. “I’m doing all I can. Someone will probably get another letter before long, and when—”

“No, sir. No more letters. I am stating facts. Friday evening tetanus set in from that cut on her toe, and about an hour ago she died. Maryella’s voice was choked with emotion as she told me.”

Wolfe scowled at me. “Tetanus?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That would have been a five thousand dollar fee.”

“It would have been if you had seen fit to do a little work instead of—”

“It was no good and you know it. I was waiting for another letter. File it away, including the letter to Mrs. Horrocks, to be delivered to her on request. I’m glad to be rid of it.”

I wasn’t. Down in the office, as I checked over the folder, consisting of the Horrocks letter, the snapshot of Janet, a couple of reports I had made and some memos Wolfe had dictated, I felt as if I was leaving a ball game in the fourth inning with the score a tie. But it looked as if nothing could be done about it, and certainly there was no use trying to badger Wolfe. I phoned Janet to ask if there was anything I could do, and she told me in a weak tired voice that as far as she knew there wasn’t.