Рекс Стаут - Gambit

“No.” Sally’s fists were so tight I could see the white on her knuckles. “I don’t believe it, Mr. Wolfe. I can’t believe it. Of course Archie was right, I thought Dan Kalmus might want... I thought he wouldn’t do everything he could, everything he ought to do... but now you’re saying he killed Paul, he planned it, so my father would be arrested and convicted. I can’t believe it!”

“You need not. As I said, I specified Kalmus only to avoid verbal complexities. It could have been one of the others — Hausman, Yerkes, Farrow — or even the cook or steward, though they are less probable. He must fit my three facts, and he should be eligible for my two surmises. Above all, he must meet the most obvious requirement, that he had a compelling reason to wish to ruin your father, to take his liberty if not his life. Do any of the others qualify? Hausman, Yerkes, Farrow, the cook, or steward?”

She shook her head. Her mouth opened and shut, but no words came.

“One of them might, of course, without your knowledge. But that was another reason for specifying Kalmus; you had yourself supplied a possible inducement for him. And now, with this theory, I must of course see him in any case. If he is guiltless and is proceeding on the assumption that the death of Jerin was the sole and final objective of the murderer, unless I intervene your father is doomed. It may be that the fact known only to Kalmus and your father, mentioned in the note to your mother which Mr. Goodwin read, is relevant, but speculation on that would be futile. I must see Mr. Kalmus, peccant or not, and for that I need your help.” He swiveled. “Your notebook, Archie.”

I got it, and my pen. “Shoot.”

“Just a draft for Miss Blount. Any paper, no carbon. She will supply the salutation. I suppose my mother has told you that I am at Nero Wolfe’s house, comma, and I am going to stay here until I am sure I have done all I can for my father. Period. Mr. Wolfe has a theory you should know about, comma, and you must come and talk with him tomorrow, comma, Wednesday. Period. He will be here all day and evening, comma, but is not available from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon. Period. If you haven’t come by noon Thursday I shall see a newspaper reporter and tell him why I came here and why I don’t trust you to represent my father effectively.”

He turned to her. “From you to Mr. Kalmus, handwritten. On my letterhead or plain paper, as you prefer. Mr. Goodwin will take it to his office after lunch.”

“I won’t,” she said positively. “I couldn’t tell a reporter that. I couldn’t . I won’t.”

“Certainly you won’t. You won’t have to. He’ll come.”

“But if he doesn’t?”

“He will. If he doesn’t we’ll try something else. Notify him that you have engaged an attorney to take legal steps to have him superseded as your father’s counsel. I’m not a lawyer, but I know a good one, and the law has room for many stratagems.” He flattened his palm on the desk. “Miss Blount. I shall see Mr. Kalmus, or quit. As you please.”

“Not quit.” She looked at me. “How does it... will you read it, Archie?”

I did so, including commas and periods.

She shook her head. “It’s not like me. He’ll know I didn’t write it.” She looked at Wolfe. “He’ll know you did.”

“Certainly he will. That is intended.”

“Well.” She took a breath. “But I won’t tell any reporter, no matter what happens.”

“That is not intended.” Wolfe twisted his head to look up at the wall clock. “Before you write it, please make a phone call or two. Mr. Yerkes, Mr. Farrow, Dr. Avery. It’s just as well I didn’t see them before Mr. Cramer brought me that fact; it would have been wasted time and effort. Can you get them to come? At six o’clock or, preferably, after dinner, say at nine-thirty. Either separately or together.”

“I can try. What phone do I use? There isn’t one in my room.”

Wolfe’s lips tightened. A woman saying casually “my room,” meaning a room in his house, was hard to take. I told her she could use my phone and went to get another chair to sit on while I typed the letter to Kalmus for her to copy.

Usually I know exactly what Wolfe is doing while he’s doing it, and why. I always know afterwards exactly what he did, and nearly always I know why. But I’m still not dead sure, months later, that I know why he had Sally phone those guys and get them to come that day. At the time I not only wasn’t sure, I couldn’t even guess. He hates to work. When I return from an errand on a case and sit down to report, and he knows he must listen and listen hard, from the look he gives me you might think I had put ketchup in his beer. When a caller enters the office, even if he expects to pry out of him some essential fact on a tough one, from the welcome he gets you might think he had come to examine the income tax reports for the past ten years.

So why ask Sally to get people to work on both before and after dinner, before he had had a go at the most likely candidate? I didn’t get it. I now believe that though he wasn’t aware of it, he was grabbing at straws. He was pretending, not only to Sally and me but also to himself, that the new situation, resulting from the fact Cramer had brought, was just dandy because it gave him a new approach. But actually what it amounted to was that it was now extremely close to certain that none of the other candidates had had a shadow of a reason to kill Paul Jerin, and therefore it took either a mule or a sap to stick to the basic assumption that Blount hadn’t. You can’t sit and enjoy a book, even a fascinating one about what happened in Africa a hundred thousand years ago, while you’re fighting off a suspicion that you’re acting like a mule or a sap, so you tell your client to get people to come to take your mind off your misery. As I say, I’m not dead sure, but I suspect that was it.

Of course it’s barely possible that even at that stage he had some vague notion in some corner of his skull of what had really happened that night at the Gambit Club, but I don’t think so. In that case he would have — but I’d better save that.

However, there wasn’t much work to the first interview, before dinner, with Morton Farrow. Yerkes, the banker, had told Sally he would come around nine-thirty, but the best she could get out of Avery, the doctor, was that he would try to make it some time during the evening. It had been decided after lunch, after I returned from taking the letter to Kalmus’ office — in a steel-and-glass fifty-story hive in the financial district where his firm had a whole floor — that Sally would not appear, and before six o’clock came she went up to her room. Farrow had said he would arrive at six but was twenty minutes late. I left it to Fritz to admit him, thinking he would consider it improper for a famous detective to answer a doorbell.

When Fritz ushered him to the office he came across to me with his hand out. I took it and let it go, and he turned to Wolfe, but Wolfe, who is always prepared for it, had turned to the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, leather-bound, on the stand at his elbow, and was busy turning pages. Farrow stood and watched him for five seconds and then turned back to me and boomed, “Where’s Sally?” I told him she was upstairs and might be down later, and indicated the red leather chair, and, when he was seated and it was safe, Wolfe closed the dictionary and swiveled.

“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Nero Wolfe. You told Miss Blount you couldn’t stay long.”

Farrow nodded. “I’ve got a dinner date.” Twice as loud as necessary. He glanced at his wrist. “I’ll have to trot along in half an hour, but that should be enough. I couldn’t make it by six, couldn’t get away. With the big boss gone I’ve got my hands full. I was glad Sally called me. She said you wanted to see me, and I wanted to see you. I know her, and of course you don’t. She’s a good kid, and I’m all for her, but like everybody else she has kinks. Apparently she has sold you a bill of goods. I’m a salesman myself, a sales manager for a hundred-million-dollar corporation, but it depends on what you’re selling. Sally just doesn’t understand her mother, my aunt, and never will. Of course that’s strictly a family matter, but she’s brought it into this mess herself, she’s sold you on it, and I’ve got to set you straight. She’s got you believing that there’s something between my aunt and Dan Kalmus. That’s plain moonshine. Anybody who knows my Auntyanna — have you ever seen her?”