Рекс Стаут: Murder Is Corny

I took my time getting up. “You have no warrant, but I don’t want to be fussy.” I turned to Wolfe. “If you want me around tomorrow, you might give Parker a ring.”

“I shall.” He swiveled. “Mr. Cramer. Knowing your considerable talents as I do, I am sometimes dumfounded by your fatuity. You were so bent on baiting Mr. Goodwin that you completely ignored the point I was at pains to make.” He pointed at the piles on his desk. “Who picked that corn? Pfui!”

“That’s your point,” Cramer rasped. “Mine is who killed Kenneth Faber. Move, Goodwin.”

At twenty minutes past eleven Wednesday morning, standing at the curb on Leonard Street with Nathaniel Parker, I said, “Of course in a way it’s a compliment. Last time the bail was a measly five hundred. Now twenty grand. That’s progress.”

Parker nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it He argued for fifty thousand, but I got it down to twenty. You know what that means. They actually — Here’s one.”

A taxi headed in to us and stopped. When we were in and I had told the driver Eighth Avenue and 35th Street, and we were rolling, Parker resumed, leaning to me and keeping his voice down. The legal mind. Hackies are even better listeners than they are talkers, and that one could be a spy sicked on us by the district attorney. “They actually,” he said, “think you may have killed that man. This is serious, Archie. I told the judge that bail in the amount that was asked would be justified only if they had enough evidence to charge you with murder, in which case you wouldn’t be bailable, and he agreed. As your counsel, I must advise you to be prepared for such a charge at any moment I didn’t like Mandel’s attitude. By the way, Wolfe told me to send my bill to you, not him. He said this is your affair and he isn’t concerned. I’ll make it moderate.”

I thanked him. I already knew that Assistant District Attorney Mandel, and maybe Cramer too, regarded me as a real candidate for the big one. Cramer had taken me to his place, Homicide South, and after spending half an hour on me had turned me over to lieutenant Rowcliff and gone home. Rowcliff had stood me for nearly an hour — I had him stuttering in fourteen minutes, not a record — and had then sent me under convoy to the DA’s office, where Mandel had taken me on, obviously expecting to make a night of it.

Which he did, with the help of a pair of dicks from the DA’s Homicide Bureau. He had of course been phoned to by both Cramer and Rowcliff, and it was evident from the start that he didn’t merely think I was holding out on details that might be useful, to prevent either bother for myself or trouble for someone else; he had me tagged as a real prospect Naturally I wanted to know why, so I played along. I hadn’t with Cramer because he had got me sore in front of Wolfe, and I hadn’t with Rowcliff because playing along is impossible with a double-breasted baboon, but with Mandel I could. Of course he was asking the questions, him and the dicks, but the trick is to answer them in such a way that the next question, or maybe one later on, tells you something you want to know, or at least gives you a hint That takes practice, but I had had plenty, and it makes it simpler when one guy pecks away at you for an hour or so and then backs off, and another guy starts in and goes all over it again.

For instance, the scene of the crime — the alley and receiving platform at the rear of Rusterman’s. Since Wolfe was the trustee, there was nothing about that restaurant I wasn’t familiar with. From the side street it was only about fifteen yards along the narrow alley to the platform, and the alley ended a few feet farther on at the wall of another building. A car or small truck entering to deliver something had to back out. Knowing, as I had, that Kenneth Faber would come with the corn sometime after five o’clock, I could have walked in and hid under the platform behind a concrete post, with the weapon in my hand, and, when Faber drove in, got out, and came around to open the tailgate, he would never know what hit him. If I could have done that, who couldn’t? I would have had to know one other thing, that I couldn’t be seen from the windows of the restaurant kitchen because the glass had been painted on the inside so boys and girls couldn’t climb onto the platform to watch Leo boning a duck or Felix stirring goose blood into a Sauce Rouennaise.

In helping them get it on the record that I knew all that, I learned only that they had found no one who had seen the murderer in the alley or entering or leaving it, that Faber had probably been dead five to ten minutes when someone came from the kitchen to the platform and found the body, and that the weapon was a piece of two-inch galvanized iron pipe sixteen and five-eighths inches long, threaded male at one end and female at the other, old and battered. Easy to hide under a coat. Where it came from might be discovered by one man in ten hours, or by a thousand men in ten years.

Getting those details was nothing, since they would be in the morning papers, but regarding their slant on me I got some hints that the papers wouldn’t have. Hints were the best I could get, no facts to check, so I’ll just report how it looked when Parker came to spring me in the morning. They hadn’t let me see Sue’s statement, but it must have been something in it, or something she had said, or something someone else, maybe Carl Heydt or Peter Jay or Max Maslow, had said, either to her or to the cops. Or possibly something Duncan McLeod, Sue’s father, had said. That didn’t seem likely, but I included him because I saw him. When Parker and I entered the anteroom on our way out he was there on a chair in the row against the wall, dressed for town, with a necktie, his square deep-tanned face shiny with sweat. I crossed over and told him good morning, and he said it wasn’t, it was a bad morning, a day lost and no one to leave to see to things. It was no place for a talk, with people there on the chairs, but I might at least have asked him who had picked the corn if someone hadn’t come to take him inside.

So when I climbed out of the taxi at the corner and thanked Parker for the lift and told him I’d call him if and when, and walked the block and a half on 35th Street to the old brownstone, I was worse off than when I had left, since I hadn’t learned anything really useful, and no matter how Parker defined “moderate,” the cost of a twenty-grand bond is not peanuts. I couldn’t expect to pass the buck to Wolfe, since he had never seen either Kenneth Faber or Sue McLeod, and as I mounted the seven steps to the stoop and put my key in the lock I decided not to try to.

The key wasn’t enough. The door opened two inches and stopped. The chain bolt was on. I pushed the button, and Fritz came and slipped the bolt; and his face told me something was stirring before he spoke. If you’re not onto the faces you see most of, how can you expect to tell anything from strange ones? As I crossed the sill I said, “Good morning. What’s up?”

He turned from closing the door and stared. “But Archie. You look terrible.”

“I feel worse. Now what?”

“A woman to see you. Miss Susan McLeod. She used to bring—”

“Yeah. Where is she?”

“In the office.”

“Where is he?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Has he talked with her?”

“No.”

“How long has she been here?”

“Half an hour.”

“Excuse my manners. I’ve had a night.” I headed for the end of the hall, the swinging door to the kitchen, pushed it open, and entered. Wolfe was at the center table with a glass of beer in his hand. He grunted. “So. Have you slept?”

“No.”

“Have you eaten?”

I got a glass from the cupboard, went to the refrigerator and got milk, filled the glass, and took a sip. “If you could see the bacon and eggs they had brought in for me and I paid two bucks for, let alone taste it, you’d never be the same. You’d be so afraid you might be hauled in as a material witness you’d lose your nerve. They think maybe I killed Faber. For your information, I didn’t.” I sipped milk. “This will hold me till lunch. I understand I have a caller. As you told Parker, this is my affair and you are not concerned. May I take her to the front room? I’m not intimate enough with her to take her up to my room.” I sipped milk.