Рекс Стаут: Murder Is Corny

“That’s silly,” Sue blurted, “I’m not pregnant.”

I stared. “You said Ken told you he told me...”

She nodded. “Ken would tell anybody anything.”

“But you thought you were?”

“Of course not. How could I? There’s only one way a girl can get pregnant, and it couldn’t have been that with me because it’s never happened.”

Like everybody else, I like to kid myself that I know why I think this or do that, but sometimes it just won’t work, and that was once. I don’t mean why I believed her about not being pregnant and how she knew she couldn’t be; I do know that; it was the way she said it and the way she looked. I had known her three years. But since, if I believed her on that, I had to scrap the item I had just given Wolfe for ‘no’ on her killing Faber, why didn’t I change the odds to even money? I pass. I could cook up a case, for instance if she was straight on one thing, about not being pregnant and why not, she was probably straight on other things too, but who would buy it? It’s even possible that every man alive, of whom I am one, has a feeling down below that an unmarried girl who knows she can’t be pregnant is less apt to commit murder than one who can’t be sure. I admit that a good private detective shouldn’t have feelings down below, but have you any suggestions?

Since Wolfe pretends to think I could qualify on the witness stand as an expert on attractive young women, of course he turned to me and said, “Archie?” and I nodded yes. An expert shouldn’t back and fill, and as I just said, I believed her on the pregnancy issue. Wolfe grunted, told me to take my notebook, gave her a hard eye for five seconds, and started in.

An hour and ten minutes later, when Fritz came to announce lunch, I had filled most of a new notebook and Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes shut and his lips tight. It was evident that he was going to have to work. She had answered all his questions with no apparent fumbling, and it still looked very much as if either I was going to ride the bumps or she was. Or possibly both.

As she told it, she had met Ken Faber eight months ago at a party at the apartment of Peter Jay. Ken had been fast on the follow-up and four months later, in May, she had told him she would marry him some day — say in two or three years, when she was ready to give up modeling — if he had shown that he could support a family. From the notebook: “I was making over eight hundred dollars a week, ten times as much as he was, and of course if I got married I couldn’t expect to keep that up. I don’t think a married woman should model anyway because if you’re married you ought to have babies, and there’s no telling what that will do to you, and who looks after the babies?”

In June, at his request, she had got her father to give him a job on the farm, but she had soon regretted it. From the notebook: “Of course he knew I went to the farm weekends in the summer, and the very first weekend it was easy to see what his idea was. He thought it would be different on the farm than in town, it would be easy to get me to do what he wanted, as easy as falling off a log. The second week it was worse, and the third week it was still worse, and I was seeing what he was really like and I wished I hadn’t said I would marry him. He accused me of letting other men do what I wouldn’t let him do, and he tried to make me promise I wouldn’t date any other man, even for dinner or a show. Then the last week in July he seemed to get some sense, and I thought maybe he had just gone through some kind of a phase or something, but last week, Friday evening, he was worse than ever all of a sudden, and Sunday be told me he had told Archie Goodwin that I thought I was pregnant and he was responsible, and of course Archie would pass it on, and if I denied it no one would believe me, and the only thing to do was to get married right away. That was when I told him I’d like to kill him. Then the next day, Monday, Carl — Carl Heydt — told me that Ken had told him the same thing, and I suspected he had told two other men, on account of things they had said, and I decided to go there Tuesday and see him. I was going to tell him he had to tell Archie and Carl it was a lie, and anybody else he had told, and if I had to I’d get a lawyer.”

If that was straight, and the part about Carl Heydt and Peter Jay and Max Maslow could be checked, that made it more like ten to one that she hadn’t killed him. She couldn’t have ad-libbed it; she would have had to go there intending to kill him, or at least bruise him, since she couldn’t have just happened to have with her a piece of two-inch pipe sixteen inches long. Say twenty to one. But if she hadn’t, who had? Better than twenty to one, not some thug. There had been eighty bucks in Ken’s pockets, and why would a thug go up that alley with the piece of pipe, much less hide under the platform with it? No. It had to be someone out for Ken specifically who knew that spot, or at least knew about it, and knew he would come there, and when.

Of course it was possible the murderer was someone Sue had never heard of and the motive had no connection with her, but that would make it really tough, and there she was, and Wolfe got all she had — or at least everything she would turn loose of. She didn’t know how many different men she had had dates with in the twenty months she had been modeling — maybe thirty. More in the first year than recently; she had thought it would help to get jobs if she knew a lot of men, and it had, but now she turned down as many jobs as she accepted. When she said she didn’t know why so many men wanted to date her Wolfe made a face, but I knew she really meant it. It was hard to believe that a girl with so much born come-on actually wasn’t aware of it, but I knew her, and so did my friend Lily Rowan, who is an expert on women.

She didn’t know how many of them had asked her to marry them; maybe ten; she hadn’t kept count. Of course you don’t like her; to like a girl who says things like that, you’d have to see her and hear her, and if you’re a man you wouldn’t stop to ask whether you liked her or not. I frankly admit that the fact that she couldn’t dance had saved me a lot of wear and tear.

From the time she had met Ken Faber she had let up on dates, and in recent months she had let only three other men take her places. Those three had all asked her to marry them, and they had stuck to it in spite of Ken Faber. Carl Heydt, who had given her her first modeling job, was nearly twice her age, but that wouldn’t matter if she wanted to marry him when the time came. Peter Jay, who was something important in a big advertising agency, was younger, and Max Maslow, who was a fashion photographer, was still younger.

She had told Carl Heydt that what Ken had told him wasn’t true, but she wasn’t sure that he had believed her. She couldn’t remember exactly what Peter Jay and Max Maslow had said that made her think that Ken had told them too; she hadn’t had the suspicion until Monday, when Carl had told her what Ken had told him. She had told no one that she was going to Rusterman’s Tuesday to see Ken. All three of them knew about the corn delivery to Rusterman’s and Nero Wolfe; they knew she had made the deliveries for two summers and had kidded her about it; Peter Jay had tried to get her to pose in a cornfield, in an evening gown, for a client of his. They knew Ken was working at the farm and was making the deliveries. From the notebook, Wolfe speaking: “You know those men quite well. You know their temperaments and bents. If one of them, enraged beyond endurance by Mr. Faber’s conduct, went there and killed him, which one? Remembering it was not a sudden fit of passion, it was premeditated, planned. From your knowledge of them, which one?”