Рекс Стаут: The Final Deduction

Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled. If she had been doing any crying jalong with her employer it had certainly left no traces. At sight I had guessed her age at thirty, but that might have been a couple of years short.

“I earn my salary, Mr. Wolfe,” she said.

She was cool — cool eyes, cool smile, cool voice. With some cool ones the reaction is that it would be interesting to apply a little heat and see what happens, and you wouldn’t mind trying, but with others you feel that they are cool clear through, and she was one of them, though there was nothing wrong with her features or figure. You could even call her a looker.

Wolfe was taking her in. “No doubt,” he said. “As you know, Mrs. Vail phoned you from here. I heard her tell you not to tell me what Mr. Knapp said to her on the phone yesterday, but you may feel that she is under great strain and your judgment on that point is better than hers. Do you?”

“No.” Very cool. “I’m in her employ.”

“Then I won’t try to cajole you. Do you always open Mrs. Vail’s mail?”

“Yes.”

“Everything that comes?”

“Yes.”

“How many items were there in yesterday morning’s mail?”

“I didn’t count them. Perhaps twenty.”

“The envelope with that note in it, did you open it first or further along in the process?”

Of course that tactic is three thousand years old, maybe more, asking for a detail of a reported action, looking for hesitation or confusion. Dinah Utley smiled. “I always sort it out first, leaving circulars and other obvious stuff until later. Yesterday there were four — no, five — that I opened at once. The envelope with that note was the third one I opened.”

“Did you show it to Mrs. Vail at once?”

“Certainly. I took it to her room.”

“Were you present Sunday night when she phoned to the country to ask about her husband?”

“No. I was in the house, but I was in bed.”

“What time yesterday did the call come from Mr. Knapp?”

“Eight minutes after four. I knew that might be important somehow, and I made a note of it.”

“You listened to that conversation?”

“Yes. Mrs. Vail had told me to take it down, and I did.”

“Then you know shorthand?”

“Of course.”

“Are you a college graduate?”

“Yes.”

“Do you type with two fingers, or four?”

She smiled. “All of them. By touch.” She turned a hand over. “Really, Mr. Wolfe. Isn’t this rather silly? Is it going to get Mr. Vail back alive?”

“No. But it may conceivably serve a purpose. Naturally you want to be with Mrs. Vail, and she wants you; I won’t keep you much longer. There’s no point now in asking you about that man’s voice and diction; even if I got a hint that suggested another wording for the notice it’s too late. But you will please let Mr. Goodwin take samples of your fingerprints. Archie?”

That roused her a little. “ My fingerprints? Why?”

“Not to get Mr. Vail back alive. But they may be useful later on. It’s barely possible that Mr. Knapp or an accomplice inadvertently left a print on that note. To your knowledge, has anyone handled it besides Mrs. Vail and you?”

“No.”

“And Mr. Goodwin and me. We shall get Mrs. Vail’s. Mr. Goodwin is an expert on prints, and even if Mr. Vail returns safely, as I hope he will, we’ll want to know if there are any unidentifiable prints on that note. Do you object to having your prints taken?

“Of course not. Why should I?”

“Then Archie?”

I had opened a desk drawer and was getting out the equipment — ink with dauber and surfaced paper. I prefer a dauber to a pad. Knowing now, as I did, what the conjecture was that Wolfe had been testing when he inspected my typewriter keyboard with the note from Mr. Knapp in his hand, and therefore also knowing why I was to take Dinah Utley’s prints, it wasn’t necessary to write her name on the paper, but I did anyway. She got up and came to my desk and I did her right hand first. She had good hands, firm, smooth, well kept, with long slender fingers. No rings. With her left hand, when I had done the thumb, index, and middle, and started to daub the ring finger, I asked casually, “What’s this? Scald it?”

“No. Shut a drawer on it.”

“The pinkie too. I’ll go easy.”

“It’s not very tender now. I did it several days ago.”

But I went easy, there being no point in making her suffer, since we had no use for the prints. As she cleaned her fingers with solvent and tissues she asked Wolfe, “You don’t really think a kidnaper would be fool enough to leave his fingerprint on that note, do you?”

“No,” Wolfe said, “not fool enough. But possibly distraught enough. One thing more, Miss Utley. I would like you to know that I’m aware that the primary concern is the safety of Mr. Vail. I have done all I can. Archie, show her a copy of the notice.

I got it from my desk and handed it to her. Wolfe waited until she had finished reading it to say, “That will appear, prominently, in today’s Gazette and the morning papers. If the kidnaper sees it, it may have an effect; it certainly will if he has some knowledge of me. For I will have publicly committed myself, and if he kills Mr. Vail he will be doomed inevitably. A month, a year, ten years; no matter. It’s regrettable that you or I can’t reach him, to make that clear to him.”

“Yes, it is.” Still perfectly cool. She handed me the notice. “Of course he may not have as high an opinion of your abilities as you have.” She turned to go, after three steps stopped and turned her head to say, “He might even think the police are more dangerous than you are,” and went. There ahead of her, and preceding her to the hall and the front door, I let her out; and, expecting no thanks or good day, got none.

Returning to the office, I stopped in front of Wolfe’s desk, stood looking down at him, and said, “So she typed it.”

He nodded. “Of course I didn’t—”

“Excuse me. I’ll do the spiel. When you first looked at it you noticed, as I did, that whoever typed it had an uneven touch. Later, while I was phoning, you looked at it again, got an idea, and came and compared it with the keyboard, and you saw that all the letters that were faint were on the left — not just left of center, but at the left end. W, E, A, S, and D. So you conjectured that the typist had been someone who used all his fingers, not just two or four, and that for some—”

“And probably typed by touch, because—”

“Excuse me, I’m doing the spiel. The touch was merely a probable. And for some reason the ring and little fingers of his left hand had not hit the keys as hard as the other fingers, not nearly as hard. Okay. I caught up with you after lunch, while you were reading, just before she came. You saw me comparing the note with the keyboard.”

“No. I was reading.”

“Let me not believe that. You miss nothing, though you often pretend to. You saw me all right. Then she came, and you went on ahead of me again, and I admit I ought to be docked. My eyes are as good as yours, and I had been closer to her than you were, but you noticed that the tips of those two fingers on her left hand were discolored and slightly swollen, and I didn’t. Of course when you told her we wanted her prints I saw it, and you will ignore what I said about being docked because I found out how and when the fingers got hurt. Any corrections?”

“No. It is still a conjecture, not a conclusion.”

“Damn close to it. One will get you fifty. That it is just a coincidence that she, a touch typist, living in that house, hurt just those two fingers, just at that time, just enough to make her go easy with them but not enough to stop using them — nuts. One will get you a hundred. So you had her read that notice and rubbed it in, thinking she’ll get in touch with Mr. Knapp. Why did you let her walk out?”