Рекс Стаут: The Final Deduction

“No. He did it sitting down.”

“Yes? But he would do nothing without you to piquer. ”

“How do you spell that?”

He spelled it. I said, “I’ll look it up,” put my empty glass down, went to the table against the wall where my copy of the Times was on the rack, and sat. I kept an eye on my watch, and at 8:57, when I had downed the last bite of my first griddle cake and my second sausage, I reached for the house phone and buzzed Wolfe’s room.

His growl came. “Yes?”

“Good morning. Mrs. Vail called an hour ago. Her husband had just phoned from their house in the country. He’s at large and intact and will come to town as soon as he cleans up and feeds. He promised someone, presumably Mr. Knapp, that neither he nor his wife will make a peep for forty-eight hours, and she wants us to keep the lid on.”

“Satisfactory.”

“Yeah. Nice and neat. But I’ll be taking a walk, to the bank to deposit her checks, and it’s only five more blocks to the Gazette. It’s bound to break soon, and I could give it to Lon Cohen to hold until we give the word. He’d hold it, you know that, and he would deeply appreciate it.”

“No.”

“You mean he wouldn’t hold it?”

“No. He has shown that he can be trusted. But I haven’t seen Mr. Vail, nor have you. It’s useful to have Mr. Cohen in our debt, but no. Perhaps later in the day.” He hung up. He would be two minutes late getting to the plant rooms on the roof. As Fritz brought my second cake and pair of sausages I said, “For a bent nickel I’d go up and peekay him.”

He patted my shoulder and said, “Now, Archie. If you should, you will. If you shouldn’t, you won’t.”

I buttered the cake. “I think that’s a compliment. It’s tricky. I’ll study it.”

For the next couple of hours, finishing breakfast and the Times (the notice was on page twenty-six), opening the mail, dusting our desks, removing yesterday’s orchids and putting fresh water in the vase, walking to the bank and back, and doing little miscellaneous office chores, I considered the situation off and on. It seemed pretty damn silly, being hired in connection with something as gaudy as the kidnaping of Jimmy Vail, merely to put a ad in the paper and collect a fee and then call it a day. But what else? I’m more than willing to peekay Wolfe when there’s any point or profit to it, but with Jimmy Vail back in one piece the job Wolfe had been hired for was done, so what? As soon as it broke, an army of cops and FBI scientists would be after Mr. Knapp, and they’d probably get him sooner or later. We were done, except for one little detail, to see Jimmy Vail whole. Mrs. Vail had said she would give us a ring when he arrived, and I would go up and ask him if Mr. Knapp had shown him the Gazette with the notice in it.

I didn’t have to. At 11:25 the doorbell rang. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and gone to his desk, put a spray of Oncidium marshallianum in the vase, torn yesterday from his desk calendar, and gone through the mail, and was dictating a long letter to an orchid collector in Guatemala. He hates to be interrupted when he’s doing something really important, but Fritz was upstairs, so I went, and there he was on the stoop. I told Wolfe, “Jimmy Vail in person,” and went and opened the door, and he said, “Maybe you know me? I know you.” He stepped in. “You’re a hell of a good dancer.”

I told him he was too, which was true, took his coat and hat and put them on the rack, and took him to the office, and he crossed to Wolfe’s desk, stood, and said, “I know you don’t shake hands. I once offered to fight a man because he called you a panjandrum; of course I knew he was yellow. I’m Jimmy Vail. May I sit down? Preferably in the red leather chair. There it is.” He went and sat, rested his elbows on the chair arms, crossed his legs, and said, “If I belch you’ll have to pardon me. I had nothing but cold canned beans for two days and three nights, and I overdid it on the bacon and eggs. My wife has told me about hiring you. Never has so much been spent on so little. Naturally I don’t like being called my wife’s property — who would? — but I realize you had to. I only saw it when my wife showed it to me, and I don’t know whether they saw it or not. Is that important?”

You wouldn’t have thought, looking at him and listening to him, that he had just spent sixty hours in the clutches of kidnapers, living on cold beans, and maybe not long to live even on beans, but of course he had cleaned up and had a meal, and the talk I had heard had never included any suggestion that he was a softy. His face was dead white, but it always was, and smooth and neat as it always was, and his dark eyes were bright and clear.

“It would be helpful to know,” Wolfe said, “but it isn’t vital. You came to tell me that? That you don’t know?”

“Not actually.” Vail lifted a hand to the neighborhood of his right temple and flipped his middle finger off the tip of his thumb. He had made that gesture famous during his career at the Glory Hole. “I just mentioned it because it may be important to us, my wife and me. If one of them saw that thing in the paper they know my wife has told you about it, and that may not be too good. That’s why I came and came quick. They told me to keep my trap shut for forty-eight hours, until Friday morning, and to see that my wife did too, or we would regret it. I think they meant it. I got a strong impression that they mean what they say. So my wife and I are going to keep it to ourselves until Friday morning, but what about you? You could put another notice in the paper to Mr. Knapp, saying that since the property has been returned the case is closed as far as you’re concerned. That you’re no longer interested. What do you think?”

Wolfe had cocked his head and was eying him. “You’re making an unwarranted assumption, Mr. Vail — that I too will keep silent until Friday morning. I told your wife that the obligation not to withhold knowledge of a major crime must sometimes bow to other considerations, for instance saving a life, but you are no longer in jeopardy. Now that I’ve seen you alive and at freedom, I cannot further postpone reporting to authority. A licensed private detective is under constraints that do not apply to the ordinary citizen. I don’t want to subject you or your wife—”

The phone rang, and I swiveled to get it. “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Good—”

“This is Althea Vail. Is my husband there?”

“Yes, he—”

“I want to speak to him.”

She sounded urgent. I proceeded as I did not merely out of curiosity. There was obviously going to be a collision between Wolfe and Jimmy Vail about saving it until Friday, and if that was what she was urgent about I wanted to hear it firsthand. So I told her to hold the wire, told him his wife wanted to speak to him, and beat it, to the kitchen and the extension there. As I got the receiver to my ear Mrs. Vail was talking.

“... terrible has happened. A man just phoned from White Plains, Captain Saunders of the State Police, he said, and he said they found a dead body, a woman, and it’s Dinah Utley, they think it is, and they want me to come to White Plains to identify it or send someone. My God, Jimmy, could it be Dinah? How could it be Dinah?”

JIMMY: I don’t know. Maybe Archie Goodwin will know; he’s listening in on an extension. Did he say how she was killed?

ALTHEA: No. He—

JIMMY: Or where the body was found?

ALTHEA: No. He—

JIMMY: Or why they think it’s Dinah Utley?

ALTHEA: Yes, things in her bag and in the car. Her car was there. I don’t think — I don’t want to — can’t I send Emil?

JIMMY: Why not? How about it, Goodwin? Emil is the chauffeur. He can certainly tell them whether it’s Dinah Utley or not. Must my wife go? Or must I go?