Rex Stout - The Broken Vase

Diego stopped; his jaw worked; he lifted a hand and let it drop again. “I’m sorry, Fox,” he said with an odd and clumsy courtesy. “You think you saved my life. Thank you. That’s all I’m going to say. To anyone.” He pointed. “There’s the phone over there.”

Fox looked at him, at the crooked set to his mouth, at his narrowed eyes, half closed to conceal the mortal hurt to pride or hope or self-respect that had desperately moved him even to the ignominy of falsely declaring himself a thief. It was manifestly useless to badger him or wheedle him or reason with him; another time, another day, perhaps; not now. His hands were moving, and Fox, glancing there, saw that the tips of the index and middle fingers of his right hand were making little circles on the ends of the two stubs on the other hand. Fox had never seen him do that before; in fact, no one had; Diego had never permitted himself to indulge in that little gesture except in solitude.

Fox got up and went to the table and tore a piece from a newspaper, went to the hall and used the scrap of paper to pick up the pan, returned and put the pan on the table, and got his hat from the top of the chest of drawers. As he stopped in front of Diego, Diego looked up at him and then down again.

“Don’t touch that pan with your bare fingers,” Fox said. “That stuff is oily. Even one drop of it is dangerous. On your skin. It wouldn’t kill you, but it might make you pretty sick. Get rubber gloves and wet a cloth with cleaning alcohol and wipe the floor and the door and the woodwork. Clean the pan with alcohol before you throw it away — unless you want to keep it for a souvenir. You can’t lock the door, the lock’s ruined. Some one tried to kill you and may try again. Don’t be a damn fool.”

“The police,” Diego said. “I don’t expect — I’m not asking any favors. I’m perfectly willing—”

“The police are busy on a stabbing up in Harlem,” Fox said roughly, and strode out, down the stairs, and to the street.

In a little restaurant on 54th Street west of Lexington Fox considered the situation, meanwhile disposing of some excellent oysters, good tender calf’s liver, tolerable lyonnaise potatoes, and broccoli that was saved from being seaweed only by its color.

At the end of the oysters he went to the phone booth, called Dora Mowbray’s number, and got no answer. In the middle of the liver he tried another number, that of Garda Tusar in an apartment house on Madison Avenue, with the same result. Before putting sugar in his coffee he tried still another, Adolph Koch’s residence on 12th Street, and was informed by the soft voice of a colored maid that Mr. Koch was out.

None of those disappointments was the quietus of a brilliant idea. He had no brilliant ideas. There was no sense in plodding along the trails, any of them, already worn by the trampling of Inspector Damon’s battalions — as, for instance, the matter of Garda Tusar’s income. That sort of thing was pie for a good detective squad, and Damon had fully realized the possibilities it offered of opening a crack, but he had got nowhere. If Garda had been a frequent visitor, discreet or indiscreet, to Koch’s place, or to Diego’s or Perry Dunham’s; or if one of them or any other remunerative male had enjoyed recurrent hospitality at her apartment; or if she had been habitually either guest or hostess at some clandestine pied-á-terre — all those possibilities had been explored by Damon’s men with painstaking and elaborate thoroughness, and Garda’s mysterious opulence remained a mystery. The inevitable official conjecture, that she was blackmailing somebody, was certainly plausible, but on that too there was a painful and persistent lack of evidence.

It was the same with all the other traditionally indicated lines of inquiry. In dogged desperation Damon had even nosed into the matter of Lawrence Mowbray’s death four months previously, but had found nothing in that hole either. Alone in his office on the twentieth floor of a building on 48th Street, at 5:37 P.M. on November 29th, Mowbray had toppled from a window, bounced from a ledge eighty feet down, and smashed on the pavement. The routine investigation had disclosed that Jan Tusar had entered the building two or three minutes later and taken an elevator to the twentieth floor, to keep an appointment with Mowbray, but that was the only item of the record which might have possessed significance, and it had none for the present problem.

No, Fox decided as he set down his empty coffee cup and scowled at it, it was hopeless to start barking at the tails of the trained dogs. What was needed was a flash of inspiration, and the devil of it was that none came. All he could do was poke around somewhere and wait for it, and as good a place to poke as any was Perry Dunham’s place on 51st Street, for which he had a key. There would even be a bed there which he might as well use. He paid his check, went to the phone booth again, asked for Brewster 8000, and after a little wait heard a familiar voice.

“Mrs. Trimble? Fox. Please tell Pokorny the billiard date is off because I won’t get home tonight. And tell Sam to leave the strawberries until I get a look at them. I hope to be there tomorrow evening. Everything all right?”

“Fine.” Mrs. Trimble had her mouth too close to the transmitter, and talked too loud, as usual. “Mr. Crocker skinned his leg a little and two pigs got out. There’s a telegram.”

“Telegram? From that fellow in Boston?”

“Not Boston, New York. Wait till I get it, Sam wrote it down.” An interval, then her voice again: “It’s from a woman, anyway it’s signed Dora Mowbray: D, O—”

“I know. What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Telegram received. Will arrive Brewster 8:48 as requested.’ ”

Fox missed a breath. “Read it again.”

She repeated it.

“What time did it come?”

“Sam wrote it down. At 7:15.”

“Hold the wire.” Fox put the receiver on the shelf, whisked papers from his pocket, found a timetable among them and ran his eye down a column of it, glanced at his wrist watch, picked up the phone and told it, “All right, Mrs. Trimble, good-bye,” and shot from the booth. Grabbing his hat and coat, and narrowly avoiding collisions with two startled waiters, he made for the street. Luckily there had been a space for his car near the entrance, and, running to it, he scrambled in, got it started, and jerked it into the lane.

Though it would take precious minutes to go cross-town, the West Side Highway was his only hope, and he swung into 57th Street and headed for it. Nothing much could be done for that stretch, with a light and a stream of traffic at every avenue; the Wethersill was no better than any old jalopy; instead of fretting about it, he calculated. A part of the timetable column was in his head:

At Eighth Avenue his dashboard clock said 7:55. Then either Bedford Hills or Katonah was out of the question. Golden’s Bridge, barely possible. Purdy’s, possible. Croton Falls, yes, with luck. Brewster itself, of course, but he didn’t like that. He wanted to be on that train, and find her, before it reached Brewster. The person who had got her on that train by sending her a telegram signed Tecumseh Fox had probably concocted a stratagem that would get her off of it this side of Brewster.

Purdy’s, possible.

Ninth Avenue... Tenth... Eleventh... he circled to the ramp, shot up to the highway, and accelerated.

The only problem was cops, and that was a simple one. As every motorist knows, there are two ways to avoid trouble with cops: drive so slow they don’t stop you, or so fast they can’t catch you. The second was no good for the West Side Highway, since a phone call to the toll booths at the Henry Hudson Bridge would have caught him, so Fox gritted his teeth and held it under sixty, weaving smoothly and expertly through the crowd holding to the conventional forty-five.