Rex Stout: The Broken Vase

Were they?...

No, not that Diego knew of. The dark and tempestuous Garda, as Fox had himself had opportunity to observe, exhibited in her face and figure and movements the authentic ingredients of a seductress, but if she was using them to that end she was being extremely discreet about it. She was in fact somewhat of a mystery. She was supposed to be working at some vague sort of job connected with the fashion world, but if her salary paid for the clothes she wore and the apartment she maintained and her car and chauffeur, it must be a super-job.

She had been fond of her brother, Fox said.

Undoubtedly, Diego agreed; but recently there had been a coolness. Only yesterday Jan had told him that Garda was so angry with him that she was not coming to the Carnegie Hall recital, but he had not said what she was angry about. Diego added remorsefully that for the past few months he had not maintained his former close relations with Jan, and that had been wrong because it had been his, Diego’s, fault; he had been envious. In his remorse, and after six or seven drinks, he admitted it. Jan had been preparing for the most important event of his career; it would assuredly be a glorious triumph; and it was a little more than Diego could bear. He had neglected his young friend at the moment of his greatest need, and he would never forgive himself. Now he would do what he could to atone for it. He would avenge the contemptible treachery that had plunged Jan into a false but fatal despair and caused him to take his life. He would, with his friend Fox’s help, discover who it was that had substituted a cracker box with a handle for Jan’s violin and had taken it away after it had fulfilled its base purpose. He would...

Ten minutes later he was saying that if any substitution had been made, Jan couldn’t possibly have failed to know it.

Fox smiled at him. “You can’t have it both ways, Diego. A little while ago you said—”

“What if I did?” Diego met the smile with sour gloom. “Anyway, I was right. It’s all well enough to say Jan couldn’t have been fooled about that violin, but he was. And I’m going to find out who did it. I’m drunk now, but I won’t be tomorrow, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“Well, good luck.” Fox looked at his watch. “I’m sorry I can’t be here to help, but I’m catching a sleeper to Louisville. Two days should be all I need there, so I’ll probably be giving you a ring Thursday morning to ask how you’re making out.”

But at Louisville a problem regarding a sudden and unaccountable epidemic of stomach-aches in a stable of racehorses, among them a Derby entry, took a day longer than Fox had expected, so it was Friday instead of Thursday when he returned to New York, at two in the afternoon instead of eight in the morning, and at LaGuardia Airport instead of the Pennsylvania Station. He did not, however, need to phone Diego Zorilla to learn how he was making out with his project of atonement and vengeance, because he had talked with him over long distance Thursday evening and already knew. Furthermore, he had received information and a request which now resulted in his eating a hasty lunch in the airport lunchroom, taking a subway to Manhattan, and a taxi to an address on Park Avenue.

His fatigue after three strenuous days and nights, his pockets bulging with packages — gifts for the Trimbles and others at the Zoo, as his home in the country was popularly called — and the battered suitcase he was carrying, should naturally, he thought, have caused some degree of aloofness on the part of the impeccable butler who admitted him to a spacious reception hall after an elevator had lifted him to the twentieth floor. But the butler seemed utterly unimpressed, and Fox surmised that the household staff of Irene Dunham Pomfret was hardened to apparitions from other worlds. The butler was standing by courteously while a second man in uniform, also courteously, was disposing of Fox’s bag and outdoor coverings, when a woman appeared from within through a vaulted archway and approached, talking as she came.

“How do you do? I don’t have any maids. I don’t like them. I have only men. I had maids once, and they were always sick. You’re Fox? Tecumseh Fox? I’ve heard a great deal about you from Diego. You were very sweet to him at the time of his misfortune. Let’s go in here...”

Fox was valiantly concealing a series of shocks. The large and richly furnished reception hall had furnished one. He happened to know something about Chinese vases, through their involvement in a case he had worked on, and two rare and beautiful specimens were displayed there on a table; and on the wall back of them was an ordinary colored print of Greuze’s “The Broken Pitcher”! He did not know, of course, that that had been the favorite picture of James Garfield Dunham, Mrs. Pomfret’s rather sentimental first husband, nor that Mrs. Pomfret was capable of complete disregard of canons of convention and taste when her personal feelings were involved — though after one look at her the latter would have been an easy surmise.

Her appearance was the second shock. It displayed none of the bloodless and brittle insolence her reputation as a female Maecenas had led him to expect. Her figure was generous, her eyes shrewd and merry, her mouth with full lips well-disposed and satisfied with life, and her surprisingly youthful skin — considering, in view of her son Perry, that she must have been at least halfway between forty and fifty — was a flesh covering that Rubens would have enjoyed looking at. Fox himself did.

The vast chamber into which she conducted him, in which two concert grands were merely minor incidents, was overpowering but not irritating. She stopped at the edge of a priceless Zendjan rug and called in a voice that succeeded in blending tender affection with a note of command which invited instant response:

“Henry!”

A man got out of a chair and approached.

“My husband,” said Mrs. Pomfret; and Fox was amazed that a woman could say that as she might have said “My airedale” or “My favorite symphony” without offending his masculine pride. She was proceeding: “This is Tecumseh Fox. I know one thing, if I were your wife and you went around with a stubble like that—”

Fox, bewildered, released Henry Pomfret’s hand and foolishly tried to defend himself. “I had to jump and run to catch a plane and didn’t have time to shave, and besides, I don’t like to shave, and I haven’t any wife.” He glanced around, and as far as he could see there was no one else there except a girl and a young man seated on a divan. “I understood — Diego told me on the phone that you had invited everyone here who—”

“I did, but Adolph Koch sent word that he couldn’t come until four o’clock, and you were on an airplane and Diego couldn’t notify you — nor could my secretary reach Dora or Mr. Gill to let them know — do you know them? I suppose not.”

She led the way to the divan, and the two there stood up. As Mrs. Pomfret pronounced names, Fox saw Dora’s hand start up and then hesitate, and he reached for it, and found that it was shy but firm. Her cheeks were flatter than he remembered them, but, reflecting that she had just been through a severe flattening process, he was willing to concede Diego’s remark about loveliness. He shook hands with Ted Gill, who had the absent and faintly resentful air of a man who had been interrupted in an agreeable and important task.

“He looks,” said Mrs. Pomfret, “like a Norwegian tenor I met in Geneva in 1926 who sang with his Adam’s apple.”

“Not me,” Henry Pomfret laughed. “I probably look to her like a crocodile she met in Egypt in 1928. That was for you, Gill.”

“A cross-eyed baby crocodile,” his wife retorted with fond malice. “And that Norwegian tenor, his name was — yes, Wells, what is it?”