Рекс Стаут - Please Pass the Guilt

“Naturally Mrs. Odell has told you.”

“She told me that you showed her the LSD. I don’t suppose it was flour or sugar, supplied by you. Why would you? Was it?”

“No.” Cramer drank, emptied the glass, put it down on the table, picked up the bottle, and poured. He picked up the cigar, put it in his mouth, and took it out again. He looked at Wolfe, whose head was tilted back to drink, and waited for Wolfe’s eyes to meet his.

“Why I came,” he said. “Not to ask for help, but I thought it was possible that an exchange might help both of us. We have collected a lot of facts, thousands of facts, some established and some not. Mrs. Odell has certainly told you things that she hasn’t told us, and maybe some of the others have too. We might trade. Of course it would hurt. You would be crossing your client, and I would be giving you official information that is supposed to be withheld. You don’t want to and neither do I. But I’m making a straight offer on the square. I haven’t asked you if this is being recorded.”

“It isn’t.”

“Good.” He picked up his glass. “That’s why I came.”

Wolfe swiveled, not his chair, his head, to look at me. The look said, as plain as words, “I hope you’re appreciating this,” and my look said, “I am.” He turned back to Cramer and said, just stating a fact, “It won’t do, Mr. Cramer.”

“It won’t?”

“No. There is mutual respect between you and me, but not mutual trust. If I gave you every word spoken to me by Mrs. Odell, and by the others, you would think it possible, even probable, that I omitted something. You say you have thousands of facts. If you gave me ten thousand, I would think it likely that you had reserved at least one. You know as well as I do that in the long record of man’s make-believe, there is no sillier formula than the old legal phrase, ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Pfui.”

“So you would omit something.”

“Perhaps. I could add that if I did give you every word, you would know nothing helpful that you don’t know now, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t.” He looked at the glass in his hand and squinted at it as if he wondered how it got there. “Thanks for the beer.” He put the glass, not empty, on the table, saw the cigar, and picked it up. I expected him to throw it at my wastebasket and miss as usual, but he stuck it in the beer glass, the chewed end down. He stood up. “I had a question, I had one question, but I’m not going to ask it. By God, you had the nerve — those men — with me sitting here—” He turned and walked out.

I didn’t go to see him out, but when I heard the front door open and close, I went to the hall to see that he was out. Back in, I went to the safe to enter the outlay in the petty cash book. I don’t like to leave things hanging. As I headed for my desk, Wolfe said, “I thought I knew that man. Why did he come?”

“He said he’s desperate.”

“But he isn’t. So healthy an ego isn’t capable of despair.”

I sat. “He wanted to look at you. Of course he knew you wouldn’t play along on his cockeyed offer. He thinks he can tell when you’ve got a good hand, and maybe he can.”

“Do you think he can? Can you?”

“I’d better not answer that, not right now. We’ve got a job on. Am I to just sit here and take calls from the help?”

“No. You are to seduce either Miss Lugos or Miss Venner. Which one?”

I raised one brow. He can’t do that. “Why not both?”

We discussed it.

When I had a chance, after lunch, I looked up “seduced” in the dictionary. “1. To persuade (one) as into disobedience, disloyalty, or desertion of a lord or cause. 2. To lead or draw (one) aside or astray, as into an evil, foolish, or disastrous course or action from that which is good, wise, etc; as to be seduced into war; to seduce one from his duty; to tempt or entice; as, pleasures that seduced her from home. 3. To induce to evil; to corrupt, specif., to induce to surrender chastity; to debauch.”

Even on the 3 I couldn’t charge him at some appropriate moment with having asked me to go too far, since we had no evidence that either of them had any chastity to surrender.

The best spot in the metropolitan area at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in June is an upper box at Shea Stadium, but I wasn’t there that Saturday. I was sitting in the cockpit of a thirty-foot boat, removing a flounder the size of my open hand from the hook at the end of Sylvia Venner’s line. The object I enjoy most removing from a hook is a sixteen-inch rainbow or Dolly Varden or cutthroat, but there aren’t any in Long Island Sound. We had spent a couple of hours trying for stripers or blues without a bite and had settled for salmon eggs on little hooks. The name of the boat was Happygolucky . I had borrowed it from a man named Sopko, who had once paid Wolfe $7,372.40, including expenses, for getting his son out of a deep hole he had stumbled into.

It was from Sylvia Venner herself, on the telephone Wednesday afternoon, that I had learned that she didn’t care for baseball, didn’t like dancing, had seen all the shows in town, and wouldn’t enjoy dining at Rusterman’s because she was on a diet. The idea of a boat had come from her. She said that she loved catching fish, all except actually touching one, but the soonest she could make it was Saturday.

In fifty-six hours Saul and Fred and Orrie had produced nothing that would need help from me during the weekend. Friday evening I assembled the score for the two and a half days on a page of my notebook and got this:

Number of CAN employees who thought or guessed or hinted

— that Odell was putting the bomb in the drawer to get Browning  4

— that Browning planted the bomb to get Odell and somehow got

 Odell to go and open the drawer                1

— that Dennis Copes planted it to get Kenneth Meer        2

— that no one had planted it; the bomb was a left-over from the

 research for the program and was supposed to be de-activated   2

— that Sylvia Venner had planted it to get Browning        1

— that Helen Lugos had planted it to get Kenneth Meer      2

— that Kenneth Meer had planted it to get Helen Lugos      1

— that some kind of activist had planted it to get just anybody   3

— that it would never be known who had planted it for whom   8

If you skipped that I don’t blame you; I include it only because I didn’t want to waste the time I spent compiling it. It adds up to twenty-four, and they spoke with a total of about a hundred people, so some seventy or eighty were keeping their thinking or guessing or hinting to themselves. Wolfe and I agreed, Friday evening, to ignore the favorite guess. The idea that Odell had himself supplied the bomb was out. His wife would have known about it, and she would not have given Wolfe a hundred grand to start digging. Also why the LSD in his pocket? Because he was on the stuff and had it with him in case his nerves needed a boost? Cramer and the DA had certainly included that in their tries and had chucked it. So no. Out. One of the four who liked it was Dennis Copes, but that didn’t prove anything. Saul’s description of Copes was “5 feet 9, 160 pounds, brown hair down to his collar, sideburns that needed trimming, showy shirt and tie, neat plain gray Hickey-Freeman suit, soft low-pitched voice, nervous hands.” He had chatted with him twice and learned nothing useful. Of course he hadn’t asked if he knew or thought he knew that Kenneth Meer had the habit of checking on the whisky in the drawer, and though he is as good as Wolfe at the trick of getting an answer to an unasked question, it hadn’t worked with Copes.