Рекс Стаут - Please Pass the Guilt

“But you’re there. What if he wants you more than anything else? This is my business, Miss Lugos. The police think it’s theirs, too, you just said so. It’s not absurd to think a man’s desire for a woman can be so hot that no other desire counts. There have been cases.”

“Kenneth Meer isn’t one of them. You don’t know him, but I do. How much longer is this going to take?”

“I don’t know. It depends. Not as long as it would with Mr. Wolfe. He likes to ask questions that seem to be just to pass the time, but I try to stick to the point. For instance, when Mr. Wolfe asked you that evening if you thought the person who put the bomb in the drawer was here in the room, you said you had no idea, but naturally you would say that, with them here. What would you say now, not for quotation?”

“I would say exactly the same, I have no idea. Mr. Goodwin, I... I’m tired. I’d like some — some whisky?”

“Sure. Scotch, bourbon, rye, Irish. Water, soda, ice.”

“Just whisky. Any kind — bourbon. It doesn’t matter.”

She wasn’t tired. The fingers of both hands, in her lap, had been curling and uncurling. She was tight. I mean tense, taut. As I went to the kitchen and put a bottle of bourbon — not Ten-Mile Creek — and a glass and a pitcher of water on a tray, I was trying to decide if it was just the strain of discussing her personal affairs with a mere agent, or something even touchier. I still hadn’t decided when I had put the tray on the little table by her chair and was back at my desk. She poured about two fingers, downed it with three swallows, made a face and swallowed nothing a couple of times, poured half a glass of water, and swallowed that.

“I told you—” she began, didn’t like how it sounded or felt, and started over. “I told you I don’t drink much.”

I nodded. “I can bring some milk, but it’s an antidote for whisky.”

“No, thank you.” She swallowed nothing again.

“Okay. You said you have no idea who put the bomb in the drawer.”

“Yes, I haven’t.”

I got my notebook and pen. “For this, since this room is not bugged, I’ll have to make notes. I have to know where you were every minute of that day, that Tuesday, May 20. It was four weeks ago, four weeks tomorrow, but it shouldn’t strain your memory, since the police of course asked you that day or the day after. Anyone going to Browning’s room went through your room, so we’ll have to do the whole day, from the time you arrived. Around ten o’clock?”

“There was another door to his room.”

“But not often used except by him?”

“Not often, but sometimes it was. I’m not going to do this. I don’t think you have a right to expect me to.”

“I have no right to expect anything. But Mr. Wolfe can’t do the job Mrs. Odell hired him to do unless he can get answers to the essential questions, and this is certainly one of them. One reason I say that is that Kenneth Meer told a newspaperman that anyone who wanted to know how it happened should concentrate on Helen Lugos. Why did Meer say that?”

“I don’t believe it.” She was staring at me, which made her face different again. “I don’t believe he said that.”

“But he did. It’s a fact, Miss Lugos.”

“To a newspaperman?”

“Yes. I won’t tell you his name, but if I have to, I can produce him and he can tell you. He wasn’t a stranger to Meer. They were choir boys together at St. Andrew’s. When he tried to get Meer to go on, Meer clammed. I’m not assuming that when you tell me how and where you spent that day, I’ll know why Meer said that, since you’ll tell me exactly what you told the police and evidently it didn’t help them any, but I must have it because that’s how a detective is supposed to detect. You got to work at ten o’clock?”

She said no, nine-thirty.

Even with my personal and private shorthand it filled more than four pages of my notebook. The timing was perfect. It was exactly 7:30 when we had her in the file room and the sound and shake of the explosion came, and Fritz stepped in to reach for the doorknob. So it was time to eat. If I am in the office with company, and Wolfe isn’t, when dinner’s ready, Fritz comes and shuts the office door. That notifies me that food is ready to serve, and also it keeps the sound of voices from annoying Wolfe in the dining room across the hall, if I have to continue the conversation.

That time I didn’t have to, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to consider a couple of the things she had said without her sitting there with her face, and I wanted my share of the ducklings with mushrooms and wild rice and wine while it was hot from the oven. It’s one of the dishes Wolfe and Fritz have made up together, and they call it American duckling on account of the wild rice, and I’m for it.

So I said she was tired, and she said yes, she was, and got up, and I thanked her, and thanked her again as I opened the front door to let her out.

Of course I didn’t mention her as I joined Wolfe at the dining table. He had one of the ducklings carved, so that would have been talking business during a meal, which is not done. But when we had finished and moved to the office and Fritz had brought coffee, he showed that the week of marking time was getting on his nerves by demanding, “Well?” before I had lifted my cup.

“No,” I said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing for me. For you, I can’t say. I never can. You want it verbatim, of course.”

“Yes.”

I gave it to him, complete, up to the details of her day on Tuesday, May 20. For that I used the notebook. As usual, he just listened; no interruptions, no questions. He is the best listener I know. When I finished, the coffee pot and our cups were empty and Fritz had come for them.

I put the notebook in the drawer. “So for me, nothing. Of course she didn’t open the bag and shake it, who does? She knows or suspects something that may or may not be true and might or might not help, and to guess what it is needs a better guesser than me. I don’t think she planted the bomb. She wasn’t there at her desk in the next room when it went off, which was lucky for her, but she says she often went to the file room for something, nearly always when Browning wasn’t in his room. Of course the cops have checked that. Also of course it was a waste of time to have her name the seventeen people she saw go into Browning’s room. The bomb wasn’t put in the drawer while Browning was there unless he did it himself, and there’s another door to his room. As for who entered his room when he wasn’t there, there was a total of nearly two hours when she wasn’t there, according to her. As for her reason that Kenneth Meer wouldn’t want to kill Browning, toss a coin. You’d have to use a lie detector on Meer himself.”

He grunted. “Miss Venner, and now Miss Lugos.”

“Meaning I should have seduced at least one of them. Fire me.”

“Pfui. I complain of your conduct only directly, never by innuendo. You offend only deliberately, never by shortcoming. Miss Lugos did not plant the bomb?”

“One will get you ten.”

“Does she know who did?”

“No bet. She could think she knows. Or not.”

“Confound it.” He got up and went to the shelves for a book.

Six days later, at noon Sunday, June 22, the five of us sat in the office and looked at each other. Saul and Fred and Orrie and I looked at Wolfe, and he looked back, his eyes moving, not his head, from me past Orrie and Fred to Saul in the red leather chair.

“No,” he said. “This is preposterous. Amphigoric. And insupportable.” He looked at me. “How much altogether, including you?”

I shut my eyes and in less than half a minute opened them. “Say three thousand dollars. A little more.”