Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

What I got for my money on phone calls that day was enough to send Tel & Tel to a new low. On incoming calls the score was no better. In addition to the usual routine on a big case, like newspaper boys wanting a ringside seat in case Nero Wolfe was winding up for another fast one, there were all kinds of client trouble on account of the letters Wolfe had sent about finding the cylinders. The ad in the Times may have indicated that the NIA was a united front, but the phone calls didn’t. Each one had a different slant. Winterhoff’s line was that the assumption in the letter that the manner of finding the cylinders vindicated Miss Gunther was unjustified; that on the contrary it reinforced the suspicion that Miss Gunther was lying about it, since the parcel check had been mailed to Don O’Neill in a BPR envelope. Breslow, of course, was angry, so much so that he phoned twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. What had him sore this time was that we had spread the news about the cylinders. In the interests of justice we should have kept it to ourselves and the cops. He accused us of trying to make an impression on the Executive Committee, of trying to show that we were earning our money, and that was a hell of a note; we should have only two things in mind: the apprehension of the criminal and the proof of his guilt.

Even the Erskine family was divided. Frank Thomas Erskine, the father, had no complaint or criticism. He simply wanted something: namely, the full text of what was on the cylinders. He didn’t get indignant but he was utterly astonished. To him the situation was plain. Wolfe was doing a paid job for the NIA, and any information he got in the performance of that job was the property of the NIA, and any attempt to exclude them from possession of their property was felonious, malevolent, and naughty. He insisted as long as he thought there was any chance, and then quit without any indication of hard feelings.

The son, Ed, was the shortest and funniest. All the others had demanded to talk to Wolfe, not just me, but he said it didn’t matter, I would do fine, all he wanted was to ask a question. I said shoot, and he asked this, “How good is the evidence that O’Neill got the parcel check the way he says he did, in the mail?” I said that all we had, besides a look at the envelope, was O’Neill’s say-so, but that of course the police were checking it and he’d better ask them. He said much obliged and hung up.

All day I kept expecting a call from Don O’Neill, but there wasn’t a peep out of him.

The general impression I got was that the Executive Committee had better call a meeting and decide on policy.

The day went, and dusk came, and I turned on lights. Just before dinner I tried Fifty-fifth Street, but no Phoebe Gunther. The meal took even longer than usual, which is to be expected when Wolfe is completely at a loss. He uses up energy keeping thoughts out and trying to keep me quiet, and that makes him eat more. After dinner, back in the office, I tried Fifty-fifth Street once more, with the same result. I was stretched out on the couch, trying to work out an attack that would make Wolfe explode into some kind of action, when the bell rang and I went to the front door and swung it wide open without a preliminary peek through the glass. As far as I was concerned anybody at all would have been welcome, even Breslow, just for a friendly chat.

Two men stepped in. I told them to hang up their things and went to the office door and announced:

“Inspector Cramer and Mr. Solomon Dexter.”

Wolfe sighed and muttered, “Bring them in.”

Solomon Dexter was a blurter. I suppose, as Acting Director of BPR, he had enough to make him blurt, what with this and that, including things like Congress in an election year and the NIA ad in the morning Times , not to mention the unsolved murder of his predecessor, but still Wolfe does not like blurters. So he listened with a frown when, after brief greetings and with no preamble, Dexter blurted:

“I don’t understand it at all! I’ve checked on you with the FBI and the Army, and they give you a clean bill and speak of you very highly! And here you are tied up with the dirtiest bunch of liars and cutthroats in existence! What the hell is the idea?”

“Your nerves are on edge,” Wolfe said.

He blurted some more. “What have my nerves got to do with it? The blackest crime in the history of this country, with that unscrupulous gang behind it, and any man, any man whatever, who ties himself up—”

“Please!” Wolfe snapped. “Don’t shout at me like that. You’re excited. Justifiably excited perhaps, but Mr. Cramer shouldn’t have brought you in here until you had cooled off.” His eyes moved. “What does he want, Mr. Cramer? Does he want something?”

“Yeah,” Cramer growled. “He thinks you fixed that stunt about the cylinders. So it would look as if the BPR had them all the time and tried to plant them on the NIA.”

“Pfui. Do you think so too?”

“I do not. You would have done a better job of it.”

Wolfe’s eyes moved again. “If that’s what you want, Mr. Dexter, to ask me if I arranged some flummery about those cylinders, the answer is I didn’t. Anything else?”

Dexter had taken a handkerchief from his pocket and was mopping his face. I hadn’t noticed any moisture on him, and it was cool out, and we keep the room at seventy, but apparently he felt that there was something to mop. That was probably the lumberjack in him. He dropped his hand to his thigh, clutching the handkerchief, and looked at Wolfe as if he were trying to remember the next line of the script.

“There is no one,” he said, “by the name of Dorothy Unger employed by the BPR, either in New York or Washington.”

“Good heavens.” Wolfe was exasperated. “Of course there isn’t.”

“What do you mean of course there isn’t.”

“I mean it’s obvious there wouldn’t be. Whoever contrived that hocus-pocus about the parcel check, whether Mr. O’Neill himself or someone else, certainly Dorothy Unger had to be invented.”

“You ought to know,” Dexter asserted savagely.

“Nonsense.” Wolfe moved a finger to brush him away. “Mr. Dexter. If you’re going to sit there and boil with suspicion you might as well leave. You accuse me of being ‘tied up’ with miscreants. I am ‘tied up’ with no one. I have engaged to do a specific job, find a murderer and get enough evidence to convict him. If you have any—”

“How far have you got?” Cramer interrupted.

“Well.” Wolfe smirked. He is most intolerable when he smirks. “Further than you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yeah,” Cramer said sarcastically. “Here the other evening, I didn’t quite understand why you didn’t pick him out and let me take him.”

“Neither did I,” Wolfe agreed. “For one moment I thought I might, when one of them said something extraordinary, but I was unable—”

“Who said what?”

Wolfe shook his head. “I’m having it looked into.” His tone implied that the 82nd Airborne was at it from coast to coast. He shifted to one of mild reproach. “You broke it up and chased them out. If you had acted like an adult investigator instead of an ill-tempered child I might have got somewhere.”

“Oh, sure. I bitched it for you. I’d do anything to square it, anything you say. Why don’t you ask me to get them all in here again, right now?”

“An excellent idea.” Wolfe nearly sat up straight, he was so overcome with enthusiasm. “Excellent. I do ask it. Use Mr. Goodwin’s phone.”

“By God!” Cramer stared. “You thought I meant it?”

“ I mean it,” Wolfe asserted. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t desperate. You wouldn’t be desperate if you could think of any more questions to ask anyone. That’s what you came to me for, to get ideas for more questions. Get those people here, and I’ll see what I can do.”