Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

“Now the question that confronts us is whether it is credible, under the circumstances as we know them...”

Thirty minutes past midnight was about the peak. At that moment I was alone in my room, two flights up, sitting in the chair by the window, drinking a glass of milk, or at least holding one in my hand. I do not ordinarily hunt for a cave in the middle of the biggest excitement and the most intense action, but this seemed to hit me in a new spot or something, and anyhow there I was, trying to arrange my mind. Or maybe my feelings. All I knew was that something inside of me needed a little arranging. I had just completed a tour of the battlefield, and at that hour the disposition of forces was as follows:

Fritz was in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee, and Mrs. Boone was there helping him.

Seven of the invited guests were scattered around the front room, with two homicide dicks keeping them company. They were not telling funny stories, not even Ed Erskine and Nine Boone, who were on the same sofa.

Lieutenant Rowcliffe and an underling with a notebook were in the spare bedroom, on the same floor as mine, having a conversation with Hattie Harding, the Public Relations Queen.

Inspector Cramer, Sergeant Stebbins, and a couple of others were in the dining room firing questions at Alger Kates.

The four-star brass was in the office. Wolfe was seated beside his desk, the Police Commissioner was likewise at my desk, the District Attorney was in the red leather chair, and Travis and Spero of the FBI made a circle of it. That was where the high strategy would come from, if and when any came.

Another dick was in the kitchen, presumably to see that Mrs. Boone didn’t jump out a window and Fritz didn’t dust arsenic on the sandwiches. Others were in the halls, in the basement, all over; and still others kept coming and going from outdoors, reporting to, or getting orders from, Cramer or the Commissioner or the District Attorney.

Newspapermen had at one time infiltrated behind the lines, but they were now on the other side of the threshold. Out there the floodlights hadn’t been removed, and some miscellaneous city employees were still poking around, but most of the scientists, including the photographers, had departed. In spite of that the crowd, as I could see from the window near which my chair was placed, was bigger than ever. The house was only a five-minute taxi ride or a fifteen-minute walk from Times Square, and the news of a spectacular break in the Boone case had got to the theater crowds. The little party Wolfe had asked Cramer to arrange had developed into more than he had bargained for.

A piece of 1 ½-inch iron pipe, sixteen inches long, had been found lying on the concrete paving of the areaway. Phoebe Gunther had been hit on the head with it four times. Dr. Vollmer had certified her dead on arrival. She had also received bruises in falling, one on her cheek and mouth, presumably from the stoop, where she had been struck, to the areaway. The scientists had got that far before they removed the body.

I had been sitting in my room twenty minutes when I noticed that I hadn’t drunk any milk, but I hadn’t spilled any from the glass.

My intention was to go back downstairs and re-enter the turmoil when the microscope came. It was expected by some that the microscope would do the job, and it seemed to me quite likely.

I had myself been rinsed out, by Wolfe and Cramer working as a team, which alone made the case unique. But the circumstances made me a key man. The working assumption was that Phoebe had come and mounted the stoop, and that the murderer had either come with her, or joined her near or on the stoop, and had struck her before she had pushed the bell button, stunning her and knocking her off the stoop into the areaway. He had then run down into the areaway and hit her three times more to make sure she was finished, and shoved the body up against the gate, where it could not be seen by anyone on the stoop without leaning over and stretching your neck, and wasn’t likely to be seen from the sidewalk on account of the dimness of the light. Then, of course, the murderer might have gone home and to bed, but the assumption was that he had remounted the stoop and pushed the button, and I had let him in and taken his hat and coat.

That put me within ten feet of them, and maybe less, at the moment it happened, and if by chance I had pulled the curtain on the glass panel aside at that moment I would have seen it. It also had me greeting the murderer within a few seconds after he had finished, and, as I admitted to Wolfe and Cramer, I had observed each arriving face with both eyes to discover how they were getting along under the strain. That was another reason I had gone up to my room, to look back on those faces. It didn’t seem possible that I couldn’t pick the one, or at least the two or three most probable ones, whose owner had just a minute previously been smashing Phoebe’s skull with an iron pipe. Well, I couldn’t. They had all been the opposite of carefree, showing it one way or another, and so what? Wolfe had sighed at me, and Cramer had growled like a frustrated lion, but that was the best I could do.

Naturally I had been asked to make up a list showing the order of arrivals and the approximate intervals between, and had been glad to oblige. I hadn’t punched a time clock for them, but I was willing to certify my list as pretty accurate. They had all come singly. The idea was that if any two of them had arrived close together, say within two minutes or less of each other, the one that entered the house first could be marked as improbable. But not the one that came in second, because the murderer, having finished, and hearing footsteps or a taxi approaching, could have flattened himself against the gate in that dark corner, waited until the arriver had mounted the stoop and been admitted, and then immediately ascended the stoop himself to ring the bell. Anyhow, such close calculation wasn’t required, since, as my memory had it, none of the intervals had been less than three minutes.

Of course the position on the list meant nothing. As far as opportunity was concerned, there was no difference between Hattie Harding, who came first, and Nina Boone, who came last.

All the guests had been questioned at least once, each separately, and it was probable that repeat performances would go on all night if the microscope didn’t live up to expectations. Since they had all already been put through it, over and over, about the Boone murder, the askers had hard going. The questions had to be about what had happened there that evening, and what was there to ask? There was no such thing as an alibi. Each one had been on the stoop alone between nine-fifty and ten-forty, and during that period Phoebe Gunther had arrived and had been killed. About all you could ask anybody was this, “Did you ring the bell as soon as you mounted the stoop? Did you kill Phoebe Gunther first?” If he said Phoebe Gunther wasn’t there, and he pushed the button and was admitted by Mr. Goodwin, what did you ask next? Naturally you wanted to know whether he came by car or taxi, or on foot from a bus or subway, and where did that get you?

Very neat management, I told myself, sitting by the window in my room. Fully as neat as any I remembered. Very neat, the dirty deadly bastard.

I have said that the assumption was that the murderer had remounted the stoop and entered the house, but perhaps I should have said one of the assumptions. The NIA had another one, originated by Winterhoff, which had been made a part of the record. In the questioning marathon Winterhoff had come toward the end. His story had three main ingredients:

1. He (Winterhoff, the Man of Distinction) always had shoe soles made of a composition which was almost as quiet as rubber, and therefore made little noise when he walked.