Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

She had been making steady progress with the shrimps, which had now cooled off enough to permit it. “No,” she admitted, “but you’d better ask her. All I can tell you is about me.”

“Sure. You’re virtuous and noble. It shows in your chin. The herald angels sing. A in deportment.”

“What do you want?” she demanded. “Do you want me to tell you that I saw my aunt sneaking into a corner with Winterhoff or with any of those apes and whispering to him? Well, I didn’t. And if I had—” She stopped.

“If you had would you tell me?”

“No. In spite of the fact that in my opinion my aunt is a pain in the neck.”

“You don’t like her?”

“No. I don’t like her and I disapprove of her and I regard her as a grotesque relic. That’s spread all over my past, but it’s strictly personal.”

“You don’t go so far as to accept Breslow’s suggestion that Mrs. Boone killed her husband on account of jealousy of Phoebe Gunther, and later, at Wolfe’s house, finished up?”

“No, does anybody?”

“I couldn’t say.” Having disposed of the last shrimp, I started on the salad. “I don’t. But it does seem to be a sound idea that Mrs. Boone was jealous of Phoebe Gunther.”

“Certainly she was. There are several thousand girls and women working for the BPR, and she was jealous of all of them.”

“Yeah. Chiefly on account of her nose, of course. But Phoebe Gunther wasn’t just one of thousands. Wasn’t she special?”

“She was indeed.” Nina flashed me a quick glance which I failed to interpret. “She was extremely special.”

“Was she going to do anything as trite as having a baby?”

“Oh, good lord.” Nina pulled her salad over. “You pick up all the crumbs, don’t you?”

“Was she?”

“No. And my aunt had just as little reason to be jealous of her as of anybody else. Her idea that my uncle had wolf in him was simply silly.”

“How well did you know Miss Gunther?”

“I knew her pretty well. Not intimately.”

“Did you like her?”

“I... yes, I guess I liked her. I certainly admired her. Of course I envied her. I would have liked to have her job, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could fill it. I’m too young for one thing, but that’s only part of it, she wasn’t such a lot older than me. She did field work for a year or so and made the best record in the whole organization, and then she was brought to the main office and before long she was on the inside of everything. Usually when an organization like that gets a new Director he does a great deal of shifting around, but when my uncle was appointed there wasn’t any shifting of Phoebe except that she got a raise in pay. If she had been ten years older and a man she would have been made Director when my uncle — died.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Did you know her before you went to work for the BPR?”

“No, but I met her the first day I went there, because my uncle asked her to keep an eye on me.”

“Did she do so?”

“In a way she did, yes, as much as she had time for. She was very important and very busy. She had BPR fever.”

“Yeah?” I stopped a forkload of salad on its way to my mouth. “Bad?”

“One of the most severe cases on record.”

“What were the main symptoms?”

“It varies with character and temperament. In its simplest form, a firm belief that whatever the BPR does is right. There are all kinds of complications, from bitter and undying hatred of the NIA to a messianic yen to educate the young, depending on whether you are primarily a do-gooder or a fighter.”

“Have you got it?”

“Certainly I have, but not in its acute form. With me it was mostly a personal matter. I was very fond of my uncle.” Her chin threatened to get out of control for a moment, and she paused to attend to that and then explained, “I never had a father, to know him, and I loved Uncle Cheney. I don’t really know an awful lot about it, but I loved my uncle.”

“Which complications did Phoebe have?”

“All of them.” The chin was all right again. “But she was a born fighter. I don’t know how much the enemies of the BPR, for instance the heads of the NIA, really knew about the insides of it, but if their intelligence was any good they must have known about Phoebe. She was actually more dangerous to them than my uncle was. I’ve heard my uncle say that. A political shake-up might have got him out, but as long as she was there it wouldn’t have mattered much.”

“That’s a big help,” I grumbled, “I don’t think. It gives precisely the same motive, to the same people, for her as for him. If you call that a new angle...”

“I don’t call it anything. You asked me.”

“So I did. How about dessert?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’d better. You’re going to have to help me out with your aunt maybe all afternoon, and that will take extra energy since you don’t like her. A good number here is walnut pudding with cinnamon.”

She conceded that it was a good idea and I passed it on to the waiter. While our table was being cleared and we were waiting for the pudding and coffee, we continued on the subject of Phoebe Gunther, with no revelations coming out of it, startling or otherwise. I introduced the detail of the missing tenth cylinder, and Nina snorted at the suggestion that Phoebe might have had concealed relations with some NIA individual and had ditched the cylinder because it implicated him or might have. I gave her that and asked how about the possibility that the cylinder implicated Solomon Dexter or Alger Kates. What was wrong with that?

With her spoon in her hand ready to start on the pudding, she shook her head positively. She said it was loony. To suppose that Dexter would have done anything to hurt Boone, thereby hurting the BPR also, was absurd. “Besides, he was in Washington. He didn’t get to New York until late that night, when he was sent for. As for Mr. Kates, good heavens, look at him! He’s just an adding machine!”

“He is in a pig’s eye. He’s sinister.”

She gasped. “Alger Kates sinister?”

“Anyhow, mysterious. Down at Wolfe’s house that evening Erskine accused him of killing your uncle because he wanted to marry you and your uncle opposed it, and Kates let it stand that he did want to marry you, along with two hundred other lovesick BPR’s, and then later that same evening I learn that he already has a wife who is at present in Florida. A married adding machine does not covet another lovely maiden.”

“Puh. He was merely being gallant or polite.”

“An adding machine is not gallant. Another thing, where does the dough come from to send his wife to Florida at the present rates and keep her there until the end of March?”

“Really.” Nina stopped eating pudding. “No matter what Nero Wolfe charges the NIA, you’re certainly trying your best to earn it! You’d just love to clear them completely — and it looks as if you don’t care how you do it! Perhaps Mrs. Kates won some money at a church bingo. You ought to check on that!”

I grinned at her. “When your face is flushed like that it makes me feel like refusing to take any part of my salary in NIA money. Some day I’ll tell you how wrong you are to suspect us of wanting to frame one of your heroes like Dexter or Kates.” I glanced at my wrist. “You just have time to finish your cigarette and coffee. — What is it, Carlos?”

“Telephone, Mr. Goodwin. The middle booth.”

I had a notion to tell him to say I had gone, because I had a natural suspicion that it was the creature I had bribed with three nickels merely wanting to know how much longer we were going to be in there, but I thought better of it and excused myself, since there was one other person who knew where I was.