Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

I waved a hand. “That’s how it stands. Five years ago, the time Wolfe did you a little favor when that crook — what was his name? Griffin — tried to frame you on a malpractice suit, and you told Wolfe if he ever wanted anything all he had to do was ask for it, I warned you you might regret it some day. Brother, this is the day.”

Vollmer was rubbing his chin. He didn’t really look reluctant, merely thoughtful. He looked at Wolfe, saying nothing, and then returned to me and spoke:

“Naturally I have an uncontrollable itch to ask a lot of questions. This is absolutely fascinating. I suppose the questions wouldn’t be answered?”

“I’m afraid not. Not by me anyhow, because I don’t know the answers. You might try the patient.”

“How long will the certificate have to function?”

“I have no idea. Damn it, I tell you I’m ignorant.”

“If he’s bad enough to prohibit visitors I’ll have to insist on calling on him at least twice a day. And to make it good there ought to be nurses.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I grant there ought to be, but he would run a fever. Nurses are out. As for you, call as often as you want to. I may get lonely. And make that certificate as strong as they come. Say it would kill him if anybody whose name begins with A even looked at him.”

“It will be so worded as to serve its purpose. I’ll bring it over in ten minutes or so.” Vollmer stood up with his toolbox in his hand. “I did say that time, though, that Wolfe would get anything he asked for.” He looked at Wolfe. “It would be gratifying just to hear you ask me for something. How about it?”

Wolfe groaned. “They come in hordes,” he said distinctly, but in a phony voice. “In chariots with spiked wheels, waving the insolent banners of inflation! Five dollars for a pound of corned beef! Ten dollars for a squab! Sixty cents—”

“I’d better be going,” Vollmer said, and moved.

I didn’t get lonely during the two and a half days — Thursday, Friday, and part of Saturday — that the certificate worked. Newspapermen, cops, FBI’s, NIA’s — they all appreciated that I was holding the fort under trying circumstances and did their best to keep my mind occupied so I wouldn’t fret. If ordinarily I earn twice as much as I get, which is a conservative estimate, during those sixty-some hours it was ten times as much at a minimum.

Throughout the siege Wolfe stayed put in his room, with the door locked and one of the keys in my pocket and one in Fritz’s. Keeping away from the office, dining room, and kitchen for that length of time was of course a hardship, but the real sacrifice, the one that hurt, was giving up his two-a-day trips to the plant rooms. I had to bully him into it, explaining that if a surprise detachment shoved a search warrant at me I might or might not be able to get him back into bed in time, and besides, Theodore slept out, and while he was no traitor he might inadvertently spill it that his afflicted employer did not seem to be goofy among the orchids. For the same reason I refused to let Theodore come down to the bedroom for consultations. I told Wolfe Thursday or Friday, I forget which:

“You’re putting on an act. Okay. Applause. Since it requires you to be out of circulation that leaves it strictly up to me and I make the rules. I am already handicapped enough by not knowing one single goddam thing about what you’re up to. We had a—”

“Nonsense,” he growled. “You know all about it. I have twenty men looking for that cylinder. Nothing can be done without that cylinder. It must be found and it will be. I simply prefer to wait here in my room instead of in jail.”

“Nuts.” I was upset because I had just spent a hot half hour with another NIA delegation down in the office. “Why did you have to break with the NIA before you went to bed to wait? Granting that one of them did it and you know all about it, which everybody is now sure of but you’ll have to show me, that was no reason to return their money in order to keep from having a murderer for a client, because you said yourself that no man was your client, the NIA was. Why in the name of God did you return their dough? And if this cylinder gag is not merely a stall, if it’s really it and all the it there is, as you say, what if it never is found? What are you going to do, stay in bed the rest of your life, with Doc Vollmer renewing the certificate on a monthly basis?”

“It will be found,” he said meekly. “It was not destroyed, it exists, and therefore it will be found.”

I stared at him suspiciously, shrugged, and beat it. When he gets meek it is absolutely no use. I went back to the office and sat and scowled at the Stenophone machine standing over in a corner. My chief reason for admitting that Wolfe really meant what he said about the cylinder was that we were paying a dollar a day rent for that machine.

Not the only reason, however. Bill Gore and twenty Bascom men were actually looking for the cylinder, no question about it. I had been instructed to read the reports before taking them up to Wolfe, and they were quite a chapter in the history of hunting. Bill Gore and another guy were working on all of Phoebe Gunther’s friends and even acquaintances in Washington, and two others were doing likewise in New York. Three were flying all over the country, to places where she knew people, on the theory that she might have mailed the cylinder to one of them, though that seemed like a bum theory if, as Wolfe had said, she had wanted to have it easily accessible on short notice. His figure of a grand a day hadn’t been so far out after all. One had learned that she had gone to a beauty parlor that Friday afternoon in New York, and he had turned it inside out. Three had started working on parcel rooms everywhere, but had discovered that parcel rooms were being worked by the police and the FBI, armed with authority, so they had switched to another field. They were trying to find out or guess all the routes she had taken on foot and were spending their days on the sidewalks, keeping their eyes peeled for something, anything — a window box with dirt in it, for instance — where she might have made a cache. The rest of them were trying this and that. Friday evening, to take my mind off my troubles, I tried to figure out some possible spot that they were missing. I kept at it an hour, with no result. They were certainly covering the territory.

There were unquestionably twenty-one expensive men on the cylinder chase, but what stuck in my craw was Saul Panzer. No matter what you had on the program Saul rated star billing, and he was not among the twenty-one at all. As far as I was allowed to know he was not displaying the slightest interest in any cylinder. Every couple of hours he phoned in, I didn’t know from where, and I obeyed instructions to connect him with Wolfe’s bedside extension and keep off the line. Also he made two personal appearances — one at breakfast time Thursday morning and one late Friday afternoon — and each time he spent a quarter of an hour alone with Wolfe and then departed. By that time I was so damn cylinder-conscious that I was inclined to suspect Saul of being engaged in equipping a factory in a Brooklyn basement so we could roll our own.

As the siege continued, my clashes with Wolfe increased both in frequency and in range. One, Thursday afternoon, concerned Inspector Cramer. Wolfe buzzed me on the house phone and told me he wished to have a telephone conversation with Cramer, so would I please dig him up. I flatly refused. My point was that no matter how bitter Cramer might be, or how intensely he might desire to spray Ash with concentrated DDT, he was still a cop, and was therefore not to be trusted with any evidence, as for instance Wolfe’s voice sounding natural and making sense, that would tend to cast doubt on Doc Vollmer’s certificate. Wolfe finally settled for my getting the dope on Cramer’s whereabouts and availability, and that proved to be easy. Lon Cohen told me he had taken a two weeks’ leave of absence, for sulking, and when I dialed the number of Cramer’s home he answered the phone himself. He kept the conversation brief and to the point, and when I hung up I got Wolfe on the house phone and told him: