Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

“How long were you together?”

“Ten minutes. My estimate would be ten minutes.”

“What time was it?”

“Ten o’clock. We were to meet at ten o’clock and I was on time, but he was late about fifteen minutes because he said he had to make sure he wasn’t being followed. I don’t think an intelligent man should have any trouble about that.”

Wolfe broke in. “Mr. Cramer. Isn’t this a waste of time? You’re going to have to go all over it again downtown, with a stenographer. He seems to be ready to co-operate.”

“He is ready,” O’Neill put in, “to get himself electrocuted and to make all the trouble he can for other people with his damn lies.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you.” Wolfe regarded O’Neill with a glint in his eyes. “He is at least more of a philosopher than you are. Bad as he is, he has the grace to accept the inevitable with a show of decorum. You, on the contrary, try to wiggle. From the glances you have been directing at Mr. Warder, I suspect you have no clear idea of where you’re at. You should be making up with him. You’re going to need him to look after the business while you’re away.”

“I’m seeing this through. I’m not going away.”

“Oh, but you are. You’re going to jail. At least that seems—” Wolfe turned abruptly to the Vice-President. “What about it, Mr. Warder? Are you going to try to discredit this message from the dead? Are you going to repudiate or distort your interview with Mr. Boone and have a jury vote you a liar? Or are you going to show that you have some sense?”

Warder no longer looked scared, and when he spoke he showed no inclination to scream. “I am going,” he said in a firm and virtuous voice, “to tell the truth.”

“Did Mr. Boone tell the truth on that cylinder?”

“Yes. He did.”

Wolfe’s eyes flashed back to O’Neill. “There you are, sir. Bribery is a felony. You’re going to need Mr. Warder. The other matter, complicity in murder as an accessory after the fact — that all depends, mostly on your lawyer. From here on the lawyers take over. — Mr. Cramer. Get them out of here, won’t you? I’m tired of looking at them.” He shifted to me. “Archie, pack up that cylinder. Mr. Cramer will want to take it along.”

Cramer, moving, addressed me: “Hold it, Goodwin, while I use the phone,” so I sat facing the audience, with the automatic in my hand in case someone had an attack of nerves, while he dialed his number and conversed. I was interested to hear that his objective was not the Homicide Squad office, where Ash had been installed, nor even the Chief Inspector, but Hombert himself. Cramer did occasionally show signs of having more brain than a mollusk.

“Commissioner Hombert? Inspector Cramer. Yes, sir. No, I’m calling from Nero Wolfe’s office. No, sir, I’m not trying to horn in, but if you’ll let me... Yes, sir, I’m quite aware it would be a breach of discipline, but if you’d just listen a minute — certainly I’m here with Wolfe, I didn’t break in, and I’ve got the man, I’ve got the evidence, and I’ve got a confession. That’s exactly what I’m telling you, and I’m neither drunk nor crazy. Send — wait a minute, hold it.”

Wolfe was making frantic gestures.

“Tell him,” Wolfe commanded, “to keep that confounded doctor away from here.”

Cramer resumed. “All right, Commissioner. Send up — oh, nothing, just Wolfe raving something about a doctor. Were you sending him a doctor? He don’t need one and in my opinion never will. Send three cars and six men to Wolfe’s address. No, I don’t, but I’m bringing three of them down. You’ll see when I get there. Yes, sir, I’m telling you, the case is finished, all sewed up and no gaps worth mentioning. Sure, I’ll bring them straight to you....”

He hung up.

“You won’t have to put handcuffs on me, will you?” Alger Kates squeaked.

“I want to phone my lawyer,” O’Neill said in a frozen voice.

Warder just sat.

Skipping a thousand or so minor details over the weekend, such as the eminent neurologist Green — no one having bothered to stop him — showing up promptly at a quarter to six, only a few minutes after Cramer had left with his catch, and being informed, in spite of his court order, that the deal was off, I bounce to Monday morning. Wolfe, coming down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock, knew that he would have a visitor, Cramer having phoned for an appointment, and when he entered the office the Inspector was there in the red leather chair. Beside him on the floor was a misshapen object covered with green florist’s paper which he had refused to let me relieve him of. After greetings had been exchanged and Wolfe had got himself comfortable, Cramer said he supposed that Wolfe had seen in the paper that Kates had signed a full and detailed confession to both murders.

Wolfe nodded. “A foolish and inadequate man, that Mr. Kates. But not intellectually to be despised. One item of his performance might even be called brilliant.”

“Sure. I would say more than one. Do you mean his leaving that scarf in his own pocket instead of slipping it into somebody else’s?”

“Yes, sir. That was noteworthy.”

“He’s noteworthy all right,” Cramer agreed. “In fact he’s in a class by himself. There was one thing he wouldn’t talk about or sign any statement about, and what do you suppose it was, something that would help put him in the chair? Nope. We couldn’t get anything out of him about what he wanted the money for, and when we asked if it was his wife, trips to Florida and so forth, he stuck his chin out and said as if we was worms, ‘We’ll leave my wife out of this, you will not mention my wife again.’ She got here yesterday afternoon and he won’t see her. I think he thinks she’s too holy to be dragged in.”

“Indeed.”

“Indeed yes. But on the part that will do for him he was perfectly willing to oblige. For instance, with Boone there at the hotel. He entered the room and handed Boone some papers, and Boone threw it at him, what he had found out, and then told him to beat it and turned his back on him, and Kates picked up the monkey wrench and gave it to him. Kates tells us exactly what Boone said and what he said, and then carefully reads it over to be sure we got it down right. The same way with Phoebe Gunther here on your stoop. He wants the story straight. He wants it distinctly understood that he didn’t arrange to meet her and come here with her, when she phoned him, he merely waited in an areaway across the street until he saw her coming and then joined her and mounted the stoop with her. The pipe was up his sleeve with the scarf already wrapped around it. Three days before that, the first time they were here, when he swiped the scarf out of Winterhoff’s pocket, he didn’t know then what he would be using it for, he only thought there might be some way of planting it somewhere to involve Winterhoff — an NIA man.”

“Naturally.” Wolfe was contributing to the conversation just to be polite. “Anything to keep eyes away from him. Wasted effort, since my eye was already on him.”

“It was?” Cramer sounded skeptical. “What put it there?”

“Mostly two things. First, of course, that command Mr. O’Neill gave him here Friday evening, indubitably a command to one from whom he had reason to expect obedience. Second, and much more important, the wedding picture mailed to Mrs. Boone. Granted that there are men capable of that gesture, assuredly none of the five NIA men whom I had met had it in them. Miss Harding was obviously too cold-blooded to indulge in any such act of grace. Mr. Dexter’s alibi had been tested and stood. Mrs. Boone and her niece were manifestly not too suspected, not by me. There remained only Miss Gunther and Mr. Kates. Miss Gunther might conceivably have killed Mr. Boone, but not herself with a piece of pipe; and she was the only one of them who could without painful strain on probability be considered responsible for the return of the wedding picture. Then where did she get it? From the murderer. By name, from whom? As a logical and workable conjecture, Mr. Kates.”