Рекс Стаут - The Silent Speaker

Neither hotel employees nor anyone else had heard any noise from the murder room, or seen anybody enter or leave it other than those whose presence there was known and acknowledged.

No one was eliminated on account of age, size, or sex. While a young male athlete can swing a monkey wrench harder and faster than an old female bridge player, either could have struck the blows that killed Boone. There had been no sign of a struggle. Any one of the blows, from behind, could have stunned him or killed him. G. G. Spero of the FBI joined in the discussion of this point, and replied to a crack from Erskine by stating that it was not a function of the FBI to investigate local murders, but that since Boone had been killed while performing his duty as a government official, the Department of Justice had a legitimate interest in the matter and was acting on a request for co-operation from the New York police.

One interesting development was that it was hard to see how Boone had got killed unless he did it himself, because everybody had alibis. Meaning by everybody not merely those present in Wolfe’s office — there being no special reason to suppose that the murderer was there with us — but all fourteen or fifteen hundred at the dinner. The time involved was about half an hour, between seven-fifteen, when Phoebe Gunther left the baby carriage and its contents, including the monkey wrenches, with Boone in the room, and around seven forty-five, when Alger Kates discovered the body. The police had gone to town on that, and everybody had been with somebody else, especially those in the reception room. But the hitch was that all the alibis were either mutual NIA’s or mutual BPR’s. Strange to say, no NIA could alibi a BPR, or vice versa. Even Mrs. Boone, the widow, for instance — no NIA was quite positive that she had not left the reception room during that period or that she had gone straight from there to the dais in the ballroom. The BPR’s were equally unpositive about Frank Thomas Erskine, the NIA president.

There was no evidence that the purpose had been to keep Boone from delivering that particular speech. The speech had been typical Boone, pulling no punches, but had exposed or threatened no particular individual, neither in the advance text distributed to the press nor in the last-minute changes and additions. Nothing in it pointed to a murderer.

The first brand-new ingredient for me, of which nothing had been reported in the papers, was introduced by accident by Mrs. Boone. The only person invited to our party who hadn’t come was Phoebe Gunther, Boone’s confidential secretary. Her name had of course been mentioned several times during the first hour or so, but it was Mrs. Boone who put the spotlight on it. I had the notion that she did it deliberately. She had not up to that moment got any of my major attention. She was mature and filled-out, though not actually fat and by no means run to seed, and she had been short-changed as to nose.

Wolfe had doubled back to the question of Cheney Boone’s arrival at the Waldorf, and Cramer, who was by then in a frame of mind to get it over with and disperse, had said sarcastically, “I’ll send you a copy of my notes. Meanwhile Goodwin can take this down. Five of them — Boone and his wife, Nina Boone, Phoebe Gunther, and Alger Kates — were to take the one o’clock train from Washington to New York, but Boone got caught in an emergency conference and couldn’t make it. The other four came on the train, and when they reached New York Mrs. Boone went to the Waldorf, where rooms had been engaged, and the other three went to the BPR New York office. Boone came on a plane that landed at LaGuardia Field at six-five, went to the hotel and up to the room where his wife was. By that time the niece was there too, and the three of them went together down to the ballroom floor. They went straight to the reception room. Boone had no hat or coat to check, and he hung onto a little leather case he had with him.”

“That was the case,” Mrs. Boone put in, “that Miss Gunther says she forgot about and left on a window sill.”

I looked at the widow reproachfully. That was the first sign of a split in the BPR ranks, and it sounded ominous, with the nasty emphasis she put on says . To make it worse, Hattie Harding of the NIA immediately picked it up:

“And Miss Gunther is absolutely wrong, because four different people saw that case in her hand as she left the reception room!”

Solomon Dexter snorted: “It’s amazing what—”

“Please, sir.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “What was this case? A brief case? A vanity case?”

“No.” Cramer was helping out again. “It was a little leather case like a doctor’s, and it contained cylinders from a dictating machine. Miss Gunther has described it to me. When she took that baby carriage and other stuff to him Tuesday evening, to the room where he was killed, he told her the conference in Washington had ended earlier than he expected, and he had gone to his office and spent an hour dictating before he took the plane to New York. He had the cylinders with him in that case for her to transcribe. She took it to the reception room when she went back there for a cocktail, and left it there on a window sill. That’s the last of it.”

“So she says,” Mrs. Boone repeated.

Dexter glared at her. “Nonsense!”

“Did you ,” Hattie Harding demanded, “see the case in her hand when she left the reception room?”

All eyes went to the widow. She moved hers and got the picture. One word would be enough. She was either a traitor or she wasn’t. Confronted with that alternative, it didn’t take her long to decide. She met Hattie Harding’s gaze and said distinctly:

“No.”

Everybody breathed. Wolfe asked Cramer:

“What was on the cylinders, letters? What?”

“Miss Gunther doesn’t know. Boone didn’t tell her. No one in Washington knows.”

“The conference that ended earlier than Boone expected, what was it about?”

Cramer shook his head.

“Who was it with?”

Cramer shook his head again. G. G. Spero offered, “We’ve been working on that in Washington. We can’t trace any conference. We don’t know where Boone was for about two hours, from one to three. The best lead is that the head NIA man in Washington had been wanting to see him, to discuss his speech, but he denies—”

Breslow exploded. “By God,” he blurted, “there it is! It’s always an NIA man! That’s damned silly, Spero, and don’t forget where FBI salaries come from! They come from taxpayers!”

From that point on the mud was flying more or less constantly. It wasn’t on account of any encouragement from Wolfe. He told Breslow:

“The constant reference to your Association is unfortunate from your standpoint, sir, but it can’t be helped. A murder investigation invariably centers on people with motives. You heard Mr. Cramer, early in this discussion, say that a thorough inquiry has disclosed no evidence of personal enemies. But you cannot deny that Mr. Boone had many enemies, earned by his activities as a government official, and that a large number of them were members of the NIA.”

Winterhoff asked, “A question, Mr. Wolfe, is it always an enemy who kills a man?”

“Answer it yourself,” Wolfe told him. “Obviously that’s what you asked it for.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t always an enemy,” Winterhoff declared. “For an illustration, you couldn’t say that Mr. Dexter here was Boone’s enemy, quite the contrary, they were friends. But if Mr. Dexter had been filled with ambition to become the Director of the Bureau of Price Regulation — and that’s what he is at this moment — he might conceivably have taken steps to make the office vacant. Incidentally, he would also have placed under grave suspicion the members of an organization he mortally hates — which also has happened.”