Rex Stout - Poison à la Carte

“Certainly.” Her chin was up. “Of course I had met him. Everybody in show business has. Once when he came backstage at the Coronet, and once at a party somewhere, and one other time but I don’t remember where.”

“Miss Morgan?”

She was smiling at me, a crooked smile. “Do you call this helping us?” she demanded.

“It might lead to that after I know how you stand. After all, the cops have your statement.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been around longer than Carol, so I had seen him to speak to more than she had. Once I danced with him at the Flamingo, two years ago. That was the closest I had ever been to him.”

“Miss Choate?”

“I never had the honor. I only came to New York last fall. From Montana. He had been pointed out to me from a distance, but he never chased me.”

“Miss Jaret?”

“He was Broadway,” she said. “I’m TV.”

“Don’t the twain ever meet?”

“Oh, sure. All the time at Sardi’s. That’s the only place I ever saw the great Pyle, and I wasn’t with him.”

I started to cross my legs, but the wobbly chair leg reacted, and I thought better of it. “So there you are,” I said, “you’re all committed. If one of you poisoned him, and though I hate to say it I don’t see any way out of that, that one is lying. But if any of the others are lying, if you saw more of him than you admit, you had better get from under quick. If you don’t want to tell the cops tell me, tell me now, and I’ll pass it on and say I wormed it out of you. Believe me, you’ll regret it if you don’t.”

“Archie Goodwin, a girl’s best friend,” Lucy said. “My bosom pal.”

No one else said anything.

“Actually,” I asserted, “I am your friend, all of you but one. I have a friendly feeling for all pretty girls, especially those who work, and I admire and respect you for being willing to make an honest fifty bucks by coming there yesterday to carry plates of grub to a bunch of finickers. I am your friend, Lucy, if you’re not the murderer, and if you are no one is.”

I leaned forward, forgetting the wobbly chair leg, but it didn’t object. It was about time to put a crimp in Helen’s personal project. “Another thing. It’s quite possible that one of you did see her returning to the kitchen for another plate, and you haven’t said so because you don’t want to squeal on her. If so, spill it now. The longer this hangs on, the hotter it will get. When it gets so the pressure is too much for you and you decide you have got to tell it, it will be too late. Tomorrow may be too late. If you go to the cops with it tomorrow they probably won’t believe you; they’ll figure that you did it yourself and you’re trying to squirm out. If you don’t want to tell me here and now, in front of her, come with me down to Nero Wolfe’s office and we’ll talk it over.”

They were exchanging glances, and they were not friendly glances. When I had arrived probably not one of them, excluding the murderer, had believed that a poisoner was present, but now they all did, or at least they thought she might be; and when that feeling takes hold it’s good-bye to friendliness. It would have been convenient if I could have detected fear in one of the glances, but fear and suspicion and uneasiness are too much alike on faces to tell them apart.

“You are a help,” Carol Annis said bitterly. “Now you’ve got us hating each other. Now everybody suspects everybody.”

I had quit being nice and sympathetic. “It’s about time,” I told her. I glanced at my wrist. “It’s not midnight yet. If I’ve made you all realize that this is no Broadway production, or TV either, and the longer the pay-off is postponed the tougher it will be for everybody, I have helped.” I stood up. “Let’s go. I don’t say Mr. Wolfe can do it by just snapping his fingers, but he might surprise you. He has often surprised me.”

“All right,” Nora said. She arose. “Come on. This is getting too damn painful. Come on.”

I don’t pretend that that was what I had been heading for. I admit that I had just been carried along by my tongue. If I arrived with that gang at midnight and Wolfe had gone to bed, he would almost certainly refuse to play. Even if he were still up, he might refuse to work, just to teach me a lesson, since I had not stuck to my instructions. Those thoughts were at me as Peggy Choate bounced up and Carol Annis started to leave the couch.

But they were wasted. That tussle with Wolfe never came off. A door at the end of the room, which had been standing ajar, suddenly swung open, and there in its frame was a two-legged figure with shoulders almost as broad as the doorway, and I was squinting at Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Manhattan Homicide West. He moved forward, croaking, “I’m surprised at you, Goodwin. These ladies ought to get some sleep.”

Of course I was a monkey. If it had been Stebbins who had made a monkey of me I suppose I would have leaped for a window and dived through. Hitting the pavement from a four-story window should be enough to finish a monkey, and life wouldn’t be worth living if I had been bamboozled by Purley Stebbins. But obviously it hadn’t been him; it had been Peggy Choate or Nora Jaret, or both; Purley had merely accepted an invitation to come and listen in.

So I kept my face. To say I was jaunty would be stretching it, but I didn’t scream or tear my hair. “Greetings,” I said heartily. “And welcome. I’ve been wondering why you didn’t join us instead of skulking in there in the dark.”

“I’ll bet you have.” He had come to arm’s length and stopped. He turned. “You can relax, ladies.” Back to me: “You’re under arrest for obstructing justice. Come along.”

“In a minute. You’ve got all night.” I moved my head. “Of course Peggy and Nora knew this hero was in there, but I’d—”

“I said come along!” he barked.

“And I said in a minute. I intend to ask a couple of questions. I wouldn’t dream of resisting arrest, but I’ve got leg cramp from kneeling too long and if you’re in a hurry you’ll have to carry me.” I moved my eyes. “I’d like to know if you all knew. Did you, Miss Iacono?”

“Of course not.”

“Miss Morgan?”

“No.”

“Miss Annis?”

“No, I didn’t, but I think you did.” She tossed her head and the corn silk fluttered. “That was contemptible. Saying you wanted to help us, so we would talk, with a policeman listening.”

“And then he arrests me?”

“That’s just an act.”

“I wish it were. Ask your friends Peggy and Nora if I knew — only I suppose you wouldn’t believe them. They knew, and they didn’t tell you. You’d better all think over everything you said. Okay, Sergeant, the leg cramp’s gone.”

He actually started a hand for my elbow, but I was moving and it wasn’t there. I opened the door to the hall. Of course he had me go first down the three flights; no cop in his senses would descend stairs in front of a dangerous criminal in custody. When we emerged to the sidewalk and he told me to turn left I asked him, “Why not cuffs?”

“Clown if you want to,” he croaked.

He flagged a taxi on Amsterdam Avenue, and when we were in and rolling I spoke. “I’ve been thinking, about laws and liberties and so on. Take false arrest, for instance. And take obstructing justice. If a man is arrested for obstructing justice, and it turns out that he didn’t obstruct any justice, does that make the arrest false? I wish I knew more about law. I guess I’ll have to ask a lawyer. Nathaniel Parker would know.”

It was the mention of Parker, the lawyer Wolfe uses when the occasion calls for one, that got him. He had seen Parker in action.