Rex Stout - Poison à la Carte

“But then,” the lawyer objected, “one of them served no one. How could that be?”

“I am not a tyro at inquiry, Mr. Leacraft. I’ll ravel it for you later if you want, but now I want to get on. It is no conjecture that poison was given to Mr. Pyle by the woman who brought him the caviar; it is a fact. By a remarkable combination of cunning and luck she has so far eluded identification, and I am appealing to you. All of you. I ask you to close your eyes and recall the scene. We are here at table, discussing the orchids — the spots and streaks. The woman serving that place” — he pointed — “lets a blini slip from the plate and Felix retrieves it. It helps to close your eyes. Just about then a woman enters with a plate, goes to Mr. Pyle, and puts it before him. I appeal to you: which one?”

Emil Kreis shook his head. “I told you upstairs, I don’t know. I didn’t see her. Or if I did, it didn’t register.”

Adrian Dart, the actor, stood with his eyes closed, his chin up, and his arms folded, a fine pose for concentration. The others, even Leacraft, had their eyes closed too, but of course they couldn’t hold a candle to Dart. After a long moment the eyes began to open and heads to shake.

“It’s gone,” Dart said in his rich musical baritone. “I must have seen it, since I sat across from him, but it’s gone. Utterly.”

“I didn’t see it,” another said. “I simply didn’t see it.”

“I have a vague feeling,” another said, “but it’s too damn vague. No.”

They made it unanimous. No dice.

Wolfe put his palms on the table. “Then I’m in for it,” he said grimly. “I am your guest, gentlemen, and would not be offensive, but I am to blame that Fritz Brenner was enticed to this deplorable fiasco. If Mr. Pyle dies, as he surely will—”

The door opened and Benjamin Schriver entered. Then Lewis Hewitt, and then the familiar burly frame of Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Manhattan Homicide West.

Schriver crossed to the table and spoke. “Vincent is dead. Half an hour ago. Doctor Jameson called the police. He thinks that it is practically certain—”

“Hold it,” Purley growled at his elbow. “I’ll handle it if you don’t mind.”

“My God,” Adrian Dart groaned, and shuddered magnificently.

That was the last I heard of the affair from an aristologist.

“I did not!” Inspector Cramer roared. “Quit twisting my words around! I didn’t charge you with complicity! I merely said you’re concealing something, and what the hell is that to scrape your neck? You always do!”

It was a quarter to two Wednesday afternoon. We were in the office on the first floor of the old brownstone on West 35th Street — Wolfe in his oversized chair. The daily schedule was messed beyond repair. When we had finally got home, at five o’clock in the morning, Wolfe had told Fritz to forget about breakfast until further notice, and had sent me up to the plant rooms to leave a note for Theodore saying that he would not appear at nine in the morning and perhaps not at all. It had been not at all. At half past eleven he had buzzed on the house phone to tell Fritz to bring up the breakfast tray with four eggs and ten slices of bacon instead of two and five, and it was past one o’clock when the sounds came of his elevator and then his footsteps in the hall, heading for the office.

If you think a problem child is tough, try handling a problem elephant. He is plenty knotty even when he is himself, and that day he was really special. After looking through the mail, glancing at his desk calendar, and signing three checks I had put on his desk, he had snapped at me, “A fine prospect. Dealing with them singly would be interminable. Will you have them all here at six o’clock?”

I kept calm. I merely asked, “All of whom?”

“You know quite well. Those women.”

I still kept calm. “I should think ten of them would be enough. You said yourself that two of them can be crossed off.”

“I need them all. Those two can help establish the order in which the plates were taken.”

I held on. I too was short on sleep, shorter even than he, and I didn’t feel up to a fracas. “I have a suggestion,” I said. “I suggest that you postpone operations until your wires are connected again. Counting up to five hundred might help. You know damn well that all twelve of them will spend the afternoon either at the District Attorney’s office or receiving official callers at their homes — probably most of them at the DA’s office. And probably they’ll spend the evening there too. Do you want some aspirin?”

“I want them ,” he growled.

I could have left him to grope back to normal on his own and gone up to my room for a nap, but after all he pays my salary. So I picked up a sheet of paper I had typed and got up and handed it to him. It read:

“Fern Faber’s out,” I said, “and I realize it doesn’t have to be one of those five, even though Lucy Morgan took the last plate. Possibly one or two others took plates after Peggy Choate did, and served the men they were assigned to. But it seems—”

I stopped because he had crumpled it and dropped it in the wastebasket. “I heard them,” he growled. “My faculties, including my memory, are not impaired. I am merely ruffled beyond the bounds of tolerance.”

For him that was an abject apology, and a sign that he was beginning to regain control. But a few minutes later, when the bell rang, and after a look through the one-way glass panel of the front door I told him it was Cramer, and he said to admit him, and Cramer marched in and planted his fanny on the red leather chair and opened up with an impolite remark about concealing facts connected with a murder, Wolfe had cut loose; and Cramer asked him what the hell was that to scrape his neck, which was a new one to me but sounded somewhat vulgar for an inspector. He had probably picked it up from some hoodlum.

Ruffling Cramer beyond the bounds of tolerance did Wolfe good. He leaned back in his chair. “Everyone conceals something,” he said placidly. “Or at least omits something, if only because to include everything is impossible. During those wearisome hours, nearly six of them, I answered all questions, and so did Mr. Goodwin. Indeed, I thought we were helpful. I thought we had cleared away some rubble.”

“Yeah.” Cramer wasn’t grateful. His big pink face was always a little pinker than normal, not with pleasure, when he was tackling Wolfe. “You had witnessed the commission of a murder, and you didn’t notify—”

“It wasn’t a murder until he died.”

“All right, a felony. You not only failed to report it, you—”

“That a felony had been committed was my conclusion. Others present disagreed with me. Only a few minutes before Mr. Stebbins entered the room Mr. Leacraft, a member of the bar and therefore himself an officer of the law, challenged my conclusion.”

“You should have reported it. You’re a licensed detective. Also you started an investigation, questioning the suspects—”

“Only to test my conclusion. I would have been a ninny to report it before learning—”

“Damn it,” Cramer barked, “will you let me finish a sentence? Just one?”

Wolfe’s shoulders went up an eighth of an inch and down again. “Certainly, if it has import. I am not baiting you, Mr. Cramer. But I have already replied to these imputations, to you and Mr. Stebbins and an assistant district attorney. I did not wrongly delay reporting a crime, and I did not usurp the function of the police. Very well, finish a sentence.”