Rex Stout - Too Many Clients

He was licked and he knew it. His face didn’t go gargoyle again, but his mouth twisted and the skin around his eyes was squeezed in as if the light was too strong.

“Circumstances,” he said. “Men are the sport of circumstances. Good God, as I sat in this chair talking to Goodwin, Yeager was dead, had been dead for hours. When I read it in the paper yesterday morning I knew how it would be if you found me, and I decided what to say; I was going to deny it, but now that won’t do.”

He nodded, slowly. “So. Circumstances. Of course my wife shouldn’t have married me. It was a circumstance that she met me at a moment when she was — but I won’t go into that. I’ll try to keep to the point. I was a fool to think that I might still save our marriage, but I did. She wanted things that I couldn’t supply, and she wanted to do things that I am not inclined to and not equipped for. She couldn’t do them with me, so she did them without me.”

“The point,” Wolfe said.

“Yes. This is the first time I have ever said a word about my relations with my wife to anyone. About a year ago she suddenly had a watch that must have cost a thousand dollars or more. Then other things — jewelry, clothes, a fur coat. She had frequently spent evenings out without me, but it became more than evenings; occasionally she came home after dawn. You realize that now that I’ve started it’s difficult to confine myself to the essentials.”

“Do so if possible.”

“I’ll try. I descended to snooping. Curiosity creeps into the homes of the unfortunate under the names of duty or pity. When my wife—”

“Is that Pascal?”

“No, Nietzsche. When my wife went out in the evening I followed her — not always, but when I could manage it. Mostly she went to a restaurant or the address of a friend I knew about, but twice she went to that address on Eighty-second Street and entered at the basement door. That was incomprehensible, in that kind of neighborhood, unless it was a dive of some sort — dope or God knows what. I went there one afternoon and pushed the button at the basement door, but learned nothing. I am not a practiced investigator like you. A man, I think a Puerto Rican, told me only that he had no vacant rooms.”

He stopped to swallow. “I also snooped at home, and one day I found a phone number that my wife had scribbled on the back of an envelope. Chisholm five, three-two-three-two. I dialed it and learned that it was the residence of Thomas G. Yeager. It wasn’t listed. I made inquiries and found out who he was, and I saw him, more by luck than design. Do you want to know how it happened?”

“No. You met him?”

“No, I saw him at a theater. That was two weeks ago. And three days later, Friday, a week ago last Friday, I followed her when she went out, and she went again, that was the third time, to that house on Eighty-second Street. I went and stood across the street, and very soon, not more than five minutes, Yeager came, walking. It was still daylight. He turned in, to the basement entrance, and entered. What would you have done?”

Wolfe grunted. “I wouldn’t have been there.”

Hough turned to me. “What would you have done, Goodwin?”

“That’s irrelevant,” I said. “I’m not you. You might as well ask what I would do if I were a robin and saw a boy robbing my nest. What did you do?”

“I walked up and down the block until people began to notice me, and then went home. My wife came home at six o’clock. I didn’t ask her where she had been; I hadn’t asked her that for a year. But I decided I must do something. I considered various things, various plans, and rejected them. I finally settled on one Sunday evening. We had had dinner—”

“Which Sunday?”

“Last Sunday. Three days ago. We had had dinner at a restaurant and returned home. My wife was watching television, and I was in my room working, only I wasn’t working. I was deciding what to do, and the next day I did it. I came here and saw Archie Goodwin. You know what I said to him.”

“Yes. Do you think you’ve accounted for it?”

“I suppose not. It was like this: I knew that when Yeager didn’t turn up Goodwin would find out why, either phone him — that was why I gave him the number — or go to the house. He would want to see Yeager, and he would tell him about me and what I had said. So Yeager would know that someone, someone he wouldn’t identify from Goodwin’s description, knew about his going to that house. He would know that Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe also knew about it. And he would tell my wife about it and describe me to her, and she would know I knew. That was the most important. I couldn’t tell her, but I wanted her to know that I knew.”

His eyes came to me and returned to Wolfe. “Another thing. I knew that Archie Goodwin wouldn’t just dismiss it from his mind. He would wonder why I had mentioned that particular address, and he would wonder what secret connection there might be between Yeager and that house in that neighborhood, and when Archie Goodwin wonders about anything he finds out. All of this was in my mind, but the most important was that my wife would know that I knew.”

His mouth worked, and he gripped the chair arms. “And that evening on the radio, the eleven-o’clock news, I learned that Yeager was dead, and yesterday morning in the paper I learned that he had died, had been murdered, Sunday night, and his body had been found in a hole in front of that house. Thank God my wife wasn’t there Sunday night.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Certainly I’m sure. We sleep in separate beds, but when she turns over I hear her. You realize—” He stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was going to say you realize that I have told you things I wouldn’t have thought I could possibly ever tell anybody, but you don’t care about that. Perhaps I have blundered again, but I was trapped by circumstance. Is there any chance, any chance at all, that it will stay with you? I can’t ask you for any consideration, I know that, after the way I imposed on Goodwin Monday afternoon. But if you could find it possible...”

Wolfe looked up at the clock. “It’s my dinnertime. It doesn’t please me to hurt a man needlessly, Mr. Hough, and your puerile imposition on Mr. Goodwin doesn’t rankle. On the contrary; you gave him that address and he went there, and as a result we have a client.” He pushed his chair back and rose. “What you have told us will be divulged only if it becomes requisite.”

“Who is your client?”

When Wolfe said that was hardly his concern, he didn’t try to insist. I permitted myself to feel sorry for him again as he left the chair. He was in a hell of a spot. He wanted to see his wife, he had to see her, but what was he going to say? Was he going to explain that he was responsible for her finding a reception committee when she went to get her umbrella? Was he going to admit — I turned that switch off. He had married her, I hadn’t. When I went to the front to let him out, I stood on the stoop for a minute to see if there was someone around who was curious enough about him to follow him. There wasn’t. I shut the door and went to join Wolfe in the dining room.

The two letters in the morning mail hadn’t been answered, and when we returned to the office after dinner and had finished coffee we attended to them. One was from a Putnam County farmer asking how many starlings he wanted this year, and the other was from a woman in Nebraska saying that she would be in New York for a week late in June, with her husband and two children, and could they come and look at the orchids. The reply to the first was forty; Wolfe always invites two dinner guests for the starling pie. The reply to the second was no; she shouldn’t have mentioned the children. When the answers had been typed and Wolfe had signed them, he sat and watched while I folded them and put them in the envelopes, and then spoke.