Rex Stout - Too Many Clients

There was a chair turned to face the bed, and I took it. As I sat she asked if I had brought her cigarette case.

“No,” I said, “but it’s still there in the safe, and that’s something. Mr. Wolfe sent me to ask you a question. Where were you yesterday evening from nine o’clock to midnight?”

If she had been on her feet, or even on a chair, I believe she would have jumped me again, from the way her eyes flashed. It was personal, not professional. “I wish I had clawed your eyes out,” she said.

“I know, you said that before. But I didn’t come to fire that question at you just to hear you say it again. If you have seen a newspaper you may have noticed that a girl named Maria Perez was murdered last night?”

“Yes.”

“And that she lived at One-fifty-six West Eighty-second Street?” “Yes.”

“So where were you?”

“You know where I was. At the theater. Working.”

“Until ten minutes to eleven. Then you changed. Then?”

She was smiling. “I don’t know why I said that about clawing your eyes out. I mean I do know. Holding me so tight my ribs hurt, and then just a cold fish. Just a — a stone.”

“Not a fish and a stone. In fact, neither. Just a detective on an errand. I still am. Where did you go when you left the theater?”

“I came down and went to bed. Here.” She patted the bed. The way she used her hands had been highly praised by Brooks Atkinson in the Times . “I usually go somewhere and eat something, but last night I was too tired.”

“Had you ever seen Maria Perez? Ever run into her in that basement hall?”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon; I doubled up the questions. Had you ever seen her or spoken with her?”

“No.”

I nodded. “You would say that, naturally, if you thought you could make it stick. But you may have to eat it. This is how it stands. The police haven’t got onto that room yet. They still haven’t connected Yeager with that house. Mr. Wolfe hopes they won’t, for reasons that don’t matter to you. He believes that whoever killed Yeager killed Maria Perez, and so do I. He wants to find the murderer and clear it up in such a way that that house doesn’t come into it. If he can do that you’ll never have to go on the witness stand and identify your cigarette case. But he can do that only if he gets the facts, and gets them quick.”

I left the chair and went and sat on the bed where she had patted it. “For example, you. I don’t mean facts like where were you Sunday night. We haven’t the time or the men to start checking alibis. I asked you about last night just to start the conversation. Your alibi for last night is no good, but it wouldn’t have been even if you had said you went to Sardi’s with friends and ate a steak. Friends can lie, and so can waiters.”

“I was at a benefit performance at the Majestic Theater Sunday night.”

“It would take a lot of proving to satisfy me that you were there without a break if I had a healthy reason to think you killed Yeager — but I’m not saying you didn’t. An alibi, good or bad, isn’t the kind of fact I want from you. You say you never saw or spoke with Maria Perez. Last night her mother phoned me to come, and I went, and searched her room, and hidden under a false bottom in a drawer I found a collection of items. Among them were three photographs of you. Also there was some money, five-dollar bills, that she hadn’t wanted her parents to know about. I’m being frank with you, Miss Duncan; I’ve told you that Mr. Wolfe would prefer to close it up without the police ever learning about that room and the people who went there. But if they do learn about it, not from us, then look out. Not only that you walked in on Mr. and Mrs. Perez and me, and your cigarette case, but what if they find your fingerprints on those five-dollar bills?”

That was pure dumb luck. I would like to say that I had had a hunch and was playing it, but if I once started dolling up these reports there’s no telling where I’d stop. I was merely letting my tongue go. If there was anything more in Meg Duncan than the fact (according to her) that she had gone straight home from the theater last night, I wanted to talk it out of her if possible. It was just luck that I didn’t mention that the photographs were magazine and newspaper reproductions and that I tossed in the question about the bills.

Luck or not, it hit. She gripped my knee with one of the hands she used so well and said, “My God, the bills. Do they show fingerprints?”

“Certainly.”

“Where are they?”

“In the safe in Mr. Wolfe’s office. Also the photographs.”

“I only gave her one. You said three.”

“The other two are from magazines. When did you give it to her?”

“I–I don’t remember. There are so many...”

My left hand moved to rest on the coverlet where her leg was, above her knee, the fingers bending, naturally, to the curve of the surface they were touching. Of course it would have been a mistake if I had given the hand a definite order to do that, but I hadn’t. I’m not blaming the hand; it was merely taking advantage of an opportunity that no alert hand could be expected to ignore; but it got a quicker and bigger reaction than it had counted on. When that woman had an impulse she wasted no time. As she came up from the pillow I met her, I guess on the theory that she was going to claw, but her arms clamped around my neck and she took me back with her, and there I was, on top of her from the waist up, my face into the pillow. She was biting the side of my neck, not to hurt, just cordial.

The time, the place, and the girl is a splendid combination, but it takes all three. The place was okay, but the time wasn’t, since I had other errands, and I doubted if the girl’s motives were pure. She was more interested in a cigarette case, a photograph, and some five-dollar bills than in me. Also I don’t like to be bullied. So I brought my hand up, slipped it between her face and my neck, shoved her head into the pillow while raising mine, folded the ends of the pillow over, and had her smothered. She squirmed and kicked for ten seconds and then stopped. I got my feet on the floor and my weight on them, removed my hands from the pillow, and stepped back. I spoke.

“When did you give her the photograph?”

She was panting, gasping, to catch up on oxygen. When she could she said, “Damn you, you put your hand on me.”

“Yeah. Do you expect me to apologize? Patting a place on the bed for me to sit and you in that gauzy thing? You know darned well your nipples show through it. That wasn’t very smart, trying to take my mind off of my work when you’ve got as much at stake as I have.” I sat on the chair. “Look, Miss Duncan. The only way you can possibly get clear is by helping Nero Wolfe wrap it up, and we haven’t got all summer. We may not even have all day. I want to know about the photograph and the five-dollar bills.”

She had got her breath back and pulled the coverlet up to her chin. “You did put your hand on me,” she said.

“Conditional reflex. The wonder is it wasn’t both hands. When did you give her the photograph?”

“A long time ago. Nearly a year ago. She sent a note to my dressing room at a Saturday matinee. The note said she had seen me at her house and she would like to have three tickets for next Saturday so she could bring two friends. At the bottom below her name was her address. That address... I had her sent in. She was incredible. I have never seen a girl as beautiful. I thought she was — that she had been...”

I nodded. “A guest in that room. I don’t think so.”

“Neither did I after I talked with her. She said she had seen me in the hall — twice, she said — and she had recognized me from pictures she had seen. She said she had never told anyone, and she wouldn’t, and I gave her an autographed picture and the three tickets. That was in June, and in July we closed for a month for summer vacation, and in August she came to see me again. She was even more beautiful, she was incredible. She wanted three more tickets, and I said I’d mail them to her, and then she said she had decided she ought to have hush money. That’s what she said, hush money. Five dollars a month. I was to mail it to her the first of each month, to a branch post office on Eighty-third Street, the Planetarium Station. Have you ever seen her?”