Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue

“Sorry I made you wait,” she told me politely. “What is it?” She didn’t sit, and we were up.

“A couple of little points,” I said. “I saw Doctor Buhl this afternoon, and expected he would phone you, but since you were out he couldn’t. First about the morphine he gave you Saturday to be given to Bertram Fyfe. He says he took two quarter-grain tablets from a bottle he had, and gave them to you, with directions. Is that correct?”

“Wait a minute, Anne.” Arrow was squinting at me. “What’s the idea of this?”

“No special idea.” I met the brown eyes through the squint. “Mr. Wolfe needs the information to clear this thing up, that’s all. — Do you object to giving it, Miss Goren? I asked Doctor Buhl where you kept the tablets until the time came to administer them, and he told me to ask you.”

“I put them in a saucer and put the saucer on top of the bureau in the patient’s room. That is standard procedure.”

“Sure. Would you mind going right through it? From the time Doctor Buhl gave you the tablets?”

“He handed them to me just before he left, and after he left I went to the bureau and put them in the saucer. The instructions were to give one as soon as the guests had gone, and one an hour later if it seemed desirable, and that’s what I did.” She was being cool and professional. “At ten minutes past eight I put one of the tablets in my hypo syringe with one c.c. of sterile water, and injected it in the patient’s arm. An hour later he was asleep but a little restless, and I did the same with the other tablet. That quieted him completely.”

“Have you any reason to suspect that the tablets in the saucer had been changed by someone? That the ones you gave the patient were not the ones Doctor Buhl gave you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Look here,” Johnny Arrow drawled, “that’s a kind of a nasty question. I guess that’s enough.”

I grinned at him. “You’re too touchy. If the cops ever got started on this they’d hammer away at her for hours. Five people have admitted they were in the patient’s room after Doctor Buhl left, including you, and the cops would go over that with her forward, backward, sideways, and up and down. I don’t want to spoil her appetite for dinner, so I merely ask her if she saw anything suspicious. Or heard anything. You didn’t, Miss Goren?”

“I did not.”

“Then that’s that. Now the other point. You may or may not know that Paul Fyfe brought some ice cream to the apartment and put it in the refrigerator. It was mentioned at the dinner table, but you weren’t there. Do you know what happened to the ice cream?”

“No.” Her voice sharpened. “This seems pretty silly. Ice cream?”

“I often seem silly. Just ignore it. Mr. Wolfe wants to know about the ice cream. You know nothing at all about it?”

“No. I never heard of it.”

“Okay.” I turned to Arrow. “This one is for you too. What do you know about the ice cream?”

“Nothing.” He chuckled. “You can get as nasty as you want to with me, after that squeeze you put on me last night, but don’t try getting behind me. I’m going to keep you right in front.”

“From the front I use something else. You remember Paul Fyfe mentioned the ice cream at the dinner table?”

“I guess I do. I had forgotten about it.”

“But you never saw it or touched it?”

“No.”

“Or heard anything about what happened to it?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. You’ll be doing yourself one too, because it’s the quickest way to get rid of me. Where are you going for dinner?”

“I’ve got a table reserved at Rusterman’s.”

He was certainly learning his way around, possibly with Anne’s help. “That’s fine,” I said, “because it’s only a block out of the way. I want you to take me to the Churchill Towers apartment and let me look in the refrigerator.”

It was a good thing I had taken the trouble to brief him on tailors and haberdashers. But for that he would probably have refused, and I would have had to go and persuade Tim Evarts, the house dick, to oblige, and that would have cost both time and money. He did balk some, but Anne put in, saying it would take less time to humor me than to argue with me, and that settled it. It seemed likely that in the years to come Anne would do a lot of settling, and then and there I decided to let him have her. She permitted him to help her get a yellow embroidered stole across her bare shoulders, and he got a black Homburg from a table. On our way downstairs, and in the taxi we took to the Churchill, I could have coached him on black Homburgs, when and where and with what, but with Anne present I thought it advisable to skip it.

The Churchill Towers apartment, on the thirty-second floor, had a foyer about the size of my bedroom, and the living room would have accommodated three billiard tables with plenty of elbow space. There was an inside hall between the living room and the bedrooms, and at one end of the hall was a serving pantry, with an outside service entrance. Besides a long built-in stainless-steel counter, the pantry had a large warmer cabinet, an even larger refrigerator, and a door to a refuse-disposal chute, but no cooking equipment. Arrow and Anne stood just inside the swinging door, touching elbows, as I went and opened the door of the refrigerator.

The freezing compartment at the top held six trays of ice cubes and nothing else. On the shelves below were a couple of dozen bottles — beer, club soda, tonic — five bottles of champagne lying on their sides, a bowl of oranges, and a plate of grapes. There was no paper bag, big or little, and absolutely no sign of ice cream. I closed the door and opened the door of the warmer cabinet. It contained nothing. I opened the door of the disposal chute and stuck my head in, and got a smell, but not of ice cream.

I turned to the hooker and the hooked. “All right,” I told them, “I give up. Many thanks. As I said, this was the quickest way to get rid of me. Enjoy your dinner.” They made gangway for me, and I pushed through the swinging door and on out.

When Wolfe had asked me what about dinner I had told him I didn’t know, but I knew now. I could be home by 8:30, and that afternoon, preparing for one of Wolfe’s favorite hot-weather meals, Fritz had been collecting eight baby lobsters, eight avocados, and a bushel of young leaf lettuce. When he had introduced to them the proper amounts of chives, onion, parsley, tomato paste, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, paprika, pimientos, and dry white wine, he would have Brazilian lobster salad as edited by Wolfe, and not even Wolfe could have it all stowed away by half past eight.

He hadn’t. I found him in the dining room, at table, starting on deep-dish blueberry pie smothered with whipped cream. There was no lobster salad in sight, but Fritz, who had let me in, soon entered with the big silver platter, and there was plenty left. Wolfe’s ban on business during meals is not only for his own protection but other people’s too, including me, so I could keep my mind where it belonged, on the proper ratio of the ingredients of a mouthful. Only after that had been attended to, and my share of the blueberry pie, and we had crossed the hall to the office, where Fritz brought coffee, did he ask for a report. I gave it to him. When I had described the climax, the empty refrigerator — that is, empty of ice cream — I got up to refill our coffee cups.

“But,” I said, “if you have simply got to know what happened to it, God knows why, there is still one slender hope. David wasn’t on my list. I was going to phone from the Churchill to ask if you wanted me to try him, but I wanted some of that lobster. He was there in the apartment most of Sunday. Shall I see him?”