Rex Stout: Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue

Wolfe had returned the knife to his pocket and was putting the oilstone in the drawer.

“Actually,” Fyfe said, “Arrow was wrong when he stated that Bert possessed nothing that had not been acquired with income from the uranium. Bert never claimed his share of our father’s estate, and they couldn’t find him, and we have never applied for its distribution. His one-quarter share was around sixty thousand dollars, and now it’s more than double that. Of course Paul and Louise and I will get it now, but honestly it will give me no pleasure. I may say frankly, Mr. Wolfe, that I am sorry Bert came back. It reopened an old sore, and now his death, and the way it happened, and Paul acting like this...”

It was one minute to four, and Wolfe was pushing his chair back and leaving it. “Yes indeed, Mr. Fyfe,” he concurred. “A nuisance alive and an affliction dead. Please give Mr. Goodwin the necessary information, and phone when you have made the arrangements for this evening.”

He headed for the door.

A little research into backgrounds is often a help, even in cases that apparently don’t call for it, and after Fyfe left I made a few phone calls to various quarters, getting a skimpy crop of useless information. David had taught at Audubon High School for twelve years, and had been head of the English Department for four. Paul’s real estate agency in Mount Kisco was no whirlwind but was seemingly solvent. Vincent Tuttle’s drugstore, also in Mount Kisco, was his own, and was thought to be doing fine. David had had no address or phone number for the nurse, Anne Goren, but Wolfe wanted them all, and I found her in the Manhattan book, listed as an RN. The first two times I dialed her number I got a busy signal, and the next three times no answer. Nor could I get Johnny Arrow. Calls to the Churchill Towers go through the Churchill switchboard, and I left word for him to call, and made half a dozen tries. Finally, just before Fritz announced dinner, I got Tim Evarts, assistant house dick, security officer to you, and asked him a few discreet questions. The answers were both for and against. For, the rent was paid on the de luxe Towers apartment, and the bar and restaurant staff all liked Johnny Arrow, especially his tipping standards. Against, Arrow had plugged a guy in the bar Saturday night, repeatedly and persistently, and had been removed by cops. Tim said that technically it had been a fine performance, but the Churchill bar wasn’t the place for it.

Fyfe had phoned that the arrangements had been made. At nine o’clock, when Doctor Frederick Buhl arrived, Wolfe and I were through in the dining room, having put away around four pounds of salmon mousse, Wolfe’s own recipe, and a peck of summer salad, and were back in the office. The doorbell took me to the hall, and as I switched on the stoop light what I saw through the one-way glass panel of the front door gave me a double surprise. Doctor Buhl, if it was he, was no doddering old worn-out hick doc; he was an erect, gray-haired, well-dressed man of distinction. And with him was a young female having her own personal points of distinction, discernible even by a swift glance at a distance.

I went and opened up. He moved aside for her to enter and then followed, saying that he was Doctor Buhl and had an appointment with Nero Wolfe. No hat covered his crown of distinguished gray hair, so there was nothing for the rack, and I led them down the hall and into the office. Inside, he halted to dart a glance around, then crossed to Wolfe’s desk and said aggressively, “I’m Frederick Buhl. David Fyfe asked me to come. What is all this nonsense?”

“I don’t know,” Wolfe murmured. He keeps his voice down to a murmur after a meal, unless goaded. “I’ve been hired to find out. Sit down, sir. The young woman?”

“She’s the nurse. Miss Anne Goren. Sit down, Anne.”

She was already sitting, in a chair I had moved up for her. I was making revisions in my opinion of Paul Fyfe. Probably he had been too impetuous, but the temptation had been strong; and the marks on her neck and cheeks and wrists must have been superficial since no scars were visible. Also a nurse’s uniform is much more provocative than the blue cotton print she was wearing, with a bolero jacket to match. Even in the cotton print, I could have — but skip it. She was there on business. She thanked me for the chair, coldly, no smile.

Doctor Buhl, in the red leather chair, demanded, “Well, what is it?”

Wolfe murmured, “Didn’t Mr. Fyfe tell you?”

“He told me that Paul thought there was something suspicious about Bert’s death and wanted to go to the police, and David and Louise and Vincent Tuttle couldn’t talk him out of it, and they agreed to get you to investigate and accept your decision, and he had talked with you, and you insisted on seeing me. I think it quite unnecessary. I am a reputable physician, and I signed a death certificate.”

“So I understand,” Wolfe murmured. “But if my decision is to be final it should be well fortified. I have no thought of challenging the propriety of your issuance of the death certificate. But there are a few questions. When did you last see Bertram Fyfe alive?”

“Saturday evening. I was there half an hour, and left at twenty minutes past seven. The others were there, having dinner in the living room. He had refused to go to a hospital. I had put him under an oxygen tent, but he kept jerking it off, he wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t get him to leave it on, and neither could Miss Goren. He was in considerable pain, or said he was, but his temperature was down to a hundred and two. He was a difficult patient. He couldn’t sleep, and I told the nurse to give him a quarter of a grain of morphine as soon as the guests had gone, and another quarter-grain an hour later if that didn’t work — he had had half a grain the night before.”

“Then you returned to Mount Kisco?”

“Yes.”

“Did you think he might die that night?”

“Of course not.”

“Then when you got word Sunday morning that he was dead, weren’t you surprised?”

“Of course I was.” Buhl flattened his palms on the chair arms. “Mr. Wolfe, I am tolerating this as a favor to David Fyfe. You are being inane. I’m sixty years old. I’ve been practising medicine for more than thirty years, and fully half of my patients have surprised me one way or another — by bleeding too much or too little, by getting a rash from taking aspirin, by refusing to show a temperature with a high blood count, by living when they should die, by dying when they should have lived. That is the universal experience of general practitioners. Yes, Bertram Fyfe’s death was a surprise, but it was by no means unprecedented. I examined the body with great care a few hours after he died, and found nothing whatever to make me question the cause of death. So I issued the certificate.”

“Why did you examine the body with great care?” Wolfe was still murmuring.

“Because the nurse had left him in the middle of the night — had been forced to leave — and I hadn’t been able to get a replacement. The best I could do was to arrange for one to report at seven in the morning. Under those circumstances I thought it well to make a thorough examination for the record.”

“And you are completely satisfied that pneumonia was the cause of death, with no contributing factors?”

“No, of course not. Complete satisfaction is a rarity in my profession, Mr. Wolfe. But I am satisfied that it was proper and correct to issue the certificate, that it was consistent with all the observable evidence, that — in layman’s language — Bertram Fyfe died of pneumonia. I am not quibbling. Long ago a patient of mine died of pneumonia, but it was a cold winter night and someone had opened the windows of his room and let the storm in. But in this case it was a hot summer night and the windows were closed. The apartment was air-conditioned, and I had instructed the nurse to keep the regulator at eighty in that room because a pneumonia patient needs warmth, and she had done so. In the case I mentioned, windows open to a winter storm were certainly a contributing factor, but in this case there was no evidence of any such factor.”