Rex Stout: Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue

“About going to sleep, Mr. Tuttle, you said after one o’clock. That was after Paul had got you out of bed to let him in?”

“Yes.” He had a soothing hand on his wife’s arm. “It took a little time, hearing what Paul had to say and getting him settled on the couch. Then we took a look in Bert’s room and found him asleep, and went to bed.”

“Did you sleep right through until Paul woke you around six in the morning?”

“I think my wife did. She was tired out. She may have stirred a little, but I don’t think she awoke. I went to the bathroom a couple of times, I usually do during the night, but except for that I slept until Paul called us. The second time I went and opened the door of Bert’s room, and didn’t hear anything, so I didn’t go in. Why? Is this important?”

“Not especially.” Wolfe darted a glance at Louise, alert to danger, and back at him. “I am thinking of Mr. Arrow and trying to cover all the possibilities. Of course he had a key to the apartment, and so might have entered during the night, performed an errand if he had one, and left again. Might he not?”

Tuttle considered. To watch him consider I had to make an effort to forget his shiny dome and concentrate on his features. It would have been simpler if his eyes and nose and mouth had been on top of his head. “Possibly,” he conceded, “but I doubt it. I’m not a very sound sleeper and I think I would have heard him. And he would have had to go through the living room and Paul was there on the couch, but of course Paul was pretty well gone.”

“I was all gone,” Paul asserted. “He would have had to slug me again if he wanted me to notice him.” He looked at Wolfe. “It’s an idea. What kind of an errand?”

“No special kind. I’m merely asking questions. — Mr. Tuttle, when did you next see Mr. Arrow?”

“That morning, Sunday morning, he came to the apartment around nine o’clock, just after Doctor Buhl arrived.”

“Where had he been?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him and he didn’t say. It was — well, it was in the presence of death. He asked us a great many questions, some of them impertinent, I thought, but under those circumstances I made allowances.”

Wolfe leaned back, closed his eyes, and lowered his chin. The brothers sat and looked at him. Tuttle turned to his wife, smoothing her shoulder and murmuring to her, and before long she uncovered her face and lifted her head. He got a nice clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, and she took it and dabbed around with it. There was no sign of any tear gullies down her cheeks.

Wolfe opened his eyes and moved them from left to right and back again. “I see no likely advantage,” he pronounced, “in keeping you longer. I had hoped it would be possible to reach a decision this evening” — he leveled at Paul — “but your conjecture about the morphine merits a little inquiry — by me, that is, and of course discreet. It would be no service to expose you to an action for slander.” His eyes went to David and back across to Tuttle. “By the way, I haven’t mentioned that Doctor Buhl asked me to let you know that if Miss Goren is charged with negligence he will advise her to bring such an action, and he will support it. She maintains that before she left she put hot water in the bags, and he believes her. You will hear further from me, probably not later—”

The doorbell rang. When we have company in the office Fritz usually answers it, but I had a hunch, which I frequently do, and I got up and, passing behind the customers’ chairs, reached the hall in time to head Fritz off on his way to the front. The stoop light was on, and through the panel I saw a stranger — a square-shouldered specimen about my age and nearly my size. Telling Fritz I’d take it, I went and opened the door to the extent allowed by the chain of the bolt and asked through the crack, “Can I help you?”

A soft drawly voice slipped through. “I guess so. My name’s Arrow. Johnny Arrow. I want to see Nero Wolfe. If you open the door that’ll help.”

“Yeah, but I’ll have to ask him. Hold it a minute.” I shut the door, got a piece of paper from my pocket and wrote “Arrow” on it, returned to the office and crossed to Wolfe’s desk, and handed him the paper. The visitors were out of their chairs, ready to leave.

Wolfe glanced at the paper. “Confound it,” he grumped. “I thought I was through for the day. But perhaps I can — very well.”

I will concede that I can be charged with negligence, since I knew what had happened Saturday night in the Churchill bar, but I deny that it was intentional. I have as much respect for the furniture in the office as Wolfe has, or Fritz. I just didn’t stop to consider, as I went to the front door and let the uranium prince in and ushered him to the office and stepped aside to observe expressions on faces. When, the instant he caught sight of Paul Fyfe, Arrow went for him, I was too far away and therefore one of the yellow chairs got busted. The consolation was that I saw a swell demonstration of how Paul had got his jaw bruised on both sides. Arrow jabbed with his left, hard enough to rock him off balance, and then swung his right and sent him some six feet crashing onto the chair. As he was reaching to yank him up, presumably to attend to the other eye, I got there and put my arm around his neck from behind, and my knee in his back. Tuttle was there, trying to grab Arrow’s sleeve. David was circling around, apparently with the notion of getting in between them, which is rotten tactics. Louise was making shrill noises.

“Okay,” I told them, “just back off. I’ve got him locked.” Arrow tried to wriggle, found that the only question was which would snap first, his neck or his back, and quit. Wolfe spoke, disgusted, saying they had better go. Paul had scrambled to his feet, and for a second I thought he was going to take a poke at Arrow while I held him, but David had his arm, pulling him away. Tuttle went to Louise and started her out, and David got Paul moving. At the door to the hall David turned to protest to Wolfe, “You shouldn’t have let him in, you might have known.” When they were all in the hall I unlocked Arrow and went to see them out, and as they crossed the threshold I wished them good night, but only David wished me one in return.

Back in the office Johnny Arrow was sitting in the red leather chair, working his head gingerly forward and back to check on his neck. I may have been a little thorough, but with a complete stranger how can you tell?

I sat with my back to my desk and took him in as an object with assorted points of interest. He was a uranium millionaire, the very newest kind. He was a chronic jaw-puncher, no matter where. He knew a good-looking nurse when he saw one, and acted accordingly. And he had been nominated as a candidate for the electric chair. Quite a character for one so young. He wasn’t bad-looking himself, unless you insist on the kind they use for cigarette ads. His face and hands weren’t as rough and weathered as I would have expected of a man who had spent five years in the wilderness pecking at rocks, but since finding Black Elbow he had had time to smooth up some.

He quit working his head and returned my regard with a stare of curiosity from brown eyes that had wrinkles at their corners from squinting for uranium. “That was quite a squeeze,” he said in his soft drawl, no animosity. “I thought my neck was broken.”

“It should have been,” Wolfe told him severely. “Look at that chair.”

“Oh, I’ll pay for the chair.” He got a big roll of lettuce from his pants pocket. “How much?”

“Mr. Goodwin will send you a bill.” Wolfe was scowling. “My office is not an arena for gladiators. You came, I suppose, in response to the message we left for you?”