Rex Stout: Before Midnight

I went and took the tray from Fritz and convoyed it to the kitchen.

If I had known what was on the way to him in the shape of Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles, founder and president of the Women’s Nature League, I wouldn’t have had the heart to hijack the beer. And if Wolfe had known, he probably would have refused the case and sent LBA and their counselor on their way.

I should try to describe her outfit, but I won’t; I will only say she had swiped it from a museum. As for describing her, it’s hard to believe. The inside corners of her eyes were trying to touch above a long thin nose, and nearly made it. Only an inch of brow was visible because straggles of gray hair flopped down over the rest. The left half of her mouth slanted up and the right half slanted down, and that made you think her chin was lower on one side than on the other, though maybe it wasn’t. She was exactly my height, five feet eleven, and she strode.

She sat halfway back in the red leather chair, with both hands on her bag in her lap and her back straight and stiff. “I fail to see,” she told Wolfe, “that the death of that man has any effect on the contest. Murder or not. There was nothing in the rules about anybody dying.”

When she spoke her lips wanted to move perpendicular to the slant, but her jaw preferred straight up and down. You might have thought that after so many years, at least sixty, they would have come to an understanding, but nothing doing.

Wolfe was taking her in. “Certainly, madam, the rules did not contemplate sudden and violent death, and made no provision for it. The contest is affected, not by the death itself, but by the action of the police in asking the contestants not to leave the city until further—”

“They didn’t ask me! They told me! They said if I left I would be brought back and arrested for murder!”

I shook my head. So she was that kind. No homicide cop and no assistant DA could possibly have said anything of the sort.

“They are sometimes ebullient,” Wolfe told her. “Anyhow, I wanted to discuss not only the contest, but also you. After the prizes are awarded there will be great demand for information about the winners, and my clients want to be able to supply it. The enforced delay gives us this opportunity. My assistant, Mr. Goodwin, will take notes. I assume that you have never married, Miss Frazee?”

“I have not. And I won’t.” Her eyes took in my notebook. “I want to see anything that’s going to be printed about me.”

“You will. Have you ever won a prize in a contest?”

“I have never entered a contest. I despise contests.”

“Indeed. Didn’t you enter this one?”

“Of course I did. That’s a stupid question.”

“No doubt.” Wolfe was polite. “But surely that’s an interesting paradox — you despise contests, but you entered one. There must have been a compelling motive?”

“I fail to see that my motive is anybody’s business, but I certainly am not ashamed of it. Ten years ago I founded the Women’s Nature League of America. We have many thousand members, too many to count. What is your opinion of women who smear themselves with grease and soot and paint and stink themselves up with stuff made from black tar and decayed vegetable matter and tumors from male deer?”

“I haven’t formulated one, madam.”

“Of course you have. You’re a male.” Her eyes darted to me. “What’s yours, young man?”

“It depends,” I told her. “The tumor part sounds bad.”

“It smells bad. It’s been used for thirty centuries. Musk. In the Garden of Eden, when Eve’s face was dirty what did she do? She washed it with good clean water. What do women do today? They rub it in with grease! Look at their lips and fingernails and toes and eyelashes — and other places. The Women’s Nature League is the champion and the friend of the natural woman, and the natural woman was Eve, Eve the way God made her. The only true beauty is natural beauty, and I know, because I was denied that wondrous gift. I am not merely unlovely, I am ugly. The well-favored ones have no right to pollute the beauty of nature. I know!”

Her back had bowed a little, and she straightened it. “That knowledge came to me early, and it has been my staff and my banner all my life. I have always had to work for my bread, but I saved some money, and ten years ago I used some of it to start the League. We have many members, over three thousand, but the dues are small and we are severely limited. Last fall, last September, when I saw the advertisement of the contest, I thought again what I had thought many times before, that it was hopeless because there was too much money against us, millions and millions, and then, sitting there looking at the advertisement, the idea came to me. Why not use their money for us? I considered it and approved of it. A majority of our members live in or near Los Angeles, and most of them are cultured and educated women. I phoned to some and asked them to phone others, and all of them were enthusiastic about it and wanted to help. I organized it, and you don’t have to be beautiful to know how to organize. Within two weeks there were over three hundred of us working at it. We had no serious trouble with any of the original twenty, the twenty that were published — except Number Eighteen, and we finally got that. With the second group, to break the tie, with those we had to get five in less than a week, which was unfair because the verses were all mailed at the same time in New York and it took longer for them to get to me, and they were harder, much harder, but we got them, and I mailed them ten hours before the deadline. We’re going to get these too.” She tapped her bag, in her lap. “No question about it. No question at all. We’re going to get it, no matter how hard they are. Half a million dollars. For the League.”

Wolfe was regarding her, trying not to frown and nearly succeeding. “Not necessarily half a million, madam. You have four competitors.”

“The first prize,” she said confidently. “Half a million.” Suddenly she leaned forward. “Do you ever have a flash?”

The frown won. “Of what? Anger? Wit?”

“Just a flash — of what is coming. I had two of them long ago, when I was young, and then never any more until the day I saw the advertisement. It came on me, into me, so swiftly that I only knew it was there — the certainty that we would get their money. Certainty can be a very sweet thing, very beautiful, and that day it filled me from head to foot, and I went to a mirror to see if I could see it. I couldn’t, but it was there, so there has never been any question about it. The first prize. Our budget committee is already working on projects, what to do with it.”

“Indeed.” The frown was there to stay. “The five new verses, those that Mr. Dahlmann gave you last evening — how did you send them to your colleagues? Telephone or telegraph or airmail?”

“Ha,” she said. Apparently that was all.

“Because,” Wolfe observed matter-of-factly, “you have sent them, naturally, so they could go to work. Haven’t you?”

Her back was straight again. “I fail to see that that is anybody’s business. There is nothing in the rules about getting assistance. Nothing was said about it last night. This morning I telephoned my vice-president, Mrs. Charles Draper, because I had to, to tell her I couldn’t return today and I didn’t know when I could. It was a private conversation.”

Evidently it was going to stay private. Wolfe dropped it and switched. “Another reason for seeing you, Miss Frazee, was to apologize on behalf of Lippert, Buff and Assa, my clients, for the foolish joke that Mr. Dahlmann indulged in last evening — when he exhibited a paper and said it was the answers to the verses he had just given you. Not only was it witless, it was in bad taste. I tender you the apologies of his associates.”