Rex Stout - Before Midnight

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

“Brandy,” Wolfe told me.

“No,” she said, “I’m all right. I couldn’t drink brandy. I guess what did it was what you said about help. I haven’t had any. The first few weeks weren’t bad, but after that they got harder, and later, when they got really hard... I don’t know how I did it. I said I wasn’t going to say anything, but after what you said about Miss Frazee having three hundred women helping her... well. I’m thirty-two years old, and I have two children, and my husband is a bookkeeper and makes fifty dollars a week. I was a schoolteacher before I married. I had been going along for years, just taking it, and I saw this contest and decided to win it. I’m going to have a nice home and a car — two cars, one for my husband and one for me — and I’m going to have some clothes, and I’m going to send my husband to school and make him a CPA if he has it in him. That day I saw the contest, I took charge that day. You know what I mean.”

“Indeed I do,” Wolfe muttered.

“So when they got hard there was no one I could ask for help, and anyway, if I had got help I would have had to share the prize. I didn’t do much eating or sleeping the last seven weeks of the main contest, but the worst was when they sent us five to do in a week to break the tie. I didn’t go to bed that week, and I was afraid I had one of them wrong, and I didn’t get them mailed until just before midnight — I went to the post office and made them let me see them stamp the envelope. After all that, do you think I’m going to let somebody get it by cheating? With three hundred women working at it while we’re not allowed to go home?”

After seeing her handle the fit I didn’t think she was going to let somebody get anything she had made up her mind to have, with or without cheating.

“It is manifestly unfair,” Wolfe conceded, “but I doubt if it can be called cheating, at least in the legal sense. And as for cheating, it’s conceivable that someone else had a bolder idea than Miss Frazee and acted upon it. By killing Mr. Dahlmann in order to get the answers.”

“I’m not going to say anything about that,” she declared. “I’ve decided not to.”

“The police have talked with you, of course.”

“Yes. They certainly have. For hours.”

“And they asked you what you thought last evening when Mr. Dahlmann displayed a paper and said it contained the answers. What did you tell them?”

“I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Did you tell the police that? That you wouldn’t talk about it?”

“No. I hadn’t decided then. I decided later.”

“After consultation with someone?”

She shook her head. “With whom would I consult?”

“I don’t know. A lawyer. A phone call to your husband.”

“I haven’t got a lawyer. I wouldn’t call my husband — I know what he’d say. He thinks I’m crazy. I couldn’t pay a lawyer anyway because I haven’t got any money. They paid for the trip here, and the hotel, but nothing for incidentals. I was late for my appointment with you because I got on the wrong bus. I haven’t consulted anybody. I made the decision myself.”

“So you told the police what you thought when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not tell me? I assure you, madam, that I have only one interest in the matter, on behalf of my clients, to make sure that the prizes are fairly and honestly awarded. You see, of course, that that will be extremely difficult if in fact one of the contestants took that paper from Mr. Dahlmann and it contains the answers. You see that.”

“Yes.”

“However, it is the belief of my clients — and their contention — that the paper did not contain the answers, that Mr. Dahlmann was only jesting; and that therefore the secrecy of the answers is still intact. Do you challenge that contention?”

“No.”

“You accept it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must have told the police that when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper you regarded it as a joke, and the sequel is plain: it would be absurd to suspect you of going to his apartment and killing him to get it. So it is reasonable to suppose that you are not suspected. — Archie, your phone call from the corner. Did you see anyone?”

“Yes, sir. Art Whipple. He was here on the Heller case.”

“Tell Mrs. Wheelock about it.”

I met her eyes. “I was hanging out up the street when you came, and a Homicide detective was following you. I exchanged a few words with him. If you want to spot him when you leave, he’s about my size, drags his feet a little, and is wearing a dark gray suit and a gray snap-brim hat.”

“He was following me?”

“Right.”

Her eyes left me for Wolfe. “Isn’t that what they do?” But her left hand had started to tremble, and she had to grasp it with the other one and squeeze it. Wolfe shut his eyes, probably expecting some more tongue control. Instead, she arose abruptly and asked, “May I have — a bathroom?”

I told her certainly, and went and opened the door of the one partitioned off in the far corner, to the left of my desk, and she came and passed through, closing the door behind her.

She was in there a good quarter of an hour without making a sound. The partitions, like all the inner walls on the ground floor, are soundproofed, but I have sharp ears and heard nothing whatever. I said something to Wolfe, but he only grunted. After a little he looked up at the clock: twenty to four. Thereafter he looked at it every two minutes; at four sharp he would leave for the plant rooms. There were just nine minutes to go when the door in the partition opened and she was back with us.

She came and stood at Wolfe’s desk, across from him. “I beg your pardon,” she said in her low even voice. “I had to take some pills. The food at the hotel is quite good, but I simply can’t eat. I haven’t eaten much for quite a while. Do you want to tell me anything else?”

“Milk toast,” Wolfe said gruffly. “My cook, Fritz Brenner, makes it superbly. Sit down.”

“I couldn’t swallow it. Really.”

“Then hot bouillon. Our own. It can be ready in eight minutes. I have to leave you, but Mr. Goodwin—”

“I couldn’t. I’m going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee — I think I am — I’ll think about it on the bus. That’s cheating.” She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.

Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn’t break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it. When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.

“You put the answers in the safe,” he stated.

“Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O’Garro and Talbott Heery were there, but I didn’t report that Heery brought me downtown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him—”

“Verbatim, please.”

I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon’s interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, “For a footnote, Heery couldn’t knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?”

He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn’t been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.