Rex Stout - When a Man Murders…

I was getting low on prospects. Back at the Park Avenue address, where the hallman and I were by now on intimate terms, he informed me that Mrs. Horne had come in, and he had told her that Mr. Goodwin had called several times and would return, and she had said to send me up.

At Apartment D on the twelfth floor I was admitted by a maid, properly outfitted, who showed me to a living room where a slice of Karnow’s money had been used with no great taste but a keen eye to comfort. I sat down, and almost at once got up again when Ann Horne entered. She met me and let me have a hand.

“We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “My husband may be home any minute. What do you do first, rubber hose?”

She was wearing a nice simple blue dress that either was silk or wanted to be, and had renovated her make-up since coming in from the street.

“Not here,” I told her. “Get the stole. I’m taking you to a dungeon.”

She flowed onto a couch. “Sit down and describe it to me. Rats, I hope?”

“No, we can’t get rats to stay. Bad air.” I sat. “As a matter of fact, I’ve decided the physical approach wouldn’t work with you, and we’re going after you mentally. That’s Mr. Wolfe’s department, and he never leaves the house, so I’ve come to take you down there. You can leave word for your husband, and he can join us.”

“That doesn’t appeal to me at all. Mentally I’m a wreck already. What’s the matter, are you afraid I can’t take it?”

“On the contrary, I’m afraid I can’t give it. Nature went to a lot of trouble with you, and I’d hate to spoil it. You’d enjoy a session with Nero Wolfe. He’s afraid of women anyhow, and you’d scare him stiff.”

She pulled a routine that I approved of. Knowing that if she took a cigarette I’d have to get up to light it, she first picked up a lighter and flicked it on, and then reached to a box for the cigarette. A darned good idea.

“What’s the score?” she asked, after inhaling and letting it out.

I told her. “Paul Aubry is charged with murder. Mr. Wolfe can earn a big fee only by clearing him. Mr. Wolfe has never let a big fee get away. So Aubry will be cleared. We’ll be glad to let you share the glory, though not the fee. Get the stole, and let’s go.”

“You’re irresistible,” she said admiringly. “It’s too bad about Paul.”

“Not at all. When he gets out he can marry his wife.”

“ If he gets out. Do you remember nursery rhymes?”

“I wrote them.”

“Then of course you remember this one:

“Sure, that’s one of my favorites. Only Aubry didn’t murder.”

She nodded. “That’s your line, of course, and you’re stuck with it.” She reached to crush her cigarette in a tray, then suddenly turned to me with her eyes flashing. “All this poppycock! All this twaddle about life being sacred! For everybody there’s just one life that’s sacred, and everybody knows it! Mine!” She spread her hand on her breast. “Mine! And Sidney’s was sacred to him, but he’s dead. So it’s too bad about Paul.”

“If you feel that way about it you ought to be ready to give him a lift.”

“I might be if I had anything to lift with.”

“Maybe I can furnish something. Last Friday you were at a conference at Jim Beebe’s office. Aubry put one of his business cards on Beebe’s desk. Why did you pick up that card, and what did you do with it?”

She stared at me a moment. Then she shook her head. “You’ll have to get out the rubber hose, or pliers to pull out my nails. Even then I may hold out.”

“Didn’t you pick up the card?”

“I did not.”

“Then who did?”

“I have no idea — if there was a card.”

“You don’t remember Aubry putting it on the desk? Or seeing it there?”

“No. But this begins to sound like something. You sound as if you’re really detecting. Are you?”

I nodded. “This is called the double sly squeeze. First I get you to deny you touched the card, which I have done. Then I display one of Aubry’s cards in a cellophane envelope, tell you it has fingerprints on it which I suspect are yours, and dare you to let me take your prints so I can check. You’re afraid to refuse—”

“Come and show me how you take my prints. I’ve never had it done.”

I was, I admit it, curious. Was she inviting physical contact because she was like that, or was she expecting to voodoo me, or was she merely passing the time? To find out I got up and went to her, took her offered hand and got it snugly in mine, palm up, and bent over it for a closeup. The hand seemed to be telling me that it didn’t mind the operation at all, and with the fingertips of my other hand I spread her fingers apart, bending lower.

Of course I was concentrated on the job. Whether the door from the outside hall to the foyer was opened so quietly that no sound came, or whether my ears caught a sound but I ignored it, what interrupted my investigation was her sudden tight grip on my hand as she straightened up and cried, “Don’t! You’re hurting me! Norman — thank God!”

My whirl around was checked for a second by her hold on my hand. For her size and sex she had muscle. I suppose to Norman Horne, approaching from behind me, it could have looked as if I were holding her, instead of her me, but even so it must have been obvious that I was turning, and he might have held his fire until I could at least see it coming. As it was, I was off balance when he plugged me on the side of the jaw, and I went clear down, sprawling. Added to the four touchdowns he had scored for Yale against Princeton, that made five.

“He was trying to force me—” Ann was saying with her sense of humor.

Probably I would have scrambled to my feet and departed, since Wolfe wouldn’t have appreciated my letting my personal feelings take charge when I was on a job, if it hadn’t been for Horne’s attitude. He was glaring down at me, with his fists ready, and it was doubtful if he would wait till I got farther up than on my knees. So I did a quick double roll, sprang all the way up, and faced him. He came at me wide open, as if I had been a dummy, and swung. There wouldn’t have been the slightest excuse for my missing the exact spot for a dead kidney punch, and I didn’t. Air exploded out of him, and he crumpled, not sprawling, but in a compact heap. Then he sort of settled to get comfortable.

His attractive wife took a couple of steps toward him, stopped to look at me, and said, “I’ll be damned.”

“You will if they consult me,” I told her emphatically, turned, went to the foyer and got my hat, and let myself out. On the way down in the elevator I felt my jaw and took a look at it in the mirror, and decided I would live.

I got home just at the dinner hour, seven-thirty, and since it takes an earthquake to postpone a meal in that house, and no mention of business is permitted at the table, my full report of the afternoon had to wait. If the main dish had been something like goulash or calves’ brains probably nothing unusual in my technique would have been apparent, but it was squabs, which of course have to be gnawed off the bones, and while I was working on the second one Wolfe demanded, “What the deuce is the matter with you?”

“Nothing. What?”

“You’re not eating, you’re nibbling.”

“Yeah. Broken jaw. With the compliments of Ann Horne.”

He stared. “A woman broke your jaw?”

“Sorry, no shoptalk at meals. I’ll tell you later.”

I did so, in the office, after dinner, and after I had looked into a little matter I was wondering about. I had obeyed the instruction, given me before lunch, to phone Saul Panzer, and Saul had said he would be at the office at two-thirty. By that time I had left. When, on the way from the dining room to the office, I asked Wolfe if Saul had come, he replied in one word, “Yes,” indicating that that was all I needed to know about it. Thinking it wouldn’t hurt me any to know more, I went and opened the safe and got out the little book from the cash drawer. Sometimes, in addition to the name and date and amount, Wolfe scribbles something about the purpose, but that time he hadn’t. The latest entry was merely the date and “SP $1000.” All that did was make me wonder further what Saul was expected to buy that might cost as much as a grand.