Rex Stout: The Last Witness

“Yes, sir. That’s Mr. Leonard Ashe.”

“When and where did you meet him?”

“In July he came to my office on Forty-seventh Street. First he phoned, and then he came.”

“Can you give the day in July?”

“The twelfth. A Monday.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked how my answering service worked, and I told him, and he said he wanted it for his home telephone at his apartment on East Seventy-third Street. He paid cash for a month in advance. He wanted twenty-four-hour service.”

“Did he want any special service?”

“He didn’t ask me for any, but two days later he contacted Marie Willis and offered her five hundred dollars if she—”

The witness was interrupted from two directions at once. The defense attorney, a champion named Jimmy Donovan whose batting average on big criminal cases had topped the list of the New York bar for ten years, left his chair with his mouth open to object; and Mandelbaum showed the witness a palm to stop him.

“Just a minute, Mr. Bagby. Just answer my questions. Did you accept Leonard Ashe as a client?”

“Sure, there was no reason not to.”

“What was the number of his telephone at his home?”

“Rhinelander two-three-eight-three-eight.”

“Did you give his name and that number a place on one of your switchboards?”

“Yes, sir, one of the three boards at the apartment on East Sixty-ninth Street. That’s the Rhinelander district.”

“What was the name of the employee who attended that board — the one with Leonard Ashe’s number on it?”

“Marie Willis.”

A shadow of stir and murmur rippled across the packed audience, and Judge Corbett on the bench turned his head to give it a frown and then went back to his knitting.

Bagby was going on. “Of course at night there’s only one girl on the three boards — they rotate on that — but for daytime I keep a girl at her own board at least five days a week, and six if I can. That way she gets to know her clients.”

“And Leonard Ashe’s number was on Marie Willis’s board?”

“Yes, sir.”

“After the routine arrangements for serving Leonard Ashe as a client had been completed, did anything happen to bring him or his number to your personal attention?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What and when? First, when?”

Bagby took a second to make sure he had it right before swearing to it. “It was Thursday, three days after Ashe had ordered the service. That was July fifteenth. Marie phoned me at my office and said she wanted to see me privately about something important. I asked if it could wait till she was off the board at six o’clock, and she said yes, and a little after six I went up to Sixty-ninth Street and we went into her room at the apartment. She told me Ashe had phoned her the day before and asked her to meet him somewhere to discuss some details about servicing his number. She told him such a discussion should be with me, but he insisted—”

A pleasant but firm baritone cut in. “If Your Honor pleases.” Jimmy Donovan was on his feet. “I submit that the witness may not testify to what Marie Willis and Mr. Ashe said to each other when he was not present.”

“Certainly not,” Mandelbaum agreed shortly. “He is reporting what Marie Willis told him had been said.”

Judge Corbett nodded. “That should be kept clear. You understand that, Mr. Bagby?”

“Yes, sir.” Bagby bit his lip. “I mean Your Honor.”

“Then go ahead. What Miss Willis said to you and you to her.”

“Well, she said she had agreed to meet Ashe because he was a theatrical producer and she wanted to be an actress. I hadn’t known she was stage-struck but I know it now. So she had gone to his office on Forty-fifth Street as soon as she was off the board, and after he talked some and asked some questions he told her — this is what she told me — he told her he wanted her to listen in on calls to his home number during the daytime. All she would have to do, when his light on her board went on and the buzzes started, if the buzzes stopped and the light went off — that would mean someone had answered the phone at his home — she would plug in and listen to the conversation. Then each evening she would phone him and report. That’s what she said Ashe had asked her to do. She said he counted out five hundred dollars in bills and offered them to her and told her he’d give her another thousand if she went along.”

Bagby stopped for wind. Mandelbaum prodded him. “Did she say anything else?”

“Yes, sir. She said she knew she should have turned him down flat, but she didn’t want to make him sore, so she told him she wanted to think it over for a day or two. Then she said she had slept on it and decided what to do. She said of course she knew that what Ashe was after was phone calls to his wife, and aside from anything else she wouldn’t spy on his wife, because his wife was Robina Keane, who had given up her career as an actress two years ago to marry Ashe, and Marie worshiped Robina Keane as her ideal. That’s what Marie told me. She said she had decided she must do three things. She must tell me about it because Ashe was my client and she was working for me. She must tell Robina Keane about it, to warn her, because Ashe would probably get someone else to do the spying for him. It occurred to me that her real reason for wanting to tell Robina Keane might be that she hoped—”

Mandelbaum stopped him. “What occurred to you isn’t material, Mr. Bagby. Did Marie tell you the third thing she had decided she must do?”

“Yes, sir. That she must tell Ashe that she was going to tell his wife. She said she had to because at the start of her talk with him she had promised Ashe she would keep it confidential, so she had to warn him she was withdrawing her promise.”

“Did she say when she intended to do those three things?”

The witness nodded. “She had already done one of them, telling me. She said she had phoned Ashe and told him she would be at his office at seven o’clock. That was crowding it a little, because she had the evening shift that day and would have to be back at the boards at eight o’clock. It crowded me too because it gave me no time to talk her out of it. I went downtown with her in a taxi, to Forty-fifth Street, where Ashe’s office was, and did my best but couldn’t move her.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I tried to get her to lay off. If she went through with her program it might not do any harm to my business, but again it might. I tried to persuade her to let me handle it by going to Ashe and telling him she had told me of his offer and I didn’t want him for a client, and then drop it and forget it, but she was dead set on warning Robina Keane, and to do that she had to withdraw her promise to Ashe. I hung on until she entered the elevator to go up to Ashe’s office, but I couldn’t budge her.”

“Did you go up with her?”

“No, that wouldn’t have helped any. She was going through with it, and what could I do?”

So, I was thinking to myself, that’s how it is. It looked pretty tough to me, and I glanced at Wolfe, but his eyes were closed, so I turned my head the other way to see how the gentleman in the dark blue suit seated next to the officer was taking it. Apparently it looked pretty tough to Leonard Ashe too. With deep creases slanting along the jowls of his dark bony face from the corners of his wide full mouth, and his sunken dark eyes, he was certainly a prime subject for the artists who sketch candidates for the hot seat for the tabloids, and for three days they had been making the most of it. He was no treat for the eyes, and I took mine away from him, to the left, where his wife sat in the front row of the audience.

I had never worshiped Robina Keane as my ideal, but I had liked her fine in a couple of shows, and she was giving a good performance for her first and only courtroom appearance — either being steadfastly loyal to her husband or putting on an act, but good in either case. She was dressed quietly and she sat quietly, but she wasn’t trying to pretend she wasn’t young and beautiful. Exactly how she and her older and unbeautiful husband stood with each other was anybody’s guess, and everybody was guessing. One extreme said he was her whole world and he had been absolutely batty to suspect her of any hoop-rolling; the other extreme said she had quit the stage only to have more time for certain promiscuous activities, and Ashe had been a sap not to know it sooner; and anywhere in between. I wasn’t ready to vote. Looking at her, she might have been an angel. Looking at him, it must have taken something drastic to get him that miserable, though I granted that being locked up two months on a charge of murder would have some effect.