Rex Stout: The Zero Clue

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Well, search me. I’ve got patents on six inventions, and none of them is on the market. One of them is not perfect — I know damn well it’s not — but it needs only one more trick to make it an absolute whiz. I can’t find the trick. I’ve read about this Heller, and it seemed to me that if I gave him all the dope, all the stuff he needed for one of his formulas, there was a good chance he would come up with the answer. So I went to him. I spent three long sessions with him. He finally thought he had enough to try to work up a formula, and he was taking a crack at it, and I had a date to see him this morning and find out how it was going.”

Ennis stopped for emphasis. “So I’m hoping. After all the sweating I’ve done and the dough I’ve spent, maybe I’m going to get it at last. So I go. I go upstairs to his office and shoot him dead, and then I go to the waiting room and sit down and wait.” He smiled. “Listen. If you want to say there are smarter men than me, I won’t argue. Maybe you’re smarter yourself. But I’m not a lunatic, am I?”

Wolfe’s lips were pursed. “I won’t commit myself on that, Mr. Ennis. But you have by no means demonstrated that it is fatuous to suppose you might have killed Heller. What if he devised a formula from the data you supplied, discovered the trick that would transform your faulty contraption into a whiz, as you expressed it, and refused to divulge it except on intolerable terms? That would be a magnificent motive for murder.”

“It sure would,” Ennis agreed without reservation. “I would have killed him with pleasure.” He leaned forward and was suddenly intense and in dead earnest. “Look. I’m headed for the top. I’ve got what I need in here” — he tapped his forehead — “and nothing and nobody is going to stop me. If Heller had done what you said, I might have killed him, I don’t deny it; but he didn’t.” He jerked to Cramer. “And I’m glad of a chance to tell you what I’ve told those bozos that have been grilling me. I want to go through Heller’s papers to see if I can find the formula he worked up for me. Maybe I can’t recognize it, and if I do I doubt if I can figure it out, but I want to look for it, and not next year either.”

“We’re doing the looking,” Cramer said dryly. “If we find anything that can be identified as relating to you, you’ll see it, and eventually you may get it.”

“I don’t want it eventually, I want it now. Do you know how long I’ve been working on that thing? Four years! It’s mine, you understand that, it’s mine!” He was getting upset.

“Calm down, bud,” Cramer advised him. “We’re right with you in seeing to it that you get what’s yours.”

“Meanwhile,” Wolfe said, “there’s a point or two. When you entered that building this morning, why did you stop and gape at Mr. Goodwin and Miss Maturo?”

Ennis’s chin went up. “Who says I did?”

“I do, on information. Archie. Did he?”

“Yes,” I stated. “Rudely.”

“Well,” Ennis told Wolfe, “he’s bigger than I am. Maybe I did, at that.”

“Why? Any special reason?”

“It depends on what you call special. I thought I recognized her, a girl I knew once, and then saw I was wrong. She was much too young.”

“Very well. I would like to explore my suggestion, which you reject, that Heller was trying to chouse you out of your invention as perfected by his calculations. I want you to describe the invention as you described it to him, particularly the flaw which you had tried so persistently to rectify.”

I won’t attempt to report what followed, and I couldn’t anyhow, since I understood less than a tenth of it. I did gather that the invention was a gadget intended to supersede all existing X-ray machines, but beyond that I got lost in a wilderness of cathodes and atomicity and coulombs, and if you ask me, Wolfe and Cramer were no better off. If talking like a character out of space-science fiction proves you’re an inventor, that bird was certainly one. He stood up to make motions to illustrate, and grabbed a pad and pencil from Wolfe’s desk to explain with drawings, and after a while it began to look as if it would be impossible to stop him. They finally managed it, with Sergeant Stebbins lending a hand by marching over and taking his elbow. On his way out he turned at the door to call back, “I want that formula, and don’t you forget it!”

The female of an executive type was still in mink, or rather she had it with her, but she was not so brisk. As I said before, that morning I would have classified her as between twenty and sixty, but the day’s experiences had worn her down closer to reality, and I would now have put her at forty-seven. However, she was game. With all she had gone through, at that late hour she still let us know, as she deposited the mink on a chair, sat on another, crossed her legs, got out a cigarette and let me light it, and thanked me for an ashtray, that she was cool and composed and in command.

My typing her as an executive had been justified by the transcripts. Her name really was Agatha Abbey, and she was executive editor of a magazine, Mode , which I did not read regularly. After Cramer had explained the nature of the session, including Wolfe’s status, Wolfe took aim and went for the center of the target.

“Miss Abbey. I presume you’d like to get to bed — I know I would — so we won’t waste time flouncing around. Three things about you.” He held up a finger. “First. You claim that you never saw Leo Heller. It is corroborated that you had not visited his place before today, but whether you had seen him elsewhere will be thoroughly investigated by men armed with pictures of him. They will ask people at your place of business, at your residence, and at other likely spots. If it is found that you had in fact met him and conferred with him, you won’t like it.”

He raised two fingers. “Second. You refused to tell why you went to see Heller. That does not brand you as a miscreant, since most people have private matters which they innocently and jealously guard, but you clung to your refusal beyond reason, even after it was explained that that information had to be given by all of the six persons who called on Heller this morning, and you were assured that it would be revealed to no one unless it proved to be an item of evidence in a murder case. You finally did give the information, but only when you perceived that if you didn’t there would be a painstaking investigation into your affairs and movements.”

He raised three fingers. “Third. When the information was wormed out of you, it was almost certainly flummery. You said that you wanted to engage Heller to find out who had stolen a ring from a drawer of your desk some three months ago. That was childish nonsense. I grant that even though the ring was insured you may have been intent on disclosing the culprit, and the police had failed you; but if you have enough sense to get and hold a well-paid job in a highly competitive field, as you have, surely you would have known that it was stupid to suppose Heller could help you. Even if he were not a humbug, if he were honestly applying the laws of probability to complex problems with some success, singling out a sneak thief from among a hundred possibilities was plainly an operation utterly unsuited to his technique, and even to his pretensions.”

Wolfe moved his head an inch to the left and back again. “No, Miss Abbey, it won’t do. I want to know whether you saw Leo Heller before today, and in any case what you wanted of him.”

The tip of her tongue had appeared four times, to flick across her lips. She spoke in a controlled, thin, steely voice. “You make it sound overwhelming, Mr. Wolfe.”