Rex Stout: The Zero Clue

Cramer said no thanks, he would, and left the room.

By the time he returned, citizen number two had been brought in by Stebbins, introduced to Wolfe, and seated where Winslow had been. She was Susan Maturo. She looked fully as harassed as she had that morning, but I wouldn’t say much more so. There was now, of course, a new aspect to the matter: did she look harassed or guilty? She was undeniably attractive, but so had Maude Vail been, and she had poisoned two husbands. There was the consideration that if Heller had been killed by the client whom he suspected of having committed a crime, it must have been a client he had seen previously at least once, or how could he have got grounds for a suspicion; and, according to Susan Maturo, she had never called on Heller before and had never seen him. But actually that eliminated neither her nor Agatha Abbey, who also claimed that that morning had been her first visit. It was known that Heller had sometimes made engagements by telephone to meet prospective clients elsewhere, and Miss Maturo and Miss Abbey might well have been among that number.

Opening up on her, Wolfe was not too belligerent, probably because she had accepted an offer of beer and, after drinking some, had licked her lips. It pleases him when people share his joys.

“You are aware, Miss Maturo,” he told her, “that you are in a class by yourself. The evidence indicates that Mr. Heller was killed by one of the six people who entered that building this morning to call on him, and you are the only one of the six who departed before eleven o’clock, Mr. Heller’s appointment hour. Your explanation of your departure as given in your statement is close to incoherent. Can’t you improve on it?”

She looked at me. I did not throw her a kiss, but neither did I glower. “I’ve reported what you told me,” I assured her, “exactly as you said it.”

She nodded at me vaguely and turned to Wolfe. “Do I have to go through it again?”

“You will probably,” Wolfe advised her, “have to go through it again a dozen times. Why did you leave?”

She gulped, started to speak, found no sound was coming out, and had to start over again. “You know about the explosion and fire at the Montrose Hospital a month ago?”

“Certainly. I read newspapers.”

“You know that three hundred and two people died there that night. I was there working, in Ward G on the sixth floor. In addition to those who died, many were injured, but I went all through it and I didn’t get a scratch or any burn. My dearest friend was killed, burned to death trying to save the patients, and another dear friend is crippled for life, and a young doctor I was engaged to marry — he was killed in the explosion, and others I knew. I don’t know how I came out of it without a mark, because I’m sure I tried to help. I’m positively sure of that, but I did, and that’s one trouble, I guess, because I couldn’t be glad about it — how could I?”

She seemed to expect an answer, so Wolfe muttered, “No. Not to be expected.”

“I am not,” she said, “the kind of person who hates people.”

She stopped, so Wolfe said, “No?”

“No, I’m not. I never have been. But I began to hate the man — or if it was a woman, I don’t care which — that put the bomb there and did it. I can’t say I went out of my mind because I don’t think I did, but that’s how I felt. After two weeks I tried to go back to work at another hospital, but I couldn’t. I read all there was in the newspapers, hoping they would catch him, and I couldn’t think of anything else, and I dreamed about it every night, and I went to the police and wanted to help, but of course they had already questioned me and I had told everything I knew. The days went by, and it looked as if they never would catch him, and I wanted to do something, and I had read about that Leo Heller, and I decided to go to him and get him to do it.”

Wolfe made a noise and her head jerked up. “I said I hated him!”

Wolfe nodded. “So you did. Go on.”

“And I went, that’s all. I had some money saved, and I could borrow some, to pay him. But while I was sitting there in the waiting room, with that man and woman there, I suddenly thought I must be crazy, I must have got so bitter and vindictive I didn’t realize what I was doing, and I wanted to think about it, and I got up and went. Going down in the elevator I felt as if a crisis had passed — that’s a feeling a nurse often has about other people — and then as I left the elevator I heard the names Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, and the idea came to me, why not get them to find him? So I spoke to Mr. Goodwin, and there I was again, but I couldn’t make myself tell him about it, so I just told him I wanted to see Nero Wolfe to ask his advice, and he said he would try to arrange it, and he would phone me or I could phone him.”

She fluttered a hand. “That’s how it was.”

Wolfe regarded her. “It’s not incoherent, but neither is it sapient. Do you consider yourself an intelligent woman?”

“Why — yes. Enough to get along. I’m a good nurse, and a good nurse has to be intelligent.”

“Yet you thought that quack could expose the man who planted the bomb in the hospital by his hocus-pocus?”

“I thought he did it scientifically. I knew he had a great reputation, just as you have.”

“Good heavens.” Wolfe opened his eyes wide at her. “It is indeed a bubble, as Jacques said. What were you going to ask my advice about?”

“Whether you thought there was any chance — whether you thought the police were going to find him.”

Wolfe’s eyes were back to normal, half shut again. “This performance I’m engaged in, Miss Maturo — this inquisition of a person involved by circumstance in a murder — is a hubbub in a jungle, at least in its preliminary stage. Blind, I grope, and proceed by feel. You say you never saw Mr. Heller, but you can’t prove it. I am free to assume that you had seen him, not at his office, and talked with him; that you were convinced, no matter how, that he had planted the bomb in the hospital and caused the holocaust; and that, moved by an obsessive rancor, you went to his place and killed him. One ad—”

She was gawking. “Why on earth would I think he had planted the bomb?”

“I have no idea. As I said, I’m groping. One advantage of that assumption would be that you have confessed to a hatred so overpowering that surely it might have impelled you to kill if and when you identified its object. It is Mr. Cramer, not I, who is deploying the hosts of justice in this enterprise, but no doubt two or three men are calling on your friends and acquaintances to learn if you have ever hinted a suspicion of Leo Heller in connection with the hospital disaster. Also they are probably asking whether you had any grudge against the hospital that might have provoked you to plant the bomb yourself.”

“My God!” A muscle at the side of her neck was twitching. “Me? Is that what it’s like?”

“It is indeed. That wouldn’t be incongruous. Your proclaimed abhorrence of the perpetrator could be simply the screeching of your remorse.”

“Well, it isn’t.” Suddenly she was out of her chair, and a bound took her to Wolfe’s desk, and her palms did a tattoo on the desk as she leaned forward at him. “Don’t you dare say a thing like that! The six people I cared for most in the world — they all died that night! How would you feel?” More tattoo. “How would anybody feel?”

I was up and at her elbow, but no bodily discipline was required. She straightened and for a moment stood trembling all over, then got her control back and went to her chair and sat. “I’m sorry,” she said in a tight little voice.

“You should be,” Wolfe said grimly. A woman cutting loose is always too much for him. “Pounding the top of my desk settles nothing. What were the names of the six people you cared for most in the world, who died?”