Rex Stout: The Cop Killer

“This,” Wolfe said, “could take a few minutes or it could take all night. What we’re after is an object with something on it that identifies it as coming from this shop. Ideally it should be the name and address or phone number, but we’ll take less if we have to. Since we’re proceeding on my assumptions, we are supposing that it was inside the newspaper as Wallen was carrying it, so it is not a business card or match folder or bottle or comb or brush. It should be flat and of considerable dimensions. Another point, it should be easily recognizable. All of you went to the booth and were questioned by Wallen, but he showed you no such object and mentioned none. Is that correct?”

They nodded and mumbled affirmatives. Ed said “Yes!” in a loud voice.

“Then only the murderer saw it or was told of it. Wallen must for some reason have shown it to him or asked him about it, and not the rest of you; or its edge may have been protruding from the newspaper, unnoticed by the others; or the murderer may merely have suspected that Wallen had it. In any case, when opportunity offered later for him to dive into the booth and kill Wallen he got the object and disposed of it. If Mr. Stebbins is right about the surveillance that has been maintained, it is still here in the shop. I put it to you, and especially to you, Mr. Fickler: what is it and where is it?”

They looked at one another and back at Wolfe. Philip said in his thin tenor, “Maybe it was the newspaper itself.”

“Possibly. I doubt it. Where is it, Mr. Cramer?”

“At the laboratory. There’s nothing on it or in it that could have brought Wallen here.”

“What else has been taken from here to the laboratory?”

“Nothing but the scissors and the bottle that was used on Miss Stahl.”

“Then it’s here. All right, Jimmie, finish.”

Jimmie moved to the left of him and carried on.

“It looks to me,” Purley objected in his bass rumble, “like a turkey. Even with your assumptions. Say we find something like what you want, how do we know it’s it? Even if we think it’s it, where does that get us?”

“We’ll see when we find it.” Wolfe was curt. “For one thing, fingerprints.”

“Nuts. If it belongs here of course it will have their prints.”

“Not their prints, Mr. Stebbins. Wallen’s prints. If he picked it up in the car he touched it. If he touched it he left prints. As I understand it, he didn’t go around touching things here. He entered, spoke to Mr. Fickler, was taken to the booth, and never left it alive. If we find anything with his prints on it we’ve got it. Have you equipment here? If not, I advise you to send for it at once, and also for Wallen’s prints from your file. Will you do that?”

Purley grunted. He didn’t move.

“Go ahead,” Cramer told him. “Phone. Give him what he wants. Get it over. Then he’ll give us what we want, what he’s here for, or else.”

Purley descended from the chair and headed for the phone at the cashier’s counter.

“The search,” Wolfe said, “must be thorough and will take time. First I ask all of you to search your minds. What object is here, belongs here, that meets the specifications as I have described them? Surely you can tell us. Mr. Fickler?”

“I’ve been thinking.” Fickler shook his head. “I’ve been thinking hard. I don’t know unless it’s a towel, and why would he carry a towel like that?”

“He wouldn’t. Anyway a towel wouldn’t help us any, so I reject it. Philip?”

“No, sir. I don’t know what.”

“Tom?”

Tom just shook his head gloomily.

“Ed?”

“You’ve got me. Pass.”

“Miss Stahl?”

“I think he might have been keeping the paper because there was something in it he wanted to read. I know I often do that, say it’s in an evening paper and I don’t have time—”

“Yes. We’ll consider that. Jimmie?”

“I don’t know a thing like that in the shop, Mr. Wolfe. Not a thing.”

“Pfui.” Wolfe was disgusted. “Either you have no brains at all, or they’re temporarily paralyzed, or you’re all in a conspiracy. I’m looking straight at such an object right now.”

From behind I couldn’t see where his gaze was directed, but I didn’t have to. The others could, and I saw them. Eleven pairs of eyes, including Purley’s — he had finished at the phone and rejoined us — were aimed at the magazine table next to Janet’s chair from eleven different angles. Up to that moment my brain may have been as paralyzed as the others’, but it could still react to a stimulus. I left the stool and stood right behind Wolfe, ready if and when needed.

“You mean the magazines?” Cramer demanded.

“Yes. You subscribe to them, Mr. Fickler? They come through the mail? Then the name and address is on them.”

“Not on this one,” said the dick on the other side of the magazine table, picking up the New Yorker on top.

“Drop it!” Cramer barked. “Don’t touch it!”

“No,” Wolfe conceded, “that comes in a wrapper. But others don’t. For instance that Time , there on the shelf below — the addressee is on the cover. Surely it deserves examination, and others too. What if he took it from here and had it in his pocket when he stole the car and drove up Broadway? And in the excitement of his misadventure he failed to notice that it had dropped from his pocket and was on the seat of the car? And Wallen found it there, took it, and saw the name and address on it? You have sent for the equipment and Wallen’s prints, Mr. Stebbins? Then we—”

“Oh! I remember!” Janet cried. She was pointing a finger. “You remember, Jimmie? This morning I was standing here, and you came by with a hot towel and you had that magazine and you tossed it under there, and I asked if you had been steaming it, and you said—”

Jimmie leaped. I thought his prey was Janet and in spite of everything I was willing to save her life, but Wolfe and the chair were in my way and cost me a fifth of a second. And it wasn’t Janet he was after, it was the magazine. He went for it in a hurtling dive and got his hands on it, but then the three dicks, not to mention Cramer and Purley, were on his neck and various other parts of him. It was a handsome pile-up. Janet, except for pulling her feet back under her chair out of harm’s way, did not move, nor did she make a sound. I suppose she was considering what to say to the reporters.

“Confound it,” Wolfe grumbled savagely behind me. “ My barber.”

Anyhow that haircut was practically done.

As stubborn as Cramer was, he never did learn why Wolfe went to get a haircut that day. Eventually he stopped trying.

He learned plenty about Jimmie Kirk. Kirk was wanted as a bail-jumper, under another name, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on an old charge as a car stealer, with various fancy complications such as slugging a respected citizen who had surprised him in the act. Apparently he had gone straight in New York for a couple of years and had then resumed his former avocation. Unquestionably he had been fortified with liquids that Monday evening. Driving a stolen car while drunk is a risky operation, especially with a stolen magazine in your pocket.

As for Carl and Tina, I took a strong position on them Tuesday evening in the office after they had been sent up to the south room to bed.

“You know damn well what will happen,” I told Wolfe. “They won’t go to Ohio or anywhere else, they’ll stay here. Some day, maybe next week, maybe next year, they’ll be confronted and they’ll be in trouble. Being in trouble, they will come to me, because Carl likes me and because I rescued them this time—”

Wolfe snorted. “You did!”