Rex Stout - The Gun with Wings

As I followed Wolfe into the dining room for lunch I remarked to his outspread back, “There are already eight hundred and nine people in the metropolitan area who would like to poison you. This will make it eight hundred and eleven. Don’t think they won’t find out sooner or later.”

“Of course they will,” he conceded, pulling his chair back. “But too late.”

The rest of that day and evening nothing happened at all, as far as we knew.

I was at my desk in the office at 10:40 the next morning when the phone rang. I got it and told the transmitter, “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“I want to talk to Mr. Wolfe.”

“He won’t be available until eleven o’clock. Can I help?”

“This is urgent. This is Weppler, Frederick Weppler. I’m in a booth in a drugstore on Ninth Avenue near Twentieth Street. Mrs. Mion is with me. We’ve been arrested.”

“Good God!” I was horrified. “What for?”

“To ask us about Mion’s death. They had material-witness warrants. They kept us all night, and we just got out on bail. I had a lawyer arrange for the bail, but I don’t want him to know about — that we consulted Wolfe, and he’s not with us. We want to see Wolfe.”

“You sure do,” I agreed emphatically. “It’s a damn outrage. Come on up here. He’ll be down from the plant rooms by the time you arrive. Grab a taxi.”

“We can’t. That’s why I’m phoning. We’re being followed by two detectives and we don’t want them to know we’re seeing Wolfe. How can we shake them?”

It would have saved time and energy to tell him to come ahead, that a couple of official tails needn’t worry him, but I thought I’d better play along.

“For God’s sake,” I said, disgusted. “Cops give me a pain in the neck. Listen. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the Feder Paper Company, Five-thirty-five West Seventeenth Street. In the office ask for Mr. Sol Feder. Tell him your name is Montgomery. He’ll conduct you along a passage that exits on Eighteenth Street. Right there, either at the curb or double-parked, will be a taxi with a handkerchief on the door handle. I’ll be in it. Don’t lose any time climbing in. Have you got it?”

“I think so. You’d better repeat the address.”

I did so, and told him to wait ten minutes before starting, to give me time to get there. Then, after hanging up, I phoned Sol Feder to instruct him, got Wolfe on the house phone to inform him, and beat it.

I should have told him to wait fifteen or twenty minutes instead of ten, because I got to my post on Eighteenth Street barely in time. My taxi had just stopped, and I was reaching out to tie my handkerchief on the door handle, when here they came across the sidewalk like a bat out of hell. I swung the door wide, and Fred practically threw Peggy in and dived in after her.

“Okay, driver,” I said sternly, “you know where,” and we rolled.

As we swung into Tenth Avenue I asked if they had had breakfast and they said yes, not with any enthusiasm. The fact is, they looked as if they were entirely out of enthusiasm. Peggy’s lightweight green jacket, which she had on over a tan cotton dress, was rumpled and not very clean, and her face looked neglected. Fred’s hair might not have been combed for a month, and his brown tropical worsted was anything but natty. They sat holding hands, and about once a minute Fred twisted around to look through the rear window.

“We’re loose all right,” I assured him. “I’ve been saving Sol Feder just for an emergency like this.”

It was only a five-minute ride. When I ushered them into the office Wolfe was there in his big custom-made chair behind his desk. He arose to greet them, invited them to sit, asked if they had breakfasted properly, and said that the news of their arrest had been an unpleasant shock.

“One thing,” Fred blurted, still standing. “We came to see you and consult you in confidence, and forty-eight hours later we were arrested. Was that pure coincidence?”

Wolfe finished getting himself re-established in his chair. “That won’t help us any, Mr. Weppler,” he said without resentment. “If that’s your frame of mind you’d better go somewhere and cool off. You and Mrs. Mion are my clients. An insinuation that I am capable of acting against the interest of a client is too childish for discussion. What did the police ask you about?”

But Fred wasn’t satisfied. “You’re not a double-crosser,” he conceded. “I know that. But what about Goodwin here? He may not be a double-crosser either, but he might have got careless in conversation with someone.”

Wolfe’s eyes moved. “Archie. Did you?”

“No, sir. But he can postpone asking my pardon. They’ve had a hard night.” I looked at Fred. “Sit down and relax. If I had a careless tongue I wouldn’t last at this job a week.”

“It’s damn funny,” Fred persisted. He sat. “Mrs. Mion agrees with me. Don’t you, Peggy?”

Peggy, in the red leather chair, gave him a glance and then looked back at Wolfe. “I did, I guess,” she confessed. “Yes, I did. But now that I’m here, seeing you—” She made a gesture. “Oh, forget it! There’s no one else to go to. We know lawyers, of course, but we don’t want to tell a lawyer what we know — about the gun. We’ve already told you. But now the police suspect something, and we’re out on bail, and you’ve got to do something!”

“What did you find out Monday evening?” Fred demanded. “You stalled when I phoned yesterday. What did they say?”

“They recited facts,” Wolfe replied. “As I told you on the phone, I made some progress. I have nothing to add to that — now. But I want to know, I must know, what line the police took with you. Did they know what you told me about the gun?”

They both said no.

Wolfe grunted. “Then I might reasonably ask that you withdraw your insinuation that I or Mr. Goodwin betrayed you. What did they ask about?”

The answers to that took a good half an hour. The cops hadn’t missed a thing that was included in the picture as they knew it, and, with instructions from Cramer to make it thorough, they hadn’t left a scrap. Far from limiting it to the day of Mion’s death, they had been particularly curious about Peggy’s and Fred’s feelings and actions during the months both prior and subsequent thereto. Several times I had to take the tip of my tongue between my teeth to keep from asking the clients why they hadn’t told the cops to go soak their heads, but I really knew why: they had been scared. A scared man is only half a man. By the time they finished reporting on their ordeal I was feeling sympathetic, and even guilty on behalf of Wolfe, when suddenly he snapped me out of it.

He sat a while tapping the arm of his chair with a fingertip, and then looked at me and said abruptly, “Archie. Draw a check to the order of Mrs. Mion for five thousand dollars.”

They gawked at him. I got up and headed for the safe. They demanded to know what the idea was. I stood at the safe door to listen.

“I’m quitting,” Wolfe said curtly. “I can’t stand you. I told you Sunday that one or both of you were lying, and you stubbornly denied it. I undertook to work around your lie, and I did my best. But now that the police have got curious about Mion’s death, and specifically about you, I refuse longer to risk it. I am willing to be a Quixote, but not a chump. In breaking with you, I should tell you that I shall immediately inform Inspector Cramer of all that you have told me. If, when the police start the next round with you, you are fools enough to contradict me, heaven knows what will happen. Your best course will be to acknowledge the truth and let them pursue the investigation you hired me for; but I would also warn you that they are not simpletons and they too will know that you are lying — at least one of you. Archie, what are you standing there gaping for? Get the checkbook.”