Rex Stout: The Gun with Wings

“Well—” Clara laughed. It was a tinkly soprano laugh, rather attractive. “What a nice old-fashioned way to say it! Yes, I had. But it wasn’t true!”

“But you believed it, Mr. James?”

Gifford James was having trouble holding himself in, and I concede that such leading questions about his daughter’s honor from a stranger must have been hard to take. But after all it wasn’t new to the rest of the audience, and anyway it sure was relevant. He forced himself to speak with quiet dignity. “I believed what my daughter told me, yes.”

Wolfe nodded. “So much for that,” he said in a relieved tone. “I’m glad that part is over with.” His eyes moved. “Now. Mr. Grove, tell me about the conference in Mr. Mion’s studio, a few hours before he died.”

Rupert the Fat had his head tilted to one side, with his shrewd black eyes meeting Wolfe’s. “It was for the purpose,” he said in his high tenor, “of discussing the demand Mion had made for payment of damages.”

“You were there?”

“I was, naturally. I was Mion’s adviser and manager. Also Miss Bosley, Dr. Lloyd, Mr. James, and Judge Arnold.”

“Who arranged the conference, you?”

“In a way, yes. Arnold suggested it, and I told Mion and phoned Dr. Lloyd and Miss Bosley.”

“What was decided?”

“Nothing. That is, nothing definite. There was the question of the extent of the damage — how soon Mion would be able to sing again.”

“What was your position?”

Grove’s eyes tightened. “Didn’t I say I was Mion’s manager?”

“Certainly. I mean, what position did you take regarding the payment of damages?”

“I thought a preliminary payment of fifty thousand dollars should be made at once. Even if Mion’s voice was soon all right he had already lost that and more. His South American tour had been canceled, and he had been unable to make a lot of records on contract, and then radio offers—”

“Nothing like fifty thousand dollars,” Judge Arnold asserted aggressively. There was nothing wrong with his larynx, small as he was. “I showed figures—”

“To hell with your figures! Anybody can—”

“Please!” Wolfe rapped on his desk with a knuckle. “What was Mr. Mion’s position?”

“The same as mine, of course.” Grove was scowling at Arnold as he spoke to Wolfe. “We had discussed it.”

“Naturally.” Wolfe’s eyes went left. “How did you feel about it, Mr. James?”

“I think,” Arnold broke in, “that I should speak for my client. You agree, Gif?”

“Go ahead,” the baritone muttered.

Arnold did, and took most of one of the three hours. I was surprised that Wolfe didn’t stop him, and finally decided that he let him ramble on just to get additional support for his long-standing opinion of lawyers. If so, he got it. Arnold covered everything. He had a lot to say about tort-feasors, going back a couple of centuries, with emphasis on the mental state of a tort-feasor. Another item he covered at length was proximate cause. He got really worked up about proximate cause, but it was so involved that I lost track and passed.

Here and there, though, he made sense. At one point he said, “The idea of a preliminary payment, as they called it, was clearly inadmissible. It is not reasonable to expect a man, even if he stipulates an obligation, to make a payment thereon until either the total amount of the obligation, or an exact method of computing it, has been agreed upon.”

At another point he said, “The demand for so large a sum can in fact be properly characterized as blackmail. They knew that if the action went to trial, and if we showed that my client’s deed sprang from his knowledge that his daughter had been wronged, a jury would not be likely to award damages. But they also knew that we would be averse to making that defense.”

“Not his knowledge,” Wolfe objected. “Merely his belief. His daughter says she had misinformed him.”

“We could have showed knowledge,” Arnold insisted.

I looked at Clara with my brows up. She was being contradicted flatly on the chronology of her lie and her truth, but either she and her father didn’t get the implication of it or they didn’t want to get started on that again.

At another point Arnold said, “Even if my client’s deed was tortious and damages would be collectible, the amount could not be agreed upon until the extent of the injury was known. We offered, without prejudice, twenty thousand dollars in full settlement, for a general release. They refused. They wanted a payment forth with on account. We refused that on principle. In the end there was agreement on only one thing: that an effort should be made to arrive at the total amount of damage. Of course that was what Dr. Lloyd was there for. He was asked for a prognosis, and he stated that — but you don’t need to take hearsay. He’s here, and you can get it direct.”

Wolfe nodded. “If you please, Doctor?”

I thought, My God, here we go again with another expert.

But Lloyd had mercy on us. He kept it down to our level and didn’t take anything like an hour. Before he spoke he took another swallow from his third helping of bourbon and water with mint, which had smoothed out some of the lines on his handsome face and taken some of the worry from his eyes.

“I’ll try to remember,” he said slowly, “exactly what I told them. First I described the damage the blow had done. The thyroid and arytenoid cartilages on the left side had been severely injured, and to a lesser extent the cricoid.” He smiled — a superior smile, but not supercilious. “I waited two weeks, using indicated treatment, thinking an operation might not be required, but it was. When I got inside I confess I was relieved; it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. It was a simple operation, and he healed admirably. I wouldn’t have been risking much that day if I had given assurance that his voice would be as good as ever in two months, three at the most, but the larynx is an extremely delicate instrument, and a tenor like Mion’s is a remarkable phenomenon, so I was cautious enough merely to say that I would be surprised and disappointed if he wasn’t ready, fully ready, for the opening of the next opera season, seven months from then. I added that my hope and expectation were actually more optimistic than that.”

Lloyd pursed his lips. “That was it, I think. Nevertheless, I welcomed the suggestion that my prognosis should be reinforced by Rentner’s. Apparently it would be a major factor in the decision about the amount to be paid in damages, and I didn’t want the sole responsibility.”

“Rentner? Who was he?” Wolfe asked.

“Dr. Abraham Rentner of Mount Sinai,” Lloyd replied, in the tone I would use if someone asked me who Jackie Robinson was. “I phoned him and made an appointment for the following morning.”

“I insisted on it,” Rupert the Fat said importantly. “Mion had a right to collect not sometime in the distant future, but then and there. They wouldn’t pay unless a total was agreed on, and if we had to name a total I wanted to be damn sure it was enough. Don’t forget that that day Mion couldn’t sing a note.”

“He wouldn’t have been able even to let out a pianissimo for at least two months,” Lloyd bore him out. “I gave that as the minimum.”

“There seems,” Judge Arnold interposed, “to be an implication that we opposed the suggestion that a second professional opinion be secured. I must protest—”

“You did!” Grove squeaked.

“We did not!” Gifford James barked. “We merely—”

The three of them went at it, snapping and snarling. It seemed to me that they might have saved their energy for the big issue, was anything coming to Mrs. Mion and if so how much, but not those babies. Their main concern was to avoid the slightest risk of agreeing on anything at all. Wolfe patiently let them get where they were headed for — nowhere — and then invited a new voice in. He turned to Adele and spoke.