Rex Stout - Man Alive

“Imagine it!” I said. “After the weddings I will of course have to take a good-sized apartment...”

I’ve already told about that.

The next morning, Tuesday, he was still shirking. When we have a job on he usually has breakfast instructions for me before he goes up to the plant rooms for his nine-to-eleven session with Theodore and the orchids, but that day there wasn’t a peep out of him, and when he came down to the office at eleven o’clock he got himself comfortable in his chair behind his desk, rang for Fritz to bring beer — two short buzzes — and picked up his book. Even when I showed him the check from Cynthia which had come in the morning mail, two thousand smackers, he merely nodded indifferently. I snorted at him and strode to the hall and out the front door, on my way to the bank to make a deposit. When I got back he was on his second bottle of beer and deep in his book. Apparently his idea was to go on reading until Thursday’s show for buyers.

For one o’clock lunch in the dining room, which was across the hall from the office, Fritz served us with chicken livers and tomato halves fried in oil and trimmed with chopped peppers and parsley, followed by rice cakes and honey. I took it easy on the livers because of my attitude toward Fritz’s rice cakes. I was on my fifth cake, or maybe sixth, when the doorbell rang. During meals Fritz always answers the door, on account of Wolfe’s feeling that the main objection to atom bombs is that they may interrupt people eating. Through the open door from the dining room to the hall I saw Fritz pass on his way to the front, and a moment later his voice came, trying to persuade someone to wait in the office until Wolfe had finished lunch. There was no other voice, but there were steps, and then our visitor was marching in on us — a man about Wolfe’s age, heavy-set, muscular, red-faced, and obviously aggressive.

It was our chum Inspector Cramer, head of Homicide. He advanced to the table before he stopped and spoke to Wolfe.

“Hello. Sorry to break in on your meal.”

“Good morning,” Wolfe said courteously. For him it was always morning until he had finished his lunch coffee. “If you haven’t had lunch we can offer you—”

“No, thanks, I’m busy and in a hurry. A woman named Cynthia Nieder came to see you yesterday.”

Wolfe put a piece of rice cake in his mouth. I had a flash of a thought: Good God, the client’s dead.

“Well?” Cramer demanded.

“Well what?” Wolfe snapped. “You stated a fact. I’m eating lunch.”

“Fine. It’s a fact. What did she want?”

“You know my habits and customs, Mr. Cramer.” Wolfe was controlling himself. “I never talk business at a meal. I invited you to join us and you declined. If you will wait in the office—”

Cramer slapped a palm on the table, rattling things. My guess was that Wolfe would throw the coffee pot, since it was the heaviest thing handy, but I couldn’t stay for it because along with the sound of Cramer’s slap the doorbell rang again, and I thought I’d better not leave this one to Fritz. I got up and went, and through the one-way glass panel in the front door I saw an object that relieved me. The client was still alive and apparently unhurt. She was standing there on the stoop.

I pulled the door open, put my finger on my lips, muttered at her, “Keep your mouth shut,” and with one eye took in the police car parked at the curb, seven steps down from the stoop. The man seated behind the wheel, a squad dick with whom I was acquainted, was looking at us with an expression of interest. I waved at him, signaled Cynthia to enter, shut the door, and elbowed her into the front room, which faces the street and adjoins the office.

She looked scared, untended, haggard, and determined.

“The point is,” I told her, “that a police inspector named Cramer is in the dining room asking about you. Do you want to see him?”

“Oh.” She gazed at me as if she were trying to remember who I was. “I’ve already seen him.” She looked around, saw a chair, got to it, and sat. “They’ve been — asking me — questions for hours—”

“Why, what happened?”

“My uncle—” Her head went forward and she covered her face with her hands. In a moment she looked up at me and said, “I want to see Nero Wolfe,” and then covered her face with her hands again.

It might, I figured, take minutes to nurse her to the point of forming sentences. So I told her, “Stay here and sit tight. The walls are soundproofed, but keep quiet anyhow.”

When I rejoined them in the dining room the coffee pot was still on the table unthrown, but the battle was on. Wolfe was out of his chair, erect, rigid with rage.

“No, sir,” he was saying in his iciest tone, “I have not finished my gobbling now, as you put it. I would have eaten two more cakes, and I have not had my coffee. You broke in, and you’re here. If you were not an officer of the law Mr. Goodwin would knock you unconscious and drag you out.”

He moved. He stamped to the door, across the hall, and into the office. I was right behind him. By the time Cramer was there, seated in the red leather chair, Wolfe was seated too, behind his desk, breathing at double speed, with his mouth closed tight.

“Forget it,” Cramer rasped, trying to make up.

Wolfe was silent.

“All I want,” Cramer said, “is to find out why Cynthia Nieder came to see you. You have a right to ask why I want to know, and I would have told you if you hadn’t lost your temper just because I arrived while you were stuffing it in. There’s been a murder.”

Wolfe said nothing.

“Last night,” Cramer went on. “Time limits, eight P.M. and midnight. At the place of business of Daumery and Nieder on the twelfth floor of Four-ninety-six Seventh Avenue. Cynthia Nieder was there last night between nine and nine-thirty, she admits that; and nobody else as far as we know now. She says she went to get some drawings, but that’s got holes in it. The body was found this morning, lying in the middle of the floor in the office. He had been hit in the back of the head with a hardwood pole, one of those used to raise and lower windows, and the end of the pole with the brass hook on it had been jabbed into his face a dozen times or more — like spearing a fish.”

Wolfe had his eyes closed. I was considering that after all Cramer was the head of Homicide and he was paid for handling murders, and he always tried hard and deserved a little encouragement, so I asked in a friendly manner, “Who was it?”

“Nobody knows,” he said sarcastically and without returning the friendliness. “A complete stranger to all the world, and nothing on him to tell.” He paused, and then suddenly barked at me, “You describe him!”

“Nuts. Who was it?”

“It was a medium-sized man around forty, with a brown beard and slick brown hair parted on the left side, with glasses that were just plain glass. Can you name him?”

I thought it extremely interesting that Cramer’s description consisted of the three items that Cynthia had specified. It showed what a well-planned disguise could do.

Wolfe remained silent.

“Sorry,” I said. “Never met him.”

Cramer left me for Wolfe. “Under the circumstances,” he argued, still sarcastic, “you may concede that I have a right to ask what she came to you for. It was only after she tried two lies on us about how she spent yesterday morning that we finally got it out of her that she came here. She didn’t want us to know, she was dead against it, and she wouldn’t tell what she came for. Add to that the fact that whenever you are remotely connected with anyone who is remotely connected with a murder you always know everything, and there’s no question about my needing to know what you were consulted about. I came to ask you myself because I know what you’re like.”