Rex Stout - Trouble in Triplicate

Naturally Wolfe was scowling. He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation.

“No, sir,” he said emphatically. “I suppose two hundred men and women have sat in that chair, Mr. Poor, and tried to hire me to keep someone from killing them.”

His eyes twitched to me. “How many, Archie?”

I said, to oblige him, “Two hundred and nine.”

“Have I taken the jobs?”

“No, sir. Never.”

He wiggled a finger at Eugene. “For two million dollars a year you can make it fairly difficult for a man to kill you. That’s about what it costs to protect a president or a king, and even so consider the record. Of course, if you give up all other activity it can be done more cheaply, say forty thousand a year. A cave in a mountainside, never emerging, with six guards you can trust and a staff to suit-”

Eugene was trying to get something in. He finally did. “I don’t expect you to keep him from killing me. That’s not what I came for.”

“Then-what the deuce did you come for?”

“To keep him from getting away with it.” Eugene cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you. I agree that you can’t stop him, I don’t see how anybody can. Sooner or later. He’s a clever man.” His voice took on bitterness. “Too damn clever for me and I wish I’d never met him. Sure, I know a man can kill a man if he once decides to, but Con Blaney is so damn clever that it isn’t a question whether he can kill me or not, the question is whether he can manage it so that he is in the clear. I’m afraid he can. I would bet he can. And I don’t want him to.”

His wife made a little noise and he stopped to look at her. Then he shook his head at her as if she had said something, took a cigar from his vest pocket, removed the band, inspected first one end and then the other to decide which was which, got a gadget from another vest pocket and snipped one of the ends, and lit up. He no sooner had it lit than it slipped out of his mouth, bounced on his thigh, and landed on the rug. He retrieved it and got his teeth sunk in it. So, I thought to myself, you’re not so doggone calm about getting murdered as you were making out to be.

“So I came,” he told Wolfe, “to give you the facts, to get the facts down, and to pay you five thousand dollars to see that he doesn’t manage it that way.” The cigar between his teeth interfered with his talking, and he removed it. “If he kills me I’ll be dead. I want someone to know about it.”

Wolfe’s eyes had gone half shut. “But why pay me five thousand dollars in advance? Wouldn’t someone know about it? Your wife, for instance?”

Eugene nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought it all out. What if he kills her too? I have no idea how he’ll try to work it, or when, and who is there besides my wife I can absolutely trust? I’m not taking any chances. Of course I thought of the police, but judging from my own experience, a couple of burglaries down at the shop, and you know, the experiences of a businessman, I’m not sure they’d even remember I’d been there if it happened in a year or maybe two years.” He stuck his cigar in his mouth, puffed twice, and took it out again. “What’s the matter, don’t you want five thousand dollars?”

Wolfe said gruffly, “I wouldn’t get five thousand. This is October. As my nineteen forty-five income now stands, I’ll keep about ten percent of any additional receipts after paying taxes. Out of five thousand, five hundred would be mine. If Mr. Blaney is as clever as you think he is, I wouldn’t consider trying to uncover him on a murder for five hundred dollars.” He stopped and opened his eyes to glare at the wife. “May I ask, madam, what you are looking so pleased about?” Wolfe couldn’t stand to see a woman look pleased. Mrs. Poor was regarding him with a little smile of obvious approval.

“Because,” she said, in a voice that was pleased too, and a nice voice, “I need help and I think you’re going to help me. I don’t approve of this. I didn’t want my husband to come here.”

“Indeed. Where did you want him to go, to the Atlantic Detective Agency?”

“Oh, no, if I had been in favor of his going to any detective at all, of course it would have been Nero Wolfe. But-may I explain?”

Wolfe glanced at the clock on the wall. Three-forty. In twenty minutes he would be leaving for the plant rooms on the roof, to monkey with the orchids. He said curtly, “I have eighteen minutes.”

Eugene put in with a determined voice, “Then I’m going to use them-”

But his wife smiled him out of it. She went on to Wolfe, “It won’t take that long. My husband and Mr. Blaney have been business partners for ten years. They own the firm of Blaney and Poor, manufacturers of novelties-you know, they make things like matches that won’t strike and chairs with rubber legs and bottled drinks that taste like soap-”

“Good God,” Wolfe muttered in horror.

She ignored it. “It’s the biggest firm in the business. Mr. Blaney gets the ideas and handles the production, he’s a genius at it, and my husband handles the business part, sales and so on. But Mr. Blaney is really just about too conceited to live, and now that the business is a big success he thinks my husband isn’t needed, and he wants him to get out and take twenty thousand dollars for his half. Of course it’s worth a great deal more than that, at least ten times as much, and my husband won’t do it. Mr. Blaney is very conceited, and also he will not let anything stand in his way. The argument has gone on and on, until now my husband is convinced that Mr. Blaney is capable of doing anything to get rid of him.”

“Of killing him. And you don’t agree.”

“Oh, no. I do agree. I think Mr. Blaney would stop at nothing.”

“Has he made threats?”

She shook her head. “He isn’t that kind. He doesn’t make threats, he just goes ahead.”

“Then why didn’t you want your husband to come to me?”

“Because he’s simply too stubborn to live.” She smiled at Eugene to take out any sting, and back at Wolfe. “There’s a clause in the partnership agreement, they signed it when they started the business, that says if either one of them dies the other one owns the whole thing. That’s another reason why my husband thinks Mr. Blaney will kill him, and I think so too. But what my husband wants is to make sure Mr. Blaney gets caught, that’s how stubborn he is, and what I want is for my husband to stay alive.”

“Now, Martha,” Eugene put in, “I came here to-” So her name was Martha. I had no prejudice against women named Martha.

She kept the floor. “It’s like this,” she appealed to Wolfe. “My husband thinks that Mr. Blaney is determined to kill him if he can’t get what he wants any other way, and I think so too. You yourself think that if a man is determined to kill another man nothing can stop him. So isn’t it perfectly obvious? My husband has over two hundred thousand dollars saved up outside the business, about half of it in war bonds. He can get another twenty thousand from Mr. Blaney for his half of the business-”

“It’s worth twenty times that,” Eugene said savagely, showing real emotion for the first time.