Rex Stout - Trio for Blunt Instruments

She took it and wiped her face. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“The hell I didn’t.” I got another chair and put it at a dry spot, went to my desk, and sat. “It might help if someone did it to me. Now listen. Whether you meant it or not, I am out on an extremely rickety limb. Ken did not tell me last Tuesday that you thought you were pregnant and he was responsible, he told me nothing whatever, but whether he lied to you or you’re lying to the cops and me, they think he did. They also think or suspect that you and I have been what they call intimate. They also expect you to say under oath that I agreed to meet you at the entrance of that alley yesterday at five o’clock, and I can’t prove I wasn’t there. There’s a man who will say he was with me somewhere else, but he’s a friend of mine and he often works with me when Mr. Wolfe needs more help, and the cops don’t have to believe him and neither would a jury. I don’t know what else the cops have or haven’t got, but any time now-”

“I didn’t lie to you, Archie.” She was on the dry chair, gripping the towel. A strand of wet hair dropped over her eye, and she pushed it back. “Everything I told-”

“Skip it. Any time now, any minute, I may be hauled in on a charge of murder, and then where am I? Or suppose I somehow made it stick that I did not agree to meet you there, that you’re lying to them, and I wasn’t there. Then where will you be? The way it stands, the way you’ve staged it, today or tomorrow either you or I will be in the jug with no out. So either I-”

“But Archie, you-”

“Don’t interrupt. Either I wriggle off by selling them on you-and by the way, I haven’t asked you.” I got up and went to her. “Stand up. Look at me.” I extended my hands at waist level, open, palms up. “Put your hands on mine, palms down. No, don’t press, relax, just let them rest there. Damn it, relax! Right. Look at me. Did you kill Ken?”

“No.”

“Again. Did you kill him?”

“No, Archie!”

I turned and went back to my chair. She came a step forward, backed up, and sat. “That’s my private lie detector,” I told her. “Not patented. Either I wriggle off by selling them on you, and it would take some wriggling, which is not my style, or I do a job that is my style-I hope. As you know, I work for Nero Wolfe. First I see him and tell him I’m taking a leave of absence-I hope a short one. Then you and I go some place where we’re sure we won’t be interrupted, and you tell me things, a lot of things, and no fudging. Where I go from there depends on what you tell me. I’ll tell you one thing now, if you-”

The door opened and Wolfe was there. He crossed to the corner of his desk, faced her, and spoke. “I’m Nero Wolfe. Will you please move to this chair?” He indicated the red leather chair by a nod, circled around his desk, and sat. He looked at me. “A job that is your style?”

Well. As I remarked when he insisted that I see her in the office, if I hadn’t been pooped I would have given that offer a little attention. If I had been myself I would have known, or at least suspected, what he intended. I suppose he and I came as close to trusting each other as any two men can, on matters of joint concern, but as he had told Parker, this was my affair, and I was discussing it with someone in his office, keeping him away from his favorite chair, and I had just told him that nothing of what I had told Cramer was flummery. So he had gone to the hole in the alcove.

I looked back at him. “I said I hope. What if I heard the panel open and steered clear?”

“Pfui. Clear of what?”

“Okay. Your trick. But I think she has a right to know.”

“I agree.” Sue had moved to the red leather chair, and he swiveled. “Miss McLeod. I eavesdropped, without Mr. Goodwin’s knowledge. I heard all that was said, and I saw. Do you wish to complain?”

She had fingered her hair back, but it was still a sight. “Why?” she asked.

“Why did I listen? To learn how much of a pickle Mr. Goodwin was in. And I learned. I have intruded because the situation is intolerable. You are either a cockatrice or a witling. Whether by design or stupidity, you have brought Mr. Goodwin to a desperate pass. That is-”

I broke in. “It’s my affair. You said so.”

He stayed at her. “That is his affair, but now it threatens me. I depend on him. I can’t function properly, let alone comfortably, without him. He just told you he would take a leave of absence. That would be inconvenient for me but bearable, even if it were rather prolonged, but it’s quite possible that I would lose him for good, and that would be a calamity. I won’t have it. Thanks to you, he is in grave jeopardy.” He turned. “Archie. This is now our joint affair. By your leave.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Retroactive? Parker and my bail?”

He made a face. “Very well. Intimate or not, you have known Miss McLeod three years. Did she kill that man?”

“No and yes.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“I know it doesn’t. The ‘no’ because of a lot of assorted items, including the lie-detector test I just gave her, which of course you would hoot at it if you hooted. The ‘yes,’ chiefly because she’s here. Why did she come? She says, to ask me to change my story and back hers up, that we had a date to meet there. That’s a good deal to expect, and I wonder. If she killed him, of course she’s scared stiff and she might ask anybody anything, but if she didn’t, why come and tell me she went in the alley and saw him dead and scooted? I wonder. On balance, one will get you two that she didn’t. One item for ‘no,’ when a man gets a girl pregnant her normal procedure is to make him marry her, and quick. What she wants most and has got to have is a father for the baby, and not a dead father. She certainly isn’t going to kill him unless-”

“That’s silly,” Sue blurted, “I’m not pregnant.”

I stared. “You said Ken told you he told me…”

She nodded. “Ken would tell anybody anything.”

“But you thought you were?”

“Of course not. How could I? There’s only one way a girl can get pregnant, and it couldn’t have been that with me because it’s never happened.”

3

LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, I like to kid myself that I know why I think this or do that, but sometimes it just won’t work, and that was once. I don’t mean why I believed her about not being pregnant and how she knew she couldn’t be; I do know that; it was the way she said it and the way she looked. I had known her three years. But since, if I believed her on that, I had to scrap the item I had just given Wolfe for ‘no’ on her killing Faber, why didn’t I change the odds to even money? I pass. I could cook up a case, for instance if she was straight on one thing, about not being pregnant and why not, she was probably straight on other things too, but who would buy it? It’s even possible that every man alive, of whom I am one, has a feeling down below that an unmarried girl who knows she can’t be pregnant is less apt to commit murder than one who can’t be sure. I admit that a good private detective shouldn’t have feelings down below, but have you any suggestions?