Rex Stout - Trio for Blunt Instruments

“Very well, I can’t insist. It’s only that he is my confidential assistant, and I would like to know how you got the strange notion that he would best serve your purpose. He is inquisitive, impetuous, alert, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful-the worst choice you could possibly have made. One more why before the last and crucial one: why did you phone Mr. Goodwin to burn the tie? That was unnecessary, because his curiosity was sufficiently aroused without that added fillip; and it was witless, because whoever phoned must have known that he had not already phoned you or gone to see you, and only you could have known that. Do you wish to comment?”

“I didn’t phone him.”

I must say that Vance was showing more gumption than I had expected. By letting Wolfe talk he was finding out exactly how deep the hole was, and he was saying nothing.

Wolfe turned a hand over. “Now the primary why: why did you kill her? I learned yesterday that you probably had an adequate motive, but as I told Mr. Cramer, that was only hearsay. I had to have a demonstrable fact, an act or an object, and you supplied it. Not yesterday or today; you supplied it Tuesday afternoon when, after killing Mrs. Kirk, you stooped over her battered skull, or knelt or squatted, and cut off a lock of her hair, choosing one that had her blood on it. With a knife, or scissors? Did you stoop, or squat, or kneel?”

Vance’s lips moved, but no sound came. Unquestionably he was trying to say “I didn’t” but couldn’t make it.

Wolfe grunted. “I said a demonstrable fact. To demonstrate is to establish as true, and I’ll establish it. Mr. Goodwin found the lock of hair, caked with blood, some two hours ago, in a drawer in your bedroom. He called it a keepsake, but a keepsake is something given and kept for the sake of the giver, a token of friendship. Trophy would be a better term.” He opened a desk drawer.

I can move fast and so can Purley Stebbins, but we both misjudged James Neville Vance, at least I did. When he started up at sight of the glove Wolfe took from the drawer I started too, but I wasn’t expecting him to dart like lightning, and he did; and he got the glove, snatched it out of Wolfe’s hand. Of course he didn’t keep it long. I came from his left side and Purley from his right, and since he had the glove in his right hand it was Purley who got his wrist and twisted it, and the glove dropped to the floor.

Cramer picked it up. Purley had Vance by the right arm, and I had him by the left.

Wolfe stood up. “It’s in the glove,” he told Cramer. “Mr. Goodwin, will furnish any details you require, and Mrs. Fougere.” He headed for the door. The clock said 5:22. His schedule had hit a snag, but by gum it wasn’t wrecked.

10

A LITTLE BEFORE FIVE o’clock one afternoon last week the doorbell rang, and through the one-way glass I saw Martin Kirk on the stoop, his overcoat collar turned up and his hat on tight. When I opened the door snow came whirling in. Obviously he was calling on me, not Wolfe, since he knew the schedule, and I was glad to see an ex-client who had paid his bill promptly, so I took his hat and coat and put them on the rack, and ushered him to the office and a chair. When we had exchanged a few remarks about the weather, and his health and mine, and Wolfe’s, and he had declined an offer of a drink, he said he saw that Vance’s lawyer was trying a new approach on an appeal, and I said yeah, when you’ve got money you can do a lot of dodging. With that disposed of, he said he often wondered where he would be now if he hadn’t come straight to Wolfe from the DA’s office that day in August.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve said that before. I have all the time there is and I enjoy your company, but you didn’t come all the way here through the worst storm this winter just to chew the fat. Something on your mind?”

He nodded. “I thought you might know-might have an idea.”

“I seldom do, but it’s possible.”

“It’s Rita. You know she’s in Reno?”

“Yes, I’ve had a card from her.”

“Well, I phoned her yesterday. There’s some good ski slopes not far from Reno, and I told her I might go out for a week or so and we could give them a try. She said no. A flat no.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know how to ski.”

“Sure she does. She’s good, very good.” He uncrossed his legs and crossed them again. “I came to see you because- Well, frankly, I thought that maybe you and she have a-an understanding. I used to think she liked me all right-nothing more than that, but I thought she liked me. I know she was a friend in need, I know what she did that day in Vance’s apartment, but ever since then she has shied off from me. And I know she thinks you’re quite a guy. Well… if you have got an understanding with her I want to congratulate you. Of course, her too.”

I cleared my throat. “Many thanks,” I said, “for the compliment. It’s nice to know that she thinks I’m quite a guy, but it’s nothing more than that. There’s not only no understanding, there’s no misunderstanding. It’s possible that she actually likes you. It’s possible that she would enjoy skiing with you, though in my opinion anyone who enjoys skiing is hard up for something to enjoy, but a woman in the process of getting a divorce is apt to be skittish. She either thinks she has been swindled or she feels like a used car. Do you want my advice?”

“Yes.”

“Go to Reno unannounced. Tell her you want her to go skiing with you because if you tumble and break a leg, as you probably will, she is the only one you can rely on to bring help. If after a week or so you want to tell her there are other reasons, and there are other reasons, she may possibly be willing to listen. She might even enjoy it. You have nothing to lose but a week or so unless you break your neck.”

His jaw was working exactly the way it had that day six months back, but otherwise his appearance was very different. “All right,” he said. “I’m glad I came. I’ll go tomorrow.”

“That’s the spirit. I don’t suppose you’d consider playing pinochle with her, or dancing or going for a walk, instead of skiing?”

“No. I’m not a good dancer.”

“Okay. We’ll drink to it.” I got up. “Scotch and water, I believe?”

“Yes please. No ice. I think you’re quite a guy too, Goodwin.”

“So do I.” I went to the kitchen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but, by the age of nine, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance , appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks , The Silent Speaker , If Death Ever Slept , The Doorbell Rang and Please Pass the Guilt , which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty” and as a member of several national committees. After the war, he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. All together, his Nero Wolfe novels have been translated into twenty-two languages and have sold more than forty-five million copies. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death, he published his forty-sixth Nero Wolfe novel, A Family Affair .