Rex Stout - Some Buried Caesar

"Gee," I said, "that's swell. All you have to do is have the New York cops grab the somebody and run him through the coffee grinder-"

"Much obliged. What was the receipt for and where is it?"

I shook my head. "The deputy must have heard wrong. Maybe the name was Doodwin or Goldstein or DiMaggio-"

"I would like to clip you. Jesus, I would enjoy stretching you out." Barrow breathed. "Are you going to spill it?"

"Sorry, nothing to spill."

"On the hotel register you wrote your first name as Archie. Is that correct?"

"Yep."

He turned to his colleague. "Bill, youll find Judge Hutehins waiting upstairs. Run up and swear out a material witness commitment. Archie Goodwin. Hurry down with it, we've got to shake a leg."

I raised the brows. The cossack made it snappy. I asked, "How's the accommodations?"

"Fair. A little crowded on account of the exposition. Any time you're ready to talk turkey-"

"No speak English. This will get you a row of ciphers and the finger of scorn and a bellyache."

He merely looked unflinching. We sat. In a few minutes his pal returned with a document, and I asked to see it and was obliged. Barrow took it and asked me to come on, and I went between them down the dark hall, around a comer and along another hall, and into another office smaller than the one we had left but not so dingy, with WARDEN on the door. A sleepy-looking plump guy sat at a desk which had a vase of flowers on it besides miscellany. He let out a low growl when he saw us, like a dog being disturbed in the mid- dle of comfort. Barrow handed him the paper and told him:

"Material witness in the Bronson case. We've gone through him; I suppose you'll want to take his jackknife. I'll stop in bter for my copy or get it in the morning. Any time he asks for me, day or night, I want to see him."

The warden pushed a button on his desk, ran his eyes over the paper, looked at me, and cackled. "By golly, bud, you should have put on some old clothes. The valley service here is terrible."

17

IT WAS certainly an antique. Apparently it was a whole wing of the ground floor of the court- house. The cells faced each other, two rows of them, one on either side of a long corridor. Mine was two doors from the far end. My cellmate was a chap in a dark blue suit with a pointed nose and sharp brown eyes and a thick mop of well- brushed hair. At the time I was locked in, which was around 6 o'clock, he was sitting on one of the cots brushing the hair. The dim light from the little barred window, too high to see out of, made things seem gloomy. We exchanged greetings and he went on brushing. Pretty soon he asked;

"Got any cards or dice with you?"

"Nope."

"They didn't strip you, did they?"

'They took my knife."

He put the brush down and nodded. "You can't kick on that. Were you working out at the grounds? I've never seen you around before."

"You wouldn't. My name is Archie Goodwin, and I'm from New York and am being squeezed." I waved a hand and sat down on the other cot, which was covered with a dirty gray blanket. "Forget it. Were you working out at the grounds?"

"I was until yesterday afternoon. Spoon-bean. Are you hungry?"

'I could eat. But I hesitate to send in an order-"

"Oh, not on the house. No. They feed at 5, and it's the usual. But if you're hungry and happen to have a little jack…"

"Go ahead."

He went over to the deor and tapped three times with his fingernail on one of the iron bars, waited a second, and tapped twice. In a couple of minutes slow footsteps sounded in the corridor, and as they got to our apartment my mate said in a tone restrained but not particularly secretive, "Here, Slim."

I got up and ambled across. It wasn't the keeper who had escorted me in, but a tall skinny object with an Adam's ap- ple as big as a goose egg. I got out the Nero Wolfe expense wallet, extracted a dollar bill, and told him that I required two ham sandwiches and a chocolate egg malted. He took it but shook his head and said it wasn't enough. I told him I knew that but hadn't wanted to spoil him, and parted from another one, and asked him to include 5 evening papers in the order.

By the time he returned, in a quarter of an hour, my mate and I were old friends. His name was Basil Graham, and his firsthand knowledge of geography and county jails was exten- sive. I spread my lunch out on the cot with a sheet of the newspaper for a tablecloth, and it wasn't until the last crumb had disappeared that he made a proposal which might have withered the friendship in the bud if I hadn't been firm. His preparations were simple but interesting. From under the blanket of his cot he produced three teaspoons of the five and dime variety, and a small white bean. Then he came over and picked up one of my newspapers and asked, "May I?" I nodded. He put the newspaper on the floor and sat on it, and in front of him, on the concrete, ranged the three tea- spoons in a row, bottoms up. He had nifty fingers. Under one of the spoons he put the bean and then looked up at me like the friend he was.

"You understand," he said, "I'm just showing you how it's done. It will pass the time. Sometimes the hand is quicker, sometimes the eye is quicker. It's not a game of chance, but a game of skill. Your eye against my hand. Your eye may be quicker than my hand, and we can only tell by trying. It never hurts to try. Which spoon is the bean under?"

I told him, and it was. He tried again, his fingers darting, and again it was. The next time it wasn't. The next three times it was, and he began to act flustered and surprised and dis- pleased with himself.

I shook my liead. "Don't do it, Basil," I said regretfully. "I'm not a wise guy exactly, but I'm a tightwad. If you go on working up indignation at yourself because my eye is so much quicker than your hand, you might get so upset you would actually offer to make a bet on it, and I would have to refuse. As a matter of fact, you are extremely good, both at manipu- lating the bean and at getting upset, but the currency you saw in the wallet is not my own, and even if it was I'm a tightwad."

"It don't hurt to try, does it? I just want to see-"

"No, I don't lather."

He cheerfully put the spoons and the bean away, and the friendship was saved.

It began to get dark in the cell, and after a while the lights were turned on. Somehow that only made it gloomier, since there was no light in the cell itself. The only way I could have read the paper, except for the headlines, which were screaming murder, would have been to hold it up against the bars of the door to catch the light from the corridor, so I gave it up and devoted myself to Basil. He was certainly a good-natured soul, for he had been nabbed after only one day's work at the exposition and expected to be fined 50 samoleons on the morrow, but I suppose if you embrace spoon- bean as a career you have to be a philosopher to begin with. The inside of my nose was beginning to smart from the atmo- sphere. In a cell across the corridor someone started to sing in a thin tenor, I'm wearing my heart away for you, it cries out may your love be true, and from further down the line groans sounded, interrupted by a voice like a file growling, "Let him sing, let him sing, what the hell, it's beautiful."