Rex Stout - The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

Okay from Inspector Cramer for inspection of the room at the Waldorf. Will report later by phone.

At the right of the typing, scribbled in ink, also my work and worthy of admiration, were the initials LTC.

Since I had got an early start and the office of the Homicide Squad on Twentieth Street was less than a mile downtown, it was only a little after nine-thirty when I was admitted to an inside room and took a chair at the end of a crummy old desk. The man in the swivel chair, frowning at papers, had a big round red face, half-hidden gray eyes, and delicate little ears that stayed close to his skull. As I sat down he transferred the frown to me and grunted:

“I’m busy as hell.” His eyes focused three inches below my chin. “What do you think it is, Easter?”

“I know of no law,” I said stiffly, “against a man’s buying a new shirt and tie. Anyhow, I’m in disguise as a detective. Sure you’re busy, and I won’t waste your time. I want to ask a favor, a big favor. Not for me, I’m quite aware that if I were trapped in a burning building you would yell for gasoline to toss on the flames, but on behalf of Nero Wolfe. He wants permission for me to inspect that room at the Waldorf where Cheney Boone was murdered Tuesday evening. Also maybe to take pictures.”

Inspector Cramer stared at me, not at my new tie. “For God’s sake,” he said finally in bitter disgust. “As if this case wasn’t enough of a mess already. All it needed to make it a carnival was Nero Wolfe, and by God here he is.” He worked his jaw, regarding me sourly. “Who’s your client?”

I shook my head. “I have no information about any client. As far as I know it’s just Mr. Wolfe’s scientific curiosity. He’s interested in crime-”

“You heard me, who’s your client?”

“No, sir,” I said regretfully. “Rip me open, remove my heart for the laboratory, and you’ll find inscribed on it-”

“Beat it,” he grated, and dug into his papers.

I stood up. “Certainly, Inspector, I know you’re busy. But Mr. Wolfe would greatly appreciate it if you’ll give me permission to inspect-”

“Nuts.” He didn’t look up. “You don’t need any permission to inspect and you know damn well you don’t. We’re all through up there and it’s public premises. If what you’re after is authority, it’s the first time Wolfe ever bothered to ask for authority to do anything he wanted to do, and if I had time I’d try to figure out what the catch is, but I’m too busy. Beat it.”

“Gosh,” I said in a discouraged tone, starting for the door. “Suspicious. Always suspicious. What a way to live.”

Chapter 3

IN APPEARANCE, DRESS, and manner, Johnny Darst was about as far as you could get from the average idea of a hotel dick. He might have been taken for a vice-president of a trust company or a golf club steward. In a little room, more a cubbyhole than a room in size, he stood watching me deadpan while I looked over the topography, the angles, and the furniture, which consisted of a small table, a mirror, and a few chairs. Since Johnny was not a sap I didn’t even try to give him the impression that I was doing something abstruse.

“What are you really after?” he asked gently.

“Nothing whatever,” I told him. “I work for Nero Wolfe just as you work for the Waldorf, and he sent me here to take a look and here I am. The carpet’s been changed?”

He nodded. “There was a little blood, not much, and the cops took some things.”

“According to the paper there are four of these rooms, two on each side of the stage.”

He nodded again. “Used as dressing rooms and resting rooms for performers. Not that you could call Cheney Boone a performer. He wanted a place to look over his speech and they sent him in here to be alone. The Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf is the best-equipped-”

“Sure,” I said warmly. “You bet it is. They ought to pay you extra. Well, I’m a thousand times obliged.”

“Got all you want?”

“Yep, I guess I’ve solved it.”

“I could show you the exact spot where he was going to stand to deliver his speech if he had still been alive.”

“Thanks a lot, but if I find I need that I’ll come back.”

He went with me down the elevator and to the entrance, both of us understanding that the only private detectives hotels enjoy having around are the ones they hire. At the door he asked casually:

“Who’s Wolfe working for?”

“There is never,” I told him, “any question about that. He is working first, last, and all the time for Wolfe. Come to think of it, so am I. Boy, am I loyal.”

Chapter 4

IT WAS A QUARTER to eleven when I parked the car in Foley Square, entered the United States Court House, and took the elevator.

There were a dozen or more FBI men with whom Wolfe and I had had dealings during the war, when he was doing chores for the government and I was in G-2. It had been decided that for the present purpose G. G. Spero, being approximately three per cent less tight-lipped than the others, was the man, so it was to him I sent my card. In no time at all a clean efficient girl took me to a clean efficient room, and a clean efficient face, belonging to G. G. Spero of the FBI, was confronting me. We chinned a couple of minutes and then he asked heartily:

“Well, Major, what can we do for you?”

“Two little things,” I replied. “First, quit calling me Major. I’m out of uniform, and besides, it stimulates my inferiority complex because I should have been a colonel. Second is a request from Nero Wolfe, sort of confidential. Of course he could have sent me to the Chief, or phoned him, but he didn’t want to bother him about it. It’s a little question about the Boone murder case. We’ve been told that the FBI is mixing in, and of course you don’t ordinarily touch a local murder. Mr. Wolfe would like to know if there is something about the FBI angle that would make it undesirable for a private detective to take any interest.”

Spero was still trying to look cordial, but training and habit were too much for him. He started to drum on the desk, realized what he was doing, and jerked his hand away. FBI men do not drum on desks.

“The Boone case,” he said.

“That’s right. The Cheney Boone case.”

“Yes, certainly. Putting aside, for the moment, the FBI angle, what would Mr. Wolfe’s angle be?”

He went at me and kept after me from forty different directions. I left half an hour later with what I had expected to leave with, nothing. The reliance on his three per cent under par in lip tightness was not for the sake of what he might tell me, but what he might tell about me.

Chapter 5

THE LAST NUMBER ON the program proved to be the most complicated, chiefly because I was dealing with total strangers. I didn’t know a soul connected with the National Industrial Association, and so had to start from scratch. The whole atmosphere, from the moment I entered the offices on the thirtieth floor of a building on Forty-first Street, made a bad impression on me. The reception room was too big, they had spent too much money on rugs, upholstery had been carried to extremes, and the girl at the desk, though not a bad specimen from the standpoint of design, had been connected up with a tube running from a refrigerating unit. She was so obviously congealed for good that there wasn’t the slightest temptation to start thawing her out. With females between twenty and thirty, meeting a certain standard in contour and coloring, I do not believe in being distant, but I was with that one as I handed her a card and said I wanted to see Hattie Harding.