Rex Stout - The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

“That’s a slight exaggeration. This is not a cell, and I don’t-”

“He intended to,” Wolfe asserted grimly. “He would have. Very well. You have asked me my advice. I would continue, within reason, all lines of inquiry that have already been started, and initiate any others that offer any promise whatever, because no matter what the cylinder gives you-if and when you find it-you will almost certainly need all available scraps of support and corroboration. But the main chance, the only real hope, is the cylinder. I suggest you try this. You both met Miss Gunther? Good. Sit down and shut your eyes and imagine it is last Thursday afternoon, and you are Miss Gunther, sitting in your office in the BPR headquarters in Washington. You have decided what you are going to do with the leather case and the nine eliminated cylinders; forget all that. In your hand is the cylinder, and the question is what to do with it. Here’s what you’re after: you want to preserve it against any risk of damage, you want it easily accessible should you need it on short notice, and you want to be certain that no matter how many people look for it, or who, with whatever persistence and ingenuity, it will not be found.”

Wolfe looked from one to the other. “There’s your little problem, Miss Gunther. Anything so simple, for example, as concealing it there in the BPR office is not even to be considered. Something far above that, something really fine, must be conceived. Your own apartment would be merely ridiculous; you show that you are quite aware of that by disposing of the other nine cylinders as you do. Perhaps the apartment of a friend or colleague you can trust? This is murder; this is of the utmost gravity and of ultimate importance; would you trust any other human being that far? You are ready now to leave, to go to your apartment first and then take a plane to New York. You will probably be in New York some days. Do you take the cylinder with you or leave it in Washington? If so, where? Where? Where?”

Wolfe flipped a hand. “There’s your question, gentlemen. Answer it the way Miss Gunther finally answered it, and your worries are ended.” He stood up. “I am spending a thousand dollars a day trying to learn how Miss Gunther answered it.” He was multiplying by two and it wasn’t his money he was spending, but at least it wasn’t a barefaced lie. “Come, Archie. I want to go home.”

They didn’t want him to go, even then, which was the best demonstration to date of the pitiable condition they were in. They certainly were stymied, flummoxed, and stripped to the bone. Wolfe magnanimously accommodated them by composing a few more well-constructed sentences, properly furnished with subjects, predicates, and subordinate clauses, none of which meant a damn thing, and then marched from the room with me bringing up the rear. He had postponed his exit, I noticed, until after a clerk had entered to deliver some papers to Hombert’s desk, which had occurred just as Wolfe was telling the P.C. and D.A. to shut their eyes and pretend they were Miss Gunther.

Driving back home he sat in the back seat, as usual, clutching the toggle, because of his theory that when-not if and when, just when-the car took a whim to dart aside and smash into some immovable object, your chances in back, hopeless as they were, were slightly better than in front. On the way down to Centre Street I had, on request, given him a sketch of my session with Nina Boone, and now, going home, I filled in the gaps. I couldn’t tell whether it contained any morsel that he considered nutritious, because my back was to him and his face wasn’t in my line of vision in the mirror, and also because the emotions that being in a moving vehicle aroused in him were too overwhelming to leave any room for minor reactions.

As Fritz let us in and we entered the hall and I attended to hat and coat disposal, Wolfe looked almost good-humored. He had beaten a rap and was home safe, and it was only six o’clock, time for beer. But Fritz spoiled it at once by telling us that we had a visitor waiting in the office. Wolfe scowled at him and demanded in a ferocious whisper:

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Cheney Boone.”

“Good heavens. That hysterical gammer?”

Which was absolutely unfair. Mrs. Boone had been in the house just twice, both times under anything but tranquil circumstances, and I hadn’t seen the faintest indication of hysteria.

Chapter 30

I HAD MADE A close and prolonged study of Wolfe’s attitude toward women. The basic fact about a woman that seemed to irritate him was that she was a woman; the long record showed not a single exception; but from there on the documentation was cockeyed. If woman as woman grated on him you would suppose that the most womany details would be the worst for him, but time and again I have known him to have a chair placed for a female so that his desk would not obstruct his view of her legs, and the answer can’t be that his interest is professional and he reads character from legs, because the older and dumpier she is the less he cares where she sits. It is a very complex question and some day I’m going to take a whole chapter for it. Another little detail: he is much more sensitive to women’s noses than he is to men’s. I have never been able to detect that extremes or unorthodoxies in men’s noses have any effect on him, but in women’s they do. Above all he doesn’t like a pug, or in fact a pronounced incurve anywhere along the bridge.

Mrs. Boone had a pug, and it was much too small for the surroundings. I saw him looking at it as he leaned back in his chair. So he told her in a gruff and inhospitable tone, barely not boorish:

“I have ten minutes to spare, madam.”

Entirely aside from the nose she looked terrible. She had had a go at her compact, but apparently with complete indifference to the result, and anyway it would have been a job for a make-up artist. She was simply all shot and her face had quit trying to do any pretending about it.

“Naturally,” she said, in a voice that was holding up much better than the face, “you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“Naturally,” Wolfe agreed.

“I mean why I came to see you, since you’re on the other side. It’s because I phoned my cousin this morning and he told me about you.”

“I am not,” Wolfe said curtly, “on the other side or any side. I have undertaken to catch a murderer. Do I know your cousin?”

She nodded. “General Carpenter. That was my maiden name. He is my first cousin. He’s in a hospital after an operation, or he would have come to help me when my husband was killed. He told me not to believe anything you said but to do whatever you told me to do. He said that you have your own private set of rules, and that if you are working on a case of murder the only one that can really rely on you is the murderer. Since you know my cousin, you know what he meant. I’m used to him.”

She stopped, looked at me and back at Wolfe, and used her handkerchief on her lower lip and at the corners, which didn’t improve things any. When her hand went back to her lap it was gripping the handkerchief as if it was afraid that someone was planning to snatch it.

“And?” Wolfe prompted her.

“So I came to see you to get some advice. Or maybe I ought to say make up my mind whether I want to ask your advice. I have to get some from somebody, and I don’t know-” She looked at me again, returned to Wolfe, and made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t guarding the handkerchief. “Do I have to tell you why I prefer not to go to someone in the FBI or the police?”