Rex Stout: The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

“Oh, no. I saw that was hopeless. You wouldn’t do that. Would you?”

“I’m afraid not without some excellent reason. As Mr. Breslow put it, the interest of justice is paramount. That was his position. Mine is that I need the money. Then what did you come for?”

O’Neill grinned at me, as if to say, your boss is really a card, isn’t he? He shifted the grin intact to Wolfe. “I’m glad to see you stick to the point. With me you need to, the way I go floundering around. What brought me down here, frankly, was a sense of my responsibility as Chairman of the Dinner Committee. I’ve seen a copy of the letter Frank Erskine gave you, but I didn’t hear the conversation you had, and ten thousand dollars as a retainer on a straight inquiry job is away above the clouds. I hire detectives in my business, things like labor relations and so on, and I know what detectives get, so naturally the question occurs to me, is it really a straight inquiry job? I asked Erskine point-blank, have you hired Wolfe to protect the NIA members by-uh-getting attention shifted to other directions, and he said no. But I know Frank Erskine, and I wasn’t satisfied, and I told him so. The trouble with me is I’ve got a conscience and a sense of responsibility. So I came to ask you.”

Wolfe’s lips twitched, but whether with amusement or fierce indignation I couldn’t tell. The way he takes an insult never depends on the insult but on how he happens to be feeling. At the peak of one of his lazy spells he wouldn’t have exerted himself to bat an eyelash even if someone accused him of specializing in divorce evidence.

His lips twitched. “I also say no, Mr. O’Neill. But I’m afraid that won’t help you much. What if Mr. Erskine and I are both lying? I don’t see what you can do about it, short of going to the police and charging us with obstructing justice, but then you don’t like the police either. You’re really in a pickle. We have invited some people to meet here this evening at nine o’clock and talk it over. Why don’t you come and keep an eye on us?”

“Oh, I’m coming. I told Erskine and the others I’m coming.”

“Good. Then we won’t keep you now.-Archie?”

It wasn’t as simple as that. O’Neill was by no means ready to go, on account of his sense of responsibility. But we finally got him out without resorting to physical violence. After wrangling him to the stoop, I returned to the office and asked Wolfe:

“Exactly what did he really come here for? Of course he killed Boone, I understand that, but why did he waste his time and mine-”

“You let him in,” Wolfe said icily. “You did not notify me. You seem to forget-”

“Oh, well,” I broke in cheerfully, “it all helps in studying human nature. I helped get him out, didn’t I? Now we have work to do, getting ready for the party. How many will there be, around twelve not counting us?”

I got busy on the chair problem. There were six there in the office, and the divan would hold four comfortably, except that in a murder case three days old you don’t often find four people connected with it who are still in a frame of mind to sit together on the same piece of furniture. It would be better to have plenty of chairs, so I brought five more in from the front room, the one facing on the street, and scattered them around, not in rows, which would have been too stiff, but sort of staggered and informal. Big as the room was, it made it look pretty crowded. I backed against the wall and surveyed it with a frown.

“What it needs,” I remarked, “is a woman’s touch.”

“Bah,” Wolfe growled.

Chapter 9

AT A QUARTER PAST ten Wolfe was leaning back in his chair with his eyes half closed, taking them in. They had been at it for over an hour.

There were thirteen of them. Thanks to my foresight with the seating arrangements, there had been no infighting. The NIA contingent was at the side of the room farthest from my desk, the side toward the hall door, with Erskine in the red leather chair. There were six of them: the four who had formed the afternoon delegation, including Winterhoff, who had had an appointment he couldn’t break, Hattie Harding, and Don O’Neill.

On my side of the room were the BPR’s, four in number: Mrs. Boone the widow, Nina the niece, Alger Kates, and a gate-crasher named Solomon Dexter. Dexter was around fifty, under rather than over, looked like a cross between a statesman and a lumberjack, and was the ex-Deputy Director, now for twenty-four hours Acting Director, of the Bureau of Price Regulation. He had come, he told Wolfe, ex officio.

In between the two hostile armies were the neutrals or referees: Spero of the FBI, and Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I had explained to Cramer that I was aware that he rated the red leather chair, but that he was needed in the middle. By a quarter past ten he was about as mad as I had ever seen him, because he had long ago caught on that Wolfe was starting from scratch and had arranged the gathering for the purpose of taking in, not giving out.

There had been one puny attempt to disrupt my seating plans. Mrs. Boone and the niece had come early, before nine, and since there is nothing wrong with my eyesight I had without the slightest hesitation put the niece in the chair-one of the yellow ones from the front room-nearest to mine. When Ed Erskine arrived, alone, a little later, I assigned him to a seat on the NIA side, only to discover, after attending to a couple of other customers, that he had bounced across and was in my chair talking to the niece. I went over and told him:

“This side is for the Capulets. Would you mind sitting where I put you?”

He twisted his neck and lifted his chin to get me, and his focusing was not good. It was obvious that he had been applying the theory of acquired immunity to his hangover. I want to be fair, he was not pie-eyed, but neither was he in danger of desiccating.

He asked me, “Huh? Why?”

“Besides,” I said, “this is my chair and I work here. Let’s not make an issue of it.”

He shrugged it off and moved. I addressed Nina Boone courteously:

“You run into all sorts of strangers in a detective’s office.”

“I suppose you do,” she said. Not a deep remark, nothing specially penetrating about it, but I smiled at her to show I appreciated her taking the trouble to make it when under a strain. She had dark hair and eyes, and was keeping her chin firm.

From the moment, right at the beginning, that Wolfe had announced that he had been retained by the NIA, the BPR’s had been suspicious and antagonistic. Of course everyone who reads a newspaper or listens to the radio, which includes me, knew that the NIA hated Cheney Boone and all he stood for, and had done everything possible to get him tossed to the wolves, and also knew that the BPR would gladly have seen the atom bomb tested by bunching the NIA crowd on an island and dropping one on them, but I hadn’t realized how it sizzled until that evening in Wolfe’s office. Of course there were two fresh elements in it then: the fact that Cheney Boone had been murdered, at an NIA dinner of all places, and the prospect that some person or persons either would or wouldn’t get arrested, tried, convicted, and electrocuted.

By a quarter past ten a good many points, both trivial and important, had been touched on. On opportunity, the BPR position was that everyone in the reception room, and probably many others, had known that Boone was in the room near the stage, the murder room, while the NIA claimed that not more than four or five people, besides the BPR’s who were there, knew it. The truth was that there was no way of finding out who had known and who hadn’t.