Rex Stout - Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

I took a taxi down to 35th Street, stopping on the way to pick up a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of milk, and found that luck was with me there too. All was serene. They had gone to bed. The house was dark. I would have liked to enjoy the sandwiches in the kitchen, but didn’t want the doorbell to ring, so I sneaked in and got a glass, turning on no light, and went back to the stoop, closing the door, and sat there on the top step to eat my dinner. Everything was going smooth as silk.

They were pretty good sandwiches. As time wore on I began to get chilly. I didn’t want to stamp around on the stoop or pace the sidewalk, since Fritz slept in the basement and I didn’t know how soundly he slept during training, so I stood and flapped my arms to work up a circulation. Then I sat on the step again. I looked at my watch and it was 10:40. An hour later I looked again and it was 10:55. Having been afraid before I got there that some squad man might discover the note first thing, now I began to wonder if the damn laboratory was going to wait till morning to start the p.m. and keep me out all night. I stood up and flapped my arms some more.

It was nearly midnight when a police car came zipping down the street and rolled to a stop right in front, and a man got out. I knew him before he hit the sidewalk. It was Sergeant Stebbins of the Homicide Squad. He crossed the sidewalk and started up the steps, and saw me, and stopped.

I said cheerfully, “Hello, Purley. Up so late?”

“Who are you?” he demanded. He peered. “Well, I’ll be damned. Didn’t recognize you in uniform. When did you get to town?”

“Yesterday afternoon. How’s crime?”

“Just fine. What do you say we go in and sit down and have a little conversation?”

“Sorry, can’t. Don’t talk loud. They’re all asleep. I just stepped out for a breath of air. Gee, it’s nice to see you again.”

“Yeah. I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Shoot.”

“Well-for instance. When did you last see Ann Amory?”

“Aw, hell,” I said regretfully. “You would do that. Ask me the one question I’m not answering tonight. This is my night for not answering any questions whatever about anybody named Ann.”

“Nuts,” he growled, his bass growl that I had been hearing off and on for ten years. “And I don’t mean peanuts. Is it news to you that she’s dead? Murdered?”

“Nothing doing, Purley.”

“There’s got to be something doing. She’s been murdered. You know damn well you’ve got to talk.”

I grinned at him. “What kind of got?”

“Well, to start with, material witness. You talk, or I take you down, and maybe I do anyway.”

“You mean arrest me as a material witness?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Go ahead. It will be the first time I’ve ever been arrested in the city of New York. And by you! Go ahead.”

He growled. He was getting mad. “Goddamn it, Archie, don’t be a sap! In that uniform? You’re an officer, ain’t you?”

“I am. Major Goodwin. You didn’t salute.”

“Well, for God’s sake-”

“No good. Final. Regarding Ann Amory, anything about Ann Amory, I don’t open my trap.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ve always thought you were cuckoo. You’re under arrest. Get in that car.”

I did so.

There was one little chore left before I could sit back and let nature take its course. Arriving at Centre Street, and asserting my right to make one phone call, I got a lawyer I knew out of bed and gave him some facts to relay to Bill Pratt of the Courier . At 3:45 in the morning, after spending three hours in the company of Inspector Cramer, two lieutenants, and some assorted sergeants and other riffraff, and still refusing to utter a syllable connected in any way with the life or death of Ann Amory, I was locked into a cell in the beautiful new city prison, which is not as beautiful inside as outside.

Chapter 8

It had cost me two bucks to get it smuggled in to me, but it was worth it. Wednesday noon I sat on the edge of my cot in my cell gazing admiringly at it, a front page headline in the early edition of the Courier:

ARMY MAJOR HELD IN MURDER CASE

NERO WOLFE’S FORMER ASSISTANT

LOCKED UP

As the schoolboy said to the teacher, good- hell , it’s perfect. The “Army Major” was plenty disgraceful, and the “Nero Wolfe’s Former Assistant” was superb. Absolutely degrading. As added attractions, there were pictures of both Wolfe and me on the second page. The article was good too. Bill Pratt hadn’t failed me. It gave me a good appetite, so I relinquished another two bucks to send out for a meal that would fit the occasion. After that was disposed of, I stretched out on the cot for a nap, having got behind on my sleep the last two nights.

The opening of the cell door woke me up. I blinked at a guard as he gave me a sign to emerge, rubbed my eyes, stood up, shook myself, enjoyed a yawn, and followed the guard. He led me to an elevator, and, when we got downstairs, through the barrier out of the prison section, then along corridors and into an anteroom, and through that into an office. I had been there before. Except for one object it was familiar: Inspector Cramer at the big desk, Sergeant Stebbins standing nearby ready for anything that didn’t require mental activity, and a guy with a notebook at a little table at one side. The unfamiliar object, in those surroundings, was Nero Wolfe. He was in a chair by a corner of Cramer’s desk, and I had to compress my lips to keep from grinning with satisfaction when I saw that he was no longer dressed for training. He was wearing the dark blue cheviot with a pin stripe, with a yellow shirt and a dark blue tie. Really snappy. The suit didn’t fit him any more, but that didn’t bother me now.

He looked at me and didn’t say a word. But he looked.

Cramer said, “Sit down.”

I sat, crossed my legs, and looked surly.

Wolfe took his eyes from me and snapped, “Repeat briefly what you’ve told me, Mr. Cramer.”

“He knows it all,” Cramer growled. He had fists on his desk. “At 7:10 last evening Mrs. Chack returned to her apartment at 316 Barnum Street and found her granddaughter, Ann Amory, there on the floor dead, strangled, with a scarf around her neck. A radio car arrived at 7:21, the squad at 7:27, the medical examiner at 7:42. The girl had been dead from one to three hours. The body was removed-”

Wolfe wiggled a finger. “Please. The main points. About Mr. Goodwin.”

“He knows them too. Found on the body, underneath the dress, was the note I have shown you, in Goodwin’s handwriting, signed ARCHIE. The paper had been torn from a notebook which was found on his person, now in my possession. Three sets of Goodwin’s fingerprints, fresh and recent, were on objects in the apartment. A strand of hair, eleven hairs, found behind the scarf which was around the body’s throat, with which she was strangled, has been compared with Goodwin’s hair and they match precisely. Goodwin was at that address Monday evening and had an altercation with Mrs. Chack, and took Ann Amory to the Flamingo Club, and left with her hastily on account of a scene with a woman whose name is-not an element in the case. He went to 316 Barnum Street again yesterday and made inquiries of a man named Furey, Leon Furey, and apparently he spent most of the afternoon snooping around the neighborhood. We’re still checking that. So the neighborhood is acquainted with him, and two people saw him walking east on Barnum Street, not far from Number 316, between six-thirty and seven o’clock, in company with a man named Roy Douglas, who lives at-”