Rex Stout - Murder by the Book

"May I interrupt?" I asked politely.

He looked up. "Since you're back so soon I assume you found nothing of interest."

"Sometimes you assume wrong. I'm back so soon because a flock of scientists would be coming and I might have been kept all night. I saw Corrigan. Dead. Bullet through his temple."

He let the slips in his hand drop to the desk. "Please report."

I did so, in full, including even the cop's thoughts about the Yankees. Wolfe was scowling some when I started and a lot more by the time I finished. He asked a few questions, sat a while tapping with a forefinger on the arm of his chair, and suddenly blurted at me, "Was the man a nincompoop?"

"Who, the cop?"

"No. Mr. Corrigan."

I lifted my shoulders and dropped them. "In California he wasn't exactly brilliant, but I wouldn't say a nincompoop. Why?"

"It's absurd. Totally. If you had stayed there you might have got something that would give some light."

"If I had stayed there I would have been corralled in a corner for an hour or so until someone decided to start in on me."

He nodded grudgingly. "I suppose so." He looked up at the clock and put his thumbs at the edge of his desk to shove his chair back. "Confound it. An exasperating piece of nonsense to go to bed on."

"Yeah. Especially knowing that around midnight or later we'll get either a ring or a personal appearance."

But we didn't. I slept like a log for nine hours.

19

SATURDAY morning I never did finish the newspaper ac-O counts of the violent death of James A. Corrigan, the prominent attorney. Phone calls interrupted my breakfast four times. One was from Lon Cohen of the Gazette, wanting an interview with Wolfe about the call he had got from Corrigan, and two were from other journalists, wanting the same. I

stalled them. The fourth was from Mrs. Abrams. She had read the morning paper and wanted to know if the Mr. Corrigan who had shot himself was the man who had killed her Rachel, though she didn't put it as direct as that. I stalled her too.

My prolonged breakfast was ruining Fritz's schedule, so when the morning mail came I took my second cup of coffee to the office. I flipped through the envelopes, tossed all but one on my desk, glanced at the clock and saw 8:55. Wolfe invariably started for the plant rooms at nine sharp. I went and ran up the flight of stairs to his room and knocked, entered without waiting for an invitation, and announced, "Here it is. The firm's envelope. Postmarked Grand Central Station yesterday, twelve midnight. It's fat."

"Open it." He was standing, dressed, ready to leave.

I did so and removed the contents. "Typewritten, single-spaced, dated yesterday, headed at the top 'To Nero Wolfe.' Nine pages. Unsigned."

"Read it."

"Aloud?"

"No. It's nine o'clock. You can ring me or come up if necessary."

"Nuts. This is just swagger."

"It is not. A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries." He strode from the room.

My eye went to the opening sentence.

I have decided to write this but not sign it. I think I want to write it mainly for its cathartic value, but my motives are confused. The events of the past year have made me unsure about everything. It may be that deep in me much is left of the deep regard for truth and justice that I acquired in my youth, through both religious and secular teaching, and that accounts for my feeling that I must write this. Whatever the motiveThe phone rang downstairs. Wolfe's extension wasn't on, so I had to go down to get it. It was Sergeant Purley Stebbins. Purley would always just as soon talk to me as Wolfe, and maybe rather. He's not dumb by any means, and he has never forgotten the prize boner that Wolfe bluffed him into on the Longren case.

He was brusque but not thorny. He said they wanted to know firsthand about two things, Corrigan's phone call the

night before, and my performance in California, especially my contacts with Corrigan. When I told him I would be glad to oblige and come down, he said that wouldn't be necessary because Inspector Cramer wanted to see Wolfe and would drop in at eleven or shortly after. I said that as far as I knew we would let him in, and Purley hung up without saying good-by.

I sat at my desk and read:

Whatever the motive may be, I am going to write it and then decide whether to mail it or destroy it.

Even if I mail it I will not sign it because I do not want to give it legal validity. You will of course show it to the police, but without my signature it will certainly not be released for publication as coming from me. Since the context will clearly identify me by inference, this may seem pointless, but it will serve an desired purposes, whatever my'motive may be, without my signature, and those purposes are moral and not legal.

I will try not to dwell at length on my motives. To me they are of more concern than the events themselves, but to you and others it is the events that matter. All you will care about is the factual statement that I wrote the anonymous letter to the court giving information about O'Malley's bribery of a juror, but I want to add that my motive was mixed. I will not deny that moving up to the position of senior partner, with increased power and authority and income, was a factor, but so was my concern for the future of the firm. To have as our senior partner a man who was capable of jury-bribing was not only undesirable but extremely dangerous. You will ask why I didn't merely confront O'Malley with it and demand that he get out. On account of the source and nature of my information, which I won't go into, I did not have conclusive proof, and the relations among the members of the firm would have made the outcome doubtful. Anyway, I did write the informing letter to the court.

Starting a habit, I said to myself, of not signing things. I resumed.

Q'Malley wai disbarred. That was of course a blow to the firm, but not a fatal one. I became senior partner,

and Kustin and Briggs were admitted to membership. As the months passed we recovered lost ground. In the late summer and fall of last year our income was higher than it had ever been, partly on account of Kustin's remarkable performances as a trial lawyer, but I think my leadership was equally responsible. Then, on Monday, December 4, a date I would never forget if I were going to be alive to remember and forget, I returned to the office in the evening to do some work and had occasion to go to Dykes's desk to get a document. It wasn't where I expected to find it and I went through the drawers. In one of them was a brown fiber portfolio and I looked inside. The document wasn't there. It contained a stack of neatly assembled sheets of paper. The top sheet, typed like a title page, said "Put Not Your Trust, A Modern Novel of a Lawyer's Frailty, by Baird Archer." Through curiosity I looked at the next sheet. It began the text, and the first sentence read "It is not true that all lawyers are cutthroats." I read on a little and then sat in Dykes's chair and read more.

It is still almost incredible to me that Dykes could have been such a fool. Through his connection with our office he knew something of the libel law, and yet he wrote that and offered it for publication. Of course it is true that lawyers themselves will do incredible things when their vanity is involved, as O'Malley did when he bribed a juror, and Dykes probably thought that the use of an assumed name would somehow protect him.