Rex Stout - The Golden Spiders (Crime Line)

“Deposit the check,” he muttered.

“Yes, sir.”

“We need information.”

“Yes, sir.”

“See Mr. Cohen and get it.”

“About what?”

“Everything. Include Matthew Birch, with the understanding that his knowledge of that connection is not to be disclosed unless the police release it or he gets it from some other source. Tell him nothing. It may be published that I am engaged on the case, but not the source of my interest.”

“Do I tell him that Pete came to see you?”

“No.”

“He would appreciate it. It would be an exclusive human interest story for him. Also it would show that your reputation-”

His fist hit the desk, which for him was a convulsion. “No!” he roared. “Reputation? Am I to invite the comment that it is a mortal hazard to solicit my help? On Tuesday, that boy. On Friday, that woman. They are both dead. I will not have my office converted into an anteroom for the morgue!”

“Yeah. Something of the sort had occurred to me.”

“You were well advised not to voice it. The person responsible would have been well advised not to induce it. We will need Saul and Fred and Orrie, but I’ll attend to that. Go.”

I did so. I took a taxi to the Gazette office. The receptionist on the third floor, who had not only received me before but also had been, for three or four years, on the list of those who receive a box of orchids from Wolfe’s plant rooms twice a year, spoke to Lon on the intercom and waved me in.

I don’t know what Lon Cohen is on the Gazette and I doubt if he does. City or wire, daily or Sunday, foreign or national or local, he seems to know his way in and around without ever having to work at it. His is the only desk in a room about nine by twelve, and that’s just as well because otherwise there would be no place for his feet, which are also about nine by twelve. From the ankles up he is fairly regular.

There were two colleagues in with him when I entered, but they soon finished and went. As we shook he said, “Stay on your feet. You can have two minutes.”

“Nuts. An hour may do it.”

“Not today. We’re spinning on the Fromm murder. The only reason you got in at all, I want your release on the item that Nero Wolfe was making inquiries yesterday about Mrs. Fromm.”

“I don’t think-” I let it hang while I moved a chair and sat. “No, better not. But okay on an item that he is working on the murder.”

“He is?”

“Yep.”

“Who hired him?”

I shook my head. “It came by carrier pigeon, and he won’t tell me.”

“Take off your shoes and socks while I light a cigarette. A few applications to your tender flesh should do it. I want the name of the client.”

“J. Edgar Hoover.”

He made an unseemly noise. “Just a whisper, to me?”

“No.”

“But it’s open that Wolfe is working on the Fromm murder?”

“Yes. Just that.”

“And the boy, Peter Drossos? And Matthew Birch? Them too?”

I gave him a look. “How come?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Wolfe’s ad in the Times wanting to date a woman wearing spider earrings who had asked a boy at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street to get a cop. Mrs. Fromm was wearing spider earrings, and you were here yesterday asking about her. As for Birch, the pattern. His body was found in a secluded spot, flattened by a car, and so was Mrs. Fromm’s. I repeat the question.”

“I answer it. Nero Wolfe is investigating the murder of Mrs. Fromm with his accustomed vigor, skill, and laziness. He will not rest until he gets the bastard or until bedtime, whichever comes first. Any mention you make of other murders should come on another page.”

“No connection implied?”

“Not by him or me. If I should ask for information on Birch, it will be because you dragged him in yourself.”

“Okay, hold everything. I want to catch the early.”

He left the room. I sat and tried to argue Wolfe into letting Lon have the juicy item about the flap from Matthew Birch’s pocket being found on the car that had killed Pete, but since Wolfe wasn’t there I made no progress. Before long Lon came back, and after he had crossed to his desk and got his big feet under it I told him, “I still need an hour.”

“We’ll see. There’s not much nourishment in that crumb.”

It didn’t take a full hour, but a big hunk of one. He gave me nearly everything I wanted without consulting any documents and with only two phone calls to shopmates.

Mrs. Fromm had had lunch Friday at the Churchill with Miss Angela Wright, Executive Secretary of Assadip-the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons. Presumably she had gone to the Churchill upon leaving Wolfe’s office, but I didn’t go into that with Lon. After lunch, around two-thirty, the two women had gone together to the office of Assadip, where Mrs. Fromm signed some papers and made some phone calls. The Gazette didn’t have her taped from around 3:15 to around five, when she had returned to her home on Sixty-eighth Street and had spent an hour or so working with her personal secretary, Miss Jean Estey. According to Lon, Angela Wright was a credit to her sex, since she would talk to reporters, and Jean Estey wasn’t, since she wouldn’t.

A little before seven o’clock Mrs. Fromm had left home, alone, to go out to dinner, driving one of her cars, a Cadillac convertible. The dinner was at the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Horan on Gramercy Park. It wasn’t known where she had parked the car, but in that neighborhood in the evening there are always spaces. There had been six people at the dinner:

Dennis Horan, the host

Claire Horan, his wife

Laura Fromm

Angela Wright

Paul Kuffner, public-relations expert

Vincent Lipscomb, magazine publisher

The party had broken up a little after eleven, and the guests had gone their ways separately. Mrs. Fromm had been the last to leave. The Gazette had a tip that Horan had taken her down to her car, but the police weren’t saying, and it couldn’t be checked. That was all on Laura Fromm until five o’clock Saturday morning, when a man on his way to work in a fish market, passing through the construction lane between the pillars, had found the body.

Just a few minutes before I reached the Gazette office the District Attorney had announced that Mrs. Fromm had been run over by her own car. The convertible had been found parked on Sixteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, only a five-minute walk from the Tenth Precinct, and had yielded not only evidence of that fact but also a heavy tire wrench, found on the floor, which had been used on the back of Mrs. Fromm’s head. Whether the murderer had been concealed in the car, under a rug behind the front seat, when Mrs. Fromm had come down to it, or whether he had been allowed by her to get in with her, then or later, it seemed better than a guess that he had picked a moment and spot to hit her with the wrench, replace her at the wheel, drive to an appropriate site, unoccupied and unobserved at that hour, unload her, and run the car over her. It would have been interesting and instructive to go down to Centre Street and watch the scientists working on that car, but they wouldn’t have let me get within a mile of it, and anyhow I was busy with Lon.