Wolfe flattened his palms on the chair arms and took in the audience. “There it is,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you about it and go all over it again for Mr. Cramer. Any questions?”
David was slumped in the red leather chair, his head down, staring at the floor. At Wolfe’s question he slowly lifted his head and slowly moved it, taking in the others, one by one, and then going to Wolfe. He squeezed words out.
“I suppose I ought to feel sorry, but I don’t. I always thought Bert killed his father. I always thought Vince’s alibi was false, that he lied to save Bert, but I see it now. Without it Bert would probably have been convicted, so it did save him, but it saved Vince too. Of course Bert knew it was false, he knew he and Vince hadn’t been together all evening, but if he said so, if he said Vince had gone out for a while, that would have destroyed his own alibi, and he didn’t dare – and he didn’t know Vince had killed our father. He might have suspected, but he didn’t know. I see it now. I even see the Mrs. Dobbs part.” He frowned. “I’m trying to remember her testimony. She said she hadn’t heard either of them go out, but probably she had, and she might have known which one, but if she said she heard either of them leave the house that would have ruined Bert’s alibi, and she was crazy about Bert and she hadn’t liked our father. Not many people liked our father.”
He thought he was going to say more, decided not to, rose from the chair, and turned to his brother. “Was this what you were after, Paul? Did you suspect this?”
“Hell no,” Paul said harshly. “You know damn well what I suspected, and who, and if this fat slob is right about the dry ice” – he bounced out of his chair and wheeled to face Johnny Arrow – “why couldn’t it have been him? He had a key to the apartment! I never said I knew exactly how he did it! And if you – now lay off!”
David had stepped across and grabbed his arm, and for a second I thought Paul was going to sock his elder brother, but evidently David knew him better than I did. David said nothing, but he didn’t have to. He merely hung onto his arm, steered him around back of the other chairs, and headed him towards the hall. They disappeared, and Saul went to let them out.
“I have no questions,” Doctor Buhl said. He arose and looked down at the Tuttles, then at Wolfe. “My God, after twenty years. You used a phrase, ‘a window for death.’ You have certainly opened one.” He looked down again. “Louise, you have been my patient nearly all your life. Do you need me? Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” Her high thin voice was trying not to be a wail. “I don’t believe it.”
Buhl opened his mouth to say more, decided not to, and turned and went. Wolfe spoke to the man and wife who owned a fine drugstore. “If you have no questions you might as well go.”
Louise, with her teeth bearing down on her lip, tugged at her husband’s sleeve. He took a deep breath, put a hand on her shoulder, and raised himself from the chair, and she came up with him. Side by side they headed for the door, and I left them to Saul too. When they were out of sight Wolfe sent his eyes in the direction of the pair in the rear and said sharply, “Well? Have I fixed it up for you?”
Damned if they weren’t holding hands, and they continued to hold as they got up and approached the desk. I am perfectly capable of holding hands, but not in public. Anne looked as if she wanted to cry but didn’t intend to. Luckily it was Johnny’s left hand she had, for he wanted to use the other one. When they got to the desk he stretched his arm across it and said, “Shake.”
VIII
I SHOULD EXPLAIN ONE THING. Since Johnny and Anne had no part in the performance, why did Wolfe tell me to invite them? I didn’t have to ask him. I know him. One little grand is a pretty skimpy fee for a job like that, spotting a murderer, and if Johnny Arrow came and saw the neat process by which the guy who had killed his partner was dug out he might feel inclined to show his appreciation by contributing a small hunk of uranium. That was the idea, no question about it, and for some weeks, as I flipped through the morning mail, I had my eye out for an envelope with his return address. It never came, and I quit expecting it.
But last week, just four days after a jury had convicted Vincent Tuttle of the first-degree murder of Bertram Fyfe’s father – it had been decided to try him for that one because it was a tighter case, especially after Mrs. Dobbs opened up – here came an envelope with Fyfe-Arrow Mining Corporation, Montreal, in the corner, and when I opened it and saw the amount of the check I raised my brows as high as they would go. A really nice hunk.
There was no letter, but that was understandable. He had no time for writing letters. He was much too busy showing his wife how to prospect.
Immune to Murder
I
I STOOD WITH my arms folded, glaring down at Nero Wolfe, who had his 278 pounds planted in a massive armchair which was made of heavy pine slats, with thick rainbow rugs draped over the back and on the seat for a cushion. It went with the rest of the furniture, including the bed, in that room of River Bend, the sixteen-room mountain lodge belonging to O. V. Bragan, the oil tycoon.
“A fine way to serve your country,” I told him. “Not. In spite of a late start I get you here in time to be shown to your room and unpack and wash up for dinner, and now you tell me to go tell your host you want dinner in your room. Nothing doing. I decline.”
He was glaring back. “Confound it, I have lumbago!” he roared.
“You have not got lumbago. Naturally your back’s tired, since all the way from Thirty-fifth Street, Manhattan, to the Adirondacks, three hundred and twenty-eight miles, you kept stiff on the back seat, ready to jump, even with me at the wheel. What you need is exercise, like a good long walk to the dining room.”
“I say it’s lumbago.”
“No. It’s acute mooditis, which is a medical term for an inflamed whim.” I unfolded my arms to gesture. “Here’s the situation. We were getting nowhere on that insurance case for Lamb and McCullough, which I admit was a little annoying for the greatest detective alive, and you were plenty annoyed, when a phone call came from the State Department. A new ambassador from a foreign country with which our country wanted to make a deal had been asked if he had any special personal desires, and he had said yes, he wanted to catch an American brook trout, and, what was more, he wanted it cooked fresh from the brook by Nero Wolfe. Would you be willing to oblige? Arrangements had been made for the ambassador and a small party to spend a week at a lodge in the Adirondacks, with three miles of private trout water on the Crooked River. If a week was too much for you, two days would do, or even one, or even in a pinch just long enough to cook some trout.”