Where There's a Will Rex Stout Series: Nero Wolfe [8] Published: 1995 Tags: Vintage Mystery
Vintage Mysteryttt
SUMMARY:
Why did the late multimillionaire Noel Hawthorne leave a peach, a pear and an apple to his sisters, April, May and June? And why is the bulk of his estate to go to a woman most definitely not his wife? The able, astute and unscrupulous detective Nero Wolfe must get to the bottom of a will that has left a whirlpool of menace... and a legacy of murder that's about to be fulfilled.
Where There's a WillRex StoutSeries: Nero Wolfe [8] Published: 1995 Tags: Vintage Mystery
Vintage Mysteryttt
SUMMARY:
Why did the late multimillionaire Noel Hawthorne leave a peach, a pear and an apple to his sisters, April, May and June? And why is the bulk of his estate to go to a woman most definitely not his wife? The able, astute and unscrupulous detective Nero Wolfe must get to the bottom of a will that has left a whirlpool of menace... and a legacy of murder that's about to be fulfilled.
WHERE THERE'S A WILL A Nero Wolfe Mystery Rex Stout WHERE THERE'S A WILL I 49 TORN STACEY LTD vi'^- ^v' 112517 KCRTH YORK PUBLIC L'BRARY RATHURST HEiGHTS First published in Great Britain by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. This edition published 1971 by Torn Stacey Ltd. 28 Maiden Lane, London, WC2E 7JP England Copyright 1940, renewed 1968, Rex Stout All rights reserved SEN 85468 057 8 Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Limited, Guildford WHERE THERE'S A WILL CHAPTER ONE I put the 1938-39 edition of Who's Who in America, open, on the leaf of my desk, because it was getting too heavy to hold on a hot day. "They were sprinkled at discreet intervals," I stated aloud. "If they didn't fudge when they supplied the dope, April is thirty-six. May forty-one, and June forty-six. Five years apart. Apparently their parents started at the middle of the calendar and worked backwards, and also apparently they named June that because she was born in June, 1893. But the next one shows an effort of the imagination. I prefer to suppose it was Mamma who thought of it. Although the baby was actually born in February, they named it May . . ." There was no sign that Nero Wolfe was listening as he leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, but I went on anyhow. On that hot July day, in spite of the swell lunch Fritz had served us, I would have sold the world for a dime. My vacation was over. The news from Europe was enough to make you want to put signs at every ten yards along the seacoast, "Private Shore. No Sharks or Statesmen Allowed." I had bandages on my arms where the black flies had bored for blood in Canada. Worst of FR1;4 WHERE THERE'S A WILL all, Nero Wolfe had gone in for a series of fantastic expenditures, the bank balance was the lowest it had been for years, and the detective business was rotten; and just to be contrary, instead of doing his share of the worrying about it he seemed to have adopted the attitude that it would be impertinent to attempt to interfere with natural laws. Which had me boiling. He might be eccentric enough to find pleasure in a personal and intimate test of the operations of the New Deal WPA, but if I had my way about it the only meaning WPA would ever have for yours truly would be Wolfe Pays Archie. So I went on buzzing. "It all depends," I declared, "on what it is that's biting them. It must be something pretty painful, or they wouldn't have made an appointment to call on you in a body. The death of their brother Noel has probably taken care of their financial potentialities. Noel's in here too." I frowned at the Who's Who. "He was forty-nine, the eldest, three years older than June, and was next to Cullen himself in Daniel Cullen and Company. Did it all himself, started there as a runner in 1908 at twelve bucks a week. That was in his obit in the Times, day before yesterday. Did you read it?" Wolfe was motionless. I made a face at him and resumed. "They're not due for twenty minutes yet, so I might as well give you the benefit of my research. FR1;WHERE THERE'S A WILL 5 There's more in this magazine article I dug up than in Who's Who. A lot of rich and colorful detail. For instance, it says that May has worn cotton stockings ever since the Japs bombed Shanghai. It says that Mamma was an amazing woman because she was the mother of four extraordinary children. I have never understood why, in cases like this, it is assumed that Papa's contribution was negligible, but there's no time to go into that now. It's the extraordinary children we're dealing with." I flipped a page of the magazine. "To sum up about Noel, who died Tuesday. It seems he had a row of buttons installed on his desk in the Wall Street offices of Daniel Cullen and Company; one for each country in Europe and Asia, not to mention South America. When he pressed a button, that country's government resigned and they telephoned him to ask who to put in next. You can't say that wasn't extraordinary. The eldest daughter, June, was, as I say, born in June, 1895. At the age of twenty she wrote a daring and sensational book called Riding Bareback, and a year later another one entitled Affairs of a Titmouse. Then she married a brilliant young New York lawyer named John Charles Dunn, who is at the present moment the Secretary of State of the United States of America. He sent a cogent letter to Japan last week. The magazine states that Dunn's meteoric rise is in great FR1;6 WHERE THERE'S A WILL part due to his remarkable wife. Mamma again. June is in fact a mamma, having a son, Andrew, twenty-four, and a daughter, Sara, twenty-two." I shifted to elevate my feet. "The other two extraordinaries are still named Hawthorne. May Hawthorne never has married. They are thinking of prosecuting her under the anti-trust law for her monopoly on brain cells. At the age of twenty-six she revolutionized colloid chemistry, something about bubbles and drops. Since 1933 she has been president of Varney College, and in those six years has increased its endowment funds by over twelve million bucks, showing that she has gone from colloidal to colossal. It says her intellectual power is extraordinary. "I was wrong when I said the other two are still named Hawthorne. In April's case I should have said 'again' instead of 'still'. While she was taking London by storm in 1927 she glanced over the prostrate nobility at her feet and picked out the Duke of Lozano. Four other dukes, a bunch of earls and barons, and two soap manufacturers, committed suicide. But alas. Three years later she divorced Lozano, while she was taking Paris by storm, and became April Hawthorne again, privately as well as publicly. She is the only actress, alive or dead, who has played both Juliet and Nora. At present she is taking New York by storm for the WHERE THERE^S A WILL 7 eighth time. I can confirm that personally, because a month ago I paid a speculator five dollars and fifty cents for a ticket to Scrambled Eggs. You may remember that I tried to persuade you to go. I figured that since April Hawthorne is the acknowledged queen of the American stage, you owed it to yourself to see her." ^ /ti tt 1 1 � n^cfV^v^^ Not a flicker. He wouldn t rouse. "Of course," I said sarcastically, "it is deplorable that these extraordinary Hawthorne gals have no more consideration for your privacy than to come charging in here before you finish digesting your lunch. No matter what is biting them, no matter if their brother Noel left them a million dollars apiece and they want to pay you half of it for putting a tail on their banker, they ought to have more regard for common courtesy. When June phoned this morning I told her--" "Archie!" His eyes opened. "I am aware that you call Mrs. Dunn, whom you have never met, by her first name, because you think it irritates me. It does. Don't do it. Shut up." --I told Mrs. Dunn it was an intolerable invasion of your inalienable right to sit here in peace and watch the bank balance disappear in the darkening twilight of the slow but inevitable dispersion of your mental powers and the pitiful collapse of your instinct of self-preservation--" FR1;8 WHERE THERE'S A WILL "Archie!" He thumped the desk. It was time to side-step, but I was rescued from that necessity by the door's opening and the appearance of Fritz Brenner. Fritz was beaming, and I could .guess why. The visitors he had come to announce had probably impressed him as something unusually promising in the way of clients. The only secrets in Nero Wolfe's old house on 3 ?th Street near the Hudson River were professional secrets. It was unavoidable that I, his secretary, bodyguard, and chief assistant, should be aware that the exchequer was having its bottom scraped; but Fritz Brenner, cook and gentleman of the household, and Theodore Horstmann, custodian of the famous and expensive collection of orchids which Wolfe maintained in the plant rooms on the roof--they knew it too. And Fritz was beaming, obviously, because the trio whose arrival he was announcing looked more like a major fee than anything the office had seen for weeks. He did it in style. Wolfe told him, with no enthusiasm, to show them in. I took my feet off the desk. Though the extraordinary Hawthorne gals did not strongly resemble one another, my discreet glances of appraisal as I got them arranged into chairs made it credible that they were daughters of the same amazing mother. April I had seen on WHERE THERE*S A WILL 9 the stage; now that I got a look at her off of it, I was ready to concede that she could probably take Nero Wolfe's office by storm if she cared to let loose. She looked hot, peevish, beautiful^ and overwhelming. When she thanked me for her chair I decided to marry her as soon as I could save up enough to buy a new pair of shoes. May, the intellectual giant and college president, surprised me. She looked sweet. Later, seeing how determined her mouth could get, and how cutting her voice, when the occasion required it, I made drastic revisions, but then she just looked sweet, harmless, and not quite middle-aged. June, Mrs. Dunn to you, was slenderer than either of her younger sisters, next door to skinny, with hair that was turning gray, and restless dark burning eyes� the kind of eyes that have never been satisfied and never will be. Where they all looked alike was chiefly the forehead�broad, rather high, with wellmarked temple depressions and strong eye ridges. June did the introducing; first herself and her sisters, and then the two males who accompanied them. Their names were Stauffer and Prescott. Stauffer was probably under forty, maybe five years older than me, not a bad-looking guy if he had been a little more careless with his face. He was living up to something. The other one, Prescott, ^s nearer fifty. He was medium-short, with a FR1;10 WHERE THERE'S A WILL central circumference that made it seem likely he would grunt if he bent over to tie his shoestring. Nothing, of course, like Nero White's globular grandeur. I recognized him from a picture I had seen in the rotogravure when he had been elected to something in the Bar Association. He was Glenn Prescott of the law firm of Dunwoodie, Prescott & Davis. He had on a Metzger shirt and tie, and a suit that cost a hundred and fifty bucks, and wore a flower in his buttonhole. The flower was the cause of a little diversion right at the beginning. I have given up trying to decide whether Wolfe does those things just to establish the point that he's eccentric, or because he's curious, or to spar for time to size someone up, or what. Anyhow, they had barely got settled in their chairs when he aimed his eyes at Prescott and asked politely: "Is that a centaurea?" "I beg your pardon?" Prescott looked blank. "Oh, you mean my buttonhole. I don't know. I just stop at the florist's and select something." "You wear a flower without knowing its name?" "Certainly. Why not?" "Wolfe shrugged. "I never saw a centaurea of that color before." "It isn't," Mrs. Dunn put in impatiently. "A centaurea cyanus has a much closer formation--" I WHERE THERE'S A WILL 11 "I didn't say centaurea cyanus, madam." Wolfe sounded testy. "I had in mind centaurea leuco- phylla." "Oh. I've never seen one. Anyway, that isn't a centaurea leuco-anything. It's a dianthus superbus." April started to laugh. May smiled at her as Einstein would smile at a kitten. June darted her eyes that way and April stopped laughing and said in her famous rippling voice: "You win, Juno. It's a dianthus superbus. I don't mind your always being right, not a bit, but when anything strikes me as funny it's my nature to laugh. And,. I might inquire, was I dragged down here to hear you treat the audience to a spot of botany?" "You weren't dragged," the elderly sister retoned. "At least not by me." May fluttered a deprecating hand. "You must forgive us, Mr. Wolfe. Our nerves are quite ragged. We do wish to consult you about something serious." She looked at me and smiled so sweetly that I smiled back. Then she added to Wolfe, "And something extremely confidential." "That's all right," Wolfe assured her. "Mr. Goodwin is my ame damnee. I could do nothing without him. The spot of botany was my fault; ^"ted it. Tell me about the something serious." Prescott inquired reluctantly, "Shall I explain?" 12 WHERE THERE'S A WILL || fc WHERE THERE'S A WILL � 13 April, waving a hand to extinguish the match ices of an able, astute, discreet and unscrupulous with which she had lit a cigarette, and squinting man." to keep the smoke from her eyes, shook her head "That's diplomacy for you," said April, tapping at him. "Fat chance of a man explaining anything ash from her cigarette. with all three of us present." It was ignored. Wolfe inquired, "What kind of "I think," May suggested, "it would be better services?" if June�" I decided what it was about June's face that Mrs. Dunn said abruptly, "It's my brother's needed adjustment. Her eyes were the eyes of a will." hawk, but her nose, which should have been a beak Wolfe frowned at her. He hated fights about to go with the eyes, was just a straight good-lookwills, having once gone so far as to tell a prospec- ing nose. I preferred to look at April. But June was tive client that he refused to engage in a tug of talking: war with a dead man's guts for a rope. But he "Very exceptional services, I'm afraid. My hus- asked not too rudely, "Is there something wrong band says nothing but a miracle will do, but he's with the will?" a cautious and conservative man. You know of "There is." June's tone was incisive. "But first course that my brother died on Tuesday, three days I'd like to say�you're a detective. It's not a detec- ago. The funeral was held yesterday afternoon. Mr. tive we need. It was my idea we should come to you. Prescott�my brother's attorney�collected us last Not so much on account of your reputation, more evening to read the will to us. Its contents shocked because of what you did once for a friend of mine, ^d astonished us�all of us, without exception." Mrs. Llewellyn Frost. She was then Glenna McNair. Wolfe made a little sound of distaste. I knew it Also I have heard my husband speak highly of you. f01' that, but I suppose it might have passed for I gathered that you had done something difficult empathy to people who had just met him. But he for the State Department." saiddrylv: "Thank you. But," Wolfe objected, "you say Those disagreeable shocks would never occur you don't need a detective." tlle ^"eritance tax were one hundred per cent." "We don't. But we very much need the serv- 1 suppose so. You sound like a Bolshevik. But it 14 WHERE THERE'S A WILL wasn't the disappointment of expectant legatee;. it was something much worse�" "Excuse me," May put in quietly. "In my case it was. He had told me he was leaving a million dollars to the science fund." "I am merely saying," June declared impatiently, "that we are not hyenas. Certainly none of us was calculating on any imminent inheritance from Noel. We knew of course that he was wealthy, but he was only forty-nine and in extremely good health." She turned to Prescott. "I think, Glenn, the quickest way will be for you to tell Mr. Wolfe briefly the provisions of the will." The lawyer cleared his throat. "I must remind you again, June, that once it is made public�" "Mr. Wolfe wi