Before Midnight Read online

  "The Forty-seventh Street office of the Continental Trust Company."

  "One of you will please meet Mr. Goodwin there at two-thirty, take him to the vault, open the envelopes containing the last five verses and the last five answers, and let him copy them and bring the copies to me. Return the originals to the vault."

  "Impossible," O'Garro said positively. "Those envelopes must not be opened."

  "Nonsense." Wolfe was beginning to get touchy, as usual when he was compelled to start things moving in his skull. "Why not? Those verses and answers are done for. No matter what happens, they can't possibly be the basis for awarding the prizes. They might, if we could get apodictic proof that there was no paper hi Dahlmann's wallet containing the answers, but we can't. Can any of you describe any circumstances in which those verses and answers can now be used? Try it."

  They exchanged glances. Wolfe waited.

  "You're right," Buff admitted for the firm.

  "Then it can do no harm for me to have them, provided Mr. Goodwin and I keep them to ourselves, and it may do some good. I have an idea for using them which may be worth developing. Will one of you meet him at two-thirty?"

  "Yes," Buff agreed. "Probably two of us. Those envelopes have been untouchable. Mr. Heery will have to know about it. He may want to be present."

  "As you please. By the way, since his firm is as deeply concerned as yours, what about him? Does he know you're hiring me? Does he approve your strategy?"

  "Completely."

  "Then that will do for now. Please use the phone on Mr. Goodwin's desk. Do you want him to get a number for you?"

  They didn't, which was the best proof yet of how desperate they were. Since those birds were up around the top, the top numbers in one of the three biggest agencies in the country, with corner rooms at least twenty by twenty and incomes in six figures, it had of course been years since any of them had personally dialed a number in an office. To expect them to would be against all reason. But when I vacated my chair O'Garro came and took it, asked me for the number of the Churchill, and went ahead and dialed it as if it were a natural and normal procedure. I thought, There you are, a man with eyes as clever as that can do anything.

  It took a while. After the rest of us had sat and listened for some minutes he finally hung up and told us, "Two of them were out. Rollins was just leaving for an appointment at Homicide West. Miss Frazee will be here at twelve-thirty."

  Hansen, on his feet, said, "We must go, well be half an hour late. We'll get them later."

  But Wolfe kept them for one more thing, information about the five contestants. They only had enough to fill one page of my notebook, which wasn't much to go on. I went to the hall with them to see that nobody took my topcoat by mistake, let them out, and returned to the office. Wolfe was sitting with his eyes closed and his palms flattened on the desk. I went to my desk and wheeled the machine to me and got out paper, to type the meager dope on the suspects. At the sound of footsteps I turned to see Fritz enter with beer on a tray.

  "No," I said firmly. "Take it back, Fritz."

  "A woman is coming!" Wolfe bellowed.

  "That's only an excuse. The real trouble is that you hate a job with a deadline, especially when you stand about one chance in four thousand. I admit that before midnight April twentieth is one hell of an order, but on January nineteenth at three-twenty-seven p.m. you told me that if you ever rang for beer before lunch I should cancel it and disregard your protests, if any. I don't blame you for losing control, since we're almost certainly going to get our noses bumped, but no beer until after lunch. However, we don't want to embarrass Mr. Brenner."

  I went and took the tray from Fritz and convoyed it to the kitchen.

  Chapter 4

  If I had known what was on the way to him in the shape of Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles, founder and president of the Women's Nature League, I wouldn't have had the heart to hijack the beer. And if Wolfe had known, he probably would have refused the case and sent LBA and their counselor on their way.

  I should try to describe her outfit, but I won't; I will only say she had swiped it from a museum. As for describing her, it's hard to believe. The inside corners of her eyes were trying to touch above a long thin nose, and nearly made it. Only an inch of brow was visible because straggles of gray hair flopped down over the rest. The left half of her mouth slanted up and the right half slanted down, and that made you think her chin was lower on one side than on the other, though maybe it wasn't. She was exactly my height, five feet eleven, and she strode.

  She sat halfway back in the red leather chair, with both hands on her bag in her lap and her back straight and stiff. "I fail to see," she told Wolfe, "that the death of that man has any effect on the contest. Murder or not. There was nothing in the rules about anybody dying."

  When she spoke her lips wanted to move perpendicular to the slant, but her jaw preferred straight up and down. You might have thought that after so many years, at least sixty, they would have come to an understanding, but nothing doing.

  Wolfe was taking her in. "Certainly, madam, the rules did not contemplate sudden and violent death, and made no provision for it. The contest is affected, not by the death itself, but by the action of the police in asking the contestants not to leave the city until further---"

  "They didn't ask me! They told me! They said if I left I would be brought back and arrested for murder!"

  I shook my head. So she was that kind. No homicide cop and no assistant DA could possibly have said anything of the sort.

  "They are sometimes ebullient," Wolfe told her. "Anyhow, I wanted to discuss not only the contest, but also you. After the prizes are awarded there will be great demand for information about the winners, and my clients want to be able to supply it. The enforced delay gives us this opportunity. My assistant, Mr. Goodwin, will take notes. I assume that you have never married, Miss Frazee?"

  "I have not. And I won't." Her eyes took in my notebook. "I want to see anything that's going to be printed about me."

  "You will. Have you ever won a prize in a contest?"

  "I have never entered a contest. I despise contests."

  "Indeed. Didn't you enter this one?"

  "Of course I did. That's a stupid question."

  "No doubt." Wolfe was polite. "But surely that's an interesting paradox---you despise contests, but you entered one. There must have been a compelluig motive?"

  "I fail to see that my motive is anybody's business, but I certainly am not ashamed of it. Ten years ago I founded the Women's Nature League of America. We have many thousand members, too many to count. What is your opinion of women who smear themselves with grease and soot and paint and stink themselves up with stuff made from black tar and decayed vegetable matter and tumors from male deer?"

  "I haven't formulated one, madam."

  "Of course you have. You're a male." Her eyes darted to me. "What's yours, young man?"

  "It depends," I told her. "The tumor part sounds bad."

  "It smells bad. It's been used for thirty centuries. Musk. In the Garden of Eden, when Eve's face was dirty what did she do? She washed it with good clean water. What do women do today? They rub it in with grease! Look at their lips and fingernails and toes and eyelashes---and other places. The Women's Nature League is the champion and the friend of the natural woman, and the natural woman was Eve, Eve the way God made her. The only true beauty is natural beauty, and I know, because I was denied that wondrous gift. I am not merely unlovely, I am ugly. The well-favored ones have no right to pollute the beauty of nature. I know!"

  Her back had bowed a little, and she straightened it. "That knowledge came to me early, and it has been my staff and my banner all my life. I have always had to work for my bread, but I saved some money, and ten years ago I used some of it to start the League. We have many members, over three thousand, but the dues are small and we are severely limited. Last fall, last September, when I saw the advertisement of the contest, I thought again what I had tho
ught many times before, that it was hopeless because there was too much money against us, millions and millions, and then, sitting there looking at the advertisement, the idea came to me. Why not use their money for us? I considered it and approved of it. A majority of our members live in or near Los Angeles, and most of them are cultured and educated women. I phoned to some and asked them to phone others, and all of them were enthusiastic about it and wanted to help. I organized it, and you don't have to be beautiful to know how to organize. Within two weeks there were over three hundred of us working at it. We had no serious trouble with any of the original twenty, the twenty that were published---except Number Eighteen, and we finally got that. With the second group, to break the tie, with those we had to get five in less than a week, which was unfair because the verses were all mailed at the same time in New York and it took longer for them to get to me, and they were harder, much harder, but we got them, and I mailed them ten hours before the deadline. We're going to get these too." She tapped her bag, in her lap. "No question about it. No question at all. We're going to' get it, no matter how hard they are. Half a million dollars. For the League."

  Wolfe was regarding her, trying not to frown and nearly succeeding. "Not necessarily half a million, madam. You have four competitors."

  "The first prize," she said confidently. "Half a million." Suddenly she leaned forward. "Do you ever have a flash?"

  The frown won. "Of what? Anger? Wit?"

  "Just a flash-of what is coming. I had two of them long ago, when I was young, and then never any more until the day I saw the advertisement. It came on me, into me, so swiftly that I only knew it was there---the certainty that we would get their money. Certainty can be a very sweet thing, very beautiful, and that day if filled me from head to foot, and I went to a mirror to see if I could see it. I couldn't, but it was there, so there has never been any question about it. The first prize. Our budget committee is already working on projects, what to do with it."

  "Indeed." The frown was there, to stay. "The five new verses, those that Mr. Dahlmann gave you last evening--- how did you send them to your colleagues? Telephone or telegraph or airmail?"

  "Ha," she said. Apparently that was all.

  "Because," Wolfe observed matter-of-factly, "you have sent them, naturally, so they could go to work. Haven't you?"

  Her back was straight again. "I fail to see that that is anybody's business. There is nothing in the rules about getting assistance. Nothing was said about it last night. This morning I telephoned my vice-president, Mrs. Charles Draper, because I had to, to tell her I couldn't return today and I didn't know when I could. It was a private conversation."

  Evidently it was going to stay private. Wolfe dropped it and switched. "Another reason for seeing you, Miss Frazee, was to apologize on behalf of Lippert, Buff and Assa, my clients, for the foolish joke that Mr. Dahlmann indulged in last evening---when he exhibited a paper and said it was the answers to the verses he had just given you. Not only was it witless, it was in bad taste. I tender you the apologies of his associates."

  "So that's how it is," she said. "I thought it would be something like that, that's why I came, to find out." Her chin went up and her voice hardened. "It won't work. Tel] them that. That's all I wanted to know." She stood up. "You think because I'm ugly I haven't got any brains. They'll regret it. I'll see that they regret it."

  "Sit down, madam. I don't know what you're talking about"

  "Ha. You're supposed to have brains too. They know that one of them went there and killed him and took the paper, and now they're going---"

  "Please! Your pronouns. Are you saying that one of my clients took the paper?"

  "Of course not. One of the contestants. That would put them in a hole they couldn't get out of unless they could prove which one took it, so they're going to say it was a joke, there was no such paper, and when we send in the answers they'll award the prizes, and they think that will settle it unless the police catch the murderer, and maybe they never will. But it won't work. The murderer will have the right answers, all five of them, and he'll have to explain how he got them, and he won't be able to. These five are going to be very difficult, and nobody can get them by spending a few hours in a library."

  "I see. But you could explain how you got them. Your colleagues at home are working on them now. You're going?"

  She had headed for the door, but turned. "I'm going back to the hotel for an appointment with a policeman. I use my brains with them too, and I know my rights. I told them I didn't have to go to see them, they could come to see me unless they arrested me, and they don't dare. I wouldn't let them search my room or my belongings. I've told them what I've seen and heard, and that's all I'm going to tell them. They want to know what I thought! They want to know if I thought the paper he showed us really had the answers on it! I fail to see why I should tell them what I thought---but I'll certainly tell you and you can tell your clients . . ."

  She came back to the chair and was sitting down, so I held on to my notebook, but as her fanny touched the leather she said abruptly, "No, I have an appointment," got erect, and strode from the room. By the time I got to the rack in the hall she had her coat on, and I had to move to get to the doorknob before her.

  When I returned to the office Wolfe was sitting slumped, taking air in through his nose and letting it out through his mouth, audibly. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down at him.

  "So she told the cops about Dahlmann showing the paper," I said. "That'll help. Twenty minutes to lunch. Beer? I'll make an exception."

  He made a face.

  "I could probably," I suggested, "get Los Angeles phone information to dig up a Mrs. Charles Draper, and you could ask her how they're making out with the verses."

  "Pointless," he growled. "If she killed him and got the answers, she would certainly have made the call and given her friends the verses. She admits she has brains. If I had had the answers I might . . . but no, that would have been premature. You have an appointment at two-thirty."

  "Right. Since expenses are on the house it wouldn't cost you anything to get Saul and Fred and Orrie and Johnny and Bill and hang tails on them, but with four of them living at the Churchill it would be a hell of a job-"

  "Useless. If anything is to be learned by that kind of routine the police will get it long before we can. They probably---"

  The phone rang. I got it at my desk, heard a deep gruff voice that needed filing, an old familiar voice, asked it to hold on, and told Wolfe that Sergeant Purley Stebbins wished to speak to him. He reached for his instrument, and since I am supposed to stay on unless I am told not to, I did so.

  "This is Nero Wolfe, Mr. Stebbins. How do you do."

  "So-so. I'd like to drop in to see you-say three o'clock?"

  "I'm sorry, I'll be engaged."

  "Three-thirty?"

  "I'll still be engaged."

  "Well ... I guess it can wait until six. Make it six o'clock?"

  Purley knew that Wolfe's schedule, four to six up in the plant rooms, might be changed for an H-bomb, but nothing much short of that.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Stebbins, but I'll have no time today or this evening. Perhaps you can tell me---"

  "Sure, I can tell you. Just a little friendly talk, that's all. I want to get your slant on a murder case."

  "I have no slant on any murder case."

  "No? Then why the hell---" He bit it off. He went on, "Look, I know you and you know me. I'm no fancy dancer. But how about this, at half-past twelve a woman named Gertrude Frazee entered your premises and as far as I know she's still there. And you have no slant on the murder of a man named Louis Dahlmann? Tell it to Goodwin. I'm not trying to get a piece of hide, I just want to come and ask you some questions. Six o'clock?"

  "Mr. Stebbins." Wolfe was controlling himself. "I have no commission to investigate the murder of Louis Dahlmann, or any other. On past occasions you and your associates have resented my presumption in undertaking to invesitgate a homicide. You have b
ullied me and harried me. When I offend again I shall expect you upon me again, but this time I am not invading your territory, so for heaven's sake let me alone."

  He hung up and so did I, synchronizing with him. I spoke. "I admit that was neat and a chance not to be passed up, but wait till he tells Cramer."

  "I know." He sounded better. "Is the chain bolt on?"

  I went to the hall to make sure, and then to the kitchen to tell Fritz we were under siege.

  Chapter 5

  I could merely report that I kept my two-thirty appointment and got the verses and answers, and let it go at that, but I think it's about time you had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Talbott Heery. He was quite a surprise to me, I don't know why, unless I had unconsciously decided what a perfume tycoon should look like and he didn't match. Nor did he smell. He was over six feet, broader than me and some ten years older, and his clear smooth skin, stretched tight over the bones, didn't look as if it had ever needed to be shaved. Nor was there any sign of grease or soot or paint. He might have been a member of the Men's Nature League.