Before Midnight Page 4

  Buff and O'Garro were with him, but not Assa. They had to do some explaining to get me admitted to the vault. Buff and Heery and I went to a small room, and soon O'Garro and an attendant came with the box, only about five by three and eighteen inches long, evidently rented for this purpose exclusively. The attendant left, and O'Garro unlocked the box and opened it, and took out some envelopes, six of them. The sealed flaps had gobs of sealing wax. Four of them had been cut open. He asked me, "You want only the last group of five?"

  I told him yes, and he handed me the two uncut envelopes. One of them was inscribed, "Verses, second group of five, Pour Amour Contest," and the other, "Answers, second group of five, Pour Amour Contest." As I got out my knife to slit them open O'Garro said, "I don't want to see them," and backed up against the end wall, and the others followed suit. From that distance they couldn't read typing, but they could watch me, and they did. There were pencils and paper pads on the table, but I preferred my pen and notebook, and sat down and used them. The five four-line verses were all on one sheet, and so were the answers---the names of five women, with brief explanations of the references in the verses.

  It didn't take long. As I was folding the sheets and returning them to the envelopes, Buff spoke. "Your name is Archie Goodwin?"

  "Right."

  "Please write on each envelope, 'Opened, and the contents copied, by Archie Goodwin, on April thirteenth, nineteen-fifty-five, in the presence of Talbott Heery, Oliver Buff, and Patrick O'Garro,' and sign it."

  I gave it a thought. "I don't like it," I told him. "I don't want to sign anything so closely connected with a million dollars. How about this: I'll write 'Opened, and the contents copied, by Archie Goodwin, on April thirteenth, nineteen-fifty-five, with our consent and in our presence,' and you gentlemen sign it."

  They decided that would do, and I wrote, and they signed, and O'Garro returned the envelopes to the box and locked it, and went out with it. Soon he rejoined us, and the four of us went up a broad flight of marble steps and out to the street. On the sidewalk Heery asked where they were bound for, and they said their office, which was around the corner, and he turned to me. "You, Goodwin?"

  I told him West Thirty-fifth Street, and he said he was going downtown and would give me a lift. The others went, and he flagged a taxi and we got in, and I told the driver Thirty-fifth and Ninth Avenue. My watch said ten to three, so I should make it by the time the second customer arrived.

  As we stopped for a red light at Fifth Avenue, headed west on Forty-seventh Street, Heery said, "I have some spare time and I think I'll stop in for a talk with Nero Wolfe."

  "Not right now," I told him. "He's tied up." "But now is when I have the time." 'Too bad, but it'll have to be later-in fact, much later. He has appointments that run right through until late this evening, to ten-thirty or eleven." "I want to see him now."

  "Sony. Ill tell him, and he'll be sorry too. If you want to give me your number I'll ring you and tell you when."

  He got a wallet from his pocket, fingered in it, and came up with a crisp new twenty. "Here," he said. " I don't need long. Probably ten minutes will do it."

  I felt flattered. A finiff would have been at the market, and a sawbuck would have been lavish. "I deeply appreciate it," I said with feeling, "but I'm not the doorman or receptionist. Mr. Wolfe has different men for different functions, and mine is to collect poetry out of safe deposit boxes. That's all I do."

  Returning the bill neatly to the wallet, he stated, with no change whatever in tone or manner, "At a better time and place I'll knock your goddam block off." You see why I wanted you to meet him. That ended the conversation. To pass the time as we weaved along with the traffic I thought of three or four things to say, but after all it was his taxi and it had been nice of him to make it a twenty. When the cab stopped at Thirty-fifth Street I only said, "See you at a better time and place," as I got out.

  At the corner drugstore I went to the phone booth, dialed our number, got Wolfe, and was told that no company had come. It may have been a minor point, whether Homicide had tails on all five of them or was giving Miss Frazee special attention, but it wouldn't hurt to find out, so I went down the block to Doc Vollmer's place, thirty yards from Wolfe's, and stepped down into the areaway, from where I could see our stoop. My watch said ten past three. I was of course expecting a taxi and wasn't interested in pedestrians, until I happened to send a glance to the east and saw a figure approaching that I could name. I swiveled my head to look west, and saw a female mounting the seven steps to our stoop. So I moved up to the sidewalk into the path of the approaching figure---Art Whipple of Homicide West. He stopped on his heels, opened his mouth, and closed it.

  "I won't tell her," I assured him. "Unless you want me to give her a message?"

  "Go chin yourself," he suggested. "At a better time and place. She'll probably be with us nearly an hour. If you want to go to Tony's around the corner I'll give you a ring just before she leaves. Luck." I went on to our stoop, and as I was mounting the steps the door opened a crack and Fritz's voice came through it "Your name, please, madam?"

  I said okay, and he slipped the bolt and opened up, and I told the visitor to enter. While Fritz attended to the door I offered to take her coat, a brown wool number that would have appreciated a little freshening up, but she said she would keep it and her name was Wheelock.

  I ushered her to the office and told Wolfe, "Mrs. James R. Wheelock, of Richmond, Virginia." Then I went and opened the safe, took the four leaves from my notebook that I had written on, put them in the inner compartment, closed that door and twirled the knob of the combination, and closed the outer door. By the time I got to my desk Carol Wheelock was in the red leather chair, with her coat draped over the back.

  According to the information she was a housewife, but if so her house was nearly out of wife. She looked as if she hadn't eaten for a week and hadn't slept for a month. Properly fed and rested for a good long stretch, filled in from her hundred pounds to around a hundred and twenty, she might have been a pleasant sight and a very satisfactory wife for a man who was sold on the wife idea, but it took some imagination to realize it. The only thing was her eyes. They were dark, set in deep, and there was fire back of them.

  "I ought to tell you," she said in a low even voice, "that I didn't want to come here, but Mr. O'Garro said it was absolutely necessary. I have decided I shouldn't say anything to anybody. But if you have something to tell me ---go ahead."

  Wolfe was glowering at her, and I would have liked to tell her that it meant nothing personal, it was only that the sight of a hungry human was painful to him, and the sight of one who must have been hungry for months was intolerable. He spoke. "You understand, Mrs. Wheelock, that I am acting for the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, which is handling the contest for Heery Products, Incorporated."

  "Yes, Mr. O'Garro told me."

  "I do have a little to tell you, but not much. For one item, I have had a talk with one of the contestants, Miss Gertrude Frazee. You may know that she is the founder and president of an organization called the Women's Nature League. She says that some three hundred of its members have helped her in the contest, which is not an infraction of the rules. She does not say that she has telephoned to them the verses that were distributed last evening, and that they are now working on them, but it wouldn't be fanciful to assume that she has and they are. Have you any comment?"

  She was staring at him, her mouth working.

  "Three hundred," she said.

  Wolfe nodded.

  "That's cheating. That's---she can't do that. You can't let her get away with it."

  "We may be helpless. If she has violated no rule and nothing that was agreed upon last evening, what then? This is one aspect of the grotesque situation created by the murder of Louis Dahlmann."

  "I'll see the others." The fire behind her eyes was showing through. "We won't permit it. We'll refuse to go ahead with those verses. We'll insist on new ones when we're allowed to go home."r />
  "That would suit Miss Frazee perfectly. She would send in her answers before the agreed deadline and demand the first prize, and if she didn't get it she could sue and probably collect. You'll have to do better than that if you want to head her off-emulate her, perhaps. Of course you've had help too-your husband, your friends; get them started."

  "I've had no help."

  She started to tremble, first her hands and then her shoulders, and I thought we were in for it, but she pulled one that I had never expected to see. Women of all ages and shapes and sizes have started to have a fit hi that office. Some I have caught in time with a good shot of brandy, some I have stopped with a smack or other physical contact, and some I have had to ride out---with Wolfe gone because he can't stand it. I left my chair and started for her, but she stuck her tongue out at me. So I thought, but that wasn't it. She was only getting the tongue between her teeth and clamping down on it. Its end bulged and curled up and was purple, but she only clamped harder. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. She stopped trembling, opened her fists and closed them and opened them again, and got her shoulders set, rigid. Then she retrieved her tongue. I had a notion to give her a pat before returning to my chair, in recognition of an outstanding performance, but decided that a woman who could stand off a fit like that in ten seconds flat probably didn't care for pats.

  "I beg your pardon," she said.

  "Brandy," Wolfe told me.

  "No," she said, "I'm all right. I couldn't drink brandy. I guess what did it was what you said about help. I haven't had any. The first few weeks weren't bad, but after that they got harder, and later, when they got really hard . . . I don't know how I did it. I said I wasn't going to say anything, but after what you said about Miss Frazee having three hundred women helping her . . . well. I'm thirty-two years old, and I have two children, and my husband is a bookkeeper and makes fifty dollars a week. I was a schoolteacher before I married. I had been going along for years, just taking it, and I saw this contest and decided to win it. I'm going to have a nice home and a car-two cars, one for my husband and one for me---and I'm going to have some clothes, and I'm going to send my husband to school and make him a CPA if he has it in him. That day I saw the contest, I took charge that day. You know what I mean."

  "Indeed I do," Wdlfe muttered.

  "So when they got hard there was no one I could ask for help, and anyway, if I had got help I would have had to share the prize. I didn't do much eating or sleeping the last seven weeks of the main contest, but the worst was when they sent us five to do in a week to break the tie. I didn't go to bed that week, and I was afraid I had one of them wrong, and I didn't get them mailed until just before midnight---I went to the post office and made them let me see them stamp the envelope. After all that, do you think I'm going to let somebody get it by cheating? With three hundred women working at it while we're not allowed to go home?"

  After seeing her handle the fit I didn't think she was going to let somebody get anything she had made up her mind to have, with or without cheating.

  "It is manifestly unfair," Wolfe conceded, "but I doubt if it can be called cheating, at least in the legal sense. And as for cheating, it's conceivable that someone else had a bolder idea than Miss Frazee and acted upon it. By killing Mr. Dahlmann in order to get the answers."

  "I'm not going to say anything about that," she declared. "I've decided not to."

  "The police have talked with you, of course."

  "Yes. They certainly have. For hours."

  "And they asked you what you thought last evening when Mr. Dahlmann displayed a paper and said it contained the answers. What did you tell them?"

  "I'm not going to talk about it."

  "Did you tell the police that? That you wouldn't talk about it?"

  "No. I hadn't decided then. I decided later."

  "After consultation with someone?"

  She shook her head. "With whom would I consult?"

  "I don't know. A lawyer. A phone call to your husband."

  "I haven't got a lawyer. I wouldn't call my husband---I know what he'd say. He thinks I'm crazy. I couldn't pay a lawyer anyway because I haven't got any money. They paid for the trip here, and the hotel, but nothing for incidentals. I was late for my appointment with you because I got on the wrong bus. I haven't consulted anybody. I made the decision myself."

  "So you told the police what you thought when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper?"

  "Yes."

  "Then why not tell me? I assure you, madam, that I have only one interest in the matter, on behalf of my clients, to make sure that the prizes are fairly and honestly awarded. You see, of course, that that will be extremely difficult if in fact one of the contestants took that paper from Mr. Dahlmann and it contains the answers. You see that."

  "Yes."

  "However, it is the belief of my clents---and their contention---that the paper did not contain the answers, that Mr. Dahlmann was only jesting; and that therefore the secrecy of the answers is still intact. Do you challenge that contention?"

  "No."

  "You accept it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you must have told the police that when Mr. Dahlmann displayed the paper you regarded it as a joke, and the sequel is plain: it would be absurd to suspect you of going to his apartment and killing him to get it. So it is reasonable to suppose that you are not suspected. ---Archie, your phone call from the corner. Did you see anyone?"

  "Yes, sir. Art Whipple. He was here on the Heller case."

  "Tell Mrs. Wheelock about it."

  I met her eyes. "I was hanging out up the street when you came, and a Homicide detective was following you. I exchanged a few words with him. If you want to spot him when you leave, he's about my size, drags his feet a little, and is wearing a dark gray suit and a gray snap-brim hat."

  "He was following me?"

  "Right."

  Her eyes left me for Wolfe. "Isn't that what they do?"

  But her left hand had started to tremble, and she had to grasp it with the other one and squeeze it. Wolfe shut his eyes, probably expecting some more tongue control. Instead, she arose abruptly and asked, "May I have---a bathroom?"

  I told her certainly, and went and opened the door of the one partitioned off in the far corner, to the left of my desk, and she came and passed through, closing the door behind her.

  She was in there a good quarter of an hour without making a sound. The partitions, like all the inner walls on the ground floor, are soundproofed, but I have sharp ears and heard nothing whatever. I said something to Wolfe, but he only grunted. After a little he looked up at the clock: twenty to four. Thereafter he looked at it every two minutes; at four sharp he would leave for the plant rooms. There were just nine minutes to go when the door in the partition opened and she was back with us.

  She came and stood at Wolfe's desk, across from him. "I beg your pardon," she said in her low even voice. "I had to take some pills. The food at the hotel is quite good, but I simply can't eat. I haven't eaten much for quite a while. Do you want to tell me anything else?"

  "Milk toast," Wolfe said gruffly. "My cook, Fritz Brenner, makes it superbly. Sit down."

  "I couldn't swallow it. Really."

  "Then hot bouillon. Our own. It can be ready in eight minutes. I have to leave you, but Mr. Goodwin---"

  "I couldn't. I'm going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee---I think I am---I'll think about it on the bus. That's cheating." She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.

  Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn't break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it: When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.

  "You put the answers in the safe," he stated.

  "Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O'Garro and Talbott Heer
y were there, but I didn't report that Heery brought me downtown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him---"

  "Verbatim, please."

  I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon's interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, "For a footnote, Heery couldn't knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?"

  He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn't been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.