Fer-De-Lance (10 page)

I nodded. "It really isn’t my business, it is that of my employer, Mr. Nero Wolfe. He asked me to thank you for permitting me to come."

"He is welcome." The deep-set gray eyes never left me. "Indeed, I am grateful that someone--even a stranger whom I shall never see--should acknowledge my authority over the doors of my house."

"Mother!"

"Yes, Sarah. Don’t be offended, dear; I know--and it is of no importance whether this Mr. Goodwin does or not--that the authority has not been usurped. It was not you who forced me to resign, it was not even your father. According to Than, it was God; probably His hands were idle and Satan furnished the mischief."

"Mother, please." Sarah Barstow had got up and approached us. "If you have anything to ask, Mr. Goodwin…"

I said, "I have two questions. May I ask you two questions, Mrs. Barstow?"

"Certainly. That is your business."

"Good. The first one is easy to ask, but may be hard to answer. That is, it may require thought and a long memory. Of all people, you are the one probably have wanted to kill Peter Oliver Barstow? Who had a grievance against him, a new one or maybe a very old one? What enemies did he have? Who hated him?"

"That isn’t a question. It is four questions."

"Well--maybe I can hitch them together."

"It isn’t necessary." The composure did not escape from the will. "They can all be answered at once. Myself."

I stared at her. Her daughter was beside her with a hand on her shoulder.

"Mother! You promised me-"

"There, Sarah." Mrs. Barstow reached up and patted her daughter’s hand. "You have not permitted those other men to see me, for which I have been thankful. But if Mr. Goodwin is to ask me questions he must have the answers. You remember what your father used to say? Never lay an ambush for truth."

Miss Barstow was at me. "Mr. Goodwin! Please!"

"Nonsense." The gray eyes were flashing. "I have my own security, daughter, as good as any you might provide for me. Mr. Goodwin, I have answered your first question. The second?"

"Don’t rush me, Mrs. Barstow." I saw that if I just pretended Sarah Barstow wasn’t there, Old Gray Eyes would be right with me. "I’m not done with the first one. There may have been others, maybe you weren’t the only one."

"Others who might have wanted to kill my husband?" For the first time the will relaxed enough to let the twitch of a smile show on the lips. "No. That is impossible. My husband was a good, just, merciful and well-loved man. I see what you would have me do, Mr. Goodwin: look back over all the years, the happy ones and the miserable ones, and pick out of memory for you a remorseless wrong or a sinister threat. I assure you it isn’t there. There is no man living my husband wronged, and none his enemy. Nor woman either. He did not wrong me. My answer to your question was direct and honest and was a relief to me, but since you are so young, not much more than a boy, it probably shocked you as it did my daughter. I would explain the answer if I could. I do not wish to mislead you. I do not wish to give pain to my daughter. When God compelled me to resign my authority He did not stop there. If by any chance you understand Him, you understand my answer too."

"All right, Mrs. Barstow. Then the second question: why did you offer a reward?"

"No!" Sarah Barstow stood between us. "No! No more of this--"

"Sarah!" The voice was sharp; then it softened a little: "Sarah dear. I will answer. This is my share. Will you stand between us? Sarah!"

Sarah Barstow went to her mother’s side, placed her arm across her mother’s shoulders, and lowered her forehead onto the gray hair.

The will re-created the composure. "Yes, Mr. Goodwin, the reward. I am not insane, I am only fantastic. I now greatly regret that the reward was offered, for I see its sordidness. It was in a fantastic moment that I conceived the idea of a unique vengeance. No one could have murdered my husband since no one could have wanted to. I am certain that his death has never seemed desirable to any person except myself, and to me only during torments which God should never impose even on the guiltiest. It came to me that there might be somewhere a man clever enough to bring God Himself to justice. I doubt if it is you, Mr. Goodwin; I do not know your employer. I now regret that I offered the reward, but if it is earned it will be paid."

"Thank you, Mrs. Barstow. Who is Than?"

"Sir?"

"Than. You said that Than told you God forced you to resign your authority."

"Oh. Of course. Dr. Nathaniel Bradford."

"Thank you." I closed my notebook and got up. "Mr. Wolfe asked me to thank you for your forbearance; I guess he knew there would be some if I got started filling up my notebook."

"Tell Mr. Wolfe he is welcome."

I turned and went on out, figuring that Miss Barstow could use my room for a while.

Miss Barstow invited me to lunch.

I liked her better than ever. For ten minutes or more I waited for her in the hall which connected the sun-room with other apartments. When she joined me there she wasn’t sore, and I could see why: I hadn’t pulled Mrs. Barstow’s leg for any of that stuff, she had just handed it to me on a platter, and that wasn’t my fault. But how many people in Sarah Barstow’s place would have stopped to consider that? Not one in a thousand. They would have been sore anyhow, even if they had realized I didn’t deserve it and tried not to show it; but she just wasn’t sore. She had made a bargain and she was going through with it, no matter how many sleepless nights it brought her and no matter how many kinds of bad luck she had. She certainly had just had some. I could see that ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later Mrs. Barstow might have had different ideas in her head and all I would have got out of it would have been to exchange the time of day with a polite calm. I had no idea what it was that had happened to make her feel like opening up, but if it was my blue shirt and tan tie I hadn’t wasted the money I had spent on them.

As Paul Panzer would have said, lovin’ babe!

She invited me to lunch. She said her brother would be present, and since I would want to see him anyway that would be convenient. I thanked her. I said, "You’re a good sport, Miss Barstow. A real one. Thank the Lord, Nero Wolfe is the cleverest man on earth and thought up that agreement with you, because if you’re in for trouble that’s the only thing that will help you out of it."

"If I’m in trouble," she said.

I nodded. "Sure, I know you’ve got plenty, but the one that bothers you most is your fear that there’s worse ahead. I just wanted to say that you’re a good sport."

As it turned out, I not only met her brother at lunch, I met Manuel Kimball too. I was glad of that, for it seemed to me that what I had learned that morning made the members of that foursome more important than they had been before.

The preceding afternoon after about two hours of telephoning, I had finally found a hook-up with the professional of the Green Meadow Club and he had accepted Wolfe’s invitation to dinner. He had never had any dealings with Barstow, had only known him by sight, but Wolfe had got out of him twenty bushels of facts regarding the general set-up at the club and around the links. By the time the professional left to go home around midnight he had a bottle of Wolfe’s best port inside of him, and Wolfe knew as much about a golf club as if he had been a professional himself. Among other things he learned that the members kept their bags in their lockers, that some of them left their lockers unlocked, and that even with the locked ones an ingenious and determined man could have got a duplicate without any great difficulty. With such a key, of course, it would have been simple to await a propitious moment to open the locker, take the driver from the bag and substitute another one. So Barstow’s companions in the foursome that Sunday were of no more importance than any of the members or attendants or visitors who had access to the locker rooms.

But now that was out, since Barstow’s bag had not been in his locker since the September before. He had brought it down with him from the university. That changed the picture and made the members of the foursome a little more interesting than lots of other people.

Where we ate surely wasn’t the dining room because it wasn’t big enough, but it had a table and chairs and windows that you couldn’t see much through on account of a lot of shrubbery just outside. The tall skinny guy in the black suit--otherwise Small, the butler, as an established guest like myself was aware--waited on us, and while the meal seemed to me a little light it was nothing that Fritz would have been ashamed of. There was some stuff in tambour shells that was first class. The table was small. I sat across from Miss Barstow, with her brother on my right and Manuel Kimball on my left.

Lawrence Barstow didn’t resemble his sister any, but I could see traces of his mother. He was well put together and had the assurance that goes with his kind of life; his features were good and regular without anything noticeable about them. I’ve seen hundreds of him in the lunch restaurants in the Wall Street section and in the Forties. He had a trick of squinting when he decided to look at you, but I thought that was perhaps due to the blowing his eyes had got in the airplane breeze. The eyes were gray, like his mother’s, but they didn’t have the discipline behind them that hers had.

Manuel Kimball was quite different. He was dark and very neat and compact, with black hair brushed straight back and black restless eyes that kept darting around at us and seemed to find any degree of satisfaction or repose only when they were looking at Sarah Barstow. He made me nervous, and it seemed to me that he set Sarah Barstow a little on edge too, though that may have been only because he didn’t know where I came in on the family crisis and wasn’t supposed to know. That morning she had informed me that there had been no intimacy between the Kimballs and Barstows; the only points of contact had been propinquity in their summer residences and the fact that Manuel was a skilled amateur pilot and his offers to take Larry Barstow up and teach him to fly had been most convenient since Larry had developed an interest in airplane design. She herself had been up with Manuel Kimball two or three times the summer before, but aside from those occasions she had scarcely ever seen him except as the companion of her brother. The Kimballs were newcomers, having bought their place, two miles south, only three years previously. E.D. Kimball, Manuel’s father, was known to the Barstows only slightly, through chance and infrequent meetings at large social or public gatherings. Manuel’s mother was dead, long since, she had vaguely gathered. She could not remember that there had ever been more than a few casual words exchanged between her father and Manuel Kimball except one afternoon the preceding summer when Larry had brought Manuel to the Barstow place to settle a wager at tennis, and she and her father had acted as umpire and linesman.

In spite of which, I was interested in Manuel Kimball. He had at any rate been one of the foursome; and he looked like a foreigner and had a funny combination for a name, and he made me nervous.

At lunch the conversation was mostly about airplanes. Sarah Barstow kept it on that, when there was any sign of lagging, and once or twice when her brother started questions on affairs closer to her bosom she abruptly headed him off. I just ate. When Miss Barstow finally pushed her chair back, punching Small in the belly with it, we all stood up. Larry Barstow addressed me directly almost for the first time; I had seen indications of his idea that I might as well have been eating out back somewhere.

"You want to see me?"

I nodded. "If you can spare a quarter of an hour."

He turned to Manuel Kimball. "If you don’t mind waiting, Manny. I promised Sis I’d have a talk with this man.

"Of course." The other’s eyes darted to rest on Sarah Barstow. "Perhaps Miss Barstow would be kind enough to help me wait."

She said yes, without enthusiasm. But I got a word in: "I’m sorry." To Miss Barstow, "May I remind you that you agreed to be present with your brother?" It hadn’t been mentioned, but I had taken it for granted, and I wanted her there.

"Oh." I thought she looked relieved. "Yes. I’m sorry, Mr. Kimball; shall we leave you here with the coffee?"

"No, thanks." He bowed to her and turned to Larry. "I’ll trot along and have a look at that gas line. If one of your cars can run me over? Thanks. I’ll be expecting you at the hangar any time. Thank you for a pleasant luncheon, Miss Barstow."

One thing that had surprised me about him was his voice. I had expected him, on sight, to sound like a tenor, but the effect he produced was more like that of a murmuring bull. The voice was deep and had a rumble in it, but he kept it low and quite pleasant. Larry Barstow went out with him to tell someone to take him home. His sister and I waited for Larry to come back, and then all three of us went out to the garden, to the bench where I had been taken on my arrival. Larry sat at one side on the grass, and Miss Barstow and I on the bench.

I explained that I wanted Miss Barstow present because she had made the agreement with Nero Wolfe and I wanted her to be satisfied that nothing was said or done that went beyond the agreement. I had certain things I wanted to ask Lawrence Barstow and if there was any question about my being entitled to answers she was the one to question it.

She said, "Very well, I’m here." She looked about played out. In the morning she had sat with her shoulders straight, but now she let them sag down.

Her brother said, "As far as I’m concerned--your name’s Goodwin, isn’t it?"

"That’s it."

"Well, as far as I’m concerned, your agreement, as you call it, is nothing more than a piece of cheap insolence."

"Anything else, Mr. Barstow?"

"Yes. If you want it. Blackmail."

His sister had a flash left. "Larry! What did I tell you?"

"Wait a minute, Miss Barstow." I was flipping back the pages of my notebook. "Maybe your brother ought to hear it. I’ll find it in a minute." I found the page. "Here it is." I read it just as Wolfe had said it, not too fast. Then I closed the notebook. "That’s the agreement, Mr. Barstow. I might as well say that my employer, Mr. Nero Wolfe, keeps his temper pretty well under control, but every once in a while I blow up. If you call him a blackmailer once more the result will probably be bad all around. If you don’t know a favor when you see it handed to you I suppose you’d think a sock on the jaw was a compliment."

He said, "Sis, you’d better go in the house."

"She can go in a minute," I said. "If the agreement is to go overboard she ought to see it sink. If you don’t like it, why did you let her come to Wolfe’s office alone to make it? He would have been glad to see you. He said to your sister, we shall proceed with the inquiry in any event. That’s our business, not such a rotten one either, a few people think who have dealt with us. I say the same to you: agreement or no agreement, we’re going to find out who murdered Peter Oliver Barstow. If you ask me, I think your sister made a swell bargain. If you don’t think so there must be some reason, and that’s one of the things we’ll find out on the way.

"Larry," Miss Barstow said. Her voice was full of things. She repeated it. "Larry." She was telling him and asking him and reminding him all at the same time.

"Come on," I said. "You’re all worked up and looking at me all through lunch didn’t help you any, but if something goes wrong with your airplane you don’t just kick and scream, do you? You pull your coat off and help fix it."

He sat looking not at me but his sister, with his lower lip stuck up and pushed out so that he looked half like a baby about ready to cry and half like a man set to tell the world to go to hell.

"All right, Sis," he said finally. He showed no signs of apologizing to me, but I thought that could wait for a rainy day.

When I began feeding him questions he snapped out of it. He answered prompt and straight and, as far as I could see, without any figuring or hesitation anywhere. Even about the golf bag, where his sister had flopped around like a fish on a bank, it was all clear and ready with him. The bag had been brought down from the university on the truck; there had been no luggage with them in the car except one suitcase, his mother’s. When the truck had arrived at the house about three o’clock in the afternoon its load had been removed and distributed at once; presumably the golf bag had been taken straight to his father’s room though he had no knowledge of that. At Sunday breakfast he and his father had arranged to play golf that afternoon.

"Who suggested it? You or your father?"

He couldn’t remember. When his father had come downstairs after lunch he had had the bag under his arm. They had driven to the Green Meadow Club in the sedan, parked, and his father had gone straight to the first tee, carrying his bag, while Larry had gone around by the hut for caddies. Larry wasn’t particular about his caddy, but there had been one the preceding summer that his father had taken a fancy to, and by chance that boy was there and Larry had taken him with another. On his way to the first tee Larry had fallen in with the Kimballs, also ready to tee off, and since he hadn’t seen Manuel for some months and was eager to discuss plans for the summer he had asked them to make it a foursome, feeling sure his father wouldn’t mind. When they had reached the tee his father had been off to one side, practicing with a mashie. Peter Oliver Barstow had been cordial with the Kimballs and had greeted his caddy with delight and sent him off to chase balls.

They had waited for two or three other matches to get started and had then teed off. Manuel Kimball had driven first, then Larry, then Barstow, and last the elder Kimball. Larry couldn’t remember seeing his father take the driver from the bag or from his caddy-- while they were waiting he had been busy talking with Manuel, and during the moments immediately preceding his father’s drive Larry had been driving himself. But he remembered well his father’s actual swing at the ball, on account of an unusual circumstance. At the end of the swing there had been a peculiar jerk of the club, and as the ball sailed away with a bad slice Barstow had made an exclamation, with a startled look on his face, and begun rubbing his belly. Larry had never seen his father so suddenly and completely abandon his accustomed dignity in public. They had asked him what was wrong, and he had said something about a wasp or a hornet and started to open his shirt. Larry had been impressed by his father’s agitation and had looked inside his shirt at the skin. There had been a tiny puncture, almost invisible, and his father had regained his composure and insisted that it would be nothing. The elder Kimball had made his drive and they had proceeded down the fairway.

The rest had been detailed in the newspapers many times. Thirty minutes later, on the fairway of the fourth hole, Barstow had suddenly collapsed on the ground, kicking and clutching the grass. He had been still alive when his caddy seized his arm, but by the time the others reached him he was dead. A crowd had collected, among them Dr. Nathaniel Bradford, an old Barstow family friend. Manuel Kimball had gone for the sedan and driven it along the edge of the fairway to the scene. The body had been lifted into the back of the sedan, Dr. Bradford had sat on the seat holding the head of his old friend on his lap, and Larry had taken the wheel.