Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 27 (24 page)

He shook his head at them. “It was also idiotic of you to assume that Mr. Goodwin was a police officer, and admit him and answer his questions, merely because he had been present during the abortive experiment with the dog. You should have asked to see his credentials. None of you had any idea who he was. Even Mr. Meegan, who had seen him in this office in the morning, was bamboozled. I mention this to anticipate any possible official complaint that Mr. Goodwin impersonated an officer. You know he didn’t. He merely took advantage of your unwarranted assumption.”

He shifted in his chair. “Another thing. Yesterday morning Mr. Meegan called here by appointment to ask me to do a job for him. With his first words I gathered that it was something about his wife, and I don’t take that kind of work, and I was brusque with him. He was offended. He rushed out in a temper, getting his hat and raincoat from the rack in the hall, and he took Mr. Goodwin’s coat instead of his own. Late in the afternoon Mr. Goodwin went to Arbor Street, with the coat that had been left in error, to exchange it. He saw that in front of number twenty-nine there were collected two police cars, a policeman on post, some people,
and a dog. He decided to postpone his errand and went on by, after a brief halt during which he patted the dog. He walked home, and had gone nearly two miles when he discovered that the dog was following him. He brought the dog in a cab the rest of the way, to this house and this room.”

He flattened a palm on his desk. “Now. Why did the dog follow Mr. Goodwin through the turmoil of the city? Mr. Cramer’s notion that the dog was enticed is poppycock. Mr. Goodwin is willing to believe, as many men are, that he is irresistible to both dogs and women, and doubtless his vanity impeded his intellect or he would have reached the same conclusion that I did. The dog didn’t follow him; it followed the coat. You ask, as I did, how to account for Mr. Kampf’s dog following Mr. Meegan’s coat. I couldn’t. I can’t. Then, since it was unquestionably Mr. Kampf’s dog, it couldn’t have been Mr. Meegan’s coat. It is better than a conjecture, it is next thing to a certainty, that it was Mr. Kampf’s coat.”

His gaze leveled at the husband. “Mr. Meegan. Some two hours ago I learned from Mr. Goodwin that you maintain that you had never seen or heard of Mr. Kampf. That was fairly conclusive, but before sending for you I had to verify my conjecture that the model who had sat for Mr. Chaffee’s picture was your wife. I would like to hear it straight from you. Did you ever meet with Philip Kampf alive?”

Meegan was meeting the gaze. “No.”

“Don’t you want to qualify that?”

“No.”

“Then where did you get his raincoat?”

No answer. Meegan’s jaw worked. He spoke. “I didn’t have his raincoat, or if I did I didn’t know it.”

“That won’t do. I warn you, you are in deadly peril.
The raincoat that you brought into this house and left here is in the hall now, there on the rack. It can easily be established that it belonged to Mr. Kampf and was worn by him. Where did you get it?”

Meegan’s jaw worked some more. “I never had it, if it belonged to Kampf. This is a dirty frame. You can’t prove that’s the coat I left here.”

Wolfe’s voice sharpened. “One more chance. Have you any explanation of how Kampf’s coat came into your possession?”

“No, and I don’t need any.”

He may not have been pure boob. If he hadn’t noticed that he wore the wrong coat home, and he probably didn’t, in his state of mind, this had hit him from a clear sky and he had no time to study it.

“Then you’re done for,” Wolfe told him. “For your own coat must be somewhere, and I think I know where. In the police laboratory. Mr. Kampf was wearing one when you killed him and pushed his body down the stairs—and that explains why, when they were making that experiment this morning, the dog showed no interest in the spot where the body had lain. It had been enveloped, not in his coat but in yours. That can be established too. If you won’t explain how you got Mr. Kampf’s coat, then explain how he got yours. Is that also a frame?”

Wolfe pointed a finger at him. “I note that flash in your eye, and I think I know what it means. But your brain is lagging. If, after killing him, you took your raincoat off of him and put on him the one that you thought was his, that won’t help you any. For in that case the coat that was on the body is Mr. Goodwin’s, and certainly that can be established, and how would you explain that? It looks hopeless, and—”

Meegan was springing up, but before he even got
well started Purley’s big hands were on his shoulders, pulling him back and down. And a new voice sounded.

“I told you he would kill me! I knew he would! He killed Phil!”

Jewel Jones was looking not at her husband, who was under control, but at Wolfe. He snapped at her, “How do you know he did?”

Judging by her eyes and the way she was shaking, she would be hysterical in another two minutes, and maybe she knew it, for she poured it out. “Because Phil told me—he told me he knew Dick was here looking for me, and he knew how afraid I was of him, and he said if I wouldn’t come and be with him again he would tell Dick where I was. I didn’t think he really would—I didn’t think Phil could be as mean as that, and I wouldn’t promise, but yesterday morning he phoned me and told me he had seen Dick and told him he thought he knew who had posed for that picture, and he was going to see him again in the afternoon and tell him about me if I didn’t promise, and so I promised. I thought if I promised it would give me time to decide what to do. But Phil must have gone to see Dick again anyway—”

“Where had they met in the morning?”

“At Phil’s apartment, he said. And he said—that’s why I know Dick killed him—he said Dick had gone off with his raincoat, and he laughed about it and said he was willing for Dick to have his raincoat if he could have Dick’s wife.” She was shaking harder now. “And I’ll bet that’s what he told Dick! That was like Phil! I’ll bet he told Dick I was coming back to him and he thought that was a good trade, a raincoat for a wife! That was like Phil! You don’t—”

She giggled. It started with a giggle, and then the valves busted open and here it came. When something
happens in that office to smash a woman’s nerves, as it has more than once, it usually falls to me to deal with it, but that time three other guys, led by Ross Chaffee, came to her, and I was glad to leave it to them. As for Wolfe, he skedaddled. If there is one thing on earth he absolutely will not be in a room with it’s a woman in eruption. He got up and marched out. As for Meegan, Purley and Cramer had him.

When they left with him, they didn’t take the dog. To relieve the minds of any of you who have the notion, which I understand is widespread, that it makes a dog neurotic to change its name, I might add that he responds to Jet now as if his mother had started calling him that before he had his eyes open.

As for the raincoat, Wolfe had been right about the flash in Meegan’s eye. Kampf had been wearing Meegan’s raincoat when he was killed, and of course that wouldn’t do, so after strangling him Meegan had taken it off and put on the one he thought was Kampf’s. Only it was mine. As a part of the DA’s case I went down to headquarters and identified it. At the trial it helped the jury to decide that Meegan deserved the big one. After that was over I suppose I could have claimed it, but the idea didn’t appeal to me. My new one is a different color.

Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe’s creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout’s own archives, here are rarely seen, never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in “The Rex Stout Library” will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.

In 1967 Rex Stout was approached by the school newspaper of Junior High School 115 in New York City and asked the following question: “Which book or books were your favorites as a teenager and why?” Stout’s reply is reproduced here.