Some Buried Caesar (14 page)

“I didn’t evade it. I merely said it has no bearing on this.”

“Tell me anyway. Of course I’m impertinent, but I’ll have to decide if I’m also irrelevant.”

Osgood shrugged. “It’s no secret. This whole end of the state knows it. I don’t hate him, I only feel
contempt for him. As I told you, his father was one of my father’s stablehands. As a boy Tom was wild, and aggressive, but he had ambition, if you want to call it that. He courted a young woman in the neighborhood and persuaded her to agree to marry him. I came home from college, and she and I were mutually attracted, and I married her. Tom went to New York and never made an appearance around here. Apparently he was nursing a grievance all the time, for about eight years ago he began to make a nuisance of himself. He had made a lot of money, and he used some of it and all his ingenuity concocting schemes to pester and injure me. Then two years ago he bought that land next to mine, and built on it, and that made it worse.”

“Have you tried retaliation?”

“If I ever tried retaliation it would be with a horsewhip. I ignore him.”

“Not a democratic weapon, the whip. Yesterday afternoon your son accused him of projecting the barbecue as an offense to you. The idea seemed to be that it would humiliate you and make you ridiculous if a bull better than your best bull was cooked and eaten. It struck me as farfetched. Mr. Pratt maintained that the barbecue was to advertise his business.”

“I don’t care a damn. What’s the difference?”

“None, I suppose. But the fact remains that the bull is a central character in our problem, and it would be a mistake to lose sight of him. So is Mr. Pratt, of course. You reject the possibility that his festering grievance might have impelled him to murder.”

“Yes. That’s fantastic. He’s not insane … at least I don’t think he is.”

“Well.” Wolfe sighed. “Will you send for your daughter?”

Osgood scowled. “She’s with her mother. Do you insist on speaking to her? I know you’re supposed to be competent, but it seems to me the people to ask questions of are at Pratt’s, not here.”

“It’s my competence you’re hiring, sir. Your daughter comes next. Mr. Waddell is at Pratt’s, where he belongs, since he has authority.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “If you please.”

Osgood got up and went to a table to push a button, and then came back and downed his highball, which must have been as warm as Wolfe’s beer by that time, in three gulps. The pug-nosed lassie appeared and was instructed to ask Miss Osgood to join us. Osgood sat down again and said:

“I don’t see what you’re accomplishing, Wolfe. If you think by questioning me you’ve eliminated everybody at Pratt’s—”

“By no means. I’ve eliminated no one.” Wolfe sounded faintly exasperated, and I perceived that it was up to me to arrange with Pug-nose for more and colder beer. “Elimination, as such, is tommyrot. Innocence is a negative and can never be established; you can only establish guilt. The only way I can apodictically eliminate any individual from consideration as the possible murderer is to find out who did it. You can’t be expected to see what I am accomplishing; if you could do that, you could do the job yourself. Let me give you a conjecture for you to try your hand on: for example, is Miss Rowan an accomplice? Did she join Mr. Goodwin last night and sit with him for an hour on the running board of my car, which he had steered into a tree, to distract him while the crime
was being committed? Or if you would prefer another sort of problem …”

He stopped with a grimace and began preparations to arise. I got up too, and Osgood started across the room toward the door which had opened to admit his daughter, and with her an older woman in a dark blue dress with her hair piled on top of her head. Osgood made an effort to head off the latter, and protested, but she advanced toward us anyhow. He submitted enough to introduce us:

“This is Mr. Nero Wolfe, Marcia. His assistant, Mr. Goodwin. My wife. Now dear, there’s no sense in this, it won’t help any …”

While he remonstrated with her I took a polite look. The farmer’s beautiful daughter who, according to one school of thought, was responsible for Tom Pratt’s unlucky idea of making beefsteak out of Hickory Caesar Grindon, was still beautiful I suppose; it’s hard for me to tell when they’re around fifty, on account of my tendency to concentrate on details which can’t be expected to last that long. Anyway, with her eyes red and swollen from crying and her skin blotchy, it wasn’t fair to judge.

She told her husband, “No, Fred, really, I’ll be all right. Nancy has told me what you’ve decided. I suppose you’re right … you always are right … now you don’t need to look like that … you’re perfectly right to want to find out about it, but I don’t want just to shut myself away … you know Clyde always said it wasn’t a pie if I didn’t have my finger in it …” her lip quivered “… and if it is to be discussed with Nancy I want to be here …”

“It’s foolish, Marcia, there’s no sense in it.” Osgood had hold of her arm. “If you’ll just—”

“Permit me.” Wolfe was frowning, and made his tone crisp. “Neither of you will stay. I wish to speak with Miss Osgood alone.—Confound it, sir, I am working, and for you! However I may want to sympathize with grief, I can’t afford to let it interfere with my job. The job you want done. If you want it done.”

Osgood glared at him, but said to his wife, “Come, Marcia.”

I followed them three steps and halted him: “Excuse me. It would be to everyone’s advantage if he had more beer, say three bottles, and make it colder.”

N
ancy, sitting in the chair Osgood had vacated, looked more adamant than the situation seemed to call for, considering that Wolfe’s client was her father. You might have thought she was confronted by hostile forces. Of course her brother had just been killed and she couldn’t be expected to beam with cheerful eagerness, but her stiffness as she sat looked not only tense but antagonistic, and her lips, which only 24 hours before had struck me as being warm and trembly, now formed a thin rigid colorless line.

Wolfe leaned back and regarded her with half-closed eyes. “We’ll be as brief as we can with this, Miss Osgood,” he said, with honey in his mouth. “I thought we might reach our objective a little sooner with your father and mother absent.”

She nodded, her head tilted forward once and back again, and said nothing. Wolfe resumed:

“We must manage to accompany your brother yesterday afternoon as continuously as possible from the time he left Mr. Pratt’s terrace. Were you and Mr. Bronson and he riding in one car?”

Her voice was low and firm: “Yes.”

“Tell me briefly your movements after leaving the terrace.”

“We walked across the lawn and back to the car and got in and came—no, Clyde got out again because Mr. McMillan called to him and wanted to speak to him. Clyde went over to him and they talked a few minutes and then Clyde came back and we drove home.”

“Did you hear his conversation with Mr. McMillan?”

“No.”

“Was it apparently an altercation?”

“It didn’t look like it.”

Wolfe nodded. “Mr. McMillan left the terrace with the announced intention of advising your brother not to do anything foolish. He did it quietly then.”

“They just talked a few minutes, that was all.”

“So. You returned home, and Clyde had a talk with your father.”

“Did he?”

“Please, Miss Osgood.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “Discretion will only delay us. Your father has described the … unpleasant scene, he called it … he had with his son. Was that immediately after you got home?”

“Yes. Dad was waiting for us at the veranda steps.”

“Infuriated by the phone call from Mr. Pratt. Were you present during the scene?”

“No. They went into the library … this room. I went upstairs to clean up … we had been at Crowfield nearly all day.”

“When did you see your brother again?”

“At dinnertime.”

“Who was at table?”

“Mother and I, and Mr. Bronson and Clyde. Dad had gone somewhere.”

“What time was dinner over?”

“A little after eight. We eat early in the country, and we sort of rushed through it because it wasn’t very gay. Mother was angry … Dad had told her about the bet Clyde had made with Monte Cris—with Mr. Pratt, and Clyde was glum—”

“You called Mr. Pratt Monte Cristo?”

“That was a slip of the tongue.”

“Obviously. Don’t be perturbed, it wasn’t traitorous, your father has told me of Mr. Pratt’s rancor. You called him Monte Cristo?”

“Yes, Clyde and I did, and …” Her lip started to quiver, and she controlled it. “We thought it was funny when we started it.”

“It may have been so. Now for your movements after dinner, please.”

“I went to mother’s room with her and we talked a while, and then I went to my room. Later I came downstairs and sat on the veranda and listened to the katydids. I was there when Dad came home.”

“And Clyde?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him after I went upstairs with mother after dinner.”

She wasn’t much good as a liar; she didn’t know how to relax for it. Wolfe has taught me that one of the most important requirements for successful lying is relaxed vocal cords and throat muscles; otherwise you are forced to put on extra pressure to push the lie through, and the result is that you talk faster and raise the pitch and the blood shows in your face.
Nancy Osgood betrayed all of those signs. I moved my eyes for a glance at Wolfe, but he merely murmured a question:

“So you don’t know when your brother left the house? Left here to go to Pratt’s?”

“No.” She stirred a little, and was still again, and repeated, “No.”

“That’s a pity. Didn’t he tell you or your mother that he was going to Pratt’s?”

“So far as I know, he told no one.”

There was an interruption, a knock at the door. I went to it and took from Pug-nose a tray with three bottles of beer, felt one and approved of the temperature, and taxied them across to Wolfe. He, opening and pouring, asked Nancy if she would have, and she declined with thanks. He drank, put down the empty glass, and wiped his lips with his handkerchief.

“Now Miss Osgood,” he said in a new tone. “I have more questions to ask of you, but this next is probably the most material of all. When did your brother tell you how and why he expected to win his bet with Mr. Pratt?”

She stared a second and said, “He didn’t tell me at all. What makes you think he did?” It sounded straight to me.

“I thought it likely. Your father says that you and your brother were very close to each other.”

“We were.”

“But he told you nothing of that wager?”

“He didn’t have to tell me he made it, I heard him. He didn’t tell me how or why he expected to win it.”

“What was discussed as you rode home from Pratt’s yesterday?”

“I don’t know. Nothing in particular.”

“Remarkable. The bizarre wager which had just been made wasn’t mentioned?”

“No. Mr. Bronson was … well, it only takes a couple of minutes to drive here from Pratt’s—”

“Mr. Bronson was what?”

“Nothing. He was there, that’s all.”

“Is he an old friend of your brother’s?”

“He’s not—no. Not an old friend.”

“But a friend, I presume, since you and your brother brought him here?”

“Yes.” She clipped it. She was terrible.

“Is he a friend of yours too?”

“No.” She raised her voice a little. “Why should you ask me about Mr. Bronson?”

“My dear child.” Wolfe compressed his lips. “For heaven’s sake don’t start that. I am a hired instrument of vengeance … hired by your father. Nowadays an Erinys wears a coat and trousers and drinks beer and works for pay, but the function is unaltered and should still be performed, if at all, mercilessly. I am going to find out who killed your brother. A part of the operation is to prick all available facts. I intend to look into Mr. Bronson as well as everyone else unlucky enough to be within range. For example, take Miss Pratt. Did you approve of your brother’s engagement to marry Miss Caroline Pratt?”

She stared in consternation, opened her mouth, and closed it.

Wolfe shook his head at her. “I’m not being wily, to disconcert you and corner you. I don’t think I need to; you have made yourself too vulnerable. To give you an idea, here are some questions I shall expect you to answer: Why, since you regard Mr. Bronson with loathing, do you permit him to remain as a guest
in this house? I know you loathe him, because when he happened to brush against you yesterday on Mr. Pratt’s terrace you drew away as if slime had touched your dress. Why would you prefer to have the mystery of your brother’s death unsolved and to leave the onus to the bull? I know you would, from the relief on your face this afternoon when your father’s incivility started me for the door. Why did you tell me that you didn’t see your brother after dinner last evening? I know it was a lie, because I was hearing and seeing you when you said it. You see how you have exposed yourself?”

Nancy was standing up, and the line of her mouth was thinner than ever. She took a step and said, “My father … I’ll see if he wants—”

“Nonsense,” Wolfe snapped. “Please sit down. Why do you think I had your father leave? Shall I send for him? He intends to learn who murdered his son, and for the moment all other considerations surrender to that, even his daughter’s dignity and peace of mind. You won’t get peace of mind by concealing things, anyway. You must give satisfactory and complete answers to those questions, and the easiest way is here, to me, at once.”

“You can’t do this.” She fluttered a hand. Her chin trembled, and she steadied it. “Really you can’t. You can’t do this.” She was beauty in distress if I ever saw it, and if the guy harassing her had been anybody else I would have smacked him cold and flung her behind my saddle.

Wolfe told her impatiently, “You see how it is. Sit down. Confound it, do you want to turn it into a brawl, with your father here too and both of us shouting at you? You’ll have to tell these things, for we
need to know them, whether they prove useful or not. You can’t bury them. For example, your dislike for Mr. Bronson. I can pick up that telephone and call a man in New York named Saul Panzer, an able and industrious man, and tell him I want to know all he can discover about Bronson and you and your brother. You see how silly it would be to force us to spend that time and money. What about Mr. Bronson? Who is he?”