The Doorbell Rang (11 page)

The boxes were strung along the hall, the radio in the office was on loud, and Wolfe was using a screwdriver on the third box from the end. I asked him if he was sure, and when he said yes, an X was chalked on it, I got another screwdriver. There were only eight screws, and in a couple of minutes we had them out. I lifted the top off, and there was Saul Panzer, on his side with his knees pulled up. I started to tilt the box, but Saul, who is undersized except for his ears and nose, twisted around and was on his knees and then his feet.

“Good afternoon,” Wolfe said.

“Not very.” Saul stretched. “I can talk?”

“Yes, with the radio.”

He stretched again. “That was a ride. I hope they’re alive.”

“I want to be sure,” Wolfe said, “that I have their names right. Mr Hewitt gave them to Archie on the phone.”

“Ashley Jarvis. That’s you. Dale Kirby is Archie. We’d better get them out.”

That was the first and only time I have ever heard men introduced while boxed.

“In a moment,” Wolfe said. “You have given them a full explanation?”

“Yes, sir. They are not to speak, not a word, unless you ask them to-or Archie. They don’t know who has bugged the house and is watching it, or why, but they have bought Hewitt’s promise that they are in no danger and won’t be. He gave them five hundred dollars apiece and you are to give them another five hundred. He also gave them the statements signed by you. I think they’ll do.” He lowered his voice a little. “Kirby is better than Jarvis, but they’ll do.”

“They know they are to stay in their room and keep away from windows?”

“Yes. Except when they are-uh-rehearsing.”

“They have the proper clothes for Thursday evening?”

“In that box.” Saul pointed. “Our things are in it too, including guns. Of course they’ll wear your hat and coat, and Archie’s.”

Wolfe made a face. “Very well. Fred and Orrie first.”

“They’re marked.” He took the screwdriver from Wolfe, went to the box with a circle chalked on it, told me, “Orrie’s has a triangle,” and started on a screw. I found the triangle and started on it. He had Fred out before I got Orrie because one of the screws had a bad head. They too had been told not to speak unless spoken to, and from the expressions on their faces when they got upright I thought it was just as well. I raised my brows at Saul and tapped my chest, and he pointed to the box at the far end, and I went and started on it.

I realize that professional actors have had a lot of practice saying only what they are supposed to say and keeping their traps closed if that’s what the script calls for, but even so I had to hand it to Ashley Jarvis and Dale Kirby. They had had a rough two hours or more-especially Jarvis, who carried fully as many pounds as Wolfe, and it wasn’t quite as well distributed. We had to ease the box over on its side before he could come loose, and he stayed on the floor a good five minutes, refusing offers of help, working his arms and legs, but when he finally made it and was erect he turned to Wolfe and bowed, a damn good bow. Kirby hadn’t bowed to me, but he hadn’t said a word. While we waited for Jarvis to get up he stood to one side doing calisthenics, keeping time with the music on the radio.

I was agreeing with Saul, they’ll do. Kirby was half an inch shorter than me, but his build was just right. Jarvis was exactly Wolfe’s height. His shoulders weren’t quite as broad and his middle was a little farther around, but with an overcoat on he would do fine. The faces were only so-so, but it would be dark and no G-man was going to get a close-up.

Wolfe returned the bow with a nod, said, “Come, gentlemen,” and entered the office. Instead of going to his desk, he moved a yellow chair to the center of the rug, which was thick enough to prevent noise, and went for another one. I got a couple, and Saul and Fred and Orrie each got one, and we all sat, in two circles, with Wolfe and Jarvis and Kirby on the inside. But Wolfe said, “The money, Archie,” and I got up and went to the safe for it-two wads with twenty-five twenties in each which were there waiting.

Wolfe’s eyes went from Jarvis to Kirby and back. “Lunch is ready,” he said, “but first a few points. That money is yours. Archie?”

I handed it to them, a wad to each. Jarvis merely glanced at it and stuck it in his side pocket. Kirby got a wallet from his breast pocket, put the bills in nice and neat, and replaced the wallet.

“Mr Hewitt explained,” Wolfe said, “that you would each receive one thousand dollars, and now you have. But having seen you emerge from those boxes, I feel that you have already earned the thousand. Amply. Therefore, if you perform the rest of it satisfactorily, I shall feel that you have earned another thousand, and you will receive it. Friday or Saturday.”

Jarvis opened his mouth, remembered just in time, and shut it. He pointed to Kirby, tapped his own chest, and looked a question.

Wolfe nodded. “Two thousand. One to each of you. A little closer, Mr Kirby. I must keep my voice down. You gentlemen will be here twenty-eight hours. During that period there must be no single sound which, if overheard, would disclose your presence in this house. Your room is two flights up. You will use the stairs, not the elevator. If you need something there will be a man in the hall outside. If you must communicate you will whisper. There are several dozen books in your room. If none of them is to your taste you may select one from these shelves. No radio or television; the house must not be a hubbub. You will need to observe closely the posture and manner of walking of Mr Goodwin and me, and there will be opportunities. Not our voices; that won’t be necessary.” He pursed his lips. “I think that covers it. If you have questions, ask them now, in an undertone near my ear. Have you?”

They shook their heads.

“Then we’ll have lunch. The radio will be silent. We do not discuss business at the table. No one will speak but Mr Goodwin and me.”

He rose.

I wouldn’t want to go through that twenty-eight hours again.

Going through a forest where you know there are snipers and one might be up any tree takes only guts and sharp eyes. But if you don’t know there are snipers but only that there could be, that’s different. Why all the guts and the keen and careful eyes'We didn’t know the house was bugged, only that it might be. If Jarvis or Kirby caught a finger in the bathroom door and yelled ouch or goddammit, it might wreck the act, but only might, and that was the hell of it. Every time I made a trip upstairs to check that Saul or Fred or Orrie was there in the hall, and that they hadn’t got fed up and started talking, I felt foolish. Grown men don’t look under the bed every night to see if there’s a burglar, though there might be one.

The two meals were screwy, with Wolfe and me, mostly Wolfe, carrying on with table talk, while the other five just ate and listened. Try it sometime. I couldn’t even ask one of them to pass the butter; I could just point. And when we were doing something, for instance taking the boxes up to the potting room and stacking them, even I couldn’t talk, because whom would I be talking to'

I left the house only once, late Wednesday afternoon, to call Hewitt from a booth and tell him the shipment had arrived in good condition, and to the garage to give Tom Halloran the picture.

There were bright spots, two of them on Wednesday and four on Thursday, when Jarvis observed Wolfe. Jarvis would stand at the foot of the stairs and study Wolfe coming down, at the top and study him going down, and in the hall and study him on the level. By the second session Thursday I knew Jarvis was pulling Wolfe’s leg, enjoying the look on his face, but I was enjoying it too. Of course Kirby observed me the same way, but that was no hardship; on a normal day I go up and down those stairs a dozen times or more. What Kirby couldn’t observe was my driving. They would probably be tailed all the way to Hewitt’s, and if his style at the wheel was too different from mine it could make a smart G-man suspicious. Thursday morning I took him to the office and turned on the radio and discussed it for half an hour.

Looking back at it, I don’t think we missed a single bet. Around eleven o’clock Wednesday night I went up to my room, which fronts on Thirty-fifth Street, paid no more attention to the curtains than usual, changed to pajamas, sat on the bed, and turned out the light on the bed stand. In a couple of minutes Fred and Orrie entered and undressed in the dark, and I got out and they got in. Saul slept on the sofa in the front room, and we didn’t turn the lights on in there at all. We rarely do.

I mention a funny thing. As I turned the office lights out Wednesday night and got between sheets on the couch, I was thinking not of the trap we were setting and whether it was going to work, but of the couch in Sarah Dacos’s apartment. What if the cleaning woman decided to turn the cushion over and looked under the spring'If I had stayed another five minutes maybe I could have found a better spot.

The two meals I mentioned were Wednesday’s lunch and dinner.

Thursday’s breakfast and lunch were different because Fritz wasn’t there. The arrangement was that Hewitt would have a car there for Fritz at eight o’clock, and it came right on time. I carried his bag out for him, and at the car door he shook my hand, looking glum. He was in no mood for producing masterpieces for a bunch of aristologists. Saul and I handled the breakfast problem, and for lunch we had cold cuts, including the sturgeon, which had been passed as edible, two bottles of champague, and five kinds of cheese.

At 4:45 Thursday afternoon I was in the office with Saul and Fred and Orrie when Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, who had been told to leave early, came downstairs, said good night, and left. Wolfe was up in his room. At 5:10 I went up to my room, turned on the lights, and started changing. I could have made sure that there was no chink in the curtains and just sat, but it wouldn’t have been normal for me to bother about chinks and we damned well wanted everything normal. Wolfe, in his room, was doing likewise. At 5:40, dressed for dinner, I went back down to the office, and at 5:45 there was the sound of the elevator, and Wolfe appeared, also dressed. He and I started talking, no radio, about traffic problems. At 5:55 on the dot there was a faint sound of footsteps in the hall, and Jarvis and Kirby were there. Jarvis’s dinner uniform was a big improvement on Wolfe’s, which had seen better years, but Kirby’s wasn’t up to mine, which had set me back three Cs. They stood at the door. I told Wolfe I would wait in the car, went to the hall, held my coat for Kirby and handed him my hat, and stayed in the corner out of range as he opened the door, crossed the sill, and pulled the door shut. As Jarvis came and stood looking out through the one-way glass, with me at his elbow, the lights in the office went out, and I got Wolfe’s coat and hat for Jarvis. In about half an hour which was really about six minutes the Heron showed and came to a stop at the curb. Jarvis flipped the light switch and the hall was dark, but I moved out of range until he was out and the door closed. I watched him and decided he was earning the extra grand. I had had no opinion about Kirby, since I don’t know how I look when I walk, but I would have sworn it was Wolfe going down the steps, crossing the sidewalk, and getting into the car, if I hadn’t known. The Heron rolled away, smooth, no jerks, like me, and I realized I had been holding my breath God knows how long.

The office was now empty if they had followed the script. Before the lights went out in the hall Wolfe had gone to the dark kitchen, Orrie to the dark dining room, and Saul and Fred through the connecting door to the dark front room. I hadn’t heard them, so no one had. I put my hand in my side pocket to touch the Marley.38, stepped to the door and touched the edge to make sure it was closed, stood until my eyes were as well adjusted to the dark as they would get, and sat down on the chair at the wall opposite the rack.

I felt fine. The strain was over. It could have been spoiled a hundred different ways, by either bad handling or bad luck, but here we were, all set, with nothing to do but wait. Either they had decided to do a bag job or they hadn’t, and that was their strain, not mine. I didn’t know what their score was on bag jobs, no outsider does, but I knew of four in New York the past year, definitely, and I had heard talk of several more.

It depended on whether Wragg believed that a G-man had killed Althaus. If he did, ten to one they would come. If he didn’t, if he had somehow been satisfied that his men were clean on the murder, they wouldn’t come. Whether the bait was good enough depended on him, not on us. I felt fine.

When I decided half an hour had passed I went to the door to look at my watch by the light coming through the one-way glass, and when I saw 6:22 I felt a little less fine. Wrong by eight minutes. I am supposed to be good at judging time, so evidently I wasn’t as unstrained as I thought I was. Instead of sitting, I walked down the hall to the office door and felt still less fine when I rubbed against the wall twice. That was inexcusable. Of course going back to the front, toward the rectangle of light, was simple, but damn it, I should be able to go straight down the center of the hall I knew so well into the pitch dark. I did, three times, and then went to the chair and sat.

I can’t give the precise time that they came because I was determined not to look again until seven o’clock, but it was close to seven. Suddenly the dim light at the door was even dimmer and there they were. Two of them. A third was probably down on the sidewalk. One of them bent over to look at the lock, and the other stood at the top of the first step, his back to the door, facing the street.

Of course they had known the lock was a Rabson and had brought the right items, but no matter how good he was he wouldn’t get a Rabson at the first stab, so there was no hurry. The door from the hall to the front room, open, was right there, four feet from the chair. I stepped to it, stuck my head in, let a low hiss through my teeth, and got one back. I walked to the dining room door, not touching the wall, did another hiss, and it was returned. Then I went and stood just outside the office door. They wouldn’t flash a light the instant they made it in; they would stand and listen.

I have since argued with Saul about how long it took him. He says the door opened eight minutes after I hissed, and I say ten. Anyway it opened, and as it started I moved into the office, got my back against the wall to the left of the door, put my left hand behind me with a finger on the light switch, and took the Marley from my pocket with the right.

Once in, they didn’t listen more than five seconds, which was bad technique. They came straight down the hall. With my head turned, I saw the faint gleam of a pencil-flash grow brighter, then streak into the office, and then them. They came in three or four steps and stopped. The one with the flash started it around and in three seconds it would have hit me, so I sang out, “Play ball!” raised the Marley, and flipped the switch, and there was light.

One of them just gawked, but the one with the flash dropped it and started his hand inside his jacket. But not only did I have my gun out, Orrie was there beside me with his, and Saul’s voice came from the door of the front room, “Strike one!” They turned their heads and saw two more guns.

“It looks bad,” I said. “We don’t even need to frisk you, you can’t shoot in two directions at once. Mr Wolfe!”

He was there. He must have left the kitchen when I called, “Play ball.” I said, “Go around,” but he had already started that way, to the right of the red leather chair, well out of their reach. At his desk he sat and eyed them-their profiles, since they were facing Orrie and me.

He spoke. “This is deplorable. Archie, call the police.” I moved. I didn’t make as wide a detour as Wolfe had, but the program would go better without a scuffle, so I circled around. Halfway to my desk I stopped and said, “Look. If you jump me when I’m dialing you won’t leave here on your feet. I suppose you know the law, crashers do. You’re inside. If you try getting rough they’ll plug you and all they’ll get from the law is thanks.”

“Balls.” It was the big handsome one with a square jaw and square shoulders. The other one was taller, but skinny, with a face that showed the bones. Handsome was giving me the stony stare. “We’re not crashers, and you know it.”

“Like hell I do. You crashed. You can explain it to the cops. I’ve warned you. Stay put. Start moving and you’ll get stopped. One of them has a quick finger.”

To get to the phone at my desk I had to give them my back. I did, and as I reached for the phone he snapped, “Cut the comedy, Goodwin. You know damn well what we are.” He turned to Wolfe. “We’re agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and you know it. We have touched nothing, and we didn’t intend to. We wanted to see you. When we rang there was no answer, and the door wasn’t locked, and we came in.”

“You lie,” Wolfe said, just stating a fact. “Five men will swear that the door was locked and you didn’t ring. Four of them heard you picking it. When you are searched, by the police, your tools will be found. Federal Bureau of Investigation'Pfui. Get the police, Archie, and tell them to send men capable of handling a pair of ruffians.”

Before I turned to dial I said, “Fred,” and bent a finger at him, and he came. Passing them, he barely gave them elbow room.

He had once had an arm twisted by a G-man, and he would have welcomed a chance to even up. With the backs of his thighs against Wolfe’s desk, facing them, his gun at his hip, he looked much nastier than he actually is. He is really a nice guy, with a wife and four children. As I started dialing I would have given a hundred to one that I wouldn’t finish, and I didn’t. At the fourth whirl Handsome blurted, “Hold it, Goodwin,” and I stopped my finger and turned. He was slipping his left hand inside his coat. I cradled the phone and moved beside Fred. The G-man’s hand came out with his little black leather fold. “Credentials,” he said, and opened it and displayed it.

That was the ticklish spot. They’re supposed to show it but hang on to it. Wolfe growled, “I’ll inspect it,” and Handsome made a move forward, and Fred’s big left hand shot out and shoved him back. I put a hand out, palm up, but said nothing. He hesitated, not long, and put it on my palm. I said, “You too,” to Skinny and stretched my arm. He had his fold already out and put it on top of the other one, and I turned and handed them to Wolfe. He looked at one and then the other, opened a drawer and got his big glass, inspected them through the glass, taking his time, returned the glass to the drawer, dropped the folds in on top of it, shut the drawer, and regarded them.

“Probably forged,” he said. “The police laboratory can tell.”

It must have taken a lot of control for them to hold tight. I would have admired them if my mind hadn’t been occupied. They both went stiff but they didn’t move; then Skinny said, “You fat sonofabitch.”

Wolfe nodded. “A natural reaction. Let’s make an assumption. Let us assume, merely for discussion, that you are in fact agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then you have a valid complaint, but not against me; against your colleagues who were gulled into thinking that this house was empty. You have nothing to apologize for.”

He cleared his throat. “Now. Still on the assumption. I am going to keep your credentials as hostages. You can recover them, or your bureau can, only by an action at law which would disclose publicly how they got here, and I would of course have a counter action, since you entered my house illegally and were caught flagrante delicto, and I have four witnesses. I doubt if your superiors would want to pay the price. So the initiative is mine. You may go. All I wanted, still on the assumption, was incontestable evidence that members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have committed a felony and can be prosecuted, and I have it here in my drawer. By the way, I haven’t mentioned the gloves you’re wearing. Of course we have all noticed them. That will be a corroborative detail if and when this gets to a courtroom. You may go, gentlemen.”

“Goddamn you.” Handsome. “It will be a federal courtroom. Those credentials are the property of federal officers.”