The Silent Speaker (11 page)

'Is that,' Breslow barked, 'what you got us here to listen to'We're heard all that before!'

'Yeah, I know you have.' Cramer was trying not to sound sour. 'We didn't get you here to listen to me. I am now turning this over to Mr. Wolfe, and he will proceed, after I say two things. First, you got the request to come here from my office, but from here on it is not official. I am responsible for getting you here and that's all. As far as I'm concerned you can all get up and go if you feel like it. Second, some of you may feel that this is improper because Mr. Wolfe has been engaged to work on this case by the National Industrial Association. That may be so. All I can say is, if you feel that way you can stay here and keep that in mind, or you can leave. Suit yourselves.'

He looked around. Nobody moved or spoke. Cramer waited ten seconds and then turned and nodded at Wolfe.

Wolfe heaved a deep sigh and opened up with a barely audible murmur:

'One thing Mr. Cramer mentioned, the inconvenience you people are being forced to endure, requires a little comment. I ask your forbearance while I make it. It is only by that kind of sacrifice on the part of persons, sometimes many persons, who are themselves wholly blameless-'

I hated to disturb his flow, because I knew from long experience that at last he was really working. He had resolved to get something out of that bunch if he had to keep them there all night. But there was no help for it, on account of the expression on Fritz's face. A movement out in the hall had caught my eye, and Fritz was standing there, four feet back from the door to the office, which was standing open, staring wide-eyed at me. When he saw I was looking at him he beckoned to me to come, and the thought popped into my mind that, with guests present and Wolfe making an oration, that was precisely how Fritz would act if the house was on fire. The whole throng was between him and me, and I circled around behind them for my exit. Wolfe kept on talking. As soon as I made the hall I closed the door behind me and asked Fritz:

'Something biting you?'

'It's-it's-' He stopped and set his teeth on his lip. Wolfe had been trying to train Fritz for twenty years not to get excited. He tried again: 'Come and I'll show you.'

He dived for the kitchen and I followed, thinking it was some culinary calamity that he couldn't bear up under alone, but he went to the door to the back stairs, the steps that led down to what we called the basement, though it was only three feet below the street level. Fritz slept down there in the room that faced the street. There was an exit through a little hall to the front; first a heavy door out to a tiny vestibule which was underneath the stoop, and then an iron gate, a grill, leading to a paved areaway from which five steps mounted to the sidewalk. It was in the tiny vestibule that Fritz stopped and I bumped into him.

He pointed down. 'Look.' He put his hand on the gate and gave it a little shake. 'I came to see if the gate was locked, the way I always do.'

There was an object huddled on the concrete of the areaway, up against the gate, so that the gate couldn't be opened without pushing the object aside. I squatted to peer. The light there was dim, since the nearest street lamp was on the other side of the stoop, thirty paces away, but I could see well enough to tell what the object was, though not for certain who it was.

'What the hell did you bring me here for?' I demanded, pushing past Fritz to re-enter the basement. 'Come with me.'

He was at my heels as I mounted the stairs. In the kitchen I detoured to jerk open a drawer and get a flashlight, and then went down the main hall to the front door, out to the stoop and down to the sidewalk, and down the five steps to the areaway. There, on the same side of the gate as the object, I squatted again and switched on the flashlight. Fritz was beside me, bending over.

'Shall I-' His voice was shaking and he had to start again. 'Shall I hold the light?'

After half a minute I straightened up, told him, 'You stay right here,' and headed for the stoop. Fritz had pulled the front door shut, and when I found myself fumbling to get the key in the hole I stood erect to take a deep breath and that stopped the fumbling. I went down the hall to the kitchen, to the phone there, and dialed the number of Dr. Vollmer, who lived down the street only half a block away. There were six buzzes before he answered.

'Doc'Archie Goodwin. Got your clothes on'Good. Get here as fast as you can. There's a woman lying in our areaway, by the gate to the basement, been hit on the head, and I think she's dead. There'll be cops on it, so don't shift her more than you have to. Right now'Okay.'

I took another breath, filling my chest, then took Fritz's pad and pencil and wrote:

Phoebe Gunther is in our areaway dead. Hit on the head. Have phoned Vollmer.

I tore off the sheet and went to the office. I suppose I had been gone six minutes, not more, and Wolfe was still doing a monologue, with thirteen pairs of eyes riveted on him. I sidled around to the right, got to his desk, and handed him the note. He got it at a glance, gave it a longer glance, flashed one at me, and spoke without any perceptible change in tone or manner:

'Mr. Cramer. If you please. Mr. Goodwin has a message for you and Mr. Stebbins. Will you go with him to the hall?'

Cramer and Stebbins got up. As we went out Wolfe's voice was resuming behind us:

'Now the question that confronts us is whether it is credible, under the circumstances as we know them& '

THIRTY MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT was about the peak. At that moment I was alone in my room, two flights up, sitting in the chair by the window, drinking a glass of milk, or at least holding one in my hand. I do not ordinarily hunt for a cave in the middle of the biggest excitement and the most intense action, but this seemed to hit me in a new spot or something, and anyhow there I was, trying to arrange my mind. Or maybe my feelings. All I knew was that something inside of me needed a little arranging. I had just completed a tour of the battlefield, and at that hour the disposition of forces was as follows:

Fritz was in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee, and Mrs. Boone was there helping him.

Seven of the invited guests were scattered around the front room, with two homicide dicks keeping them company. They were not telling funny stories, not even Ed Erskine and Nine Boone, who were on the same sofa.

Lieutenant Rowcliffe and an underling with a notebook were in the spare bedroom, on the same floor as mine, having a conversation with Hattie Harding, the Public Relations Queen.

Inspector Cramer, Sergeant Stebbins, and a couple of others were in the dining room firing questions at Alger Kates.

The four-star brass was in the office. Wolfe was seated beside his desk, the Police Commissioner was likewise at my desk, the District Attorney was in the red leather chair, and Travis and Spero of the FBI made a circle of it. That was where the high strategy would come from, if and when any came.

Another dick was in the kitchen, presumably to see that Mrs. Boone didn't jump out a window and Fritz didn't dust arsenic on the sandwiches. Others were in the halls, in the basement, all over; and still others kept coming and going from outdoors, reporting to, or getting orders from, Cramer or the Commissioner or the District Attorney.

Newspapermen had at one time infiltrated behind the lines, but they were now on the other side of the threshold. Out there the floodlights hadn't been removed, and some miscellaneous city employees were still poking around, but most of the scientists, including the photographers, had departed. In spite of that the crowd, as I could see from the window near which my chair was placed, was bigger than ever. The house was only a five-minute taxi ride or a fifteen-minute walk from Times Square, and the news of a spectacular break in the Boone case had got to the theater crowds. The little party Wolfe had asked Cramer to arrange had developed into more than he had bargained for.

A piece of 1?-inch iron pipe, sixteen inches long, had been found lying on the concrete paving of the areaway. Phoebe Gunther had been hit on the head with it four times. Dr. Vollmer had certified her dead on arrival. She had also received bruises in falling, one on her cheek and mouth, presumably from the stoop, where she had been struck, to the areaway. The scientists had got that far before they removed the body.

I had been sitting in my room twenty minutes when I noticed that I hadn't drunk any milk, but I hadn't spilled any from the glass.

MY INTENTION WAS TO go back downstairs and re-enter the turmoil when the microscope came. It was expected by some that the microscope would do the job, and it seemed to me quite likely.

I had myself been rinsed out, by Wolfe and Cramer working as a team, which alone made the case unique. But the circumstances made me a key man. The working assumption was that Phoebe had come and mounted the stoop, and that the murderer had either come with her, or joined her near or on the stoop, and had struck her before she had pushed the bell button, stunning her and knocking her off the stoop into the areaway. He had then run down into the areaway and hit her three times more to make sure she was finished, and shoved the body up against the gate, where it could not be seen by anyone on the stoop without leaning over and stretching your neck, and wasn't likely to be seen from the sidewalk on account of the dimness of the light. Then, of course, the murderer might have gone home and to bed, but the assumption was that he had remounted the stoop and pushed the button, and I had let him in and taken his hat and coat.

That put me within ten feet of them, and maybe less, at the moment it happened, and if by chance I had pulled the curtain on the glass panel aside at that moment I would have seen it. It also had me greeting the murderer within a few seconds after he had finished, and, as I admitted to Wolfe and Cramer, I had observed each arriving face with both eyes to discover how they were getting along under the strain. That was another reason I had gone up to my room, to look back on those faces. It didn't seem possible that I couldn't pick the one, or at least the two or three most probable ones, whose owner had just a minute previously been smashing Phoebe's skull with an iron pipe. Well, I couldn't. They had all been the opposite of carefree, showing it one way or another, and so what'Wolfe had sighed at me, and Cramer had growled like a frustrated lion, but that was the best I could do.

Naturally I had been asked to make up a list showing the order of arrivals and the approximate intervals between, and had been glad to oblige. I hadn't punched a time clock for them, but I was willing to certify my list as pretty accurate. They had all come singly. The idea was that if any two of them had arrived close together, say within two minutes or less of each other, the one that entered the house first could be marked as improbable. But not the one that came in second, because the murderer, having finished, and hearing footsteps or a taxi approaching, could have flattened himself against the gate in that dark corner, waited until the arriver had mounted the stoop and been admitted, and then immediately ascended the stoop himself to ring the bell. Anyhow, such close calculation wasn't required, since, as my memory had it, none of the intervals had been less than three minutes.

Of course the position on the list meant nothing. As far as opportunity was concerned, there was no difference between Hattie Harding, who came first, and Nina Boone, who came last.

All the guests had been questioned at least once, each separately, and it was probable that repeat performances would go on all night if the microscope didn't live up to expectations. Since they had all already been put through it, over and over, about the Boone murder, the askers had hard going. The questions had to be about what had happened there that evening, and what was there to ask'There was no such thing as an alibi. Each one had been on the stoop alone between nine-fifty and ten-forty, and during that period Phoebe Gunther had arrived and had been killed. About all you could ask anybody was this, 'Did you ring the bell as soon as you mounted the stoop'Did you kill Phoebe Gunther first?' If he said Phoebe Gunther wasn't there, and he pushed the button and was admitted by Mr. Goodwin, what did you ask next'Naturally you wanted to know whether he came by car or taxi, or on foot from a bus or subway, and where did that get you'

Very neat management, I told myself, sitting by the window in my room. Fully as neat as any I remembered. Very neat, the dirty deadly bastard.

I have said that the assumption was that the murderer had remounted the stoop and entered the house, but perhaps I should have said one of the assumptions. The NIA had another one, originated by Winterhoff, which had been made a part of the record. In the questioning marathon Winterhoff had come toward the end. His story had three main ingredients:

1. He (Winterhoff, the Man of Distinction) always had shoe soles made of a composition which was almost as quiet as rubber, and therefore made little noise when he walked.

2. He disapproved of tossing trash, including cigarette butts, in the street, and never did so himself.

3. He lived on East End Avenue. His wife and daughters were using the car and chauffeur that evening. He never used taxis if he could help it, because of the revolutionary attitude of the drivers during the present shortage of cabs. So when the phone call had come requesting his presence at Wolfe's office, he had taken a Second Avenue bus down to Thirty-fifth Street, and walked crosstown.

Well. Approaching Wolfe's house from the east, on his silent soles, he had stopped about eighty feet short of his destination because he was stuck with a cigarette butt and noticed an ashcan standing inside the railing of an areaway. He went down the steps to the can and killed the butt therein, and, ascending the steps, was barely back to the sidewalk when he saw a man dart out from behind a stoop, out of an areaway, and dash off in the other direction, toward the river. He had gone on to Wolfe's house, and had noted that it was that areaway, probably, that the man had darted from, but he had not gone so far as to lean over the stoop's low parapet to peer into the areaway. The best he could do on the darting and dashing man was that he had worn dark clothes and had been neither a giant nor a midget.

And by gosh, there had been corroboration. Of the thousand more or less dicks who had been dispatched on errands, two had been sent up the street to check. In half an hour they had returned and reported that there was an ashcan in an areaway exactly twenty-four paces east of Wolfe's stoop. Not only that, there was a cigarette butt on top of the ashes, and its condition, and certain telltale streaks on the inside of the can, about one inch below its rim, made it probable that the butt had been killed by rubbing it against the inside of the can. Not only that, they had the butt with them.

Winterhoff had not lied. He had stopped to kill a butt in an ashcan, and he was a good judge of distances. Unfortunately, it was impossible to corroborate the part about the darting and dashing man because he had disappeared during the two hours that had elapsed.

How much Wolfe or Cramer had bought of it, I didn't know. I wasn't even sure how well I liked it, but I had been below normal since I had flashed the light on Phoebe Gunther's face.

Cramer, hearing it from Rowcliffe, who had questioned Winterhoff, had merely grunted, but that had apparently been because at the moment he had his mind on something else. Some scientist, I never knew which one, had just made the suggestion about the microscope. Cramer lost no time on that. He gave orders that Erskine and Dexter, who were elsewhere being questioned, should be returned immediately to the front room, and had then gone there himself, accompanied by Purley and me, stood facing the assemblage and got their attention, which took no effort at all, and had begun a speech:

'Please listen to this closely so you'll know what I'm asking. The piece of-'

Breslow blurted, 'This is outrageous! We've all answered questions! We've let ourselves be searched! We've told everything we know! We-'

Cramer told a dick in a loud and hard voice, 'Go and stand by him and if he doesn't keep his trap shut, shut it.'

The dick moved. Breslow stopped blurting. Cramer said:

'I've had enough injured innocence for one night.' He was as sore and savage as I had ever seen him. 'For six days I've been handling you people as tender as babies, because I had to because you're such important people, but now it's different. On killing Boone all of you might have been innocent, but now I know one of you isn't. One of you killed that woman, and it's a fair guess that the same one killed Boone. I-'

'Excuse me, Inspector.' Frank Thomas Erskine was sharp, by no means apologetic, but neither was he outraged. 'You've made a statement that you may regret. What about the man seen by Mr. Winterhoff running from the areaway-'

'Yeah, I've heard about him.' Cramer was conceding nothing. 'For the present I stick to my statement. I add to it that the Police Commissioner has just confirmed my belief that I'm in charge here, at the scene of a murder with those present detained, and the more time you waste bellyaching the longer you'll stay. Your families have been notified where you are and why. One of you thinks he can have me sent up for twenty years because I won't let him phone all his friends and lawyers. Okay. He don't phone.'

Cramer made a face at them, at least it looked like it to me, and growled, 'Do you understand the situation?'

Nobody answered. He went on, 'Here's what I came in here to say. The piece of pipe she was killed with has been examined for fingerprints. We haven't found any that are any good. The galvanizing was rough to begin with, and it's a used piece of pipe, very old, and the galvanizing is flaking off, and there are blotches of stuff, paint and other matter, more or less all over it. We figure that anybody grasping that pipe hard enough to crack a skull with it would almost certainly get particles of stuff in the creases of his hands. I don't mean flakes you could see, I mean particles too small to be visible, and you wouldn't get them all out of the creases just by rubbing your palms on your clothes. The examination would have to be made with a microscope. I don't want to take all of you down to the laboratory, so I'm having a microscope brought here. I am requesting all of you to permit this examination of your hands, and also of your gloves and handkerchiefs.'

Mrs. Boone spoke up, 'But, Inspector, I've washed my hands. I went to the kitchen to help make sandwiches, and of course I washed my hands.'

'That's too bad,' Cramer growled. 'We can still try it. Some of those particles might not come out of the creases even with washing. You can give your answers, yes or no, to Sergeant Stebbins. I'm busy.'

He marched out and returned to the dining room. It was at that point that I felt I needed some arranging inside, and went to the office and told Wolfe I would be in my room if he wanted me. I stayed there over half an hour. It was one A.M. when the microscope came. Police cars were coming and going all the time, and it was by accident that, through my window, I saw a man get out of one carrying a large box. I gulped the rest of the milk and returned downstairs.