Three For The Chair

Nero Wolfe 28 - Three For The Chair

I WONDER HOW an old mountain boy like Nero Wolfe ended up living in New York City.

He's originally from a central European country called Montenegro, you know. The word means 'black mountain.' It was once a republic and then part of greater Yugoslavia. Lord knows what it is now. It's about fifty miles south of Sarajevo, though. Wolfe was probably wise to leave early. Anyhow, encyclopedias describe Montenegro as wholly mountainous, with a population of less than half a million supporting themselves with sheep, goats, and forestry. Aside from wars and politics, it was probably a marvelous place to spend a childhood.

I have always felt some affinity for the reclusive Mr. Wolfe because I suspect that we have things in common: maybe some folk tales and fiddle tunes, but certainly a way of looking at the world. His mountains are part of the Carpathian chain, while mine are the southern Appalachians of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia, but there is a universal kinship among mountain people. They have the same ways of doing things: a love of nature and a dislike for authority; a fierce pride and a stubborn streak. And although they are loyal and hospitable, they tend to be wary of strangers. I'm pretty sure there's a word in Serbo-Croatian for hillbilly.

For years people have called Nero Wolfe eccentric and strange because he refuses to leave his Manhattan brownstone, because he grows orchids on the roof of his building, and because he's not a sociable, glad-handing fellow. This just goes to show that you can take a man out of the mountains but not vice-versa, because, given his situation, Nero Wolfe is behaving in a perfectly reasonable fashion ' for a city-bound mountaineer.

A friend of mine who grew up in the coves of eastern Kentucky got an education and an important job late in life, and he made his first trip to New York City when he was well past forty. When Garry got back to Kentucky after two weeks in Manhattan, I called him up and asked how he liked the Big Apple. There was a pronounced pause at the end of the telephone line, and then he said, 'Did you know there're people who go there on purpose?' I am certain that if my friend Garry or Spencer Arrowood, the Tennessee sheriff in my Ballad novels, were forced to stay in New York City longer than a few weeks, they, too, would be holed up in a brownstone, refusing to come out and confront that teeming mass of strangers.

And if Sheriff Arrowood had to stay in a concrete holler in midtown, he'd be growing anything that would take root up there on the roof, just out of homesickness for greenery. He would gather a family of sorts about him, just as Nero Wolfe has assembled a clan consisting of Archie, Fritz, Theodore, and Saul Panzer; and he would be as fiercely loyal to them as Wolfe is to his folks ' though there might be some infighting when their egos rubbed together. Apologies would be rare.

When Nero Wolfe comes out of his brownstone lair, it's for one of two reasons: authority (which he doesn't like) has forced him out, or he's going to the country. In Three for the Chair we have examples of both. In the novella 'Too Many Detectives' Wolfe and Archie are summoned to the state capital for a wiretapping investigation, and Wolfe is at his irascible and uncooperative best with the Albany version of 'revenuers.' In 'Immune to Murder' Wolfe heads for the mountains ' the Adirondacks ' to cook brook trout for visiting diplomats.

Wolfe has all the good qualities of mountain people, as well as their solitary ways. He is whip-smart, honorable, and quite capable of adapting to the customs of the cultural elite. People underestimate Nero Wolfe ' and the rest of us mountain folk ' at their peril. We can jettison the accent, acquire a taste for opera and sushi, and stifle the glower of Wolfe under the sparkle of Archie's charm and self-deprecating humor. Most of us feel like Wolfe but have to act like Archie. We manage. But we tend to count trees when nobody's looking, and we always, always hold something back. Inside each of us there's a brownstone fortress, and it takes some doing to get us out of it.

Nero Wolfe has outlived his creator, and even now he is practicing the art of detection from his Manhattan home; but if he had been allowed to retire, I think I'd see another mountain trait in him. I saw it in my great-uncles, who spent forty years between youth and retirement working in the car factories in Detroit. When their working lives came to an end, they went back to the mountains. The lucky ones never leave; the rest come home when they can. Wolfe settled in New York because you can't be an eminent and well-paid private detective in, say, Banner Elk, North Carolina; but for all Wolfe's success, I am not convinced that he felt at home in the city. I think his residence there would have ended when he quit the gumshoe business.

Maybe Nero Wolfe wouldn't have made it all the way back to the hills of Montenegro, but if he'd ever been allowed to stop crime solving, I think I'd know where to look for him. You'd be walking on the Appalachian Trail, in the green wilderness somewhere between Springer Mountain, Georgia and Mount Katahdin, Maine, and as you started to climb over a split-rail fence to reach a spring, a voice would yell, 'Get away from my rhododendrons!' And you'd see a pear-shaped hulk glowering down at you from the deck of a glass and cedar chalet up on the ridge. Walk softly, dear reader. Archie's no doubt somewhere on the premises. He's probably armed. Now git.

Sharyn McCrumb

Three For The Chair Rex Stout

NERO WOLFE, behind his desk, sat glaring at the caller in the red leather chair. I was swiveled with my back to my desk, ready with my notebook, not glaring.

Wolfe's glare was partly on general principles, but more because David R. Fyfe had not phoned for an appointment. You might think it didn't matter. There was the office, on the ground floor of the old brownstone house on West 35th Street. There was Wolfe in the chair he loved, sharpening his penknife on the old oilstone he kept in a drawer. There was I, Archie Goodwin, eager to earn my pay by serving his slightest whim, within reason. There was Fritz Brenner in the kitchen, doing the luncheon dishes, set to bring beer if the buzzer went one short and one long. There was Theodore Horstmann up in the plant rooms on the roof, nursing the ten thousand orchids. And there in the red leather chair was a guy who wanted to hire a detective or he wouldn't have come. But for him and others like him Fritz and Theodore and I would have been out looking for jobs, and God only knows what Wolfe would have been doing. But Wolfe was glaring at him. He should have phoned for an appointment.

He sat forward in the red leather chair, not touching the back, his narrow shoulders sagging and his pale narrow face looking the worse for wear. I would have guessed his age at fifty, but most people look older than they are when forced by circumstances to go to a private detective. In a tired, careful voice, after giving his name and address and his occupation ' head of the English Department at Audubon High School in the Bronx ' he said he wanted Wolfe to investigate a confidential family matter.

'Marital?' Wolfe made a noise that went with the glare. 'No.'

He shook his head. 'It isn't marital. I am a widower, with two children in high school. It's about my brother Bertram ' his death. He died Saturday night of pneumonia. It will have to be ' I'll have to explain about it.'

Wolfe sent me a glance, and I met it. If he let Fyfe explain he might have to work, and he hated to work, especially when the bank balance was healthy. But I tightened my lips a little as I met his glance, and he sighed and went back to the customer. 'Do so,' he muttered.

Fyfe did so, and I took it down. His brother Bertram had suddenly appeared in New York a month ago, unannounced, after an absence of twenty years, and taken an apartment in the Churchill Towers, and communicated with his family ' his older brother, David, who was doing the explaining, his younger brother, Paul, and his sister, Louise, now Mrs. Vincent Tuttle. They had all been glad to see him again after so many years, including Tuttle, the brother-in-law, and had also been glad to learn that he had hit a jackpot ' not David's word, his was bonanza ' by finding and hooking onto a four-mile lode of uranium ore near a place called Black Elbow somewhere in Canada. It is always nice to know that a member of the family has made out well.

So they had welcomed Bertram, their brother Bert, and along with him a young man named Johnny Arrow who had accompanied him from Canada and was living with him in the Churchill Towers apartment. Bert had been fairly fraternal and had shown an interest in old memories and associations; he had even asked Paul, who was a real-estate broker, to get a line on the purchase of the old house in Mount Kisco where they had all been born and spent their childhood. Obviously Bert was back as one of the family. Ten days ago he had invited them to dine with him on Saturday the sixth, and afterwards go to the theater, but on Thursday he had been put to bed with pneumonia. He refused to go to a hospital, and insisted that they should dine at the Churchill as planned and use the theater tickets, so they gathered at his apartment late Saturday afternoon and carried out the program, returning to the apartment after the show for a champagne snack.

That is, four of them did ' sister Louise and her husband, Johnny Arrow from Canada, and brother David himself. Younger brother Paul had maintained that Bert shouldn't be left alone with the nurse, and had stayed at the apartment. When the four returned after the show they found a situation. Paul had gone and the nurse had a torn uniform and marks on her neck and cheeks and wrists. She had phoned the doctor to send another nurse and intended to leave as soon as her replacement came. Sister Louise resented some of her remarks and ordered her to leave at once, and she went. Louise phoned the doctor and told him she would stay until another nurse came. Johnny Arrow disappeared, leaving only David and Louise and her husband, Vincent Tuttle, on the scene; and after David had looked in at Bert on his sickbed, sound asleep under the morphine the nurse had given him by doctor's orders he departed for home.

Louise and Tuttle went to bed in a room that was presumably Johnny Arrow's, but were not yet asleep when a buzz took Tuttle to the door of the apartment, where he found Paul. Paul said he had been assaulted by Johnny Arrow down in the men's bar, and had an assortment of bruises to show as evidence. Arrow had been escorted away by two cops. Paul thought his jaw was broken and possibly a rib or two, and he didn't feel like driving home to Mount Kisco, so they put him on a couch in the living room, and in thirty seconds he was snoring, and after another glance in at the door of Bert's room Louise and Tuttle went back to bed. Around six in the morning they were aroused by Paul. He had aroused himself by tumbling off the couch, had gone to look at Bert, and had found him dead. They phoned down to the desk for a doctor because Bert had insisted on having the old family doctor he knew in his boyhood, and they didn't want to wait for him to get in from Mount Kisco. Of course they phoned him too, and he got there later.

Wolfe was fidgeting. He fidgets by making circles the size of a dime with a fingertip on his chair arm. 'I trust,' he grumbled, 'that the doctors will now justify your calling on me and this long recital. Or at least one of them.'

'No, sir.' David Fyfe shook his head. 'They found nothing wrong. My brother died of pneumonia. Doctor Buhl ' that's the one from Mount Kisco, Doctor Frederick Buhl ' he signed the death certificate, and my brother was buried Monday, yesterday, in the family plot. Of course the nurse having gone made the ' uh ' the situation was a little embarrassing, but no serious question was raised.'

'Then what the devil do you want of me?'

'I'm about to tell you.' Fyfe cleared his throat, and when he went on his voice was more careful than ever. 'After the funeral yesterday that man Arrow asked us to come to the apartment at eleven o'clock this morning to hear the will read, and of course we went. Louise brought her husband along. There was a lawyer there, a man named McNeil who had flown down from Montreal, and he had the will. It had all the usual legal rigmarole, but what it amounted to was that Bert left his whole estate to Paul and Louise and me, and made that man Arrow the executor. It put no value on the estate, but from things Bert had said I would have thought his uranium holdings were worth upwards of five million dollars, possibly twice that.'

Wolfe stopped fidgeting.

'Then,' Fyfe went on, 'the lawyer took another document from his brief case. He said it was a copy of an agreement he had drawn up a year ago for Bertram Fyfe and Johnny Arrow. He read it. There was a preamble about their prospecting together for uranium for five years, and their joint discovery of the Black Elbow lode, and the gist of it was that if either of them died the whole thing would become the property of the survivor, including any assets that had been acquired by the deceased through income from the mining property. That wasn't the phraseology, it was all very legal, but that's what it meant. As soon as he read it Johnny Arrow spoke up. He said that Bert had possessed nothing that had not been acquired with income from the Black Elbow uranium, and that therefore it was now legally his property, including large sums on deposit in Canadian banks, but that when Bert came to New York he had had some thirty or forty thousand dollars transferred to a New York bank, and he, Arrow, didn't intend to claim what was left of it. That would be the estate and we could have it.'

David made a mild little gesture. 'He was being generous, I thought, since he could have claimed that too. We asked the lawyer a few questions and then left and went out to a restaurant for lunch. Paul was raging. My brother Paul is impulsive. He wanted to go to the police and tell them Bert had died in suspicious circumstances, and ask them to investigate. His theory was that when Arrow saw that Bert was getting reconciled with his family he was afraid he might make large gifts to us, possibly even a share of the mining properties, and Arrow couldn't claim them under the agreement if Bert died, so he decided he had to die now. Vincent Tuttle, my sister's husband, objected that even if the theory was sound Arrow hadn't acted on it, since two competent doctors had agreed that Bert had died of pneumonia, and Louise and I agreed with him, but Paul was stubborn. He hinted that he knew something we didn't know, but then he has always liked to be a little mysterious. He stuck to it that we should go to the police, and we argued about it, and finally I suggested a compromise. I suggested that I get Nero Wolfe to investigate, and if you decided there was sufficient reason to call in the police we would join with Paul in doing so, and if you decided there wasn't, Paul would forget it. Paul said all right, he would accept your decision, so that's what I want you to do. I know you charge high fees, but this shouldn't require any great ' uh ' I mean it shouldn't be too complicated. It's a fairly simple problem, isn't it?'

Wolfe grunted. 'It could be. There was no autopsy?'

'No, no. Good heavens, no.'

'That should be the first step, but it's too late now, without the police. Before burial an examination could have been made merely to satisfy medical curiosity, but exhumation needs authority. I take it that you want me to investigate, and reach a decision, without attracting the attention of the police.'

Fyfe nodded emphatically. 'That's right. That's exactly right. We don't want any scandal& any rumors going around& '

'People rarely do,' Wolfe said drily. 'But you may be hiring me to start one. You understand, of course, that if I find evidence of skullduggery it will not be in your sole discretion whether to bury it or disclose it. I will not engage to suppress grounds, if I find any, for a suspicion of homicide. If my investigation results in a reasonable assumption that you have yourself committed a crime, I am free to act as I see fit.'

'Of course.' Fyfe tried to smile, with fair success. 'Only I know I have committed no crime, and I doubt if any one has. My brother Paul is a little impetuous. You'll need to see him, naturally, and he'll want to see you.'

'I'll have to see all of them.' Wolfe's tone was morose. Work. He grabbed at a straw: 'But under the circumstances I must ask for a retainer as a token of good faith. Say a check for a thousand dollars?'

It wasn't a bad try, since a head of a high-school English department with two children might not have a grand lying around loose, and the deal would have been off, but Fyfe didn't even attempt to haggle. He did gulp, and gulped again after he got out a check folder and pen and wrote, and signed his name. I got up and accepted the check when he offered it, and passed it across to Wolfe.

'It's a little steep,' Fyfe said ' not a complaint, just a fact ' 'but it can't be helped. It's the only way to satisfy Paul. When will you see him?'

Wolfe gave the check a look and put it under a paperweight, a chunk of petrified wood that had once been used by a man named Duggan to crack his wife's skull. He glanced up at the wall clock; in twenty minutes it would be four o'clock, time for his afternoon session in the plant rooms.

'First,' he told Fyfe, 'I need to speak with Doctor Buhl. Can you have him here at six o'clock?'

David looked doubtful. 'I could try. He would have to come in from Mount Kisco, and he's a busy man. Can't you leave him out of it'He certified the death, and he's thoroughly reputable.'

'It's impossible to leave him out. I must see him before dealing with the others. If he can be here at six, arrange for the others to come at six-thirty. Your brother and sister, and Mr. Tuttle, and Mr. Arrow.'

Fyfe stared. 'Good heavens,' he protested, 'not Arrow! Anyway, he wouldn't come.' He shook his head emphatically. 'No. I won't ask him.'

Wolfe shrugged. 'Then I will. And it might be better ' yes. It may be protracted, and I dine at seven-thirty. If you can arrange for Doctor Buhl to be here at nine, bring the others at half past. That will give us the night if we need it. Of course, Mr. Fyfe, there are several points I could go into with you now ' for instance, the situation you found when you returned to the apartment from the theater, and your brother Bertram's reconciliation with his family ' but I have an appointment; and besides, they can be explored more fully this evening. For the present, please give Mr. Goodwin the addresses and phone numbers of everyone involved.' He moved his vast bulk forward in his chair to pick up the penknife and start rubbing it gently on the oilstone. He had undertaken that job, and by gum he intended to finish it.

'I described the situation,' Fyfe said in a sharper tone. 'I invited the inference that Paul had stayed at the apartment in order to approach the nurse. I wholly disapprove of his method of approaching women. I have said he is impetuous.'

Wolfe was feeling the knife's edge tenderly with a thumb.

'What is the point,' Fyfe asked, 'about the reconciliation?'

'Only that you used the word.' Wolfe was honing again. 'What needed to be reconciled'It may be irrelevant, but so are most points raised in an investigation. It can wait till this evening.'

Fyfe was frowning. 'It's an old sore,' he said, the sharpness gone and his voice tired again. 'It may not be irrelevant, because it may partly account for Paul's attitude. Also I suppose we're over-sensitive about any threat of scandal. Pneumonia is a touchy subject with us. My father died of pneumonia twenty years ago, but it was thought by the police he was murdered. Not only by the police. He was in a ground-floor bedroom in our house at Mount Kisco, and it was January, and on a stormy night, extremely cold, someone raised two windows and left them wide open. I found him dead at five o'clock in the morning. Snow was drifted a foot deep on the floor and there was snow on the bed. My sister Louise, who was caring for him that night, was sound asleep on a couch in the next room. It was thought that some hot chocolate she drank at midnight had been drugged, but that wasn't proven. The windows weren't locked and could have been opened from the outside ' in fact, they must have been. My father had been a little shrewd in some of his real-estate dealings, and there were people in the community who had been ' uh ' who were not fond of him.'