Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One (28 page)

It was too much for Liggett. Slowly his head turned, irresistibly as if gripped in enormous pliers, square around, until he faced Dina Laszio. She didn’t look at him. She was chewing at her lip again, and her eyes were on Wolfe, fixed and fascinated. You could almost see her chewing her brain too. That lasted a full half a minute, and then by God she smiled. It was a funny one, but it was a smile; and then I saw that her eyes had shifted to Liggett and the smile was supposed to be one of polite apology. She said in a low tone but without anything shaky in it, “I’m sorry, Ray. Oh, I’m sorry, but …”

She faltered. Liggett’s eyes were boring at her.

She moved her gaze to Wolfe and said firmly, “You’re right. Of course you’re right and I can’t help it. When I met him outdoors after dinner as we had arranged—”

“Dina! Dina, for God’s sake—”

Tolman, the blue-eyed athlete, jerked Liggett back in his chair. The swamp-woman was going on:

“He had told me what he was going to do, and I believed him, I thought it was a joke. Then afterwards he told me that Phillip had attacked him, had struck at him—”

Wolfe said sharply, “You know what you’re doing, madam. You’re helping to send a man to his death.”

“I know. I can’t help it! How can I go on lying for him? He killed my husband. When I met him out there and he told me what he had planned—”

“You tricky bastard!” Liggett broke training completely. He jerked from Tolman’s grasp, plunged across Mondor’s legs,
knocked Blanc and his chair to the floor, trying to get at Wolfe. I was on my way, but by the time I got there Berin had stopped him, with both arms around him, and Liggett was kicking and yelling like a lunatic.

Dina Laszio, of course, had stopped trying to talk, with all the noise and confusion. She sat quietly looking on with her long sleepy eyes.

Jerome Berin said positively, “She’ll stick to it. She’ll do whatever will push danger farthest from her, and that will be it.”

The train was sailing like a gull across New Jersey on a sunny Friday morning, somewhere east of Philadelphia. In sixty minutes we would be tunneling under the Hudson. I was propped against the wall of the pullman bedroom again, Constanza was on the chair, and Wolfe and Berin were on the window seats with beer between them. Wolfe looked pretty seedy, since of course he wouldn’t have tried to shave on the train even if there had been no bandage, but he knew that in an hour the thing would stop moving and the dawn of hope was on his face.

Berin asked, “Don’t you think so?”

Wolfe shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care. The point was to nail Liggett down by establishing his presence at Kanawha Spa on Tuesday evening, and Mrs. Laszio was the only one who could do that for us. As you say, she is undoubtedly just as guilty as Liggett, maybe more, depending on your standard. I rather think Mr. Tolman will try her for murder. He took her last night as a material witness, and he may keep her that way to clinch his case against Liggett—or he may charge her as an accomplice. I doubt if it matters much. Whatever he does, he won’t convict her. She’s a special kind of woman, she told me so herself. Even if Liggett is bitter enough against her to confess everything in order to involve her in his doom, to persuade any dozen men that the best thing to do with that woman is to kill her would be quite a feat. I question whether Mr. Tolman is up to it.”

Berin, filling his pipe, frowned at it. Wolfe upped his beer glass with one hand as he clung to the arm of the seat with the other.

Constanza smiled at me. “I try not to hear them. Talking about killing people.” She shivered delicately.

I grunted. “You seem to be doing a lot of smiling. Under the circumstances.”

She lifted brows above the dark purple eyes. “What circumstances?”

I just waved a hand. Berin had got his pipe lit and was talking again. “Well, it turned my stomach. Poor Rossi, did you notice him? Poor devil. When Dina Rossi was a little girl and I had her many times on this knee, and she was quiet and very sly but a nice girl. Of course, all murderers were once little children, which seems astonishing.” He puffed until the little room was nicely filled with smoke. “By the way, did you know that Vukcic made this train?”

“No.”

Berin nodded. “He came leaping on at the last minute, I saw him, like a lion with fleas after him. I haven’t seen him around this morning, though I’ve been back and forth. No doubt your man told you that I stopped here at your room around eight o’clock.”

Wolfe grimaced. “I wasn’t dressed.”

“So he told me. So I came back. I wasn’t comfortable. I never am comfortable when I’m in debt, and I’ve got to find out what I owe you and pay it. There at Kanawha Spa you were a guest and didn’t want to talk about it, but now you can. You got me out of a bad hole and maybe you even saved my life, and you did it at the request of my daughter for your professional help. That makes it a debt and I want to pay it, only I understand your fees are pretty steep. How much do you charge for a day’s work?”

“How much do you?”

“What?” Berin stared. “God above. I don’t work by the day. I am an artist, not a potato peeler.”

“Neither am I.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “Look here, sir. Let’s admit it as a postulate that I saved your life. If I did, I am willing to let it go as a gesture of amity and goodwill and take no payment for it. Will you accept that gesture?”

“No. I’m in debt to you. My daughter appealed to you. It is not to be expected that I, Jerome Berin, would accept such a favor.”

“Well …” Wolfe sighed. “If you won’t take it in friendship, you won’t. In that case, the only thing I can do is render you a bill. That’s simple. If any valuation at all is to be placed on the professional services I rendered it must be a high one, for the services were exceptional. So … since you insist on paying … you owe me the recipe for saucisse minuit.”

“What!” Berin glared at him. “Pah! Ridiculous!”

“How ridiculous? You ask what you owe. I tell you.”

Berin sputtered. “Outrageous, damn it!” He waved his pipe until sparks and ashes flew. “That recipe is priceless! And you ask it.… God above, I’ve refused half a million francs! And you have the impudence, the insolence—”

“If you please.” Wolfe snapped. “Let’s don’t row about it. You put a price on your recipe. That’s your privilege. I put a price on my services. That’s mine. You have refused half a million francs. If you were to send me a check for half a million dollars I would tear it up—or for any sum whatever. I saved your life or I rescued you from a minor annoyance, call it what you please. You ask me what you owe me, and I tell you, you owe me that recipe, and I will accept nothing else. You pay it or you don’t, suit yourself. It would be an indescribable pleasure to be able to eat saucisse minuit at my own table—at least twice a month, I should think—but it would be quite a satisfaction, of another sort, to be able to remind myself—much oftener than twice a month—that Jerome Berin owes me a debt which he refuses to pay.”

“Bah!” Berin snorted. “Trickery!”

“Not at all. I attempt no coercion. I won’t sue you. I’ll merely regret that I employed my talents, lost a lot of sleep, and allowed myself to get shot at, without either acquiring credit for a friendly and generous act, or receiving the payment due me. I suppose I should remind you that I offered a guarantee to disclose the recipe to no one. The sausage will be prepared only in my house and served only at my table. I would like to reserve the right to serve it to guests—and of course to Mr. Goodwin, who lives with me and eats what I eat.”

Berin, staring at him, muttered, “Your cook.”

“He won’t know it. I spend quite a little time in the kitchen myself.”

Berin continued to stare, in silence. Finally he growled, “It can’t be written down. It never has been.”

“I won’t write it down. I have a facility for memorizing.”

Berin got his pipe to his mouth without looking at it, and puffed. Then he stared some more. At length he heaved a shuddering sigh and looked around at Constanza and me. He said gruffly, “I can’t tell it with these people in here.”

“One of them is your daughter.”

“Damn it, I know my daughter when I see her. They’ll have to get out.”

I got up and put up my brows at Constanza. “Well?” The train lurched and Wolfe grabbed for the other arm of the seat. It would have been a shame to get wrecked then.

Constanza arose, reached down to pat her father on the head, and passed through the door as I held it open.

I supposed that was the fitting end to our holiday, since Wolfe was getting that recipe, but there was one more unexpected diversion to come. Since there was still an hour to go I invited Constanza to the club car for a drink, and she swayed and staggered behind me through three cars to that destination. There were only eight or ten customers in the club car, mostly hid behind morning papers, and plenty of seats. She specified ginger ale, which reminded me of old times, and I ordered a highball to celebrate Wolfe’s collection of his fee. We had only taken a couple of sips when I became aware that a fellow passenger across the aisle had arisen, put down his paper, walked up to us, and was standing in front of Constanza, looking down at her.

He said, “You can’t do this to me, you
can’t
! I don’t deserve it and you can’t do it.” He sounded urgent. “You ought to see—you ought to realize—”

Constanza said to me, chattering prettily, “I didn’t suppose my father would
ever
tell that recipe to
any
one. Once in San Remo I heard him tell an Englishman, some very important person—”

The intruder moved enough inches to be standing between us, and rudely interrupted her: “Hello, Goodwin. I want to ask you—”

“Hello, Tolman.” I grinned up at him. “What’s the idea? You with two brand new prisoners in your jail, and here you are running around—”

“I had to get to New York. For evidence. It was too important.… Look here. I want to ask you if Miss Berin has any right to treat me like this. Your unbiased opinion. She won’t speak to me. She won’t look at me. Didn’t I have to do what I did? Was there anything else I could do?”

“Certainly. You could have resigned. But then of course you’d have been out of a job, and God knows when you’d have been able to marry. It was really a problem, I see that. But I wouldn’t worry. Only a little while ago I wondered why Miss Berin was doing so much smiling, there didn’t seem to be any special reason for it, but now I understand. She was smiling because she knew you were on the train.”

“Mr. Goodwin! That isn’t true!”

“But if she won’t even speak to me—”

I waved a hand. “She’ll speak to you all right. You just don’t know how to go about it. Her own method is as good a one as I’ve seen recently. Watch me now, and next time you can do it yourself.”

I tipped my highball glass and spilled about a jigger on her skirt where it was round over her knee.

She ejaculated and jerked. Tolman ejaculated and bent over and reached for his handkerchief. I arose and reassured them, “It’s rite all kight, it doodn’t stain.” Then I went over and picked up his morning paper and sat down where he had been.

I first met Rex Stout sometime in the early 1950s when our daughters were classmates at Oakwood School, a Quaker boarding school in upstate New York. My husband, Lennie Hayton, and I became fast family friends with the Stouts. Rex was a kind of big, bearded Hoosier patriarch, and Pola, his beautiful
Mitteleuropean
-accented wife, was a celebrated weaver and textile designer. We were amused by the fact that Lennie, like Rex, had a beard. I remember much good conversation on the subjects of children, politics, and the artistic scene. And I remember a visit to their wonderful 1930s-modern Connecticut hilltop house—full of Pola’s rugs and Rex’s orchids. I remember walking into a place with literally thousands of orchids. I was thrilled, of course—it was just like Nero Wolfe’s plant rooms. I was as much a fan as a friend. I enjoyed the Stouts as a family, but I had been a fan of Rex’s for years before we met.

In a peripatetic “showbiz” life on the road—particularly in the 1950s, when I went from country to country, not just city to city—Nero Wolfe was a sort of solace. I was a fanatic reader traveling from hotel to
hotel and dressing room to dressing room. I read between shows and I read in the wee hours of the morning, when showbiz kept me too keyed up to sleep. I loved mysteries. Mysteries satisfied every level of excitement and enjoyment. Nero Wolfe, however, was special. I read Nero Wolfe whenever I was homesick—buying the books at Harrods in London, and in English-language bookshops all over Europe.

It wasn’t the crime element as much as the life-style that so attracted me to the books. It was Nero’s house, and Archie’s New York, that really spoke to me. First of all, Nero lived in a New York brownstone. I was born in a Brooklyn brownstone that was my happiest childhood home, my only sense of roots. I could picture the house so clearly. And I could understand how Nero, despite his bulk, would never want to leave it. As an astrological Cancerian, I appreciated Nero’s nesting instinct. I especially liked how he felt about food. It was not about eating: it was more an appreciation of food as an art form. I loved reading descriptions of Fritz the chef’s meals. Next to mysteries and historical biographies, I loved reading cookbooks—maybe a reaction to a life of hotels and restaurants. I enjoyed everything about Nero: his fatness, his orchids, his Sunday-afternoon reading, his brains.

And, of course, there was Archie Goodwin, Nero’s legman. Archie had superior wit, a deadpan style, and a deceptively “unrequited” love life. Archie had depth—and he had New York. It was the New York that I missed whenever I was somewhere else. Archie knew the city streets and avenues: brownstones in the West Thirties, bars and grills on Eighth Avenue, coffee shops on Lexington, the Village. He took the
subway and buses and taxis; he read the Sunday
New York Times
. I could picture it all. It satisfied all sorts of homesickness. When I reread Nero Wolfe now, I can see that old beloved New York, and I still miss it. And I can read about Nero’s home life and remember my own.