Three Witnesses nwo-26 Read online

  Three Witnesses

  ( Nero Wolfe original - 26 )

  Rex Stout

  Rex Stout

  Three Witnesses

  Introduction

  WHEN I WAS ASKED to introduce the novellas in this collection, I felt wary of the ominously titled “Die Like a Dog,” which I had always imagined to be yet another better-left-unread mystery in which my favorite character, probably a German shepherd, would rapidly and gruesomely perish in some misguided foreshadowing of the so-called real murder. To reassure myself on the crucial quadrupedal point, I read the third of these novellas first. Delighted to discover that I could recommend it to even the most tender-hearted dog lover, I turned to the beginning of Three Witnesses only to find myself assailed by self-doubt. In every Rex Stout I had ever read, Archie Goodwin had ably performed the introductions with no help from me. I was thus relieved to discover that, despite their doglessness, the first two novellas in Three Witnesses required a few introductory remarks that I was, after all, qualified to make.

  “The Next Witness” and “When a Man Murders…” may unintentionally mystify the reader raised in the era of telephonic electronics, digit dialing, and workshops in model mugging. Back in the old days, young reader, answering machines had not yet been invented, telephone exchanges bore evocative names like Rhinelander and Gramercy, and the women who operated switchboards were quaintly known as “girls.” In those days, too, a lady who picked up a cigarette thereby compelled the nearest gentleman to offer her a light rather than a lecture on the hazards of second-hand smoke or a query about nicotine patches. I must also inform the young reader that although most of the “females” and “girls” in the world of Nero Wolfe are manipulative, neurotic, mendacious, or vacuous, Rex Stout was not actually scheming to do them in by encouraging them to smoke. As for the method of dealing with “hysterical” women that Archie employs in “When a Man Murders…,” I can say only that if Archie tried anything like that today, mystery fiction would lose one of its most engaging narrators.

  How, then, does Rex Stout continue to enchant readers of both sexes and all political persuasions? In part by treating men and women alike as objects of critical scrutiny. More important, however, Stout simultaneously confers on the reader-any reader, male or female-so flattering a sense of membership in the vivid quasi family of Wolfe’s menage that the honored adoptee eagerly overlooks, forgives, or treasures the characteristics that define and preserve that orderly universe: Wolfe’s misogyny, Archie’s women-as-objects chauvinism, even Stout’s formulaic plots.

  These three witness-centered novellas offer three radically different perspectives on the center of that universe. In “The Next Witness,” the agoraphobic, gynophobic Wolfe endures the discomfort of leaving home and suffers the intolerable sensation of finding himself seated next to a “perfumed woman.” In contrast, “When a Man Murders…” presents the Nero Wolfe most characteristic of the series, the at-home Wolfe who retains his distance from the human specimens that appear before him.

  Except in one respect, “Die Like a Dog” is also stock Stout. A murder occurs. So what? The mystery might have been written to illustrate the maxim that nobody cares about the corpse and to refute the theory that the puzzle element accounts for the genre’s appeal. The exception is the charming Labrador retriever variously called Jet, Bootsy, and-tellingly, I think-Nero, perhaps the most fleshed-out nonseries character Stout ever created and a dog relegated to none of mystery’s hackneyed canine roles. Not the not-quite-victim I had expected, neither is this dog a transparently human character in canine guise. In mystery after mystery, the dog is no character at all but is what psychoanalysts might call a “part object,” a nose that sniffs or jaws that menace; or an apparently lifeless possession, a sort of fuzzy umbrella meant to suggest the owner’s personality. Ever since “Silver Blaze” dogs have been doing nothing in the night; but in subsequent mysteries countless dogs have done nothing in the daytime, either, thereby creating no incidents, curious or otherwise. Rather, they have sat around like pieces of furniture, perhaps periodically wagging their tails as woofy cuckoo clocks. As objects of fear, dogs have at least come to life, but from the hound of the Baskervilles on, these supposedly menacing creatures have rebelliously endeared themselves to the readers they were supposed to frighten. The hound, for example, is certainly one of Doyle’s most popular creations, and Baskerville remains a name lovingly bestowed on gigantic dogs.

  Jet, however, is a canine witness portrayed with a dog lover’s enthusiasm and a dog fancier’s accuracy. An unmistakably real dog, this rain-loving, hat-fetching creature is equally recognizable as a Labrador retriever, probably a Labrador drawn from life, perhaps even one of Stout’s own, as Reed Maroc, Rex Stout’s grandson, recently suggested to me. In any case, Stout knew the breed, and Nero Wolfe knows his dogs. In discussing the skull of the Labrador retriever, Wolfe almost quotes the official standard: “wide, giving brain room.” Is Wolfe correct in asserting that the Labrador’s skull is the widest in dogdom? Perhaps not. But hyperbolic breed loyalty is an absolute mark of the true fancier. With regard to Wolfe’s claims about the relative antiquity of the basenji and the Afghan hound, the 1954 edition of the American Kennel Club’s Complete Dog Book indicates that his was an informed, if arguable, opinion. Furthermore, it is Wolfe’s ability to interpret the testimony of the canine witness that really solves the mystery.

  Better yet, the dog-Jet, Bootsy, Nero-permits a rare glimpse of an emotional Nero Wolfe and of the boy he once was. Beneath the considerable flesh of the misanthropic gourmand beats the youthful heart of a dog lover, and in the agile and gregarious dog Nero beats the nonneurotic and cholesterol-free heart of the young Wolfe himself. Nero, the Italian for “black,” the man and the dog, descendant of the wolf, Wolfe and not Wolfe, dog lover, dog fancier. It is thus my pleasure to introduce the great black dog himself: Nero Wolfe.

  –Susan Conant

  The Next Witness

  I

  I HAD HAD PREVIOUS contacts with Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, but had never seen him perform in a courtroom. That morning, watching him at the chore of trying to persuade a jury to clamp it on Leonard Ashe for the murder of Marie Willis, I thought he was pretty good and might be better when he had warmed up. A little plump and a little short, bald in front and big-eared, he wasn’t impressive to look at, but he was businesslike and self-assured without being cocky, and he had a neat trick of pausing for a moment to look at the jury as if he half expected one of them to offer a helpful suggestion. When he pulled it, not too often, his back was turned to the judge and the defense counsel, so they couldn’t see his face, but I could, from where I sat in the audience.

  It was the third day of the trial, and he had called his fifth witness, a scared-looking little guy with a pushed-in nose who gave his name, Clyde Bagby, took the oath, sat down, and fixed his scared brown eyes on Mandelbaum as if he had abandoned hope.

  Mandelbaum’s tone was reassuring. “What is your business, Mr. Bagby?”

  The witness swallowed. “I’m the president of Bagby Answers Ink.”

  “By ‘Ink’ you mean ‘Incorporated’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you own the business?”

  “I own half the stock that’s been issued, and my wife owns the other half.”

  “How long have you been operating that business?”

  “Five years now-nearly five and a half.”

  “And what is the business? Please tell the jury about it.”

  Bagby’s eyes went left for a quick, nervous glance at the jury box but came right back to the prosecutor. “It’s a telephone-answering business, that’s all. You know what that is.”

  “Yes, but some members of
the jury may not be familiar with the operation. Please describe it.”

  The witness licked his lips. “Well, you’re a person or a firm or an organization and you have a phone, but you’re not always there and you want to know about calls that come in your absence. So you go to a telephone-answering service. There are several dozen of them in New York, some of them spread all over town with neighborhood offices, big operations. My own operation, Bagby Answers Ink, it’s not so big because I specialize in serving individuals, houses and apartments, instead of firms or organizations. I’ve got offices in four different exchange districts-Gramercy, Plaza, Trafalgar, and Rhinelander. I can’t work it from one central office because-”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Bagby, but we won’t go into technical problems. Is one of your offices at six-eighteen East Sixty-ninth Street, Manhattan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Describe the operation at that address.”

  “Well, that’s my newest place, opened only a year ago, and my smallest, so it’s not in an office building, it’s an apartment-on account of the labor law. You can’t have women working in an office building after two a.m. unless it’s a public service, but I have to give my clients all-night service, so there on Sixty-ninth Street I’ve got four operators for the three switchboards, and they all live right there in the apartment. That way I can have one at the boards from eight till two at night, and another one from two o’clock on. After nine in the morning three are on, one for each board, for the daytime load.”

  “Are the switchboards installed in one of the rooms of the apartment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell the jury what one of them is like and how it works.”

  Bagby darted another nervous glance at the jury box and went back to the prosecutor. “It’s a good deal like any board in a big office, with rows of holes for the plugs. Of course it’s installed by the telephone company, with the special wiring for connections with my clients’ phones. Each board has room for sixty clients. For each client there’s a little light and a hole and a card strip with the client’s name. When someone dials a client’s number his light goes on and a buzz synchronizes with the ringing of the client’s phone. How many buzzes the girl counts before she plugs in depends on what client it is. Some of them want her to plug in after three buzzes, some want her to wait longer. I’ve got one client that has her count fifteen buzzes. That’s the kind of specialized individualized service I give my clients. The big outfits, the ones with tens of thousands of clients, they won’t do that. They’ve commercialized it. With me every client is a special case and a sacred trust.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bagby.” Mandelbaum swiveled his head for a swift sympathetic smile at the jury and swiveled it back again. “But I wasn’t buzzing for a plug for your business. When a client’s light shows on the board, and the girl has heard the prescribed number of buzzes, she plugs in on the line, is that it?”

  I thought Mandelbaum’s crack was a little out of place for that setting, where a man was on trial for his life, and turned my head right for a glance at Nero Wolfe to see if he agreed, but one glimpse of his profile told me that he was sticking to his role of a morose martyr and so was in no humor to agree with anyone or anything.

  That was to be expected. At that hour of the morning, following his hard-and-fast schedule, he would have been up in the plant rooms on the roof of his old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, bossing Theodore for the glory of his celebrated collection of orchids, even possibly getting his hands dirty. At eleven o’clock, after washing his hands, he would have taken the elevator down to his office on the ground floor, arranged his oversized corpus in his oversized chair behind his desk, rung for Fritz to bring beer, and started bossing Archie Goodwin, me. He would have given me any instructions he thought timely and desirable, for anything from typing a letter to tailing the mayor, which seemed likely to boost his income and add to his reputation as the best private detective east of San Francisco. And he would have been looking forward to lunch by Fritz.

  And all that was “would-have-been” because he had been subpoenaed by the State of New York to appear in court and testify at the trial of Leonard Ashe. He hated to leave his house at all, and particularly he hated to leave it for a trip to a witness-box. Being a private detective, he had to concede that a summons to testify was an occupational hazard he must accept if he hoped to collect fees from clients, but this cloud didn’t even have that silver lining. Leonard Ashe had come to the office one day about two months ago to hire him, but had been turned down. So neither fee nor glory was in prospect. As for me, I had been subpoenaed too, but only for insurance, since I wouldn’t be called unless Mandelbaum decided Wolfe’s testimony needed corroboration, which wasn’t likely.

  It was no pleasure to look at Wolfe’s gloomy phiz, so I looked back at the performers. Bagby was answering. “Yes, sir, she plugs in and says, ‘Mrs. Smith’s residence,’ or, ‘Mr. Jones’s apartment,’ or whatever she has been told to say for that client. Then she says Mrs. Smith is out and is there any message, and so on, whatever the situation calls for. Sometimes the client has called and given her a message for some particular caller.” Bagby flipped a hand. “Just anything. We give specialized service.”

  Mandelbaum nodded. “I think that gives us a clear picture of the operation. Now, Mr. Bagby, please look at that gentleman in the dark blue suit sitting next to the officer. He is the defendant in this trial. Do you know him?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s Mr. Leonard Ashe.”

  “When and where did you meet him?”

  “In July he came to my office on Forty-seventh Street. First he phoned, and then he came.”

  “Can you give the day in July?”

  “The twelfth. A Monday.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He asked how my answering service worked, and I told him, and he said he wanted it for his home telephone at his apartment on East Seventy-third Street. He paid cash for a month in advance. He wanted twenty-four-hour service.”

  “Did he want any special service?”

  “He didn’t ask me for any, but two days later he contacted Marie Willis and offered her five hundred dollars if she-”

  The witness was interrupted from two directions at once. The defense attorney, a champion named Jimmy Donovan whose batting average on big criminal cases had topped the list of the New York bar for ten years, left his chair with his mouth open to object; and Mandelbaum showed the witness a palm to stop him.

  “Just a minute, Mr. Bagby. Just answer my questions. Did you accept Leonard Ashe as a client?”

  “Sure, there was no reason not to.”

  “What was the number of his telephone at his home?”

  “Rhinelander two-three-eight-three-eight.”

  “Did you give his name and that number a place on one of your switchboards?”

  “Yes, sir, one of the three boards at the apartment on East Sixty-ninth Street. That’s the Rhinelander district.”

  “What was the name of the employee who attended that board-the one with Leonard Ashe’s number on it?”

  “Marie Willis.”

  A shadow of stir and murmur rippled across the packed audience, and Judge Corbett on the bench turned his head to give it a frown and then went back to his knitting.

  Bagby was going on. “Of course at night there’s only one girl on the three boards-they rotate on that -but for daytime I keep a girl at her own board at least five days a week, and six if I can. That way she gets to know her clients.”

  “And Leonard Ashe’s number was on Marie Willis’s board?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After the routine arrangements for serving Leonard Ashe as a client had been completed, did anything happen to bring him or his number to your personal attention?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What and when? First, when?”

  Bagby took a second to make sure he had it right before swearing to it. “It was Thursday, three days after Ashe
had ordered the service. That was July fifteenth. Marie phoned me at my office and said she wanted to see me privately about something important. I asked if it could wait till she was off the board at six o’clock, and she said yes, and a little after six I went up to Sixty-ninth Street and we went into her room at the apartment. She told me Ashe had phoned her the day before and asked her to meet him somewhere to discuss some details about servicing his number. She told him such a discussion should be with me, but he insisted-”

  A pleasant but firm baritone cut in. “If Your Honor pleases.” Jimmy Donovan was on his feet. “I submit that the witness may not testify to what Marie Willis and Mr. Ashe said to each other when he was not present.”

  “Certainly not,” Mandelbaum agreed shortly. “He is reporting what Marie Willis told him had been said.”

  Judge Corbett nodded. “That should be kept clear. You understand that, Mr. Bagby?”

  “Yes, sir.” Bagby bit his lip. “I mean Your Honor.”

  “Then go ahead. What Miss Willis said to you and you to her.”

  “Well, she said she had agreed to meet Ashe because he was a theatrical producer and she wanted to be an actress. I hadn’t known she was stage-struck but I know it now. So she had gone to his office on Forty-fifth Street as soon as she was off the board, and after he talked some and asked some questions he told her- this is what she told me-he told her he wanted her to listen in on calls to his home number during the daytime. All she would have to do, when his light on her board went on and the buzzes started, if the buzzes stopped and the light went off-that would mean someone had answered the phone at his home-she would plug in and listen to the conversation. Then each evening she would phone him and report. That’s what she said Ashe had asked her to do. She said he counted out five hundred dollars in bills and offered them to her and told her he’d give her another thousand if she went along.”