Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 27 - Three Witnesses Read online

  THE REX STOUT LIBRARY

  Rex Stout is one of America’s best-loved mystery writers, and Bantam is proud to present these special collector’s editions:

  AND BE A VILLAIN

  CHAMPAGNE FOR ONE

  DEATH OF A DOXY

  DEATH TIMES THREE

  FER-DE-LANCE

  THE GOLDEN SPIDERS

  IN THE BEST FAMILIES

  OVER MY DEAD BODY

  THE SECOND CONFESSION

  THE SILENT SPEAKER

  SOME BURIED CAESAR

  PRISONER’S BASE

  THREE DOORS TO DEATH

  HOMICIDE TRINITY

  TROUBLE IN TRIPLICATE

  THE MOTHER HUNT

  THE DOORBELL RANG

  AND FOUR TO GO

  A RIGHT TO DIE

  THREE WITNESSES

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  The Hand in the Glove

  Double for Death

  Bad for Business

  The Broken Vase

  The Sound of Murder

  Red Threads

  The Mountain Cat Murders

  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 ménage 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, gynephobic 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 v
ariously 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

  Contents

  The Next Witness

  When a Man Murders …

  Die Like a Dog

  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?”