Rex Stout - Tecumseh Fox 03 - The Broken Vase
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 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 sight-seeing guide and 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 from 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
This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended
between any character herein and any person,
living or dead; any such resemblance is
purely coincidental.
THE BROKEN VASE
A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement
with the Estate of the Author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Farrar & Rinehart edition published in 1941
Bantam edition / April 1982
Bantam reissue edition / August 1995
CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1941 by Rex Stout.
Introduction copyright © 1995 by Sister Carol Anne O’Marie.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76820-9
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Introduction
Rex Stout is so closely associated with his two great partners in crime, the omniscient Nero Wolfe and his fast-talking sidekick, Archie Goodwin, that it comes as a surprise to many of us that early in his career Stout wrote several mysteries featuring other detectives.
Hard-boiled private eye Theodolina (Dol) Bonner made her only full-length appearance in The Hand in the Glove. Alphabet Hicks, a brilliant but disbarred Harvard Law School graduate, tried his hand at detecting in a novel by the same name. Even Inspector Cramer, a regular in the Nero Wolfe series, appears alone in Red Threads.
Between 1939 and 1941 Rex Stout wrote three mysteries, Double for Death, Bad for Business, and The Broken Vase, featuring a part–Native American private investigator by the name of Tecumseh Fox.
Some Stout aficionados claim that the shrewd and suave Tecumseh Fox was modeled on the young Stout himself. Like Stout, Fox is a Renaissance man with a broad and diverse education and a mind that wanders without any hesitation from music and Chinese art to the intricacies of pruning vines, winter mulching, and calving. Like his creator, who was an avid gardener, Fox is an animal-loving farmer who takes time from his sleuthing to work his land.
Fox, described as medium size and height, dislikes shaving; Stout, always thin and wiry, wore what some called a scraggly, billy-goat beard. Neither man had much use for the movies. Perhaps coincidentally, Fox was the name of the road beside the Stout family’s forty-acre farm in Kansas. And both men lived in Brewster, New York.
What the Tecumseh Fox series does most surely reflect is Rex Stout’s great admiration for the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his fascination with Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes.
The Broken Vase is written in the same classic puzzle-solving style. Stout chooses his case. Then, arming Fox with awe-inspiring intelligence and a certain “Holmesiness,” Stout sets him about solving it. Fox dives right in. Not above affecting a disguise, he stares at the ceiling, pulls at the tip of his ear, and then, after taking in all the details, he makes deductions from what others have understandably missed.
As a private investigator, Fox broods, pontificates, and, after his thoughts “dodge nimbly” around his brain, pulls all the loose ends into one neat, tight, reasonable solution.
For me, much of the enjoyment of reading The Broken Vase came from Fox’s—and, of course, Stout’s—nineteen-forties view of life. It was refreshing to read a whole novel in which “I’m a son of a gun” and “Can it” express the ultimate in frustration and the only F word is in “For the love of Mike.”
It was great fun revisiting a world where people ordered highballs, forty-five miles per hour was the speed limit, and the Nazis were the bad guys.
I had nearly forgotten about lead nickels, income tax as a new idea, that ten thousand dollars once was a lot of money, and that people actually said “whizbang.”
When he wrote the series, Stout was said to have considered Double for Death his best detective story. Critics, however, were not so kind to Tecumseh Fox. They called him “contrived rather than created.” Neither did readers take to the sometimes farmer–sometimes sleuth.
On the whole The Broken Vase, the last of the series, fared very poorly. One bookseller suggested that the chief mystery about the book was who wrote it! He ventured that Rex Stout could never had done such a bad job.
Apparently Stout saw the light. He put Techumseh Fox to an early and eternal rest. His two immortals, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, appeared once more and continued together, neither aging, for the next forty-one years.
Although panned in its day, The B
roken Vase seems to be doing better with old age. Recently a first edition in mint condition was valued at somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars. Not too shabby for a flop!
And the critical bookseller? He probably wishes he’d stocked up on the remaindered copies.
—Sister Carol Anne O’Marie
Chapter 1
On that raw March night chilling drafts swirled treacherously around the corners backstage at Carnegie Hall—the icy puffs and currents which on bygone nights had sent a perspiring Paderewski or Heifetz or Chaliapin in headlong flight to the dressing room and had kept Melba’s or Sembrich’s maid vigilantly on guard at the door to the stage, with an ermine wrap ready for the diva’s hot bare damp shoulders. That, of course, was at the intermission or the end; it was now only eight-fifteen and nothing had happened yet on the great bare stage to make a strong man perspire. Any one who thinks a violin virtuoso is not a strong man should try the “Devil’s Trill” with muscles of anything less than steel.
It must be admitted, however, that Jan Tusar, who in a quarter of an hour was supposed to walk on the stage with nothing but a fiddle and a bow and prove his right to stand where Ysaye and Kreisler had stood, did not at that moment look strong. He had just emerged from the dressing room and stood there on the threshold, with one hand gripping the rim of the door and the other the neck of his violin just above the pegs. Though he was six feet tall, he looked like a frightened boy, with his set face and widened eyes, and his lower lip pulled in by his teeth. Of a dozen or more people scattered around, all were looking at him except a man in fireman’s uniform standing unobtrusively by a far wall, who had doubtless learned that an artist, during that terrible last half hour, is as unpredictable as a racehorse at the barrier, and nothing can be done about it. Among the others, at their various locations and distances, there was a general movement as if they would approach, but it was immediately restrained except in the case of a woman, not young, who with long bony fingers was keeping a sable wrap closed at her throat.
But a man moved swiftly to intercept her, and she gave it up with a shrug after an acid glance at the broad back which had interposed itself between her and the frightened boy.
Jan Tusar’s wide eyes moved to focus on the man’s face, but he said nothing.
The man put a white pudgy hand on the violinist’s shoulder. “You go back in there and sit down,” he said persuasively. His voice was a deep rumble with a rasp of asperity, in spite of his obvious desire to be sympathetic and reassuring. He was Tusar’s height, but much heavier and more than twice as old, something over fifty—well-fed, well-groomed in his evening elegance, palpably well-placed in whatever orbit he inhabited. His hand was light but firm on the youth’s shoulder. “This won’t do, Jan. Sit down and take it easy until you’re called.…”
“My hands are cold,” Tusar complained. There was scarcely controlled terror in his voice. “They won’t get warm. My fingers are stiff—What time is it?”
“A quarter past eight. You must—”
“Where’s Mrs. Pomfret?”
“She went home. She made Henry take her home. You shouldn’t have—”
“Let me alone! I’m all right. But I wish she—who’s that over there with Diego?”
“Diego Zorilla?” The man turned to look. “I don’t know.”
“His eyes looked right through me! What’s that sticking out of his pocket?” Tusar’s voice was petulant and aggrieved. “Coming to a concert with his pockets stuffed full of packages! Diego! Come here, will you?”
Diego came trotting—a stocky man somewhat older than Tusar, not as tall, with swarthy skin and black eyes and hair.
“Well, Jan!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “May Orpheus ride your bow!”
“Thanks, Diego. Who’s that with you? I want to meet him.”
“Why, he’s a friend … we didn’t …”
“I want to meet him.”
“Very well, of course.” Diego turned to beckon with his finger, and the other man crossed to join them. Of medium size and height, in his early thirties, there was nothing remarkable about his appearance unless you met directly the swift penetration of his brown eyes or were observant enough to note the smooth and effortless power of his movement. Before he had stopped beside Diego Zorilla, Tusar demanded:
“Why did you look at me like that? What have you got in your pocket?”
“This is my friend,” Diego said sharply. “Naturally, Jan, you are in a state, but you are not a child. My friend’s name is Mr. Tecumseh Fox, Mr. Jan Tusar.” He included the elegant older man, still there: “Mr. Adolph Koch.” His voice sharpened again: “You have heard me speak of Mr. Fox. He is the one who at my request contributed to the purchase—”
“Please!” Fox cut him off, hastily and peremptorily.
“Oh,” Tusar said with a frown of irritation, glancing at the violin in his hand as if he had forgotten it was there. “This—you helped—” Suddenly his face and voice changed completely; he was charmingly ashamed and contrite. “I’m sorry—I’m damn sorry—”
“Forget it,” said Fox bluntly, smiling at him. “Diego shouldn’t have mentioned it, and he shouldn’t have dragged me back here anyway. My manners are defective. I have a habit of staring at people. I apologize. This—” he slapped the package protruding from his side pocket—“is a carton of cigarettes. Another bad habit.”
“A carton?” The youth tittered. “A whole carton?” He started to laugh, but it was more like a squeak, nervous and high-pitched. “You hear that, Mr. Koch? A whole carton in his pocket! That’s the funniest—that’s worse even than you—” His shrill laughter, crescendo and accelerando, pierced the air.
There was a general stir and movement, and shocked ejaculations. A man, apparently buried in gloom and foreboding, who had been standing ten paces off, ran up and grabbed Adolph Koch by the elbow, muttering at him. Others approached, the woman in sable with a determined stride jostling Tecumseh Fox, who promptly retreated to his former position near the passage to the stage and surveyed the scene from there. In a moment he was joined by his friend Zorilla, who was shaking his head darkly and mumbling to himself.
Fox spoke to Zorilla’s ear, not to shout against the confused half-hysterical babel: “Do you tell me this is a conventional prelude to a violin recital?”
“There is nothing conventional,” the other growled savagely, “about what is happening here. I know. I tried it once.” He held up his left hand. On it the middle and third fingers were only pitiful stubs, chopped off below the knuckle. “Before that happened.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. In two hours Jan will be established on the peak or he will have tumbled into a crevasse, perhaps never to climb out again.”
“I understand that, but who the devil are those others? Why doesn’t someone—who is that clawing at the skeleton in sable?”
“That’s Felix Beck, Jan’s teacher and coach.”
“Who’s the pretty girl hugging herself and looking scared to death?”
“Dora Mowbray, Jan’s accompanist. Naturally she is scared. Her father was my manager, and also Jan’s—you know, Lawton Mowbray, who fell from his office window a few months ago and smashed on the pavement. The tall young chap pushing the others away is Perry Dunham, the son of Mrs. Pomfret. Irene Dunham Pomfret—you know about her. Her son by her first husband.”
“Where is she?”
Diego shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps out front in her box. I would have expected her to be here.”
“Who—for God’s sake, coming out of the dressing room! They were in there too! Who is it?”
“You know her.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Look again. You go to movies.”
“Not often. Is she one of them?”
“Yes, indeed. It’s Hebe Heath. I don’t know who that young fellow is with her. Look at her pulling at Jan, and look at Koch watching her.”
“I don’t want to.” Fox sounded disgusted. “Some one with a little sense ought to wade into that. Let’s go out to our seats.”
Diego nodded. “It’s nearly time. Only a minute or two.” His black eyes were aimed across at Jan Tusar, still at the dressing-room door, surrounded by confusion and clamor. “It’s a terrible thing for a boy, that long walk onto that stage, with your fingers hot and moist on the strings—or cold and dry is even worse. Come on, Fox, this way.”