Three Witnesses nwo-26 Read online

  Bagby stopped for wind. Mandelbaum prodded him. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Yes, sir. She said she knew she should have turned him down flat, but she didn’t want to make him sore, so she told him she wanted to think it over for a day or two. Then she said she had slept on it and decided what to do. She said of course she knew that what Ashe was after was phone calls to his wife, and aside from anything else she wouldn’t spy on his wife, because his wife was Robina Keane, who had given up her career as an actress two years ago to marry Ashe, and Marie worshiped Robina Keane as her ideal. That’s what Marie told me. She said she had decided she must do three things. She must tell me about it because Ashe was my client and she was working for me. She must tell Robina Keane about it, to warn her, because Ashe would probably get someone else to do the spying for him. It occurred to me that her real reason for wanting to tell Robina Keane might be that she hoped-”

  Mandelbaum stopped him. “What occurred to you isn’t material, Mr. Bagby. Did Marie tell you the third thing she had decided she must do?”

  “Yes, sir. That she must tell Ashe that she was going to tell his wife. She said she had to because at the start of her talk with him she had promised Ashe she would keep it confidential, so she had to warn him she was withdrawing her promise.”

  “Did she say when she intended to do those three things?”

  The witness nodded. “She had already done one of them, telling me. She said she had phoned Ashe and told him she would be at his office at seven o’clock. That was crowding it a little, because she had the evening shift that day and would have to be back at the boards at eight o’clock. It crowded me too because it gave me no time to talk her out of it. I went downtown with her in a taxi, to Forty-fifth Street, where Ashe’s office was, and did my best but couldn’t move her.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I tried to get her to lay off. If she went through with her program it might not do any harm to my business, but again it might. I tried to persuade her to let me handle it by going to Ashe and telling him she had told me of his offer and I didn’t want him for a client, and then drop it and forget it, but she was dead set on warning Robina Keane, and to do that she had to withdraw her promise to Ashe. I hung on until she entered the elevator to go up to Ashe’s office, but I couldn’t budge her.”

  “Did you go up with her?”

  “No, that wouldn’t have helped any. She was going through with it, and what could I do?”

  So, I was thinking to myself, that’s how it is. It looked pretty tough to me, and I glanced at Wolfe, but his eyes were closed, so I turned my head the other way to see how the gentleman in the dark blue suit seated next to the officer was taking it. Apparently it looked pretty tough to Leonard Ashe too. With deep creases slanting along the jowls of his dark bony face from the corners of his wide full mouth, and his sunken dark eyes, he was certainly a prime subject for the artists who sketch candidates for the hot seat for the tabloids, and for three days they had been making the most of it. He was no treat for the eyes, and I took mine away from him, to the left, where his wife sat in the front row of the audience.

  I had never worshiped Robina Keane as my ideal, but I had liked her fine in a couple of shows, and she was giving a good performance for her first and only courtroom appearance-either being steadfastly loyal to her husband or putting on an act, but good in either case. She was dressed quietly and she sat quietly, but she wasn’t trying to pretend she wasn’t young and beautiful. Exactly how she and her older and unbeautiful husband stood with each other was anybody’s guess, and everybody was guessing. One extreme said he was her whole world and he had been absolutely batty to suspect her of any hoop-rolling; the other extreme said she had quit the stage only to have more time for certain promiscuous activities, and Ashe had been a sap not to know it sooner; and anywhere in between. I wasn’t ready to vote. Looking at her, she might have been an angel. Looking at him, it must have taken something drastic to get him that miserable, though I granted that being locked up two months on a charge of murder would have some effect.

  Mandelbaum was making sure the jury had got it. “Then you didn’t go up to Ashe’s office with Marie Willis?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you go up later, at any time, after she had gone up?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you see Ashe at all that evening?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you speak to him on the telephone that evening?”

  “No, sir.”

  Looking at Bagby, and I have looked at a lot of specimens under fire, I decided that either he was telling it straight or he was an expert liar, and he didn’t sound like an expert. Mandelbaum went on. “What did you do that evening, after you saw Marie Willis enter the elevator to go up to Ashe’s office?”

  “I went to keep a dinner date with a friend at a restaurant-Hornby’s on Fifty-second Street-and after that, around half-past eight, I went up to my Trafalgar office at Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. I have six boards there, and a new night girl was on, and I stayed there with her a while and then took a taxi home, across the park to my apartment on East Seventieth Street. Not long after I got home a phone call came from the police to tell me Marie Willis had been found murdered in my Rhinelander office, and I went there as fast as I could go, and there was a crowd out in front, and an officer took me upstairs.”

  He stopped to swallow, and stuck his chin out a little. “They hadn’t moved her. They had taken the plug cord from around her throat, but they hadn’t moved her, and there she was, slumped over on the ledge in front of the board. They wanted me to identify her, and I had-”

  The witness wasn’t interrupted, but I was. There was a tug at my sleeve, and a whisper in my ear- “We’re leaving, come on.” And Nero Wolfe arose, sidled past two pairs of knees to the aisle, and headed for the rear of the courtroom. For his bulk he could move quicker and smoother than you would expect, and as I followed him to the door and on out to the corridor we got no attention at all. I was assuming that some vital need had stirred him, like phoning Theodore to tell him or ask him something about an orchid, but he went on past the phone booths to the elevator and pushed the down button. With people all around I asked no questions. He got out at the main floor and made for Centre Street. Out on the sidewalk he backed up against the granite of the courthouse and spoke.

  “We want a taxi, but first a word with you.”

  “No, sir,” I said firmly. “First a word from me. Mandelbaum may finish with that witness any minute, and the cross-examination may not take long, or Donovan might even reserve it, and you were told you would follow Bagby. If you want a taxi, of course you’re going home, and that will just-”

  “I’m not going home. I can’t.”

  “Right. If you do you’ll merely get hauled back here and also a fat fine for contempt of court. Not to mention me. I’m under subpoena too. I’m going back to the courtroom. Where are you going?”

  “To six-eighteen East Sixty-ninth Street.”

  I goggled at him. “I’ve always been afraid of this. Does it hurt?”

  “Yes. I’ll explain on the way.”

  “I’m going back to the courtroom.”

  “No. I’ll need you.”

  Like everyone else, I love to feel needed, so I wheeled, crossed the sidewalk, flagged a taxi to the curb, and opened the door. Wolfe came and climbed in, and I followed. After he had got himself braced against the hazards of a carrier on wheels and I had given the driver the address, and we were rolling, I said, “Shoot. I’ve heard you do a lot of explaining, but this will have to be good.”

  “It’s preposterous,” he declared.

  “It sure is. Let’s go back.”

  “I mean Mr. Mandelbaum’s thesis. I will concede that Mr. Ashe might have murdered that girl. I will concede that his state of mind about his wife might have approached mania, and therefore the motive suggested by that witness might have been adequate provocation. But he’s not an imbecile. Under the circumstances as given, and I doubt if Mr. Bagby can be discredited, I refuse to believe he was ass enough to go to that place at that time and kill her. You were present when he called on me that day to hire me. Do you believe it?”

  I shook my head. “I pass. You’re explaining. However, I read the papers too, and also I’ve chatted with Lon Cohen of the Gazette about it. It doesn’t have to be that Ashe went there for the purpose of killing her. His story is that a man phoned him-a voice he didn’t recognize-and said if Ashe would meet him at the Bagby place on Sixty-ninth Street he thought they could talk Marie out of it, and Ashe went on the hop, and the door to the office was standing open, and he went in and there she was with a plug cord tight around her throat, and he opened a window and yelled for the police. Of course if you like it that Bagby was lying just now when he said it wasn’t him that phoned Ashe, and that Bagby is such a good businessman that he would rather kill an employee than lose a customer-”

  “Pfui. It isn’t what I like, it’s what I don’t like. Another thing I didn’t like was sitting there on that confounded wooden bench with a smelly woman against me. Soon I was going to be called as a witness, and my testimony would have been effective corroboration of Mr. Bagby’s testimony, as you know. It was intolerable. I believe that if Mr. Ashe is convicted of murder on the thesis Mr. Mandelbaum is presenting it will be a justicial transgression, and I will not be a party to it. It wasn’t easy to get up and go because I can’t go home. If I go home they’ll come and drag me out, and into that witness-box.”

  I eyed him. “Let’s see if I get you. You can’t bear to help convict Ashe of murder because you doubt if he’s guilty, so you’re scooting. Right?”

  The hackie twisted his head around to inform us through t
he side of his mouth, “Sure he’s guilty.”

  We ignored it. “That’s close enough,” Wolfe said.

  “Not close enough for me. If you expect me to scoot with you and invite a stiff fine for running out on a subpoena, which you will pay, don’t try to guff me. Say we doubt if Ashe is guilty, but we think he may get tagged because we know Mandelbaum wouldn’t go to trial without a good case. Say also our bank account needs a shot in the arm, which is true. So we decide to see if we can find something that will push Mandelbaum’s nose in, thinking that if Ashe is properly grateful a measly little fine will be nothing. The way to proceed would be for you to think up a batch of errands for me, and you go on home and read a book and have a good lunch, but that’s out because they’d come and get you. Therefore we must both do errands. If that’s how it stands, it’s a fine day and I admit that woman was smelly, but I have a good nose and I think it was Tissot’s Passion Flower, which is eighty bucks an ounce. What are we going to do at Sixty-ninth Street?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good. Neither do I.”

  II

  IT WAS A DUMP, an old five-story walk-up, brick that had been painted yellow about the time I had started working for Nero Wolfe. In the vestibule I pushed the button that was labeled Bagby Answers, Inc., and when the click came I opened the door and led the way across the crummy little hall to the stairs and up one flight. Mr. Bagby wasn’t wasting it on rent. At the front end of the hall a door stood open. As we approached it I stepped aside to let Wolfe go first, since I didn’t know whether we were disguised as brush peddlers or as plumbers.

  As Wolfe went to speak to a girl at a desk I sent my eyes on a quick survey. It was the scene of the murder. In the front wall of the room three windows overlooked the street. Against the opposite wall were ranged the three switchboards, with three females with headphones seated at them. They had turned their heads for a look at the company.

  The girl at the desk, which was near the end window, had only an ordinary desk phone, in addition to a typewriter and other accessories. Wolfe was telling her, “My name is Wolfe and I’ve just come from the courtroom where Leonard Ashe is being tried.” He indicated me with a jerk of his head. “This is my assistant, Mr. Goodwin. We’re checking on subpoenas that have been served on witnesses, for both the prosecution and the defense. Have you been served?”

  With his air and presence and tone, only one woman in a hundred would have called him, and she wasn’t it. Her long, narrow face tilted up to him, she shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Pearl Fleming.”

  “Then you weren’t working here on July fifteenth.”

  “No, I was at another office. There was no office desk here then. One of the boards took office calls.”

  “I see.” His tone implied that it was damned lucky for her that he saw. “Are Miss Hart and Miss Velardi and Miss Weltz here?”

  My brows wanted to lift, but I kept them down, and anyway there was nothing startling about it. True, it had been weeks since those names had appeared in the papers, but Wolfe never missed a word of an account of a murder, and his skull’s filing system was even better than Saul Panzer’s.

  Pearl Fleming pointed to the switchboards. “That’s Miss Hart at the end. Miss Velardi is next to her. Next to Miss Velardi is Miss Yerkes. She came after-she replaced Miss Willis. Miss Weltz isn’t here; it’s her day off. They’ve had subpoenas, but-”

  She stopped and turned her head. The woman at the end board had removed her headphone, left her seat, and was marching over to us. She was about my age, with sharp brown eyes and flat cheeks and a chin she could have used for an icebreaker if she had been a walrus.

  “Aren’t you Nero Wolfe, the detective?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” he assented. “You are Alice Hart?”

  She skipped it. “What do you want?”

  Wolfe backed up a step. He doesn’t like anyone so close to him, especially a woman. “I want information, madam. I want you and Bella Velardi and Helen Weltz to answer some questions.”

  “We have no information.”

  “Then I won’t get any, but I’m going to try.”

  “Who sent you here?”

  “Autokinesis. There’s a cardinal flaw in the assumption that Leonard Ashe killed Marie Willis, and I don’t like flaws. It has made me curious, and when I’m curious there is only one cure-the whole truth, and I intend to find it. If I am in time to save Mr. Ashe’s life, so much the better; but in any case I have started and will not be stopped. If you and the others refuse to oblige me today there will be other days-and other ways.”

  From her face it was a toss-up. Her chin stiffened, and for a second she was going to tell him to go soak his head; then her eyes left him for me, and she was going to take it. She turned to the girl at the desk. “Take my board, will you, Pearl? I won’t be long.” To Wolfe, snapping it: “We’ll go to my room. This way.” She whirled and started.

  “One moment, Miss Hart.” Wolfe moved. “A point not covered in the newspaper accounts.” He stopped at the boards, behind Bella Velardi at the middle one. “Marie Willis’s body was found slumped over on the ledge in front of the switchboard. Presumably she was seated at the switchboard when the murderer arrived. But you live here-you and the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if the murderer was Mr. Ashe, how did he know she was alone on the premises?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she told him she was. Is that the flaw?”

  “Good heavens, no. It’s conceivable that she did, and they talked, and he waited until a light and buzzes had her busy at the board, with her back to him. It’s a minor point, but I prefer someone with surer knowledge that she was alone. Since she was small and slight, even you are not excluded”-he wiggled a finger-”or these others. Not that I am now prepared to charge you with murder.”

  “I hope not,” she snorted, turning. She led the way to a door at the end of the room, on through, and down a narrow hall. As I followed, behind Wolfe, I was thinking that the reaction we were getting seemed a little exaggerated. It would have been natural, under the circumstances, for Miss Velardi and Miss Yerkes to turn in their seats for a good look at us, but they hadn’t. They had sat, rigid, staring at their boards. As for Alice Hart, either there had been a pinch of relief in her voice when she asked Wolfe if that was the flaw, or I was in the wrong business.

  Her room was a surprise. First, it was big, much bigger than the one in front with the switchboards. Second, I am not Bernard Berenson, but I have noticed things here and there, and the framed splash of red and yellow and blue above the mantel was not only a real van Gogh, it was bigger and better than the one Lily Rowan had. I saw Wolfe spotting it as he lowered himself onto a chair actually big enough for him, and I pulled one around to make a group, facing the couch Miss Hart dropped onto.

  As she sat she spoke. “What’s the flaw?”

  He shook his head. “I’m the inquisitor, Miss Hart, not you.” He aimed a thumb at the van Gogh. “Where did you get that picture?”

  She looked at it, and back at him. “That’s none of your business.”

  “It certainly isn’t. But here is the situation. You have of course been questioned by the police and the District Attorney’s office, but they were restrained by their assumption that Leonard Ashe was the culprit. Since I reject that assumption and must find another in its stead, there can be no limit to my impertinence with you and others who may be involved. Take you and that picture. If you refuse to say where you got it, or if your answer doesn’t satisfy me, I’ll put a man on it, a competent man, and he’ll find out. You can’t escape being badgered, madam; the question is whether you suffer it here and now, by me, or face a prolonged inquiry among your friends and associates by meddlesome men. If you prefer the latter don’t waste time with me; I’ll go and tackle one of the others.”

  She was tossing up again. From her look at him it seemed just as well that he had his bodyguard along. She tried stalling. “What does it matter where I got that picture?”

  “Probably it doesn’t. Possibly nothing about you matters. But the picture is a treasure, and this is an odd address for it. Do you own it?”