That was Tuesday night, August 19th. On Friday the 22nd Bess Huddleston got tetanus. On Monday the 25th she died. To show how everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked when he was discussing the case with a friend the other day, if there had been a heavy rainfall in Riverdale between the 19th and 26th it would have been impossible to prove it was murder, let alone catch the murderer. Not that he showed any great — oh, well.
On Wednesday the 20th Dr. Brady came to the office for an interview with Wolfe, and the next day brother Daniel and nephew Larry came. About all we got out of that was that among the men nobody liked anybody. In the meantime, upon instructions from Wolfe, I was wrapping my tentacles about Janet, coaxing her into my deadly embrace. It really wasn’t an unpleasant job, because Wednesday afternoon I took her to a ball game and was agreeably surprised to find that she knew a bunt from a base on balls, and Friday evening we went to the Flamingo Roof and I learned that she could dance nearly as well as Lily Rowan. She was no cuddler and a little stiff, but she went with the music and always knew what we were going to do. Saturday morning I reported to Wolfe regarding her as follows:
1. If she was toting a grievance against Bess Huddleston, it would take a smarter man than me to find out what it was. 2. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with her except that she would rather live in the country than the city. 3. She had no definite suspicion about who had sent the anonymous letters or anyone’s motive for sending them.
Wolfe said, “Try Miss Timms for a change.”
I didn’t try to date Maryella for Saturday or Sunday, because Janet had told me they were all going to Saratoga for the weekend. Monday morning, I thought, was no time to start a romance, so I waited until afternoon to phone, got Maryella, and got the news. I went up to the plant rooms, where Wolfe was a sight to behold in his undershirt, cutting the tops from a row of vandas for propagation, and told him:
“Bess Huddleston is dead.”
“Let me alone,” he said peevishly. “I’m doing all I can. Someone will probably get another letter before long, and when—”
“No, sir. No more letters. I am stating facts. Friday evening tetanus set in from that cut on her toe, and about an hour ago she died. Maryella’s voice was choked with emotion as she told me.”
Wolfe scowled at me. “Tetanus?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That would have been a five thousand dollar fee.”
“It would have been if you had seen fit to do a little work instead of—”
“It was no good and you know it. I was waiting for another letter. File it away, including the letter to Mrs. Horrocks, to be delivered to her on request. I’m glad to be rid of it.”
I wasn’t. Down in the office, as I checked over the folder, consisting of the Horrocks letter, the snapshot of Janet, a couple of reports I had made and some memos Wolfe had dictated, I felt as if I was leaving a ball game in the fourth inning with the score a tie. But it looked as if nothing could be done about it, and certainly there was no use trying to badger Wolfe. I phoned Janet to ask if there was anything I could do, and she told me in a weak tired voice that as far as she knew there wasn’t.
According to the obit in the Times the next morning, the funeral service was to be Wednesday afternoon, at the Belford Memorial Chapel on 73rd Street, and of course there would be a big crowd, even in August, for Bess Huddleston’s last party. Cordially invited to meet death. I decided to go. Not merely, if I know myself, for curiosity or another look at Janet. It is not my custom to frequent memorial chapels to look at girls even if they’re good dancers. Call it a hunch. Not that I saw anything criminal, only something incredible. I filed past the casket with the throng because from a distance I had seen it and couldn’t believe it. But when I got close there it was. Eight black orchids that could have come from nowhere else in the world, and a card with his initials the way he scribbled them, “N.W.”
When I got home, and Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, I didn’t mention it. I decided it wasn’t advisable. I needed to devote some thought to it.
It was that evening, Wednesday evening after the funeral, that I answered the doorbell, and who should I see on the stoop but my old colleague Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad. I hailed him with false enthusiasm and ushered him into the office, where Wolfe was making more marks on the map of Russia. They exchanged greetings, and Cramer sat in the red leather chair, took out a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his exposed surfaces, put a cigar between his lips and sank his teeth in it.
“Your hair’s turning gray,” I observed. “You look as if you weren’t getting enough exercise. A brain-worker like you—”
“God knows why you keep him,” he said to Wolfe.
Wolfe grunted. “He saved my life once.”
“Once!” I exclaimed indignantly. “Beginning—”
“Shut up, Archie. What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“You can tell me what you were doing for Bess Huddleston.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a shade. “You? The Homicide Bureau? Why do you want to know?”
“Because a guy is making himself a pest down at Headquarters. Her brother. He says she was murdered.”
“He does?”
“Yes.”
“Offering what evidence?”
“None at all.”
“Then why bother me about it? Or yourself either?”
“Because we can’t shut him up. He’s even been to the Commissioner. And though he has no evidence, he has an argument. I’d like to tell you his argument.”
Wolfe leaned back and sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Well. He started on us last Saturday, four days ago. She got tetanus the day before. I don’t need to tell you about that cut on her toe, since Goodwin was there—”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“I’ll bet you have. The brother, Daniel, said she couldn’t have got tetanus from that cut. He said it was a clean piece of glass that dropped into her slipper when the tray of glasses fell on the terrace. He saw it. And the slipper was a clean house slipper, nearly new and clean. And she hadn’t been walking around barefooted. He claimed there couldn’t possibly have been any tetanus germs in that cut, at least not enough to cause so violent an attack so soon. I sent a man up there Saturday night, but the doctor wouldn’t let him see her, and of course he had no evidence—”
“Dr. Brady?”
“Yes. But the brother kept after us, especially when she died, and yesterday morning I sent a couple of men up to rub it off. I want to ask you, Goodwin, what was the piece of glass like? The piece in her slipper that cut her?”
“I knew you really came to see me,” I told him genially. “It was a piece from one of the thick blue glasses that they had for old-fashioneds. Several of them broke.”
Cramer nodded. “So they all say. We sent the slippers to the laboratory, and they say no tetanus germs. Of course there was another possibility, the iodine and the bandage. We sent all the stuff on that shelf to the laboratory, and the gauze was sterile, and it was good iodine, so naturally there were no germs in it. Under the circum—”
“Subsequent dressings,” Wolfe muttered.
“No. The dressing Brady found on it when he was called up there Friday night was the one he had put on originally.”
“Listen,” I put in, “I know. By God. That orangutan. He tickled her feet. He rubbed germs on her—”
Cramer shook his head. “We went into that too. One of them suggested it — the nephew. That seems to be a possibility. It sounds farfetched to me, but of course it’s possible. Now what the doctor says. Brady.”
“Excuse me,” Wolfe said. “You talked to those people. Had Miss Huddleston nothing to say to them before she died? Any of them?”
“Not much. Do you know what tetanus does?”
“Vaguely.”
“It does plenty. Like strychnine, only worse because there are no periods of relaxation and it lasts longer. When Brady got there Friday night her jaw was already locked tight. He gave her avertin to relieve her, and kept it up till the end. When my man was there Saturday night she was bent double backwards. Sunday she told Brady through her teeth she wanted to tell people good-bye, and he took them in one at a time. I’ve got their statements. Nothing significant, what you’d expect. Of course she only said a few words to each one — she was in bad shape. Her brother tried to tell her that her approaching death wasn’t an accident, it was murder, but Brady and the nurse wouldn’t let him.”
“She herself had no such suspicion?”
“Not in evidence. You realize what she was like.” Cramer shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What Brady says about the tetanus, one three-hundredth of a grain of the toxin is fatal. The bacilli and spores are more or less around everywhere, but of course especially in the neighborhood of horses. The soil around a barnyard reeks with it. I asked Brady what about his infecting the cut or the bandage with his own fingers when he dressed it, since he had just been riding, but he said he had washed his hands, and so had the Nichols girl, and she corroborated it. He said it was highly unlikely that there should have been tetanus bacilli on the piece of glass or her slipper or the skin of her toe or that animal’s paw, at least enough of them to cause such a quick and virulent attack, but he said it was also unlikely that when a man walks across a street at a corner with a green light he should get run over, but sometimes he does. He says that he deeply regrets he didn’t return Tuesday evening or Wednesday and give her an injection of antitoxin, but he doesn’t blame himself because no doctor alive would have done so. After the poison reached the nerve centers, as it had when Brady arrived Friday night, it was too late for antitoxin, though he tried it. Everything Brady said has been checked with the Examiner and is okay.”
“I don’t like his analogy,” Wolfe declared. “A man crossing a street is extremely likely to get run over. That’s why I never undertake it. However, that doesn’t impeach Dr. Brady. I ask you again, Mr. Cramer, why do you bother me with all this, or yourself either?”
“That’s what I came here to find out.”
“Not the proper place. Try the inside of your head.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Cramer asserted. “I’m satisfied. It was accidental. But that damn brother won’t let go. And before I get through with him and toss him out on his ear. I thought I’d better have a word with you. If there was anyone around there with murder in his heart, you ought to know. You would know. Since you had just started on a job for her. You’re not interested in petty larceny. So I’d like to know what the job was.”
“No doubt,” Wolfe said. “Didn’t any of those people tell you?”
“No.”
“None of them?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know she had hired me?”
“The brother told me about Goodwin being there, and that led me to question him. But he doesn’t seem to know what your job was about.”
“Neither do I.”
Cramer took the cigar from his mouth and said vehemently, “Now look! How’s it going to hurt you? Loosen up for once! I want to cross this off, that’s all. I’ve got work to do! All I want to know—”
“Please!” Wolfe said curtly. “You say you are satisfied that the death was accidental. You have no shred of evidence of a crime. Miss Huddleston hired me for a confidential job. Her death does not release me, it merely deprives me of the job. If you had an action you could summon me, but you haven’t. Will you have some beer?”
“No.” Cramer glared. “My God, you can be honorable when you want to be! Will you answer a plain question? Do you think she was murdered?”
“No.”
“Then you think it was purely accidental?”
“No.”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Nothing at all. About that. I know nothing about it. I have no interest in it. The woman died, as all women do, may she rest in peace, and I lost a fee. Why don’t you ask me this: if you knew what I know, if I told you all about the job she hired me for, would you feel that her death required further investigation?”
“Okay. I ask it.”
“The answer is no. Since you have discovered no single suspicious circumstance. Will you have some beer?”
“Yes, I will,” Cramer growled.
He consumed a bottle, got no further concessions either in information or in hypothetical questions, and departed.
I saw him to the door, returned to the office and remarked:
“Old Frizzle-top seems to be improving with age. Of course he has had the advantage of studying my methods. He seems to have covered the ground up there nearly as well as I could.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe pushed the tray aside to make room for the map. “Not that I don’t agree with you. Nearly as well as you could, yes. But either he didn’t have sense enough to learn everything that happened that afternoon, or he missed his best chance to expose a crime, if there was one. It hasn’t rained the past week, has it? No.”
I cocked an eye at him. “You don’t say. How many guesses can I have?”
But he left it at that and got busy with the map, ignoring my questions. It was one of the many occasions when it would have been a pleasure to push him off of the Empire State Building, if there had been any way of enticing him there. Of course there was a chance that he was merely pulling my leg, but I doubted it. I know his tones of voice.
It ruined my night for me. Instead of going to sleep in thirty seconds it took me thirty minutes, trying to figure out what the devil he meant, and I woke up twice with nightmares, the first time because it was raining on me through the roof and each raindrop was a tetanus germ, and the second time I was lost in a desert where it hadn’t rained for a hundred years. Next morning, after Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms at nine o’clock, I got stubborn. I sat at my desk and went over that party at Riverdale in my mind, second by second, as I had reported it to Wolfe. And I got it. I would have hit it sooner if it hadn’t been for various interruptions, phone calls and so on, but anyway finally there it was, as obvious as lipstick.
Provided one thing. To settle that I phoned Doc Vollmer, whose home and office were in a house down the street, and learned that tetanus, which carried death, had a third as many lives as a cat — one as a toxin, one as a bacillus, and one as a spore. The bacillus or the spore got in you and manufactured the toxin, which did the dirty work, traveling not with the blood but with the nerves. The bacillus and spore were both anaerobic, but could live in surface soil or dust for years and usually did, especially the spore.
And now what? Just forget it? Wolfe had, but then he wasn’t human, whereas I was and am. Besides, it would be very neat if it got results, and it would teach Wolfe a lesson. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and I wanted to get out before he came downstairs, so I phoned up to him that I was leaving on an errand, and walked to the garage on Tenth Avenue and got the roadster. Heading uptown, I stopped at a hardware store near 42nd Street and went in and bought a long-bladed kitchen knife, a narrow garden trowel, and four paper bags. Then I went to a phone booth in a drug store at the corner and called the Huddleston number.
Maryella’s voice answered, and I asked to speak to Miss Nichols. In a minute she was on, and I told her I was thinking she might be leaving there soon and I’d like to have her address.
“It’s nice of you to call,” she said. “It’s a — pleasant surprise. Naturally I thought you — last week, I mean — I thought you were just being a detective.”
“Don’t kid me,” I told her. “Anyone that dances the way you do being surprised at a phone call. Not that I suppose you’re doing any dancing at present.”
“Not now. No.”
“Will you be leaving there soon?”
“Not this week. We’re trying to help Mr. Huddleston straighten things up.”
“Will you send me your address when you go?”
“Why — yes. Certainly. If you want it.”
“I do you know. How would it be if I drove up there? Just to say hello?”
“When? Now?”
“Right now. I can be there in twenty minutes. I’d kind of like to see you.”
“Why—” Silence. “That would be all right. If you want to take the trouble.”
I told her it would be no trouble at all, hung up, went out to the roadster, and made for the entrance to the West Side Highway at 46th Street.
I admit my timing was terrible. If I had arrived, say, between twelve thirty and one, they might have been in the house having lunch, and I could have said I had already eaten and waited for Janet on the terrace, which would have been a perfect opportunity. Of course as it turned out that would have made a monkey of me, so it was just as well that I dubbed it. As it was, leaving the car outside the fence, with the knife in one hip pocket and the trowel in the other, and the folded paper bags in the side pocket of my coat, I walked across the lawn to where Larry stood near the pool, glowering at it. When he heard me coming he transferred the glower to me.
“Hello,” I said amiably. “What, no alligators?”
“No. They’re gone.”
“And Mister? And the bears?”
“Yes. What the hell are you doing here?”
I suppose it would have been sensible to appease him, but he was really quite irritating. Tone and look both. So I said, “I came to play tag with Mister,” and started for the house, but Janet appeared, cutting across the lawn. She looked prettier than I remembered her, or maybe not so much prettier as more interesting. Her hair was done differently or something. She said hello to me and let me have a hand to shake, and then told Larry:
“Maryella says you’ll have to help her with those Corliss bills. Some of them go back before she came, and she doesn’t seem to trust my memory.”
Larry nodded at her, and, moving, was in front of me. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“Nothing special,” I said. “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom—”
“If you’ve got a bill, mail it. You’ll get about three percent.”
I suppressed impulses and shook my head. “No bill. I came to see Miss Nichols.”
“Yes you did. You came to snoop—”
But Janet had her hand on his arm. “Please, Larry. Mr. Goodwin phoned and asked to see me. Please?”
I would have preferred smacking him, and it was irritating to see her with her hand on his arm looking up at him the way she did, but when he turned and marched off towards the house I restrained myself and let him go.
I asked Janet, “What’s eating him?”
“Well,” she said, “after all, you are a detective. And his aunt has died — terrible, it was terrible—”
“Sure. If you want to call that grief. What was the crack about three per cent?”
“Oh...” She hesitated. “But there’s nothing secret about it, goodness knows. Miss Huddleston’s affairs are tangled up. Everybody thought she was rich, but apparently she spent it as fast as she made it.”
“Faster, if the creditors are going to get three percent.” I got started towards the terrace, and she came beside me. “In that case, the brother and the nephew are out of luck. I apologize to Larry. He’s probably overcome by grief, after all.”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” Janet protested.
“Then I take it back.” I waved it away. “Let’s talk about something else.”
I was thinking the best plan was to sit with her on the terrace, with the idea of getting her to leave me alone there for a few minutes, which was all I needed, but the hot noon sun was coming straight down, and she went on into the house with me behind her. She invited me to sit on a couch with her, but with the tools in my hip pockets I thought it was safer to take a chair facing her. We had a conversation.
Of course the simplest thing would have been to tell her what I wanted to do and then go ahead and do it, and I deny that it was any suspicion of her, either as a letter writer or as a murderess, that kept me from doing that. It was the natural desire I had not to hurt her feelings by letting her know that my real purpose in coming was not just to see her. If things should develop it was good policy to have her friendly. So I played it for a solo. I was thinking it was about time to get on with it, and was figuring out an errand for her, preferably upstairs, that would be sure to keep her five minutes, when suddenly I saw something through the window that made me stare.
It was Daniel Huddleston on the terrace with a newspaper bundle under his arm and a long-bladed knife in one hand and a garden trowel in the other!
I stood up to see better.
“What is it?” Janet asked, and stood up too. I shushed her and whispered in her ear, “First lesson for a detective. Don’t make any noise.”
Brother Daniel stopped near the center of the terrace, in front of the swing, knelt down on a flagstone, deposited the newspaper bundle and some folded newspapers beside him, and the trowel, and plunged the knife into the strip of turf at the edge of the flagstone. There was nothing furtive about it; he didn’t do any glancing over his shoulder, but he worked fast. With the trowel he scooped out a hunk of the turf, the width of the strip, about six inches long and three inches deep, and rolled it in a piece of newspaper. Then a second one, to the right of the first hole, and then a third one, to the left, wrapping each separately.
“What on earth does he think he’s doing?” Janet whispered. I squeezed her arm.
He was about done. Opening the package he had brought with him, he produced three strips of turf the size and shape of those he had just dug out, fitted them into the trench he had made, pressed them with his foot until they were level with the flagstone, remade the package with the three hunks he had removed, and the knife and trowel, and went off as if he were bound somewhere.
I took Janet’s hand and gave her an earnest eye. “Listen, girlie,” I said, “my one fault is curiosity. Otherwise I am perfect. Don’t forget that. It’s time for your lunch anyway.”
She said something to my back as I made for the door. I emerged onto the terrace cautiously, slid across and into the hedge of shrubbery, made a hole and looked through. Daniel was forty paces away, going across the lawn not in the direction of the drive where my car was but the other way, off to the right. I decided to give him another twenty paces before emerging, and it was well that I did, for suddenly a voice sounded above me:
“Hey, Uncle Dan! Where you going?”
Daniel stopped in his tracks and whirled. I twisted my neck, and through the leaves got a glimpse of Larry’s head sticking out of an upper window, and Maryella’s beside it.
Larry shouted, “We need you!”
“See you later!” Daniel yelled.
“But it’s time for lunch!” Maryella called.
“See you later!” Daniel turned and was off.
“Now that’s a performance,” Maryella said to Larry.
“Cuckoo,” Larry declared.
Their heads went in. But they might still have been looking out, so I scooted along the side of the house to the corner, and from there circled wide around evergreens and similar obstructions before swinging into the direction Daniel had taken. He wasn’t in sight. This part of the premises was new to me, and the first thing I knew I ran smack into the fence in the middle of a thicket. I couldn’t fight my way through on account of noise, so I doubled around, dashed along the edge of the thicket, and pretty soon hit a path. No sight of Daniel. The path took me to a series of stone steps up a steep bank, and up I went. Getting to the top, I saw him. A hundred feet ahead was a gate in the fence, and he was shutting the gate and starting down a lane between rows of little trees. The package was under his arm. In a way I was more interested in the package than I was in him. What if he threw it down a sewer? So I closed up more than I would have for an ordinary tailing job, and proceeding through the gate, followed him down the lane. At the end of the lane, not far ahead, he stopped, and I dived into the trees.
He had stopped at a curb, a paved street. The way cars were rolling by, apparently it was a main traffic street; and that point was settled when a double-decker bus jerked to a stop right square in front of Daniel, and he climbed on and off the bus went.
I hotfooted it to the corner. It was Marble Avenue. Riverdale is like that. The bus was too far away to read its number, and no taxi was in sight in either direction. I stepped into the street, into the path of the first car coming, and held up a commanding palm. By bad luck it was occupied by the two women that Helen Hokinson used for models, but there was no time to pick and choose. I hopped into the back seat, gave the driver a fleeting glimpse of my detective license, and said briskly:
“Police business. Step on it and catch up with a bus that’s ahead.”
The one driving emitted a baby scream. The other one said, “You don’t look like a policeman. You get out. If you don’t we’ll drive to a police station.”
“Suit yourself, madam. While we sit and talk the most dangerous gangster in New York is escaping. He’s on the bus.”
“Oh! He’ll shoot at us.”
“No. He isn’t armed.”
“Then why is he dangerous?”
“For God’s sake,” I reached for the door latch, “I’ll take a car with a man in it!”
But the car started forward. “You will not,” the driver said fiercely. “I’m as good a driver as any man. My husband says so.”
She was okay at that. Within a block she had it up to fifty, and she was good at passing, and it wasn’t long before we caught up with the bus. At least, a bus. When it stopped at a corner I told her to get alongside, which she did neatly, and with my hand over my face I looked for him and there he was.
“I’m shadowing him,” I told the ladies. “I think he’s on his way to meet a crooked politician. The first empty taxi we see you can let me out if you want to, but of course he might suspect a taxi, whereas he never would suspect a car like this with two good-looking well-dressed women in it.”
The driver looked grim. “In that case,” she declared, “it is our duty.”
And by gum she crawled along behind that bus for a good three-quarters of an hour, to Riverside Drive, the whole length of the Drive, over to Broadway, and on downtown. I thought the least I could do was furnish diversion, which I did with tales of my experiences with gangsters and kidnappers and so forth. When Daniel was still on the bus after crossing 42nd Street I decided in disgust that he was probably bound for Headquarters, and I was so deeply considering the feasibility of intercepting him before he got there that I nearly missed it when he hopped to the sidewalk at 34th Street. Paying the ladies with thanks and a cordial smile, I jumped out and dodged through the midday shopping mob, and almost lost him. I picked him up going west on 34th.
At Eighth Avenue he turned uptown. I kept twenty yards behind.
At 35th he turned west again.
That was when I got suspicious. Naturally. On he went, straight as a bullet. When he kept on west of Ninth Avenue, there was no question about it. I closed up. He began looking at the numbers on buildings, and came to the stoop and started up. Boy, I’m telling you, they don’t get away from me. I get my man. I had trailed this one the length of New York, hanging on like a bulldog, right to Nero Wolfe’s door.