I wouldn’t want to exaggerate how brave I am. It wasn’t that I was too damn fearless to be impressed by the fact that I was thoroughly tied up and the strangler was standing there smiling at me: I was simply astounded. It was an amazing disguise. The two main changes were the eyebrows and eyelashes; these eyes had bushy brows and long thick lashes, whereas yesterday’s guest hadn’t had much of either one. The real change was from the inside. I had seen no smile on the face of yesterday’s guest, but if I had it wouldn’t have been like this one. The hair made a difference too, of course, parted on the side and slicked down.
He pulled the other straight chair around and sat. I admired the way he moved. That in itself could have been a dead giveaway, but the movements fitted the getup to a T. Finding the light straight in his eyes, he shifted the chair a little.
“So she told you about me?” he said, making it a question.
It was the voice he had used on the phone. It was actually different, pitched lower for one thing, but with it, as with the face and movements, the big change was from the inside. The voice was stretched tight, and the palms of his gloved hands were pressed against his kneecaps with the fingers straight out.
I said, “Yes,” and added conversationally, “When you saw her go in the office why didn’t you follow her in? Why did you wait?”
“That isn’t—” he said, and stopped.
I waited politely.
He spoke. “I had seen you leave, upstairs, and I suspected you were in there.”
“Why didn’t she scream or fight?”
“I talked to her. I talked a little first.” His head gave a quick jerk, as if a fly were bothering him and his hands were too occupied to attend to it. “What did she tell you?”
“About that day at Doris Hatten’s apartment — you coming in and her going out. And of course her recognizing you there yesterday.”
“She is dead. There is no evidence. You can’t prove anything.”
I grinned. “Then you’re wasting a lot of time and energy and the best disguise I ever saw. Why didn’t you just toss my note in the wastebasket? Let me answer. You didn’t dare. In getting evidence, knowing exactly what and who to look for makes all the difference. And you knew I knew.”
“And you haven’t told the police?”
“No.”
“Nor Nero Wolfe?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged — not much of a shrug, on account of my status quo. “I may not put it very well,” I said, “because this is the first time I have ever talked with my hands and feet tied and I find it cramps my style. But it strikes me as the kind of coincidence that doesn’t happen very often. I’m fed up with the detective business and I’d like to quit. I have something that’s worth a good deal to you — say fifty thousand dollars. It can be arranged so that you get what you pay for. I’ll go the limit on that, but it has to be closed damn quick. If you don’t buy I’m going to have a tough time explaining why I didn’t remember sooner what she told me. Twenty-four hours from now is the absolute limit.”
“It couldn’t be arranged so I would get what I paid for.”
“Sure it could. If you don’t want me on your neck the rest of your life, believe me, I don’t want you on mine either.”
“I suppose you don’t.” He smiled, or at least he apparently thought he was smiling. “I suppose I’ll have to pay.”
There was a sudden noise in his throat as if he had started to choke. He stood up. “You’re working your hand loose,” he said huskily and moved toward me.
It might have been guessed from his voice, thick and husky from the blood rushing to his head, but it was plain as day in his eyes, suddenly fixed and glassy like a blind man’s eyes. Evidently he had come there fully intending to kill me and had now worked himself up to it. I felt a crazy impulse to laugh. Kill me with what?
“Hold it!” I snapped at him.
He halted, muttered, “You’re getting your hand loose,” and moved again, passing me to get behind.
With what purchase I could get on the floor with my bound feet, I jerked my body and the chair violently aside and around and had him in front of me again.
“No good,” I told him. “They only went down one flight. I heard ’em. It’s no good anyway. I’ve got another note for you — from Nero Wolfe — here in my breast pocket. Help yourself, but stay in front of me.”
His eyes stayed glassy on me.
“Don’t you want to know what it says?” I demanded. “Get it!”
He was only two steps from me, but it took him four small slow ones. His gloved hand went inside my coat to the breast pocket, and came out with a folded slip of yellow paper — a sheet from one of Wolfe’s memo pads. From the way his eyes looked, I doubted if he would be able to read, but apparently he was. I watched his face as he took it in, in Wolfe’s straight precise handwriting:
If Mr. Goodwin is not home by midnight the information given him by Cynthia Brown will be communicated to the police and I shall see that they act immediately. Nero Wolfe
He looked at me, and slowly his eyes changed. No longer glassy, they began to let light in. Before he had just been going to kill me. Now he hated me.
I got voluble. “So it’s no good, see? He did it this way because if you had known I had told him you would have sat tight. He figured that you would think you could handle me, and I admit you tried your best. He wants fifty thousand dollars by tomorrow at six o’clock, no later. You say it can’t be arranged so you’ll get what you pay for, but we say it can and it’s up to you. You say we have no evidence, but we can get it — don’t you think we can’t. As for me, I wouldn’t advise you even to pull my hair. It would make him sore at you, and he’s not sore now, he just wants fifty thousand bucks.”
He had started to tremble and knew it, and was trying to stop.
“Maybe,” I conceded, “you can’t get that much that quick. In that case he’ll take your IOU. You can write it on the back of that note he sent you. My pen’s here in my vest pocket. He’ll be reasonable about it.”
“I’m not such a fool,” he said harshly. He had stopped trembling.
“Who said you were?” I was sharp and urgent and thought I had loosened him. “Use your head, that’s all. We’ve either got you cornered or we haven’t. If we haven’t, what are you doing here? If we have, a little thing like your name signed to an IOU won’t make it any worse. He won’t press you too hard. Here, get my pen, right here.”
I still think I had loosened him. It was in his eyes and the way he stood, sagging a little. If my hands had been free, so I could have got the pen myself and uncapped it and put it between his fingers, I would have had him. I had him to the point of writing and signing, but not to the point of taking my pen out of my pocket. But of course if my hands had been free I wouldn’t have been bothering about an IOU and a pen.
So he slipped from under. He shook his head, and his shoulders stiffened. The hate that filled his eyes was in his voice too. “You said twenty-four hours. That gives me tomorrow. I’ll have to decide. Tell Nero Wolfe I’ll decide.”
He crossed to the door and pulled it open. He went out, closing the door, and I heard his steps descending the stairs; but he hadn’t taken his hat and coat, and I nearly cracked my temples trying to use my brain. I hadn’t got far when there were steps on the stairs again, coming up, and in they came, all three of them. W-J was blinking again; apparently there was a bed where they had been waiting. My host ignored him and spoke to Skinny.
“What time does your watch say?”
Skinny glanced at his wrist. “Nine-thirty-two.”
“At half-past ten, not before that, untie his left hand. If he has a knife where he can get at it with his left hand, take it and — no, keep it. Leave him like that and go. It will take him five minutes or more to get his other hand and his feet free. Have you any objection to that?”
“Hell no. He’s got nothing on us.”
“Will you do it that way?”
“Right. Ten-thirty on the nose.”
The strangler took a roll of bills from his pocket, having a little difficulty on account of his gloves, peeled off two twenties, went to the table with them, and gave them a good rub on both sides with his handkerchief.
He held the bills out to Skinny. “I’ve paid the agreed amount, as you know. This extra is so you won’t get impatient and leave before half-past ten.”
“Don’t take it!” I called sharply.
Skinny, the bills in his hand, turned. “What’s the matter, they got germs?”
“No, but they’re peanuts, you sap! He’s worth ten grand to you! As is! Ten grand!”
“Nonsense,” the strangler said scornfully and started for the bed to get his hat and coat.
“Gimme my twenty,” W-J demanded.
Skinny stood with his head cocked, regarding me. He looked faintly interested but skeptical, and I saw it would take more than words. As the strangler picked up his hat and coat and turned, I jerked my body violently to the left and over I went, chair and all. I have no idea how I got across the floor to the door. I couldn’t simply roll on account of the chair, I couldn’t crawl without hands, and I didn’t even try to jump. But I made it, and not slow, and was there, down on my right side, the chair against the door and me against the chair, before any of them snapped out of it enough to reach me.
“You think,” I yapped at Skinny, “it’s just a job? Let him go and you’ll find out! Do you want his name? Mrs. Carlisle — Mrs. Homer N. Carlisle. Do you want her address?”
The strangler, on his way to me, stopped and froze. He — or I should say she — stood stiff as a bar of steel, the long-lashed eyes aimed at me.
“Missus?” Skinny demanded incredulously. “Did you say Missus?”
“Yes. She’s a woman. I’m tied up, but you’ve got her. I’m helpless, so you can have her. You might give me a cut of the ten grand.” The strangler made a movement. “Watch her!”
W-J, who had started for me and stopped, turned to face her. I had banged my head and it hurt. Skinny stepped to her, jerked both sides of her double-breasted coat open, released them, and backed up a step. “It could be a woman,” he said judiciously.
“Hell, we can find that out easy enough.” W-J moved. “Dumb as I am, I can tell that.”
“Go ahead,” I urged. “That will check her and me both. Go ahead!”
She made a noise in her throat. W-J got to her and put out a hand. She shrank away and screamed, “Don’t touch me!”
“I’ll be goddamned,” W-J said wonderingly.
“What’s this gag,” Skinny demanded, “about ten grand?”
“It’s a long story,” I told him, “but it’s there if you want it. If you’ll cut me in for a third it’s a cinch. If she gets out of here and gets safe home we can’t touch her. All we have to do is connect her as she is — here now, disguised — with Mrs. Homer N. Carlisle, which is what she’ll be when she gets home. If we do that we’ve got her shirt. As she is here now, she’s red hot. As she is at home, you couldn’t even get in.”
I had to play it that way. I just didn’t dare say call a cop, because if he felt about cops the way some rummies do he might have dragged me away from the door and let her go.
“So what?” Skinny asked. “I didn’t bring my camera.”
“I’ve got something better. Get me loose and I’ll show you.”
Skinny didn’t like that. He eyed me a moment and turned for a look at the others. Mrs. Carlisle was backed against the bed, and W-J stood studying her with his fists on his hips. Skinny returned to me. “I’ll do it. Maybe. What is it?”
“Damn it,” I snapped, “at least put me right side up. These cords are eating my wrists.”
He came and got the back of the chair with one hand and my arm with the other, and I clamped my feet to the floor to give us leverage. He was stronger than he looked. Upright on the chair again, I was still blocking the door.
“Get a bottle,” I told him, “out of my right-hand coat pocket — no, here, the coat I’ve got on. I hope to God it didn’t break.”
He fished it out. It was intact. He held it to the light to read the label.
“What is it?”
“Silver nitrate. It makes a black indelible mark on most things, including skin. Pull up her pants leg and mark her with it.”
“Then what?”
“Let her go. We’ll have her. With the three of us able to explain how and when she got marked, she’s sunk.”
“How come you’ve got this stuff?”
“I was hoping for a chance to mark her myself.”
“How much will it hurt her?”
“None at all. Put some on me — anywhere you like, as long as it don’t show.”
“You’d better give me the story — why she’ll be sunk. I don’t care how long it is.”
“Not till she’s marked.” I was firm. “I will as soon as you mark her.”
He studied the label again. I watched his face, hoping he wouldn’t ask if the mark would be permanent because I didn’t know what answer would suit him, and I had to sell him.
“A woman,” he muttered. “By God, a woman!”
“Yeah,” I said sympathetically. “She sure made a monkey of you.”
He swiveled his head and called, “Hey!”
W-J turned. Skinny commanded him, “Pin her up! Don’t hurt her.”
W-J reached for her. But, as he did so, all of a sudden she was neither man nor woman, but a cyclone. Her first leap, away from his reaching hand, was side-wise, and by the time he had realized he didn’t have her she had got to the table and grabbed the gun. He made for her and she pulled the trigger and down he went, tumbling right at her feet. By that time Skinny was almost to her and she whirled and blazed away again. He kept going, and from the force of the blow on my left shoulder I might have calculated, if I had been in a mood for calculating, that the bullet had not gone through Skinny before it hit me. She pulled the trigger a third time, but by then Skinny had her wrist and was breaking her arm.
“She got me!” W-J was yelling indignantly. “She got me in the leg!”
Skinny had her down on her knees.
“Come and cut me loose,” I called to him, “and give me that gun, and go find a phone.”
Except for my wrists and ankles and shoulder and head, I felt fine all over.