Inspector Hennessy of uptown Homicide was tall and straight, silver-haired, with a bony face and quick-moving gray eyes. Some two years ago he had told Nero Wolfe that if he ever again tried poking into a murder in his territory he would be escorted to the Harlem River and dunked. But when, at nine o’clock that evening, Hennessy breezed through the clubroom, passing in front of the leather couch where Wolfe was seated with a ham sandwich in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, he didn’t even toss a glance. He was much too busy.
The police commissioner was in Manager Kinney’s office with Chisholm and others. The district attorney and an assistant were in the locker room, along with an assortment of Homicide men, giving various athletes their third or fourth quiz. There were still a couple of dozen city employees in the clubhouse, though the scientists — the photographers and fingerprint hounds — had all finished and gone.
I had standing as the finder of the corpse, but also I was a part of Wolfe. Technically Wolfe was not poking into a murder; he had been hired by Chisholm, before the corpse had been found, to find out who had doped the ballplayers. However, in gathering facts for relay to Wolfe, I had not discriminated. I saw Nick Ferrone’s locker opened and the contents examined, with nothing startling disclosed. While I was in Kinney’s office watching a basket squad load the corpse and carry it out, I heard a lieutenant on the phone giving instructions for a roundup of gamblers throughout the metropolitan area. A little later I picked up a bunch of signed statements from a table and sat down and read them through, without anyone’s noticing. By that time the commissioner and the DA had arrived, and they had eight or nine quiz posts going in the various rooms, and Hennessy was doing his damnedest to keep it organized.
I collected all I could for Wolfe. The bat that had been used to crack Ferrone’s skull was no stock item, but a valued trophy. With it, years back, a famous Giant had belted a grand slam home run that had won a pennant, and the bat had been displayed on a wall rack in the manager’s office. The murderer could have simply grabbed it from the rack. It had no usable fingerprints. Of eight bottles of Beebright left in the cooler, the two in front had been doped, and the other six had not. No other drinks had been tampered with. Everyone had known of the liking of those four — Baker, Prentiss, Neill, and Eston — for Beebright, and their habit of drinking a bottle of it before a game. No good prints. No sign anywhere of any container of tablets of sodium phenobarbital. And a thousand other negatives — for instance, the clubhouse boy, Jimmie Burr. The custom was that, when he wasn’t around, the players would put chits in a little box for what they took, and he hadn’t been around. For that game someone had got him a box seat, and he had beat it to the grandstand while most of the players were in the locker room changing. A sergeant jumped on it: who had got him out of the way by providing a ticket for a box seat? But it had been Art Kinney himself, the manager.
Around eight o’clock they turned a big batch loose. Twenty Giants, including coaches and the bat boy, were allowed to go to the locker room to change, under surveillance, and then let out, with instructions to keep available. They were not in the picture as it then looked. It was established that Ferrone had arrived at the clubhouse shortly after twelve o’clock and had got into uniform; a dozen of them had been in the locker room when he had. He had been present during a pre-game session with Kinney in the clubroom, and no one remembered seeing him leave afterward. After they had trooped out and down the stairs, emerged onto the field, and crossed it, Ferrone’s absence was not noticed until they had been in the dugout some minutes. As the cops figured it, he couldn’t have been slammed with a baseball bat in Kinney’s office, only a few yards away, while the team was in the clubroom, and therefore all who had unquestionably left for the field with the gang, and had stayed there, were in the clear until further notice. With them went Pierre Mondor, who had wanted to see a ball game and had picked a beaut.
As I said, when Inspector Hennessy breezed through the clubroom at nine o’clock, coming from the locker room and headed for Kinney’s office, he didn’t even toss a glance at the leather couch where Wolfe and I were seated. He disappeared. But soon he was back again, speaking from the doorway.
“Come in here, will you, Wolfe?”
“No,” Wolfe said flatly. “I’m eating.”
“The commissioner wants you.”
“Is he eating?” Waiting for no reply, Wolfe turned his head and bellowed, “Mr. Skinner! I’m dining!”
It wasn’t very polite, I thought, to be sarcastic about the sandwiches and beer. Chisholm had provided. Hennessy started a remark which indicated that he agreed with me, but it was interrupted by the appearance of Commissioner Skinner at his elbow. Hennessy stepped in and aside, and Skinner entered, followed by Chisholm, and approached the couch. He spoke. “Dining?”
“Yes, sir.” Wolfe reached for another sandwich. “As you see.”
“Not your accustomed style.”
Wolfe grunted and bit into the sandwich.
Skinner kept it friendly. “I’ve just learned that four men who were told they could go are still here — Baker, Prentiss, Neill, and Eston. When Inspector Hennessy asked them why, they told him that Mr. Chisholm asked them to stay. Mr. Chisholm says that he did so at your suggestion. He understood that you want to speak with them after our men have all left. Is that correct?”
Wolfe nodded. “I made it quite plain, I thought.”
“M-m-m-m.” The commissioner regarded him. “You see, I know you fairly well. You wouldn’t dream of hanging on here half the night to speak with those men merely as a routine step in an investigation. And besides, at Mr. Chisholm’s request you have already been permitted to speak with them, and with several others. You’re cooking something. Those are the four men who were drugged, but they left the clubhouse for the field with the rest of the team, so, the way we figure it, none of them killed Ferrone. How do you figure it?”
Wolfe swallowed the last of a well-chewed bite. “I don’t.”
Hennessy growled and set his jaw. Skinner said, “I don’t believe it,” with his tone friendlier than his words. “You’re cooking something,” he insisted. “What’s the play with those four men?”
Wolfe shook his head. “No, sir.”
Hennessy took a step forward. “Look,” he said, “this is my territory. My name’s Hennessy. You don’t turn this murder into a parlor game.”
Wolfe raised brows at him. “Murder? I am not concerned with murder. Mr. Chisholm hired me to investigate the drugging of his employees. The two events may of course be connected, but the murder is your job. And they were not necessarily connected. I understand that a man named Moyse is in there now with the district attorney” — Wolfe aimed a thumb at the door to the locker room — “because it has been learned that he has twice within a month assaulted Mr. Ferrone physically, through resentment at Ferrone’s interest in his wife, injudiciously displayed. And that Moyse did not leave the clubhouse with the others, and arrived at the dugout three or four minutes later, just before Ferrone’s absence was noticed. For your murder, Mr. Hennessy, that should be a help; but it doesn’t get me on with my job, disclosure of the culprit who drugged the drinks. Have you charged Mr. Moyse?”
“No.” Hennessy was curt. “So you’re not interested in the murder?”
“Not as a job, since it’s not mine. But if you want a comment from a specialist, you’re closing your lines too soon.”
“We haven’t closed any lines.”
“You let twenty men walk out of here. You are keeping Moyse for the reasons given. You are keeping Doctor Soffer, I suppose, because when Ferrone was missed in the dugout Soffer came here to look for him, and he could have found him here alive and killed him. You are keeping Mr. Durkin, I suppose again, because he too could have been here alone with Ferrone. He says he left the clubhouse shortly before the team did and went to his seat in the grandstand, and stayed there. Has he been either contradicted or corroborated?”
“No.”
“Then you regard him as vulnerable on opportunity?”
“Yes.”
“Are you holding Mr. Chisholm for the same reason?”
Chisholm made a noise. Skinner and Hennessy stared. Skinner said, “We’re not holding Mr. Chisholm.”
“You should be, for consistency,” Wolfe declared. “This afternoon, when I reached my seat in the stands — of which only the front edge was accessible to me — at twenty minutes past one, the Mayor and others were there in a nearby box, but Mr. Chisholm was not. He arrived a few minutes later. He has told me that when he arrived with his party, including the Mayor, about one o’clock, he had the others escorted to the stands and the box, that he started for the clubhouse for a word with his employees, that he was delayed by the crowd and decided it was too late, that he went on a private errand to a men’s room and then proceeded to the box. If the others are vulnerable on opportunity, so is he.”
They made remarks, all three of them, not appreciative. Wolfe put the bottle to his lips, tilted it and his head, and swallowed beer. Paper cups had been supplied, but he hates them.
He put the bottle down empty. “I was merely,” he said mildly, “commenting on the murder as a specialist. As for my job, learning who drugged the drinks, I haven’t even made a start. How could I in this confounded hubbub? Trampled by an army. I have been permitted to sit here and talk to people, yes, with a succession of your subordinates standing behind me, breathing down my neck. One of them was chewing gum! Pfui. Working on a murder and chewing gum!”
“We’ll bounce him,” Hennessy said dryly. “The commissioner has asked you, what’s the play with those four men?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Not only those four. I included others in my request to Mr. Chisholm — Doctor Soffer, Mr. Kinney, Mr. Durkin, and of course Mr. Chisholm himself. I am not arranging a parlor game. I make a living as a professional detective, and I need their help on this job I’ve undertaken. I think I know why, engrossed as you are with the most sensational case you’ve had in years, you’re spending all this time chatting with me; you suspect I’m contriving a finesse. Don’t you?”
“You’re damn right we do.”
Wolfe nodded. “So I am.”
“You are?”
“Yes.” Wolfe suddenly was peevish. “Haven’t I sat here for five hours, submerged in your pandemonium? Haven’t you all the facts that I have, and many more besides? Haven’t you a thousand men to command — indeed, twenty thousand — and I one? One little fact strikes me as apparently it has not struck you, and in my forlorn desperation I decided to test my interpretation of it. For that test I need help, and I ask Mr. Chisholm to provide it, and—”
“We’ll be glad to help,” Skinner cut in. “Which fact, and how do you interpret it?”
“No, sir.” Wolfe was positive. “It is my one slender chance to earn a fee. I intend—”
“We may not know this fact.”
“Certainly you do. I have stated it explicitly during this conversation, but I won’t point at it for you. If I did you’d spoil it for me, and, slender as it is, I intend to test it. I am not beset with the urgency of murder, as you are, but I’m in a fix. I don’t need a motive strong enough to incite a man to murder, merely one to persuade him to drug some bottled drinks — mildly, far from lethally. A thousand dollars? Twenty thousand? That would be only a fraction of the possible winnings on a World Series game — and no tax to pay. The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime. As for opportunity, anyone at all could have slipped in here late this morning, before others had arrived, with drugged bottles of that drink and put them in the cooler — and earned a fortune. Those twenty men you let go, Mr. Hennessy — of how many of them can you say positively that they did not drug the drinks?”
The inspector was scowling at him. “I can say that I don’t think any of them killed Ferrone.”
“Ah, but I’m not after the murderer; that’s your job.” Wolfe upturned a palm. “You see why I am driven to a forlorn finesse. It is my only hope of avoiding a laborious and possibly fruitless—”
What interrupted him was the entry of a man through the door to the locker room. District Attorney Megalech was as masterful as they come, although bald as a door-knob. He strode across and told Skinner and Hennessy he wanted to speak with them, took an elbow of each, and steered them to and through the door to Kinney’s office. Chisholm, uninvited, wheeled and followed them.
Wolfe reached for a sandwich and took a healthy bite. I arose, brushed off crumbs, shook my pants legs down, and stood looking down at him. I asked, “How good is this fact you’re saving up?”
“Not very.” He chewed and swallowed. “Good enough to try if we got nothing better. Evidently they have nothing at all. If they had — but you heard them.”
“Yeah. You told them they have all the facts you have, but they haven’t. The one I gave you about Mrs. Moyse? That’s not the one you’re interpreting privately?”
“No.”
“She might be still around, waiting. I might possibly get something better than the one you’re saving. Shall I go try?”
He grunted. I took it for a yes, and moved. Outside the door to the hall and stairs stood one in uniform with whom I had already had a few little words. I addressed him. “I’m going down to buy Mr. Wolfe a pickle. Do I need to be passed out or in?”
“You?” He used only the right half of his mouth for talking. “Shoot your way through. Huh?”
“Right. Many thanks.” I went.