Free Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24 by Three Men Out Page B

you up here—don’t try to tell me he would have pulled it, or that you would have come, if you hadn’t both known Lewent had been murdered! I want a comment on that!”
    “Pfui,” Wolfe said mildly. “Don’t you think you have enough on your hands without—”
    He stopped to watch a performance, and this time it went to show how women’s minds work. Mrs. O’Shea was on her feet and moving, slowly as if in a trance, toward her employer, with tears streaming from her eyes and down her cheeks and her arms crossed on her chest. She stopped three steps short of him.
    “This is from heaven,” she said, in so low a voice that she could barely be heard. “The terror in my heart—oh, God, so long! You lied to me, and somewhere in me I knew it all the time! She did find out about us—she found out and told you so, and you killed her. Thank heaven, oh, thank heaven—”
    Inspector Cramer was there and had her elbow. Another woman’s mind was working too. Sylvia Marcy left the couch, walked across through the group to the wheelchair, and placed an object on Theodore Huck’s lap, on top of the maroon quilt. It was after she had moved away and startedfor the door that I saw what the object was—a wristwatch with a ring of red stones, maybe rubies.
    I can’t report on the fate of the other two gifts whose presentation had been precipitated by my presence. Months have passed, and only last week a jury convicted Theodore Huck of first-degree murder, but as far as I know Mrs. O’Shea and Miss Riff still have their watches.

The Zero Clue
1
    It began with a combination of circumstances, but what doesn’t? To mention just one, if there hadn’t been a couple of checks to deposit that morning I might not have been in that neighborhood at all.
    But I was, and, approving of the bright sun and the sharp clear air as I turned east off Lexington Avenue into Thirty-seventh Street, I walked some forty paces to the number and found it was a five-story yellow brick, clean and neat, with greenery in tubs flanking the entrance. I went in. The lobby, not much bigger than my bedroom, had a fancy rug, a fireplace without a fire, more greenery, and a watchdog in uniform who challenged me with a suspicious look.
    As I opened my mouth to meet his challenge, circumstances combined. A big guy in a dark blue topcoat and homburg, entering from the street, breezed past me, heading for the elevator, and as he did so the elevator door opened and a girl emerged. Four of us in that undersized lobby made a crowd, and we had to maneuver. Meanwhile I was speaking to the watchdog.
    “My name’s Goodwin, and I’m calling on Leo Heller.”
    Gazing at me, his expression changing, he blurted at me, “Ain’t you Archie Goodwin works for Nero Wolfe?”
    The girl, making for the exit, stopped a step short of it and turned, and the big guy, inside the elevator, blocked the door from closing and stuck his head out, while thewatchdog was going on, “I’ve saw your picture in the paper, and look, I want Nero Wolfe’s autograph.”
    It would have been more to the point if he had wanted mine, but I’m no hog. The man in the elevator, which was self-service, was letting the door close, but the girl was standing by, and I hated to disappoint her by denying I was me, as of course I would have had to do if I had been there on an operation that needed cover.
    I’ll have to let her stand there a minute while I explain that I was actually not on an operation at all. Chiefly, I was satisfying my curiosity. At five in the afternoon the day before, in Nero Wolfe’s office, there had been a phone call. After taking it I had gone to the kitchen—where Fritz was boning a pig’s head for what he calls
fromage de cochon
—to get a glass of water, and told Fritz I was going upstairs to do a little yapping.
    “He is so happy up there,” Fritz protested, but there was a gleam in his eye. He knows darned well that if I quit yapping the day would come when there would be