Rex Stout - And be a Villian

• Название: And be a Villian
• Автор: Rex Stout
• Жанр: Научная Фантастика

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“Strong said you'd probably show up,” he said. Neither his tone nor his expression indicated that they had been pacing up and down waiting for me. “Miss Fraser wants to know if it's something urgent.”

“Mr Wolfe thinks it is.”

“All right, come on.”

He was so preoccupied that he went into the elevator first.

I decided that if he tried leaving me alone in the enormous living-room with the assorted furniture, to wait until I was summoned, I would just stick to his heels, but that proved to be unnecessary. He couldn't have left me alone there because that was where they were.

Madeline Fraser was on the green burlap divan, propped against a dozen cushions.

Deborah Koppel was seated on the piano bench. Elinor Vance perched on a corner of the massive old black walnut table. Tully Strong had the edge of his sitter on the edge of the pink silk chair, and Nat Traub was standing. That was all as billed, but there was an added attraction. Also standing, at the far end of the long divan, was Nancylee Shepherd.

“It was Goodwin,” Bill Meadows told them, but they would probably have deduced it anyhow, since I had dropped my hat and coat in the hall and was practically at his elbow. He spoke to Miss Fraser: “He says it's something urgent.

Miss Fraser asked me briskly, “Will it take long, Mr Goodwin?” She looked clean and competent, as if she had had a good night's sleep, a shower, a healthy vigorous rub, and a thorough breakfast.

I told her I was afraid it might.

“Then I'll have to ask you to wait.” She was asking a favour. She certainly had the knack of being personal without making you want to back off. “Mr Traub has to leave soon for an appointment, and we have to make an important decision. You know, of course, that we have lost a sponsor. I suppose I ought to feel low about it, but I really don't. Do you know how many firms we have had offers from, to take the Starlite place? Sixteen!”

“Wonderful!” I admired. “Sure, I'll wait.” I crossed to occupy a chair outside the conference zone.

They forgot, immediately and completely, that I was there. All but one:

Nancylee. She changed position so she could keep her eyes on me, and her expression showed plainly that she considered me tricky, ratty, and unworthy of trust.

“We've got to start eliminating,” Tully Strong declared. He had his spectacles off, holding them in his hand. “As I understand it there are just five serious contenders.”

“Four,” Elinor Vance said, glancing at a paper she held. “I've crossed off Fluff, the biscuit dough. You said to, didn't you, Lina?”

“It's a good company,” Traub said regretfully. “One of the best. Their radio budget is over three million.”

You're just making it harder, Nat,” Deborah Koppel told him. “We can't take all of them. I thought your favourite was Meltettes.”

“It is,” Traub agreed, “but these are all very fine accounts. What do you think of Meltettes, Miss Fraser?” He was the only one of the bunch who didn't call her Lina.

“I haven't tried them.” She glanced around. “Where are they?”

Nancylee, apparently not so concentrated on me as to miss any word or gesture of her idol, spoke up: “There on the piano, Miss Fraser. Do you want them?”

“We have got to eliminate,” Strong insisted, stabbing the air with his spectacles for emphasis. “I must repeat, as representative of the other sponsors, that they are firmly and unanimously opposed to Sparkle, if it is to be served on the programme as Starlite was. They never liked the idea and they don't want it resumed.”

“It's already crossed off,” Elinor Vance stated. “With Fluff and Sparkle out, that leaves four.”

Not on account of the sponsors,” Miss Fraser put in. “We just happen to agree with them. They aren't going to decide this. We are.”

“You mean you are, Lina.” Bill Meadows sounded a little irritated. “What the hell, we all know that. You don't want Fluff because Cora made some biscuits and you didn't like 'em. You don't want Sparkle because they want it served on the programme, and God knows I don't blame you.”

Elinor Vance repeated, “That leaves four.”

“All right, eliminate!” Strong persisted.

“We're right where we were before,” Deborah Koppel told them. “The trouble is, there's no real objection to any of the four, and I think Bill's right, I think we have to put it up to Lina.”

“I am prepared,” Nat Traub announced, in the tone of a man burning bridges, “to say that I will vote for Meltettes.”

For my part, I was prepared to say that I would vote for nobody. Sitting there taking them in, as far as I could tell the only strain they were under was the pressure of picking the right sponsor. If, combined with that, one of them was contending with the nervous wear and tear of a couple of murders, he was too good for me. As the argument got warmer it began to appear that, though they were agreed that the final word was up to Miss Fraser, each of them had a favourite among the four entries left. That was what complicated the elimination.

Naturally, on account of the slip of paper I had in my pocket, I was especially interested in Elinor Vance, but the sponsor problem seemed to be monopolizing her attention as completely as that of the others. I would, of course, have to follow instructions and proceed with my errand as soon as they gave me a chance, but I was beginning to feel silly. While Wolfe had left it pretty vague, one thing was plain, that I was supposed to give them a severe jolt, and I doubted if I had what it would take. When they got worked up to the point of naming the winner-settling on the lucky product that would be cast for the role sixteen had applied for-bringing up the subject of an anonymous letter, even one implying that one of them was a chronic murderer, would be an anticlimax. With a serious problem like that just triumphantly solved, what would they care about a little thing like murder?

But I was dead wrong. I found that out incidentally, as a by-product of their argument. It appeared that two of the contenders were deadly rivals, both clawing for children's dimes: a candy bar called Happy Andy and a little box of tasty delights called Meltettes. It was the latter that Traub had decided to back unequivocally, and he, when the question came to a head which of those two to eliminate, again asked Miss Fraser if she had tried Meltettes. She told him no. He asked if she had tried Happy Andy. She said yes. Then, he insisted, it was only fair for her to try Meltettes.

“All right,” she agreed. There on the piano, Debby, that little red box. Toss it over.”

“No!” a shrill voice cried. It was Nancylee. Everyone looked at her. Deborah Koppel, who had picked up the little red cardboard box, asked her: “What's the matter?”

“It's dangerous!” Nancylee was there, a hand outstretched. “Give it to me. I'll eat one first!”

It was only a romantic kid being dramatic, and all she rated from that bunch, if I had read their pulses right, was a laugh and a brush-off, but that was what showed me I had been dead wrong. There wasn't even a snicker. No one said a word. They all froze, staring at Nancylee, with only one exception. That was Deborah Koppel. She held the box away from Nancylee's reaching hand and told her contemptuously: “Don't be silly.”

“I mean it!” the girl cried. “Let me-”

“Nonsense.” Deborah pushed her back, opened the flap of the box, took out an object, popped it into her mouth, chewed once or twice, swallowed, and then spat explosively, ejecting a spray of little particles.

I was the first, by maybe a tenth of a second, to realize that there was something doing. It wasn't so much the spitting, for that could conceivably have been merely her way of voting against Meltettes, as it was the swift, terrible contortion of her features. As I bounded across to her she left the piano bench with a spasmodic jerk, got erect with her hands flung high, and screamed: “Lina. Don't! Don't let-”

I was at her, with a hand on her arm, and Bill Meadows was there too, but her muscles all in convulsion took us along as she fought towards the divan, and Madeline Fraser was there to meet her and get supporting arms around her. But somehow the three of us together failed to hold her up or get her on to the divan. She went down until her knees were on the floor, with one arm stretched rigid across the burlap of the divan, and would have gone the rest of the way but for Miss Fraser, also on her knees.

I straightened, wheeled, and told Nat Traub: “Get a doctor quick.” I saw Nancylee reaching to pick up the little red cardboard box and snapped at her: “Let that alone and behave yourself.” Then to the rest of them: “Let everything alone, hear me?”

Chapter Twenty-Two Around four o'clock I could have got permission to go home if I had insisted, but it seemed better to stay as long as there was a chance of picking up another item for my report. I had already phoned Wolfe to explain why I wasn't following his instructions.

All of those who had been present at the conference were still there, very much so, except Deborah Koppel, who had been removed in a basket when several gangs of city scientists had finished their part of it. She had been dead when the doctor arrived. The others were still alive but not in a mood to brag about it.

At four o'clock Lieutenant Rowcliff and an assistant DA were sitting on the green burlap divan, arguing whether the taste of cyanide should warn people in time to refrain from swallowing. That seemed pointless, since whether it should or not it usually doesn't, and anyway the onjy ones who could qualify as experts are those who have tried it, and none of them is available. I moved on. At the big oak table another lieutenant was conversing with Bill Meadows, meanwhile referring to.notes on loose sheets of paper. I went on by. In the dining-room a sergeant and a private were pecking away at Elinor Vance. I passed through. In the kitchen a dick with a pugnose was holding a sheet of paper, one of a series, flat on the table while Cora, the female wrestler, put her initials on it.

Turning and going back the way I had come, I continued on to the square hall, opened a door at its far end, and went through. This, the room without a name, was mote densely populated than the others. Tully Strong and Nat Traub were on chairs against opposite walls. Nancylee was standing by a window. A dick was seated in the centre of the room, another was leaning against a wall, and Sergeant Purley Stebbins was sort of strolling around.

That called the roll, for I knew that Madeline Fraser was in the room beyond, her bedroom, where I had first met the bunch of them, having a talk with Inspector Cramer. The way I knew that, I had just been ordered out by Deputy Commissioner O’Hara, who was in there with them.

The first series of quickies, taking them one at a time on a gallop, had been staged in the dining-room by Cramer himself. Cramer and an assistant DA had sat at one side of the table, with the subject across from them, and me seated a little to the rear of the subject's elbow. The theory of that arrangement was that if the subject's memory showed a tendency to conflict with mine, I could tip Cramer off by sticking out my tongue or some other signal without being seen by the subject. The dick-stenographer had been at one end of the table, and other units of the personnel had hung around.

Since they were by no means strangers to Cramer and he was already intimately acquainted with their biographies, he could keep it brief and concentrate chiefly on two points: their positions and movements during the conference, and the box of Meltettes. On the former there were some contradictions on minor details, but only what you might expect under the circumstances; and I, who had been there, saw no indication that anyone was trying to fancy it up.

On the latter, the box of Meltettes, there was no contradiction at all. By noon Friday, the preceding day, the news had begun to spread that Starlite was bowing out, though it had not yet been published. For some time Meltettes had been on the Fraser waiting list, to grab a vacancy if one occurred. Friday morning Nat Traub, whose agency had the Meltettes account, had phoned his client the news and the client had rushed him a carton of its product by messenger. A carton held forty-eight of the little red cardboard boxes. Traub, wishing to lose no time on a matter of such urgency and importance, and not wanting to lug the whole carton, had taken one little box from it and dropped it in his pocket, and hotfooted it to the F.B.C. building, arriving at the studio just before the conclusion of the Fraser broadcast. He had spoken to Miss Fraser and Miss Koppel on behalf of Meltettes and handed the box to Miss Koppel.

Miss Koppel had passed the box on to Elinor Vance, who had put it in her bag-the same bag that had been used to transport sugared coffee in a Starlite bottle.

The three women had lunched in a nearby restaurant and then gone to Miss Fraser's apartment, where they had been joined later by Bill Meadows and Tully Strong for an exploratory discussion of the sponsor problem. Soon after their arrival at the apartment Elinor had taken the box of Meltettes from her bag and given it to Miss Fraser, who had put it on the big oak table in the living-room.

That had been between two-thirty and three o'clock Friday afternoon, and that was as far as it went. No one knew how or when the box had been moved from the oak table to the piano. There was a blank space, completely blank, of about eighteen hours, ending around nine o'clock Saturday morning, when Cora, on a dusting mission, had seen it on the piano. She had picked it up for a swipe of the dustcloth on the piano top and put it down again. Its next appearance was two hours later, when Nancylee, soon after her arrival at the apartment, had spotted it and been tempted to help herself, even going so far as to get her clutches on it, but had been scared off when she saw that Miss Koppel's eye was on her. That, Nancylee explained, was how she had known where the box was when Miss Fraser had asked.

As you can see, it left plenty of coom for inch-by-inch digging and sifting, which was lucky for everybody from privates to inspectors who are supposed to earn their pay, for there was no other place to dig at all. Relationships and motives and suspicions had already had all the juice squeezed out of them. So by four o'clock Saturday afternoon a hundred grown men, if not more, were scattered around the city, doing their damnedest to uncover another little splinter of a fact; any old fact, about that box of Meltettes. Some of them, of course, were getting results. For instance, word had come from the laboratory that the box, as it came to them, had held eleven Meltettes; that one of them, which had obviously been operated on rather skilfully, had about twelve grains of cyanide mixed into its insides; and that the other ten were quite harmless, with no sign of having been tampered with. Meltettes, they said, fitted snugly into the box in pairs, and the cyanided one had been on top, at the end of the box which opened.

And other reports, including, of course, fingerprints. Most of them had been relayed to Cramer in my presence. Whatever he may have thought they added up to, it looked to me very much like a repeat performance by the artist who had painted the sugared coffee picture: so many crossing lines and overlapping colours that no resemblance to any known animal or other object was discernible.