Please Pass the Guilt

job. In the past five months, the first five of 1969, we had had only six cases, and the fee had gone to five figures in only one of them--getting a damn fool out of a nasty mess with a bunch of smoothies he should have been on to at the first contact. So the checking account balance had lost a lot of weight, and to meet the upkeep of the old brownstone, including the weekly payroll for Theodore and Fritz and me, by about the middle of July Wolfe would have to turn some documents into cash, and that should be prevented if possible. So it wasn't just curiosity that sent me to the basement Thursday morning for old newspapers. The murder was two weeks old, but what had happened, and how, had been plain and clear in the first reports and had not been substantially revised or amended. At 3:17 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20, a man named Peter J. Odell had entered a room on the sixth floor of the CAN building on West Fifty-fourth Street, pulled open the bottom drawer of a desk, and died instantly. The bomb that shredded him was so powerful that it not only blew the metal desk up to the ceiling but even buckled two of the walls. CAN stood for Continental Air Network, which occupied the whole building, and Peter J. Odell had been Please Pass the Guilt 13 its vice-president in charge of development. The room and desk were not his; they belonged to Amory Browning, the vice- president in charge of programming. All right, that was what happened, but in addition to the main question, who had put the bomb in the drawer, there were others that had still not been answered, at least not for publication. It wasn't unheard of for a vice-president to enter another vice-president's room, but why had Odell opened that drawer? That drawer. It was known to enough people at CAN to get into both the Times and the Gazette that that drawer had rarely, possibly never, been opened by anyone but Browning himself because nothing was kept in it but a bottle or bottles of twelve-year-old Ten-Mile Creek bourbon. It had almost certainly been known to Odell. No one had admitted seeing Odell enter Browning's room. Helen Lugos, Browning's secretary, whose room adjoined his, had been down the hall in a file room. Kenneth Meer, Browning's chief assistant, had been down on the ground floor in conference with some technicians. Browning himself had been with Cass R. Abbott, the president of CAN, in his office--the corner office on that floor. If anyone knew why Odell had gone to Browning's room, he wasn't saying. So the answer to the question. Who put the bomb in the drawer? depended partly on the answer to another question: Whom did he expect to open the drawer? Rereading the accounts in fifteen copies of the Times and fifteen of the Gazette, I was impressed by how well I had absorbed the details of an event we had not been involved in, and by nothing else. There was nothing to give me a nudge on a start of what I had in mind. It was after eleven o'clock when I finished, so Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms, and I went up to the phone in my room to dial a number--the switchboard of the Gazette. It was an afternoon paper and Lon Cohen's line was usually busy from 10 a.m. to 4:20 p.m., but 14 Please Pass the Guilt I finally got him. I told him I wanted thirty seconds and he said I could have five. 'Then,' I said, 'I won't tell you about the steer that grew the Chateaubriands that Felix is saving for us. Can you meet me at Rusterman's at a quarter past six?' 'I can if I have to. Bringing what?' 'Just your tongue. And of course plenty of lettuce for later.' The 'later' meant the poker game at Saul Panzer's apartment which started at eight o'clock Thursday evenings. Lon made an appropriate retort about lettuce and hung up, and I dialed another number I didn't have to look up and got Felix, and told him that this time my request for the small room upstairs was strictly personal, not on behalf of Wolfe, and that if he was short on Chateaubriands, tornados would be fine. He asked what kind of flowers would be preferred, and I said my guest would be a man from whom I hoped to get some useful information, so instead of flowers make it four-leaf clovers for luck. An announcement to Wolfe that I wouldn't be there for dinner was not required, since I never was on Thursdays. Since his dinner time was 7:15, I couldn't eat at his table and be at Saul's poker table at eight. I merely mentioned casually, after we had finished with the morning mail, that I would be leaving around a quarter to six, before he came down from the plant rooms. I did not mention Kenneth Meer, and neither did he, but around the middle of the afternoon Vollmer phoned to say that Dr. Ostrow didn't want to know what Ronald Seaver's name was. Which of course was a polite lie. Dr. Ostrow would certainly have liked to know the name, but not from Wolfe if he had got it by a trick. The small room upstairs at Rusterman's had many memories for me, back to the days when Marko Vukcic was still alive and making it the best restaurant in New York, with frequent meals with his old friend Nero Wolfe helping to keep it the best. It was still better than good, as Lon Cohen remarked that evening after his third spoonful of Germiny & POseille, and Please Pass the Guilt 15 again after his second bite of Chateaubriand and his first sip of the claret. With about his fourth sip he said, 'I'd be enjoying this more --or less, I don't know which--if I knew the price. Of course you want something, or Nero Wolfe does. What?' I swallowed meat. 'Not Nero Wolfe. Me. He doesn't know about it and I don't want him to. I need some facts. I spent two hours this morning reading everything two great newspapers have printed about the murder of Peter J. Odell and I still don't know enough for my personal satisfaction. I thought a chat with you might be helpful.' He squinted at me. 'How straight is that? That Wolfe doesn't know you're feeding me.' 'As straight as from a ten to an ace.' His eyes aimed about a foot above my head, as they often did when he was deciding whether to call or raise, stayed there while I buttered a bite of roll, and leveled down to mine. 'Well, well,' he said. 'You could just put an ad in the Gazette. Of course with a box number since Wolfe mustn't know you're drumming.' Just looking at Lon you would never guess, from his neat little face and his slick black hair, how sharp he is. But people who know him know, including the publisher of the Gazette, which is why he has a room to himself two doors down the hall from the publisher's room. I shook my head. 'The kind of people I want to reach don't read Gazette ads. To be perfectly frank, I'm going stale and I need exercise. There must be plenty about that crowd that isn't fit to print. This room isn't bugged and neither am I. Have Cramer and the DA got a lead that they're saving?' 'No.' He forked peas. 'Almost certainly not. Of course the hitch is that they don't know who the bomb was intended for.' He put the peas where he wanted them. 'Probably no one does but the guy who planted it. It's reasonable to suppose it was meant for Browning, but after all it was Odell who got it. A 16 Please Pass the Guilt fact is a fact. Did Browning plant it for Odell? He did have a motive.' 'Good enough?' 'Apparently. Of course you know that Abbott is retiring the last of August and the board of directors was going to decide on his successor at a meeting scheduled for five o'clock that afternoon, and it would be either Browning or Odell. Odell certainly didn't plant the bomb for Browning and then open the drawer himself, but did Browning plant it and somehow get Odell to open it?' I sipped claret. 'Of course your best men are on it, or have been. What do they think?' 'They've quit thinking. All they have is guesses. Landry's guess is that Mrs. Browning put the bomb there for Helen Lugos, her husband's secretary, knowing, or thinking she knew, that Helen checked the bourbon supply every morning.' 'Did she? Check the bourbon supply every morning?' 'I don't know and I doubt if Cramer does. Helen isn't speaking to reporters and it is said that she isn't wasting any words with the law. Also I don't know for sure that Helen and Browning were bedding, but Landry thinks he does. Ask Inspector Cramer, he may know. Another guess, Gahagan's, is that Odell was setting the bomb for Browning and fumbled it. He has been trying for a week to trace where and how Odell got the bomb. Perlman's guess is that Abbott did it because he thought they were going to pick Browning for the new president and he was for Odell. He has three theories on why Odell went to Browning's room and opened the drawer, none of them much good. Damiano's guess is that Helen Lugos did it, to get Browning, but he is no better than Permian on why Odell homed in.' 'Why would Helen want to get Browning?' 'Sex.' 'That's not responsive.' 'Certainly it's responsive. When sex comes in by the window, logic leaves by the door. When two people collaborate Please Pass the Guilt 17 sexually, either one is capable of doing anything and nobody can be sure he knows why he did it. I think Damiano's guess is based on something a man named Meer, Kenneth Meer, told him. Meer is Browning's chief of staff. Damiano got him talking the day after it happened--they had been choir boys together at St. Andrew's--and Meer said that anyone who wanted to know how it happened should concentrate on Helen Lugos. Of course Damiano kept at him then, but Meer backed off. And as I said, Helen isn't doing any talking.' 'Has Damiano told Inspector Cramer what Meer said?' 'Of course not. He didn't even tell us until a couple of days ago. He was hoping to earn a medal.' 'Does anybody guess that Meer did it?' 'No one at the Gazette does. Naturally he has been considered, everybody has, but even for a wild guess you've got to have a motive. Meer certainly wouldn't have wanted to get Browning; if Browning is made president, Meer will be right up near the top. And how could he have got Odell to go to Browning's room and open that drawer? Of course guesses are a dime a dozen. If the bomb was intended for Browning, there are at least a dozen possible candidates. For instance, Made- line Odell, now the widow Odell. She had been expecting her husband to be the CAN president ever since she married him, twenty years ago, and it looked as if Browning was going to get it instead. Or Theodore Falk, the Wall Street Falk, old friend of the Odells and a member of the CAN board of directors. Of course he didn't do it himself, but millionaires don't have to do things themselves. Or Sylvia Venner. You know?' I nodded. ' 'The Big Town.'' 'Right. She had that program for two years and Browning bounced her. Now she does chores, and she hates Browning's guts. I could name more. Of course if the bomb was intended for Odell, there are candidates for that too, but for them there's the problem of getting Odell to enter that room and open that drawer.' 18 Please Pass the Guilt I swallowed my last bite of Chateaubriand and pushed the button for Pierre. 'You said Odell's wife had been expecting him to be president ever