The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

I was at my desk and Wolfe was at his. Don O’Neill was walking up and down with his hands in his pants pockets. The atmosphere was not hail-fellow-well-met. I had given Wolfe a full report, including O’Neill’s last-minute offer to me of five grand, and Wolfe’s self-esteem was such that he always regarded any attempt to buy me off as a personal affront, not to me but to him. I have often wondered who he would blame if I sold out once, himself or me.

He had repudiated without discussion O’Neill’s claim to a moral right to hear what was on the cylinders before anyone else, and when O’Neill had seen it was hopeless the look on his face was such that I had decided to make sure and had given him a good frisking. He was not packing any tools, but that had not improved the atmosphere. The question then arose, how were we to make the cylinders perform? The next day, a business day, it would have been easy, but this was Sunday. It was O’Neill who solved the problem. The President of the Stenophone Company was a member of the NIA and O’Neill knew him. He lived in Jersey. O’Neill phoned him and, without disclosing any incriminating details, got him to phone the manager of his New York office and showroom, who lived in Brooklyn, and instruct him to go to the showroom, get a Stenophone and bring it to Wolfe’s office. That was what we were sitting there waiting for-that is, Wolfe and I were sitting and O’Neill was walking.

“Mr. O’Neill.” Wolfe opened his eyes enough to see. “That tramping back and forth is extremely irritating.”

“I’m not going to leave this room,” O’Neill declared without halting.

“Shall I tie him up?” I offered.

Wolfe, ignoring me, told O’Neill, “It will probably be another hour or more. What about your statement that you got possession of this thing innocently? Your word. Do you want to explain that now? How you got it innocently?”

“I’ll explain it when I feel like it.”

“Nonsense. I didn’t take you for a nincompoop.”

“Go to hell.”

That always annoyed Wolfe. He said sharply, “Then you are a nincompoop. You have only two means of restraining Mr. Goodwin and me: your own physical prowess or an appeal to the police. The former is hopeless; Mr. Goodwin could fold you up and put you on a shelf. You obviously don’t like the idea of the police, I can’t imagine why, since you’re innocent. So how do you like this: when that machine has arrived and we have learned how to run it and the manager has departed, Mr. Goodwin will carry you out and set you on the stoop, and come back in and shut the door. Then he and I will listen to the cylinders.” O’Neill stopped walking, took his hands from his pockets and put them flat on the desk to lean on them, and glowered at Wolfe.

“You won’t do that!”

“I won’t. Mr. Goodwin will.”

“Damn you!” He held the pose long enough for five takes, then slowly straightened up. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where you got this thing.”

“All right, I’ll tell you. Last evening-”

“Excuse me. Archie. Your notebook. Go ahead, sir.”

“Last evening around eight-thirty I got a phone call at home. It was a woman. She said her name was Dorothy Unger and she was a stenographer at the New York office of the Bureau of Price Regulation. She said she had made a bad mistake. She said that in an envelope addressed to me she had enclosed something that was supposed to be enclosed in a letter to someone else. She said that she had remembered about it after she got home, and that she might even lose her job if her boss found out about it. She asked me when I received the envelope to mail the enclosure to her at her home, and she gave me her address. I asked her what the enclosure was and she said it was a ticket for a parcel that had been checked at Grand Central Station. I asked her some more questions and told her I would do what she asked me to.”

Wolfe put in, “Of course you phoned her back.”

“I couldn’t. She said she had no phone and was calling from a booth. This morning I received the envelope and the enclosure was-”

“This is Sunday,” Wolfe snapped.

“Damn it, I know it’s Sunday! It came special delivery. It contained a circular about price ceilings, and the enclosure. If it had been a weekday I would have communicated with the BPR office, but of course the office wasn’t open.” O’Neill gestured impatiently. “What does it matter what I would have done or what I thought? You know what I did do. Naturally, you know more about it than me, since you arranged the whole thing!”

“I see.” Wolfe put up a brow. “You think I arranged it?”

“No.” O’Neill leaned on the desk again. “I know you arranged it! What happened? Wasn’t Goodwin right there? I admit I was dumb when I came here Friday. I was afraid you had agreed to frame Boone’s murder on someone in the BPR, or at least someone outside the NIA. And already, you must have been, you were preparing to frame someone in the NIA! Me! No wonder you think I’m a nincompoop!”

He jerked erect, glared at Wolfe, turned to glare at me, went to the red leather chair and sat down, and said in a completely different voice, calm and controlled:

“But you’ll find that I’m not a nincompoop.”

“That point,” Wolfe said, frowning at him, “is relatively unimportant. The envelope you received this morning special delivery-have you got it with you?”

“No.”

“Where is it, at your home?”

“Yes.”