Trio for Blunt Instruments

Wolfe grunted. “So you saw someone.”

“I didn’t say I saw someone, I only said what if I told a cop I did? Did they have cops in Athens in four-oh-three B.C.?” He dabbed polish.

That took the conversation back to the ancient glories of Greece, but I didn’t listen. While Pete finished with Wolfe and then shined me, ignoring Wolfe’s advice, I practiced on him. The idea that a detective should stick strictly to facts is the bunk. One good opinion can sometimes get you further than a hundred assorted facts. So I practiced on Pete Vassos for that ten minutes. Had he killed a man half an hour ago? If the facts, now being gathered by cops, made it possible but left it open, how would I vote? I ended by not voting because I would have had to know about motive. For money, no, Pete wouldn’t. For vengeance, that would depend on what for. For fear, sure, if the fear was hot enough. So I couldn’t vote.

An hour later, when I walked crosstown on an errand to the bank, I stopped at the corner at Eighth Avenue for a look. The smashed-up Mr. Ashby had been removed, but the sidewalk in front of the building was roped off to keep the crowd of volunteer criminologists from interfering with the research of a couple of homicide scientists, and three cops were dealing with the traffic. Looking up, I saw a few heads sticking out of windows, but none on the tenth floor, which was third from the top.

The afternoon Gazette is delivered a little after five o’clock at the old brownstone on West 35th Street which is owned and lived in and worked in-when he works-by Nero Wolfe, and when we have no important operation going it’s a dead hour in the office. Wolfe is up in the plant rooms on the roof with Theodore for his four-to-six afternoon session with the orchids, Fritz is in the kitchen getting something ready for the oven or the pot, and I am killing time. So when the Gazette came that day it was welcomed, and I learned all it knew about the death of Mr. Dennis Ashby. He had hit the sidewalk at 10:35 A.M. and had died on arrival. No one had been found who had seen him come out of the window of his office on the tenth floor, but it was assumed that that was where he had come from, since the receptionist, Miss Frances Cox, had spoken with him on the phone at 10:28, and no other nearby window had been open.

If the police had decided whether to call it accident or suicide or murder they weren’t saying. If anyone had been with Ashby in the room when he left by the window, he wasn’t bragging about it. No one had gone to the room after 10:35, when Ashby had hit the sidewalk, for some fifteen minutes, when a bootblack named Peter Vassos had entered, expecting to give Ashby a shine. A few minutes later, when a cop who had got Ashby’s name from papers in his pocket had arrived on the tenth floor, Vassos had departed. Found subsequently at his home on Graham Street on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, he had been taken to the district attorney’s office for questioning.

Dennis Ashby, thirty-nine, married, no children, had been vice-president of Mercer’s Bobbins, Inc., in charge of sales and promotion. According to his business associates and his widow, he had been in good health and his affairs had been in order, and he had had no reason to kill himself. The widow, Joan, was grief-stricken and wouldn’t see reporters. Ashby had been below average in stature, 5 feet 7, 140 pounds. That bit, saved for the last, was a typical Gazette touch, suggesting that it would be no great feat to shove a man that size through a window, so it had probably been murder, and buy the Gazette tomorrow to find out.

At six o’clock the sound came from the hall of the elevator groaning its way down and jolting to a stop, and Wolfe entered. I waited until he had crossed to his desk and got his seventh of a ton lowered into the oversized chair to say, “They’ve got Pete down at the DA’s office. Apparently he didn’t go back to the building at all, and they-”

The doorbell rang. I got up and stepped to the hall, switched on the stoop light, saw a familiar brawny figure through the one-way glass, and turned. “Cramer.”

“What does he want?” Wolfe growled. That meant let him in. When Inspector Cramer of Homicide South is not to be admitted, with or without reason, Wolfe merely snaps, “No!” When he is to be admitted but is first to be riled, again with or without reason, Wolfe says, “I’m busy.” As for Cramer, he has moods too. When I open the door he may cross the sill and march down the hall without a grunt of greeting, or he may hello me man to man. Twice he has even called me Archie, but that was a slip of the tongue. That day he let me take his hat and coat, and when I got to the office he was in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk, but not settled back. That chair has a deep seat, and Cramer likes to plant his feet flat on the floor. I have never seen him cross his legs. He told Wolfe this wouldn’t take long, he just wanted a little information to fill in, and Wolfe grunted.

“About that man that came this morning to shine your shoes,” Cramer said. “Peter Vassos. What time did he get here?”

Wolfe shook his head. “You should know better, Mr. Cramer. You do know better. I answer questions only when you have established their relevance to your duty and to my obligation, and then at my discretion.”

“Yeah.” Cramer squeezed his lips together and counted three. “Yeah. Never make it simple, no matter how simple it is, that’s you. I’m investigating what may have been a murder, and Peter Vassos may have done it. If he did, he came straight to you afterwards. I know, he’s been coming more than three years, three times a week, to shine your shoes, but today he came early. I want to know what he said. I don’t have to remind you that you’re a licensed private detective, you’re not a lawyer, and communications to you are not privileged. What time did Vassos come this morning and what did he say?”

Wolfe’s brows were up. “Not established. ‘May have’ isn’t enough. A man can get through a window unaided.”

“This one didn’t. Close to certain. There was a thing on his desk, a big hunk of polished petrified wood, and it had been wiped. A thing like that on a man’s desk would have somebody’s prints or at least smudges, and it didn’t. It had been wiped. And at the back of his head, at the base of his skull, something smooth and round had hit him hard. Nothing he hit when he landed could have done that, and nothing on the way down. This hasn’t been released yet, but it will be in the morning.”

Wolfe made a face. “Then your second ‘may have.’ Supposing that someone hit him with that thing and then pushed him out the window, it couldn’t have been Mr. Vassos, by his account. A woman, a Miss Cox, saw him enter Mr. Ashby’s room; and within seconds after entering, finding no one there, he looked out the window and saw a crowd gathered below. If Miss Cox can set the time within-”

“She can. She does. But Vassos might have been in there before that. He could have entered by the other door, direct from the outer hall. That door was kept locked, but he could have knocked and Ashby let him in. He hit Ashby with that thing, killed him or stunned him, dragged or carried him to the window and pushed him out, left by that door, went down the hall and entered the anteroom and spoke to Miss Cox, went to Mercer’s room and gave him a shine, went to Busch’s room and gave him a shine, went to Ashby’s room by the inner hall, speaking to Miss Cox again, looked out of the window or didn’t, left by the door to the outer hall he had used before, took the elevator down and left the building, decided he had better come and see you, and came. What did he say?”