Dr. Brady was shaking my hand. He said with a laugh, “Don’t mind her, Mr. Goodwin. It’s a pose. She pretends she can’t remember the name of anyone not in the Social Register. Since her entire career is founded on snobbery-”
“Snob yourself,” Bess Huddleston snorted. “You were born to it and believe in it. With me it’s business. But for heaven’s sake let’s not-Mister, you devil, don’t you dare tickle my feet!”
Mister went right ahead. He already had the red slippers off, and, depositing them right side up on a flagstone, he proceeded to tickle the sole of her right foot. She screamed and kicked him. He tickled the other foot, and she screamed again and kicked him with that. That appeared to satisfy him, for he started off, but his next performance was unpremeditated. A man in a butler’s jacket, approaching with a tray of glasses and bottles, had just reached the end of the swing when Mister bumped him, and bumped him good. The man yelled and lost control, and down went the works. Dr. Brady caught one bottle on the fly, and I caught another, but everything else was shattered on the stones. Mister went twenty feet through the air and landed in a chair and sat there and giggled, and the man was trembling all over.
“For God’s sake, Haskell,” Bess Huddleston said, “don’t leave now, with guests coming for dinner. Go to your room and have a drink and lie down. We’ll clean this up.”
“My name is Hoskins,” the man said in a hollow tone.
“So it is. Of course it is. Go and have a drink.”
The man went, and the rest of us got busy. When Mister got the idea, which was at once, he waddled over to help, and I’ll say this much for him, he was the fastest picker-up of pieces of broken glass I have ever seen. Janet went and came back with implements, among them a couple of brooms, but the trouble was that you couldn’t make a comprehensive sweep of it on account of the strips of turf between the flagstones. Larry went for another outfit of drinks, and finally Maryella solved the problem of the bits of glass in the grass strips by bringing a vacuum cleaner. Bess Huddleston stayed on the swing. Dr. Brady carried off the debris, and eventually we got back to normal, everybody with a drink, including Mister, only his was non-alcoholic, or I wouldn’t have stayed. What that bird would have done with a couple of Martinis under his fur would have been something to watch from an airplane.
“This seems to be a day for breaking things,” Bess Huddleston said, sipping an old-fashioned. “Someone broke my bottle of bath salts and it splattered all over the bathroom and just left it that way.”
“Mister?” Maryella asked.
“I don’t think so. He never goes in there. I didn’t dare ask the servants.”
But apparently at the Huddleston place there was no such thing as settling down for a social quarter of an hour, whether Mister was drunk or sober, only the next disturbance wasn’t his fault, except indirectly. The social atmosphere was nothing to brag about anyhow, because it struck me that certain primitive feelings were being felt and not concealed with any great success. I’m not so hot at nuances, but it didn’t take a Nero Wolfe to see that Maryella was working on Larry Huddleston, that the sight of the performance was giving Dr. Brady the fidgets in his facial muscles, that Janet was embarrassed and trying to pretend she didn’t notice what was going on, and that Daniel was absent-mindedly drinking too much because he was worrying about something. Bess Huddleston had her ear cocked to hear what I was saying to Dr. Brady, but I was merely dating him to call at the office. He couldn’t make it that evening, but tomorrow perhaps . . . his schedule was very crowded. . . .
The disturbance came when Bess Huddleston said she guessed she had better go and see if there was going to be any dinner or anyone to serve it, and sat up and put on her slippers. That is, she put one on; the second one, she stuck her foot in, let out a squeak, and jerked the foot out again.
“Damn!” she said. “A piece of glass in my slipper! Cut my toe!”
Mister bounced over to her, and the rest of us gathered around. Since Brady was a doctor, he took charge of matters. I didn’t amount to much, a shallow gash half an inch long on the bottom of her big toe, but it bled some, and Mister started whining and wouldn’t stop. Brother Daniel brought first-aid materials from the living room, and after Brady had applied a good dose of iodine, he did a neat job with gauze and tape.
“It’s all right, Mister,” Bess Huddleston said reassuringly. “You don’t-hey!” ,
Mister had swiped the iodine bottle, uncorked it, and was carefully depositing the contents, drop by drop, onto one of the strips of turf. He wouldn’t surrender it to Brady or Maryella, but he gave it to his mistress on demand, after re-corking it himself, and she handed it to her brother.
It was after six o’clock, and I wasn’t invited to dinner, and anyway I had had enough zoology for one day, so I said good-bye and took myself off. When I got the roadster onto the highway and was among my fellows again, I took a long deep breath of the good old mixture of gasoline and air and the usual odors.
When I got back to the office Wolfe, who was making marks on a big map of Russia he had bought recently, said he would take my report later, so, after comparing the type on my sample with that on the Horrocks letter and finding they were written on the same machine, I went up to my room for a shower and a change. After dinner, back in the office, he told me to make it a complete recital, leaving out nothing, which meant that he had made no start and formed no opinion. I told him I preferred a written report, because when I delivered it verbally he threw me off the track by making faces and irritating me, but he leaned back and shut his eyes and told me to proceed.
It was nearly midnight when I finished, what with the usual interruptions. When he’s doing a complete coverage, he thinks nothing of asking such a question as, “Did the animal pour the iodine on the grass with its right paw or its left?” If he were a movable object and went places himself it would save me a lot of breath, but then that’s what I get paid for. Partly.
He stood up and stretched, and I yawned. “Well,” I asked offensively, “got it sewed up? Including proof?”
“I’m sleepy,” he said, starting off. At the door he turned. “You made the usual quantity of mistakes, naturally, but probably the only one of importance was your failure to investigate the matter of the broken bottle in Miss Huddleston’s bathroom.”
“Pah,” I said. “If that’s the best you can do. It was not a bottle of anonymous letters. Bath salts.”
“All the same it’s preposterous. It’s even improbable. Break a bottle and simply go off, leaving it scattered around? No one would do that.”
“You don’t know that orangutan. I do.”
“Not orangutan. Chimpanzee. It might have done it, yes. That’s why you should have investigated. If the animal did not do it, there’s something fishy about it. Highly unnatural. If Dr. Brady arrives by eight fifty-nine, I’ll see him before I go up to the plant rooms. Good night.”
Chapter 4
That was Tuesday night, August 19th. On Friday the 22nd Bess Huddleston got tetanus. On Monday the 25th she died. To show how everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked when he was discussing the case with a friend the other day, if there had been a heavy rainfall in Riverdale between the 19th and 26th it would have been impossible to prove it was murder, let alone catch the murderer. Not that he showed any great-oh, well.
On Wednesday the 20th Dr. Brady came to the office for an interview with Wolfe, and the next day brother Daniel and nephew Larry came. About all we got out of that was that among the men nobody liked anybody. In the meantime, upon instructions from Wolfe, I was wrapping my tentacles about Janet, coaxing her into my deadly embrace. It really wasn’t an unpleasant job, because Wednesday afternoon I took her to a ball game and was agreeably surprised to find that she knew a bunt from a base on balls, and Friday evening we went to the Flamingo Roof and I learned that she could dance nearly as well as Lily Rowan. She was no cuddler and a little stiff, but she went with the music and always knew what we were going to do. Saturday morning I reported to Wolfe regarding her as follows: