Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 41 by The Doorbell Rang Page A

water spurting from a faucet, and in a minute he came with a glass of water. He drank it, in no hurry, put the glass on the table, sat, and narrowed his eyes at me.
    “I’ve been a cop for thirty-six years,” he said, “and this is the first time I’ve ever passed the buck to an outsider.”
    I had my eyes smile a little. “I’m flattered. Or Mr. Wolfe is.”
    “Balls. He wouldn’t know flattery if it had labels pasted all over it, and neither would you. Goodwin, I’m going to tell you something that’s for you and Wolfe, and that’s
all.
No Lon Cohen or Saul Panzer or Lily Rowan. Is that understood?”
    “I don’t know why you drag in Miss Rowan, she’s merely a personal friend. And there’s no point in telling me something if we can’t use it.”
    “You’ll use it all right. But it did
not
come from me. Never, to anybody.”
    “Okay. Mr. Wolfe isn’t here to cinch it by giving youhis word of honor, so I’ll do it for him. For us. Our word of honor.”
    “That’ll have to do. You won’t have to take notes, with your tape-recorder memory. Does the name Morris Althaus mean anything to you?” he spelled it.
    I nodded. “I read the papers. One that you haven’t cracked. Shot. In the chest. Late November. No gun.”
    “Friday night, November twentieth. The body was found the next morning by a cleaning woman. Died between eight p.m. Friday and three a.m. Saturday. One shot, in at his chest and through the middle of his pump and on out at the back, denting a rib. The bullet went on and hit the wall forty-nine inches above the floor, but it was spent and only nicked it. He was on his back, legs stretched out, left arm straight at his side and right arm crossing his chest. Dressed but no jacket, in his shirtsleeves. No disorder, no sign of a struggle. As you said, no gun. Am I going too fast?”
    “No.”
    “Stop me if you have questions. It was the living room of his apartment on the third floor at Sixty-three Arbor Street—two rooms, kitchenette, and bath. He had been living there three years, alone, single, thirty-six years old. He was a free-lance writer, and in the last four years he had done seven articles for
Tick-Tock
magazine. He was going to be married in March to a girl named Marian Hinckley, twenty-four, on the staff of
Tick-Tock.
Of course I could go on. I could have brought the file. But there’s nothing in it about his movements or connections or associates that would help. It hasn’t helped us.”
    “You left out a little detail, the caliber of the bullet.”
    “I didn’t leave it out. There was no bullet. It wasn’t there.”
    My eyes widened. “Well. A damned neat murderer.”
    “Yeah. Neat and coolheaded. Judging from the wound, it was a thirty-eight or bigger. Now two facts. One: for three weeks Althaus had been collecting material for an article on the FBI for
Tick-Tock
magazine, and not a sign of it, nothing, was there in the apartment. Two: about eleven o’clock that Friday night three FBI men left the house at Sixty-three Arbor Street and went around the corner to a car and drove off.”
    I sat and looked at him. There are various reasons for keeping your mouth shut, but the best one is that you have nothing to say.
    “So they killed him,” Cramer said. “Did they go there to kill him? Certainly not. There are several ways to figure it. The one I like best is that they rang his number and he wasn’t answering the phone, so they thought he was out. They went and rang his bell and he wasn’t answering that either, so they opened the door and went in for a bag job. He pulled a gun, and one of them shot before he did. They train them good in that basement in Washington. They looked for what they wanted and got it and left, taking the bullet because it was from one of their guns.”
    I was listening. I never listened better. I asked, “Did he have a gun?”
    “Yes. S & W thirty-eight. He had a permit. It wasn’t there. They took it, you’d have to ask them why. There