Some Buried CaesarThe Golden Spiders by Rex Stout

Author:Rex Stout [Stout, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76216-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

I asked, “Shall I go get him?”

Wolfe said, “No. We’ll wait.”

We were in a room at the exposition offices, not the one where we had met Osgood Tuesday afternoon. This was smaller and contained desks and files and chairs and was cluttered with papers. It was noon. On leaving the courthouse with Wolfe I had been surprised to find that our sedan was parked out front; he explained that an Osgood employee had brought it from where I had left it the day before. He had instructed me to head for the exposition grounds, and our first stop had been the main exhibits building, where we gave the orchids an inspection and a spraying, and Wolfe arranged with an official for their care until Saturday, and the crating and shipping when the exposition closed. Then we had walked to the offices and been shown to Room 9. I was allowed to know that we expected to meet Lew Bennett there, but he hadn’t arrived, and at noon we were still waiting for him.

I said, “If you ask my opinion, I think the best thing we can do is disguise ourselves as well as possible and jump in the car and drive like hell for New York. Or maybe across the line to Vermont and hide out in an old marble quarry.”

“Stop that scratching.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets. “You realize that I have been studying your face for 10 years, its lights and its shadows, the way it is arranged, and the way you handle it. And I say in all disrespect that I do not believe that the evidence which you mentioned to those false alarms is in existence.”

“It isn’t.”

“I refer to the evidence which you promised to deliver within 24 hours.”

“So do I.”

“But it doesn’t exist.”

“No.”

“But you’re going to deliver it?”

“Yes.”

I stared. “Okay. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it’s so painful to see that I wish it had happened to me first. Once at my mother’s knee, back in 1839 I think it was—”

“Shut up, I’m going to make it.”

“What? The bughouse?”

“The evidence. There is none. The bull was cremated. Nothing else remained to demonstrate the motive for murdering Clyde, and even if there had been other incriminating details—and there were none—they would have been useless. As for Bronson, Mr. Lake reports a vacuum. No fingerprints, except yours on the wallet, no one who remembers seeing him enter the shed, no one who saw him in anybody’s company, no one with any discoverable motive. From the New York end, tracing his phone call, so far nothing—and of course there can be nothing. A complete vacuum. Under the circumstances there is only—ah! Good morning, sir.”

The Secretary of the National Guernsey League, having entered and shut the door behind him, approached. He looked like a man who has been interrupted, but nothing like as exasperated as he had been the preceding day. His greeting was affable but not frothy, and he sat down as if he didn’t expect to stay long.

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