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Title: Three Men Out
Series:
Nero Wolfe #23
Author: Rex Stout
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages:
130
Words: 59K
First
off,
I couldn’t easily get rid of the links in the synopsis below. I use
LibreOffice to write my initial reviews and there is an option to
remove all formatting from copied text. I assumed that would take
care off it, but it didn’t. I didn’t care enough to go through
and individually de-link everything. Which is stupid, because linking
is as much a format issue as font size, type and spacing is. Oh well,
whatever. I’m not real happy with libreoffice right now. I feel
like it stabbed me in the back.
I
enjoyed this collection of 3 stories, just like I expected I would. I
might have even given it 4stars except for two things.
First,
the final story is about baseball and I find baseball deadly boring.
If it had been the first story, I probably would have forgotten about
it and it wouldn’t have influenced me. But it was the last story
and so that was the note I went out of the book on. Not necessarily
bad, but not good like I wanted.
Secondly,
Nero Wolfe keeps leaving his bloody house. I have commented on it
before, but Stout really breaks the “Wolfe doesn’t leave the
house” rule all the time. Too many times for me. In two of the
three stories here he leaves the house! No, no, no! If you have
rules, you obey them and only break them once every 7 or 8 books.
Otherwise it’s like a piscetarian claiming they are a vegetarian,
ie, it’s utter balderdash.
I
know that’s a lot of complaining. But I still like these stories
and highly recommend them. It’s more like going to a high class
restaurant and being irritated that your waiter didn’t put “quite
enough” shredded parmesan on your plate of capellini with artisan
tomato sauce :-/ So let me tell you, this waiter is NOT going to be
getting a big tip from me today.
★★★✬☆
Table of Contents & Synopses from Wikipedia
"Invitation
to Murder":
Herman Lewent offers to pay Wolfe
$1,000 to solve a problem regarding his family's finances. Lewent's
father left his entire estate to his daughter Beryl in his will 20
years earlier, with a provision that she should look after Lewent's
needs. She sent him $1,000 per month until her death one year ago,
leaving the estate to her husband, Theodore Huck. Lewent has tried to
persuade Huck to give him a portion of the money, to no avail; Huck
intends to keep sending him only the $1,000 monthly payment. Now,
Lewent is concerned that one of Huck's three attractive female
employees is trying to seduce him into cutting Lewent off, and he
wants Wolfe to find out which one it is. When Wolfe rejects the case
as a family squabble, Lewent mentions that Beryl died
of ptomaine poisoning
at Huck's house; he believes that one of the three women murdered
her. Wolfe turns the case over to Archie, who accepts and travels to
Huck's mansion, where Lewent also lives.
Huck's declining health has confined
him to a wheelchair, which is motorized and outfitted with various
conveniences. The three employees Lewent suspects are secretary
Dorothy Riff, nurse Sylvia Marcy, and housekeeper Cassie O'Shea.
Archie questions Huck, using the pretense that Beryl might have
hinted at entrusting one of them with part of her father's estate to
be turned over to Lewent, in an attempt to draw out information on
them. Huck sees through the deception and even believes it might be
part of a blackmail scheme on Lewent's part, so Archie questions the
women instead, as well as Huck's nephew Paul Thayer, who lives in the
mansion and who warned Lewent about the women's possible designs on
the money. Stopping at Lewent's room, Archie finds him lying dead on
the floor inside, the base of his skull caved in. However, the skin
is not broken, there is no blood on the floor, and the blow appears
to have been delivered at an upward angle. The geometry of the room
leads him to believe that Lewent was killed elsewhere and his body
moved to this location.
Archie calls Wolfe with an update, then
continues his questioning of the household members without revealing
his knowledge of Lewent's death to any of them. He is thrown off by
Huck's decision to present Dorothy, Sylvia, and Cassie each with an
expensive jeweled wristwatch. Finding himself stumped after dinner
that evening, Archie calls Wolfe and tricks him into coming to the
mansion by faking an attack on himself. Wolfe is furious that Archie
would stoop to such methods, but prepares to question the household
about both Lewent's allegations and Beryl's death. He learns that
Beryl had died after eating pickled artichokes at a party; since she
had taken them all and no other guests became ill, it was assumed
that the artichokes had been poisoned.
Wolfe offers Huck a deal: for $100,000,
he will investigate and use what he finds to persuade Lewent that his
suspicions are groundless, with the caveat that no one will ever tell
Lewent of this arrangement. Huck accepts the terms and everyone
agrees to keep them secret, and Wolfe and Archie excuse themselves to
speak with Lewent in his room. Only after Wolfe has examined the body
and the scene does he allow Archie to call the police and tell the
others of the murder. Inspector Cramer and his men soon arrive to
question the household members; while this is going on, Archie
suddenly realizes that he knows how Lewent's body was transported
without attracting attention.
Wolfe identifies Huck as the murderer
and explains that he tricked Lewent into bending over to pick
something up off the floor, then struck him with a spherical
paperweight. The smooth surface would not break the skin, and
Lewent's posture would make it appear that the blow was delivered
upward. Huck then put the body in his lap, covered it with the quilt
he always used to keep his legs warm, and drove his wheelchair to
Lewent's room to dump the body. He was eager to accept Wolfe's
$100,000 offer because he knew that Lewent would never hear of the
results, and he had earlier poisoned Beryl in order to inherit her
fortune. Cassie provides further motive, saying that Huck had been
having an affair with her; when Beryl found out about it, Huck made
up his mind to kill her.
Sylvia removes her wristwatch and puts
it in Huck's lap as Cramer prepares to take him into custody. Even
though he is eventually convicted, Archie does not know if Dorothy or
Cassie ever returned theirs.
"The
Zero Clue":
Leo Heller, a mathematics expert who
uses his knowledge of probability to assist his clients with their
problems, tries to hire Wolfe for a difficult case. He believes that
one of his clients may have committed a crime, but does not want to
tell the police of his suspicions without evidence to back them up.
Wolfe angrily refuses the job, remembering a past incident in which
he lost a client to Heller, but Archie offers to stop by the next day
for a preliminary discussion.
The following morning, Archie goes to
Heller's private office at the agreed-on time but finds it empty,
with the door open. Taking note of several pencils lying in an
unusual pattern on the desk, he asks the five clients in the waiting
room if any of them have seen Heller in person, but all of them say
no. That evening, Inspector Cramer arrives at the brownstone with
news that Heller has been found dead, shot through the heart and
stuffed into his office closet. Accounts of Heller's movements
suggest that he was killed shortly before Archie entered the office.
Cramer demands to know Wolfe's
involvement in the case for two reasons: an envelope in Heller's
desk, marked with Wolfe's name and containing $500 cash; and the
pencils, whose pattern he re-creates as best he can. Archie corrects
it slightly, tearing the eraser off one pencil and placing it in the
middle of the pattern. Cramer is convinced that they stand for
Wolfe's initials when viewed from the side, even though one grouping
has too many strokes to form a W. Wolfe dismisses Cramer's claims,
keeps the $500, and briefly looks through a book from his shelves
before locking it in a desk drawer. He asks Cramer to bring in
Heller's five clients as well as Susan Maturo, a woman who had left
Heller's building just as Archie entered to meet with him, and urges
Cramer to watch for instances of the number six.
Wolfe and Cramer question these six
people one by one, learning of their various reasons for wanting to
see Heller. They take a particular interest in Susan, a nurse who had
worked in a hospital where a bomb exploded a month earlier, killing
302 people. She had thought of hiring Heller to find the culprit, but
changed her mind at the last minute and began to think of hiring
Wolfe instead. The number six figures in every person's account, but
a remark by one client – about Heller's winning tip on a racehorse
named Zero – prompts Wolfe to have everyone brought back to his
office.
With the pencils laid out on his desk
as they were on Heller's, Wolfe explains that the book he consulted
earlier was on the history of mathematics. The two groups of pencils
were arranged to symbolize a three and a two, and he originally
assumed that the eraser between them stood for multiplication; hence
his focus on the number six. However, the mention of the horse's name
made him realize that the eraser was meant to stand for a zero.
Before he was killed, Heller had laid out the pencils to form the
number 302 – the death toll in the hospital bombing.
Aside from Susan, the only client with
any substantial connection to that hospital is Jack Ennis, an
inventor who had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the staff to use a
new X-ray machine he had designed. Wolfe conjectures that he set the
bomb as revenge for this rejection, learned that Heller might have
become suspicious enough to call in Wolfe, and killed him. As Ennis
is placed under arrest, Archie reassures Susan that he is guilty, and
a jury reaches the same conclusion at his trial two months later.
"This
Won't Kill You":
Wolfe and Archie honor a house guest's
request to see a baseball game by taking him to the final game of
the World
Series at the Polo
Grounds. The tickets come courtesy of Emil Chisholm, part-owner
of the New
York Giants, but Wolfe is in no mood to enjoy the game or the
surroundings. The Giants fall far behind the Boston
Red Sox due to inept fielding on the part of several
players, and Archie notices that Nick Ferrone, a talented rookie, is
not part of the day's lineup. He and Wolfe are summoned to the
Giants' clubhouse by Chisholm, where they meet manager Art Kinney,
team doctor Horton Soffer, and talent scout Beaky Durkin. Soffer has
discovered that four of the Giants players have been drugged, by
drinking beverages laced with a sedative before the game. Suspicion
immediately falls on the absent Ferrone, and Archie finds him dead in
another room of the clubhouse, his skull fractured with a baseball
bat.
The Giants lose the game and the
Series, and the police arrive to question everyone on the team at
length. They begin to focus on catcher Bill Moyse, who had previously
confronted Ferrone over his interest in Moyse's wife Lila. As the
questioning comes to an end, Wolfe asks that the four players who
were drugged remain behind, along with Kinney, Soffer, Durkin, and
Chisholm, and comments that one fact has come to light and drawn his
attention. Realizing that he had previously seen Lila seated in the
stands and looking pleased at the Giants' poor play, Archie leaves
the stadium and finds her and a friend sitting in her parked car a
few blocks away. He claims that her behavior may lead the police to
think that Moyse was paid to drug the drinks and fix the game, but
learns from her friend that she was angry at Moyse being left on the
bench throughout the entire Series and had taken pleasure in their
loss.
Lila insists that Moyse had nothing to
do with the drugging or the murder, but admits that the two of them
had been approached by someone who wanted Moyse to fix the game: her
uncle, Dan Gale. She drives Archie to Gale's drugstore in an attempt
to persuade Gale to tell the police and clear Moyse's name. Instead,
Gale threatens to disfigure her with sulfuric
acid; Archie recognizes that he is trying to buy time for his
associates to arrive and deal with their intrusion. Gale, a
compulsive gambler, lost ownership of the drugstore but had been
offered a chance to reclaim it by fixing the Series on behalf of
organized crime.
Archie and Lila subdue Gale, spilling
the acid but not injuring him or themselves, and Archie calls the
police to come pick him up and look for his accomplices. Upon
Archie's return to the stadium, Wolfe confronts the eight men who
have remained in the clubhouse and notes that the assumption that
Ferrone drugged the drinks is implausible. Brought into the Giants'
organization by Durkin, Ferrone had performed so well that his next
year's salary would be increased and he would receive a large bonus
if the team won the Series. Instead, Wolfe conjectures that Ferrone
caught someone else drugging the drinks and was killed to keep him
quiet.
The fact that drew his attention is
that Durkin had been sitting in the stands from the starting lineup
announcement until the time he was called into the clubhouse. Wolfe
considers it highly unlikely that a scout who had brought such a
promising young player onto the team would not become angry over
learning that he was not going to play in a pivotal championship
game. Wolfe asserts that Durkin acted as he did because he had killed
Ferrone, but he has no proof until Kinney and the players intimidate
Durkin into admitting his guilt. He had accepted a bribe to fix the
game as a way to pay off his gambling debts; when Ferrone confronted
him over a bet he had placed against the Giants, Durkin panicked and
killed him. The money is found hidden in a radio, and one of the
players knocks Durkin unconscious when he tries to flee.
Just before Archie can call the police
to inform them of Durkin's capture, they call the clubhouse with news
that Gale has confessed to paying him off. Wolfe and Archie find
themselves at odds with each other over whether they or the police
can take credit for solving the murder.
