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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
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.
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.
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.
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