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Title:
Trouble in Triplicate
Series: Nero Wolfe
#14
Author: Rex Stout
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 159
Words:
71K
From Wikipedia
BEFORE
I DIE:
The
meat shortage of 1946[1] has drastically affected the menu at Wolfe's
dining room table and left him in a foul mood. A notorious gangster,
Dazy Perrit, arrives at the brownstone to enlist Wolfe's help and,
over Archie's protests, Wolfe invites him inside. Archie fears that
Perrit will tell Wolfe something that Wolfe would prefer not to know,
but Wolfe wants meat and thinks that Perrit's black market
connections might enable him to get it.
Perrit
gives Archie a phone number to call for a possible supply of meat,
and then tells Wolfe his problem. He has a daughter, whose existence
and identity he has kept secret in order to protect her from his
enemies. One of them, Thumbs Meeker, has recently let Perrit know
that his daughter's existence is no longer a secret; however, he does
not know her name or location. Perrit has found a grifter named
Angelina Murphy who is on the run from authorities in Utah, and has
installed her as his daughter in his Fifth Avenue penthouse in an
attempt to draw attention away from his real daughter. Angelina has
begun to blackmail Perrit, demanding large sums of money in exchange
for keeping his secret, and Perrit wants to hire Wolfe to make her
stop.
Wolfe
dispatches Archie to make contact with Perrit's real daughter, Beulah
Page. Archie learns that Beulah is engaged to marry a law student
named Morton Schane and invites them both to dinner at Wolfe's house.
Wolfe uses the occasion to acquaint himself with the couple's plans
and concerns. Later that night, after Beulah and Schane have left,
Angelina arrives for an appointment with Wolfe. He threatens to
reveal her whereabouts to the Utah authorities unless she gives him
90% of any further money she extorts from Perrit. Angelina responds
by threatening to disclose that she is not Perrit's daughter, but
Wolfe rebuffs her, saying that the information will be of no personal
worry to him.
As
Archie escorts Angelina home, she is killed in a drive-by shooting
outside her apartment building. Archie is taken into custody,
questioned, and released; when he reaches the brownstone, Perrit and
one of his thugs are waiting to talk to him. These two men are killed
in a second drive-by. Later that day, Perrit's lawyer, L.A. Schwartz,
pays a visit to Wolfe with news that he has been named executor of
Perrit's estate and entrusted with documents that prove Beulah's
parentage. Wolfe accepts the responsibility — and the $50,000 fee
that goes with it — and schedules an appointment with Beulah,
Schane, and Schwartz.
The
meeting is further joined by Saul Panzer, Meeker, and an associate of
Perrit's named Fabian. Wolfe reveals Schane as the murderer, having
become suspicious at the dinner after Schane made a nonsense comment
about a simple point of law. Schane had been in league with Angelina
in Utah, but decided to focus on Beulah instead after coming to New
York, and Perrit had figured out what he was doing. The fingerprints
he left on his wineglass at dinner confirm his identity and criminal
background. Schane shoots at the group but misses, and Saul, Fabian,
and Meeker return fire, with Saul's bullet killing Schane.
Six
days later, the meat shortage ends. Archie comments to Wolfe on the
way in which Wolfe orchestrated the meeting to bring about Schane's
death without leading to criminal charges being filed against anyone
else present, then leaves for a date with Beulah.
HELP
WANTED, MALE
Publisher
Ben Jensen pays a visit to Wolfe's office, intent on buying
protection for himself after receiving a death threat in the mail.
[1] Wolfe declines the offer, giving Jensen some advice on how to
look out for his own safety, and Archie provides him with the name of
an agency that does bodyguard work. Jensen had been involved in one
of Wolfe's earlier cases,[2] in which an Army captain named Peter
Root had offered to sell him classified information. Root was brought
before a court martial and sentenced to three years in prison.
The
following morning's newspaper carries a report that both Jensen and
the bodyguard he hired have been shot and killed; Wolfe denies to
Inspector Cramer that he is taking any interest in the case. That
day's mail brings a death threat addressed to Wolfe, identical to the
one Jensen received. Since the Root case is all that Wolfe and Jensen
had in common, Wolfe and Archie track down current information on
everyone connected to it, including Root's family and fiancée, Jane
Geer. Archie hurries to fill his end of the order before he must
leave for a meeting in Washington, D.C. with his superiors in Army
Intelligence. He locates Jane and brings her to the brownstone, but
they are both surprised to find Jensen's son Emil—an Army
major—waiting at the door. Wolfe does not come down to meet them,
but instead orders Archie over the in-house telephone to send them
away.
While
in Washington, Archie notices a help-wanted advertisement in a New
York paper, calling for male applicants who are the same height and
weight as Wolfe. Sneaking out of his meeting and hurrying back to
Manhattan, Archie is surprised to see someone other than Wolfe in the
detective's custom-built chair. Wolfe introduces the man as H.H.
Hackett, who has responded to the ad and is being paid $100 per day
to impersonate him at home and in public. He is using Hackett as a
decoy to draw the fire of would-be killers so that he can determine
who might want him dead.
Wolfe
has determined, from information provided by Army Intelligence, that
Root and his parents had no apparent involvement in the murders. He
asks Archie to bring Jane in for an interview, with Hackett doubling
for him while he observes from the peephole in the office wall.
Archie now understands why Wolfe sent her away earlier; he did not
want her to see him in person so that she would be fooled by Hackett
as a stand-in. Jane and Emil arrive for the appointment together,
having developed a close relationship since Archie last saw them. He
puts them in the front room and goes to consult with Wolfe about
Emil's unexpected presence, but the sound of a gunshot startles
everyone.
Rushing
into the office, Archie finds that a bullet has been fired through
Wolfe's chair and into the wall behind it, apparently from the front
room, and that Hackett's ear is nicked. Archie finds an old, recently
fired revolver hidden in the front room, and Wolfe reveals himself to
the visitors and takes charge. He calls Cramer to inform him about
the weapon, which turns out to be the one that killed Jensen and the
bodyguard, and pits Jane and Emil against each other in an effort to
draw out the killer. However, the case turns in a new direction when
he notices a cushion missing from the front room's couch. It is soon
found in the bottom drawer of Wolfe's desk; this discovery, along
with the fact that one of the guns in Archie's desk has been recently
fired, allows him to solve the case and turn the culprit over to
Cramer.
The
murderer is Hackett, actually Root's father Thomas, bent on revenge
against everyone he blames for his son's imprisonment. After killing
Jensen and the bodyguard, and sending the death threat to Wolfe, he
responded to Wolfe's ad and smuggled the murder weapon inside. During
a time when he was alone in the office, he took a cushion from the
couch, wrapped it around the gun to muffle the report, and fired a
shot through the chair and into the wall. He hid the cushion in the
desk and the gun in the front room, and made sure to sit in the chair
so that his head would cover the bullet hole. While Jane and Emil
were waiting in the front room, he took a gun from Archie's desk,
fired into the cushion, and used a pocketknife to cut a gash in his
ear before returning the gun. Given one more day, Hackett/Thomas
would have been able to kill Wolfe and focus suspicion on Jane and
Emil.
INSTEAD
OF EVIDENCE
Eugene
R. Poor, co-owner of a novelty products company, and his wife,
Martha, bring an unusual problem to Wolfe. Poor believes that his
business partner, Conroy Blaney, is going to kill him and take full
control of the company; he wants Wolfe to ensure that justice is done
on Blaney when it happens. Martha has tried to persuade Poor to sell
his share of the company to Blaney, without success, but Poor is
determined to see his own murderer punished. Wolfe accepts a $5,000
fee, agreeing only to inform the police of what Poor has told him if
Poor dies within one year.
Helen
Vardis had arrived just after the police got there. She said she had
come to see Poor on a confidential matter.
That
evening, Inspector Cramer calls Wolfe with news that Poor is dead,
his head blown apart by an exploding cigar in his own apartment.
Visiting the scene, Archie learns from Martha that she and Poor had
started off to visit Blaney at his estate in White Plains for a
business discussion, but Poor had decided during the trip not to go.
She left him at a tavern along the way, went to the meeting alone,
and picked him up on the return trip. Once back in the apartment, he
had opened a fresh box of cigars and lit one, but it exploded with
great force and killed him. Archie also meets Joe Groll, the foreman
at the company's factory, and Helen Vardis, an employee. Blaney also
arrives at the scene and is shocked to see Poor's remains.
The
next day, Cramer brings news to Wolfe that every cigar in that box
had been rigged with a small but powerful explosive capsule,
manufactured for military use by a different company, and that two of
Martha's hairs were found inside. Wolfe considers this to be evidence
against her involvement, since a person involved in such painstaking
work would be careful not to leave any traces. Blaney visits the
brownstone as well to argue for his own innocence, but his annoying
manner soon drives Wolfe to send him away. Wolfe calls Saul Panzer in
to investigate, having taken an interest in finding photographs of
Poor when he was alive, and Archie catches up to Groll for a talk and
realizes that Helen has been following them. The three search the
company offices and find several hiding places, one of which contains
four explosive capsules.
At
the brownstone, Wolfe tests one of the capsules by placing it in a
coffee percolator and lighting its fuse; it explodes violently enough
to damage the percolator and hurl its lid across the office, barely
missing him. Wolfe dispatches Archie to take two of the others to
Cramer, who threatens to get a warrant for the last one. Wolfe takes
a sudden interest in a newspaper article about a man found dead in
White Plains with his head crushed, and calls the local district
attorney to confirm his identity as Arthur Howell, an employee of the
company that had manufactured the capsules. Once the body has been
identified, Wolfe sends Archie to see Martha with a photograph of
Poor (obtained by Saul) that has the last capsule taped to it. Archie
warns Martha that he has orders to deliver her to either Wolfe or the
police, but she instead kills herself by putting the capsule in her
mouth and setting it off.
A
furious Cramer confronts Wolfe at the brownstone, but Wolfe maintains
that he has broken no laws in prodding Martha to suicide. He had
realized that the man who came to see him was an impostor, since Poor
was an experienced cigar smoker and the man had barely been able to
light one properly. Martha chose Howell for her plot to kill her
husband because he bore a strong resemblance to Poor, and she
persuaded him to give her some of the capsules so she could spike
Poor's cigars. During her supposed meeting with Blaney in White
Plains, she met with Howell and killed him, running over his head
with her car. The photograph that Saul obtained was actually of
Howell, but Archie mistook it as one of Poor because he did not know
of Howell's existence at the time.
Cramer
points out that it was Martha who paid Wolfe the $5,000, but Wolfe
counters by saying that Poor got his money's worth even if he did not
directly pay the fee.
For whatever reason, the novels about Wolfe that are actually 3
novellas just never work quite as well for me as a full novel.
I didn't catch on, until I was writing this post and copied the info
from Wikipedia, that each story was about a person impersonating
someone else. I think part of that is that I don't try to solve the
mystery ahead of time in books like this. I don't care who did it or
why. Just tell me and give me some interesting character interactions
along the way.
And dang, the way everybody carries
pistols around in their pockets? Sign me up for some of that please.
None of this “concealed carry” license nonsense. Not that my
state has that nonsense anymore, but there's enough floating around
the rest of the country to make up for it, le sigh.
Part of me wonders how Archie and
Wolfe have gotten on so well together for so long. I would have shot
Wolfe by now or at least put dog poop in one of his favorite dishes,
thus prompting him to shoot me. The friendship and the tension are
not something I have first hand experience with, as anyone who
bothered me as much as Wolfe bothers Archie, I would have simply
walked away from without another word. But that tension, as I've
written before, is what makes these books. The murders themselves are
usually pretty ho-hum and pedestrian but how everyone interacts is
what is the peas day resistance. And Freedom Fries. Take that, french
language!
Once again, I am pleased with
another Nero Wolfe book.
★★★✬☆
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