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Title: And Four To Go
Series:
Nero Wolfe #30
Author: Rex Stout
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages:
206
Words: 65K
I enjoyed these four stories. It is kind of hard to call them
straight up “short stories” because they’re fifty pages each,
but they don’t quite seem like novella length either.
Wolfe is pretty much at his most cantankerous and Archie is at his
needle’ist (in terms of how he deals with Wolfe) and murders get
solved.
This was a good sit back and let the stories flow over you kind of
book. I wasn’t blown away but I wasn’t bored, I didn’t feel
like I wanted to stop reading and do something else, I didn’t want
to get up to get a snack to take a break. I just read and that tells
me it was good stuff if it can keep me engrossed like that.
I realize this isn’t a long review, or even much of a book report,
but most of my reviews are like that. And considering this is #30 in
the series, at this point you’re either all in or you are out. If
you have not read any Nero Wolfe stories by Rex Stout, then go read
the first book, Fer-de-Lance.
I read that in ‘21 and I’m still going strong with the series, no
breaks. That should tell you something too.
★★★✬☆
Table of Contents:
Christmas Party
Easter Parade
Fourth of July Picnic
Murder is No Joke
Synopses from Wikipedia:
The Christmas Party
Nero Wolfe occasionally riles
Archie when he takes Archie's services too much for granted. On
Wednesday he tells Archie to change his personal plans of two weeks
standing so that he can drive Wolfe to Long Island for a meeting on
Friday with an orchid hybridizer. After counting ten, Archie explains
that he cannot and will not chauffeur Wolfe on Friday. He has
promised his fiancée that he will attend her office Christmas party,
at a furniture design studio. To substantiate his claim, Archie shows
Wolfe a marriage license, duly signed and executed: the State is
willing for Archie Goodwin and Margot Dickey to wed.
Wolfe is incredulous, but hires a
limousine to take him to Long Island as Archie attends the party.
There, a conversation between Archie and Margot reveals that Margot
has been trying to get her employer and paramour, Kurt Bottweill, to
quit procrastinating and marry her. She has suggested to Archie, who
is no more to her than a friend and dancing partner, that a marriage
license might motivate Bottweill to propose and follow through.
Archie gave her the license on Thursday, and now Margot tells him
that the plan worked perfectly, that she and Bottweill are to marry.
Also attending the party are Bottweill;
his business manager Alfred Kiernan; an artisan named Emil Hatch who
turns Bottweill's designs into marketable merchandise; Cherry Quon,
an East Asian who is the office receptionist; and Mrs. Perry Jerome
and her son – Mrs. Jerome is a wealthy widow who is the source of
Bottweill's business capital. The Bottweill-Jerome business
relationship is apparently based on intimacy, which her son Leo is
bent on disrupting. Santa Claus is also present, tending bar.
Bottweill starts to toast the season
but before he can do so Kiernan interrupts. Everyone has champagne,
but Bottweill's drink is Pernod – he keeps an entire case
of it in his office. Kiernan brings Bottweill a glass of Pernod.
Bottweill finishes his toast, tosses back the Pernod, and promptly
dies of cyanide poisoning.
As Archie is issuing instructions –
call the police, don't touch anything, nobody leave – he notices
that Santa has already left. Hatch says no one has left via the
elevator, and the only other exit is to Bottweill's office. There's
nothing unusual there, and Archie pushes a button that calls
Bottweill's private elevator. When it arrives, Archie finds Santa's
wig, mask, jacket and breeches on its floor.
The police arrive, led by Sergeant
Purley Stebbins, and after several hours of questioning he dismisses
the partygoers. Purley's first task is to try to find Santa, and if
that approach leads nowhere then he'll start after the others. Archie
heads back to the brownstone, where Wolfe, having returned from his
errand, is eating dinner. Wolfe has heard on the radio a report of
Bottweill's death, and after discussing it briefly, Wolfe sends
Archie to his room to bring him a book. Archie finds the book, and
also finds, draped over it, a pair of white gloves that appear to be
identical to the gloves that Santa was wearing while tending bar.
Stunned at first, Archie works it out
that Wolfe was the bartender in a Santa costume. He must have
arranged the charade in order to judge for himself whether Archie and
Margot were genuinely involved or the marriage license was flummery.
For Wolfe to have gone to such an extreme must mean that Wolfe
regarded the situation as potentially desperate. Finally, Wolfe left
the gloves for Archie to find so that he would reason it all out for
himself, thus sparing Wolfe the necessity of admitting how much he
depends on Archie.
Archie returns to the office and,
skipping the issue of Wolfe's motives, reports on the events that
followed Wolfe's escape. Stebbins has established that all the
partygoers knew that Bottweill drank Pernod and kept a supply in his
office. All knew that a supply of cyanide was kept in the workshop
one floor down from the studio: Hatch uses it in his gold-plating
work. Any of them could have found an opportunity to get some cyanide
from the workshop and, unobserved, put it in Bottweill's current
bottle of Pernod. But none of them ran when Bottweill died. Only
Santa ran, and the police are concentrating for the moment on finding
whoever played Santa. Wolfe gives Archie a brief summary about his
meeting with Bottweill that afternoon preparing to become Santa,
including Botteill's having a drink, in Wolfe's presence, from the
same Pernod bottle that was later poisoned - a fact the police
would love to have.
When Archie finishes reporting, the
doorbell rings. It's Cherry Quon, without appointment, wanting to
speak with Wolfe. It comes out that Cherry recently became engaged to
marry Bottweill. She is convinced that Margot murdered Bottweill in a
rage at being thrown over for Cherry. And she delivers a bombshell:
she knows it was Wolfe who played Santa at the party. Bottweill had
told her that morning at breakfast.
Cherry has a demand: she wants one of
Wolfe's men to confess to having played Santa. As he was putting on
the costume, in the bathroom attached to Bottweill's office, Wolfe's
man heard something, peeked out, and saw Margot putting something in
the Pernod bottle. Cherry is not blatant about it, but she implies
strongly that if Wolfe does not comply with her demand she will tell
the police that Wolfe himself was Santa.
That's the last thing Wolfe wants –
Cramer would lock him up as a material witness and possibly for
withholding evidence, and the publicity would be humiliating. But
Wolfe refuses to go along with Cherry's script. Instead, he sends
notes to all the partygoers, inviting the murderer to identify
himself.
Easter Parade
When Nero Wolfe's envy is aroused
he'll go to any length to satisfy it. He embarrassed Archie in
his pursuit of Jerome Berin's recipe for saucisse minuit, and
he strongarmed Lewis Hewitt to get those black orchids. Now
he's learned that Millard Bynoe has hybridized a pink Vanda orchid,
a unique plant. He wants to examine one and Bynoe has turned him
down.
Wolfe has also learned that Mrs. Bynoe
will sport a spray of the pink Vanda at this year's Easter
parade in New York, and wonders if Archie knows anyone who would
steal it from her. Archie does have a suggestion, a shifty character
nicknamed Tabby, who would probably commit petty larceny in public
for a couple of hundred bucks. Archie suggests that in addition to
arranging for Tabby's services, it might be wise to get a photograph
of the orchids. Archie offers to attend the parade too, with Wolfe's
new camera.
So it's decided: Tabby will position
himself outside the church where Mr. and Mrs. Bynoe will attend
Easter services and will try to snatch the orchid corsage from her
shoulder as they exit the church. Archie will be across the street
with the camera, attempting to get a good photo of the corsage in
case Tabby's attempted theft fails.
Easter morning arrives. Both Tabby and
Archie are in place – Archie's sharing some wooden crates with
several other photographers so as to see over the crowd. One of them
is a comely young woman named Iris Innes, who is there as a staff
photographer for a magazine.
The Bynoes exit the church in the
company of another man. Tabby tries to grab the orchids but the
Bynoes' companion wards him off. So Tabby ducks away into the crowd
and begins to stalk them as the three walk up the avenue. Archie has
been able to capture much of the action on film.
Suddenly, Mrs. Bynoe collapses. As her
companions try to help her, Tabby dashes up to them, snatches the
orchid corsage, and sprints away. Archie takes off after him, and
catches up just as Tabby gets into a cab. Archie joins him, hushes
him, and tells the cabbie to take them to 918 West 35th.
Only after Wolfe has had time to
examine the orchids, and to announce that he would pay $3,000 (in
1958) for the full plant, does Archie get a chance to point out that
if necessary the police will identify and track Tabby down, and that
inevitably Tabby will give up Wolfe and Archie. Archie phones Lon
Cohen and learns that Mrs. Bynoe is dead. Wolfe wants to avoid any
public mention of his association with the incident, and offers Tabby
$10 a day to remain incommunicado at the brownstone. After trying
unsuccessfully to raise the per diem, Tabby accepts.
Archie prudently removes the film from
the camera, and his foresight soon pays off when Inspector Cramer
arrives. A needle containing strychnine has been found in Mrs.
Bynoe's abdomen, and the theory is that the needle was shot from a
spring-loaded mechanism such as a camera. Cramer appropriates the
camera, but doesn't ask whether the film is still in it. Monday
morning, Archie takes the film to a camera store to be developed.
Then he spends
much of the day trying futilely to reach the other photographers,
including Miss Innes.[1] Archie spends the remaining hours at
the District Attorney's office, answering questions and refusing to
answer questions that he contends are immaterial to the investigation
of Mrs. Bynoe's murder. He is dismissed in time to get the developed
pictures from the store and return to the brownstone before dark.
There he finds Mr. Bynoe, Inspector
Cramer, DA Skinner and several others, including the photographers
Archie's been looking for. Wolfe asks to see the photos. He arranges
a re-enactment of the scene in front of the church, and shows Cramer
how the photos that Archie took demonstrate the murderer's identity.
Fourth of July Picnic
A restaurant workers' union is having a
Fourth of July picnic in a remote meadow on Long Island. Time has
been set aside during the afternoon for a few speeches from prominent
figures in the restaurant business, and also one from Nero Wolfe.
Wolfe has been the trustee for Rusterman's Restaurant since the death
of his old friend Marko Vukcic, and because the restaurant is so
highly regarded the union wants Wolfe to speak. As an added
inducement, the union has also promised to stop trying to get Fritz,
Wolfe's personal chef, to join.
Wolfe and Archie arrive at the meadow
and work their way through a tent to a raised platform from which the
speakers will address the thousands of union members. One of the
organizers, Phil Holt, has eaten some bad snails and is lying in
misery on a cot in the tent. He has been seen by a doctor but is too
weak to participate in the festivities. He is shivering and Wolfe
tells Archie to tie the tent flap closed, to help stop the draft
blowing through.
One by one, as the scheduled speakers
address the throng, those on the speakers' platform go back into the
tent to see to Holt. Eventually Wolfe goes to check on Holt and
shortly calls to Archie to join him. Holt is dead, lying on the cot,
covered by a blanket that conceals the knife in his back.
It is Wolfe's habit, when he is away
from home and confronted by a murder, to tell Archie to take him back
to the brownstone immediately, before the police arrive. It is
Archie's habit to refuse and he does so now, pointing out that they
would simply be hauled back to Long Island. Wolfe concedes the point
and returns to the platform to deliver his speech.
Archie has noticed that the tent flap
is no longer tied shut. He glances out the back of the tent and sees
a woman sitting in a car parked by the tent. Archie gets her name,
Anna Banau, and asks her if she has seen anyone enter the tent since
the speeches started. Mrs. Banau says that she has not. Archie is
impressed by her calm certainty, and concludes that no one entered
the tent from the back. Someone must have gone in from the platform,
stabbed Holt, and then opened the rear flap to make it appear as
though the killer came from that direction, not from the platform.
The body is soon discovered and the
police are called. It's clear that the local District Attorney would
love to hold Wolfe and Archie as material witnesses, but he can't
find a legitimate reason, so Wolfe returns home after all. The next
day, though, Mr. Banau comes calling. He knows of his wife's
discussion with Archie on the prior afternoon, and cannot understand
why the papers report that the police are proceeding on the
assumption that the murderer entered the tent from the rear. His wife
saw no one enter the tent from that side, and that is what she told
Archie – surely Archie passed that along to the police. When
Wolfe tells Banau that Mrs. Banau's information was not passed along,
Banau becomes upset and leaves the brownstone, stating that he must
tell the police.
Wolfe sees that he and Archie will be
arrested and must make their getaway. They head for Saul Panzer's
apartment, where they have arranged to meet with the others who were
on the speakers' platform. Wolfe as yet has no idea who the murderer
is, nor the motive for the crime. But when the principal suspects
arrive at Saul's, Wolfe finds it important that he and Archie share
autobiographical sketches with them. Then he bluffs the murderer into
identifying himself.
Murder Is No Joke
Alec Gallant was a member of the French
Resistance during World War II and at that time married another
member, Bianca. After the war, he learned that his wife and her two
brothers had been traitors to the Resistance. He murdered both men,
but Bianca escaped him.
Gallant came to the United States in
1945 and rejoined his sister Flora, who had immigrated from France
several years earlier. Gallant became a highly regarded couturier (as
Wolfe later terms him, "an illustrious dressmaker") with a
studio employing several staff, including Flora. A successful
Broadway actress, Sarah Yare, is a valued customer, one who is well
liked by all of Gallant's employees.
Into this happy mix comes Bianca. She
has changed her surname to Voss and insinuated herself into Gallant's
operation, making decisions about company strategy, apparently with
Gallant's approval. Gallant has kept information about his past with
Bianca to himself, hiding it not only from the staff but also from
his sister, Flora. Everyone at Alec Gallant Incorporated is mystified
that Gallant is putting up with Bianca's odd and counterproductive
decisions, particularly because she seems to have no formal title or
position at the company.
Fearing for her brother's career, Flora
calls at Nero Wolfe's office and asks him to investigate the
situation. She has only $100 to pay Wolfe's fee, but she says that
her brother would be grateful to be rid of Miss Voss, and he is a
generous man. Wolfe points out, though, that it's not Mr. Gallant who
would be hiring him. Flora suggests that they phone Bianca, and
invite her to Wolfe's office where he can ask questions of her, and
then, "We shall see." In reporting this exchange, Archie
Goodwin claims that it is Flora's choice of phrasing, instead of
an informal "We'll see" or "We will see," that
moves Wolfe to acquiesce.
Flora uses Archie's phone to call Miss
Voss, and gives Archie the handset as Wolfe picks up his own phone.
After identifying himself to Miss Voss, Wolfe becomes the target of a
string of insults hurled by Miss Voss – "You are scum, I know,
in your stinking sewer." – and then both Wolfe and Archie hear
a thud, a groan, a crash, and a dead phone line.
Archie calls Gallant's offices back,
and asks for Miss Voss. Archie and Wolfe learn that Miss Voss has
just been found dead in her office. When they inform Flora, she seems
stunned, and hurries from the office.
Later, discussing the situation with
Inspector Cramer, Wolfe agrees it's very neat that Wolfe and Archie
were on the phone with Miss Voss just as she was being assaulted, and
thus can fix the time of the attack within a minute or two. That
makes it difficult, because everyone at Gallant's studio has a strong
alibi for that time.
The next day, Archie is summoned to the
District Attorney's office to go over his statement once again. When
he returns to the brownstone, he is astonished to see that Wolfe has
exerted himself to the point of getting the phone book from Archie's
desk and taking it to his own. Wolfe has no explanation of the phone
book for Archie, but he does have instructions.
