Silver Spire (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 6) Read online

  My brain was racing to keep pace with my mouth. “Bay’s dead?”

  “Not Bay,” Lon snapped irritably. “An assistant of his. Are you going to help me, or not?”

  “Time out,” I said. “First, Mr. Wolfe—through me—was approached by one of the Silver Spire staff because of a problem they were having; that’s when I called you to find out about Bay. But Mr. Wolfe wasn’t excited at the idea of having a church on his client list, so we recommended Fred.”

  Lon snorted. “I think I’ve been around you long enough to know you wouldn’t throw Durkin to the dogs just to save your hide and Wolfe’s. So you’re giving it to me straight?”

  “As straight as William Tell’s arrow. Who got killed, and when?”

  “Guy named Royal Meade, the senior associate pastor, and Bay’s Number-Two person on the staff. Durkin shot him sometime last night in one of the church offices.”

  “Bull. Did Fred confess?”

  “All right, allegedly shot him. Anyway, he’s downtown in the lockup. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard about it. Now, just what kind of problem was the church having?”

  “That’s going to have to wait until I’ve spoken to my employer.”

  “Come on, Archie. We need—”

  “Look, I’ve got to talk to Wolfe, and then I’ll get back to you—I promise. Has a bond been set?”

  “Oh, sure, you want information, but you’re not willing to cough any up yourself,” he snapped. “As far as bond, I don’t know.”

  I vowed to Lon that he’d hear from me before the morning was over, and I signed off, taking the stairs two at a time to the plant rooms. In the cool room, which is the first one you enter, I tried not to be dazzled by the reds and whites and yellows of the Odontoglossums, but as often as I’ve been up on the roof, I never get used to the breathtaking sight of those and the other show-offs that make up the ten thousand orchids Wolfe refers to as his “concubines.” I passed on through the moderate and tropical rooms, steeling myself against the charms of the cattleyas and miltonias.

  Wolfe, wearing a yellow smock, was in the potting room, planted on his stool at the bench. He was glumly considering a panicle of Oncidium altissimum, while Theodore Horstmann, Wolfe’s full-time orchid nurse, was at the sink washing out pots.

  Wolfe’s expression didn’t improve when he spotted me in the doorway. “Yes?” he grunted.

  “We’ve got a problem, or you know damn well I wouldn’t be up here,” I said as old Horstmann threw a glare my way. He glares at me even when I’m not trespassing in his sanctuary, though. He doesn’t like me, but that’s okay, because the feeling is mutual and has been for years. I returned the glare, which sent him back to washing his pots.

  “Durkin’s in jail on a murder charge,” I told Wolfe. “You recall I told you he took the Silver Spire job that you nixed. Well, some guy named Meade on the church staff got himself shot dead last night, and Lon called to tell me they’ve charged Fred.”

  “Preposterous.”

  “Agreed. What do we do?”

  He drew in air and looked down at the panicle in his hand before gently placing it on the bench. “Confound it, get Mr. Parker—now.”

  Wolfe yields to no one in his distaste for the legal profession. However, he makes an exception for Nathaniel Parker, who has been his attorney for years and is one of the few men of any occupation he will shake hands with and invite to dinner. I went to the extension on the potting-room wall and punched out Parker’s number from memory. “Nero Wolfe calling,” I told his secretary, who put me through, and I handed the receiver to Wolfe.

  “Mr. Parker, Nero Wolfe. Yes, I am well, thank you. One of my associates, Fred Durkin, whom you have met, has been charged with murder… . No, the circumstances are unclear. I’m putting Archie on to give you those few particulars he knows… . Yes, I am prepared to post bond.” He handed the instrument to me, and I unloaded what Lon had given me. Parker took it in, said we’d be hearing from him shortly, and hung up. I cradled the phone, turning to Wolfe.

  “Okay, you’re rid of me for now—except that I promised Lon I’d give him something for the next edition. We owe him that much for his call. I’d like to at least tell him about the love notes.”

  His chin dipped almost imperceptibly, which for him constitutes a nod. He was so peeved at the interruption in his precious routine that he would have agreed to almost anything to get rid of me. As I walked out, I looked over my shoulder; Wolfe already had turned his attention back to the ailing Oncidiums, but Horstmann was at the sink eyeing me, probably afraid I’d walk off with something, like maybe an empty pot. I gave him a smile and a wink.

  FOUR

  BY THE TIME WOLFE came down from the plant rooms, I had called Lon and read him the text of the six notes to Bay, which earned me a hurried thanks. And Parker had phoned as well. “He says he can spring Fred,” I told Wolfe as he settled behind his desk and rang for beer. “It’ll cost us fifty big ones.”

  “Get the money. What else did Mr. Parker learn?”

  “Not much. It seems that—” I was interrupted by the front doorbell, and since Fritz was out, I went down the hall and took a look through the one-way glass, making a fast return trip to the office. “It’s old you-know-who,” I told Wolfe. “Instructions?”

  A sigh. “Let him in,” he said without enthusiasm as the bell sounded again, this time one long, impatient squeal.

  “Good morning, Inspector, nice to see you,” I said, throwing open the door and allowing admittance to Lionel T. Cramer, head of Homicide for the New York Police Department. He growled and barreled by me like a freight train that had lost its brakes. I was two strides behind him as he thundered into the office and plopped into the red leather chair, pulling a cigar from the breast pocket of his navy blue suitcoat and jamming it unlit into his mouth.

  “Sir?” Wolfe murmured, raising his eyebrows and looking up from an orchid catalog that had just arrived in the mail.

  “I’ll ‘sir’ you,” Cramer spat. “This house has meant nothing but trouble for me through the years. Way back when, there was that poor devil Johnny Keems. And then Cather. And God knows, I’ve aged because of you and this one,” he rasped, pointing a finger more or less in my direction. “And now Durkin. I never thought he was the smartest guy in town, but I sure didn’t have him pegged. Cather was no bargain—that never surprised me.* But Durkin does.”

  “Please, Mr. Cramer,” Wolfe said, his voice still soft. “Archie and I only recently learned of the charge against Fred. We would appreciate any details.”

  “Hah! I’m sure you would. Durkin says he wasn’t working for you, but I don’t believe it any more than I believe that college basketball is an amateur sport.”

  “He is telling the truth,” Wolfe said evenly.

  “Uh-huh.” Cramer gnawed on his stogie. “Then why did one of the people at that Silver Spire church say they’d started out by coming to see Goodwin?”

  “That is also true. Archie, tell Mr. Cramer of the visit from Mr. Morgan—all of it.”

  I recited the whole thing, including Wolfe’s steadfast refusal to accept the case, my referral of Fred to Morgan, and Fred’s one call to me to learn more about the Silver Spire operation. “And that’s all I knew about it until Lon Cohen phoned me this morning with the news that Fred had been charged,” I said to the inspector.

  He scowled at me, then at Wolfe and back at me. “Okay, maybe you’re leveling, maybe not; with you two, I can’t always tell. Here’s what we know, and it’s probably fairly accurate, because both Durkin and the Silver Spire people—and that includes their big kahuna, Barnabas Bay—tell it the same way, at least up to a point.

  “First off, and you both obviously know this, Bay had been getting those nasty Bible verse notes slipped into the Sunday collection bags. The church could have come to us about it, but did they? No—because they were afraid of bad press. And now look what they’ve got themselves. Can you imagine the headlines this afternoon and tomorrow? And the TV news?
Hah! Anyway, they hired Durkin to find out who was writing the damn things, and from what we’ve been told, he prowled around the church off and on for more than a week, including on two Sundays. He apparently alienated at least some of the staff, including Royal Meade, the guy who bought the farm last night, who had no use at all for him. From what I get, this Lloyd Morgan was the one pushing to hire a gumshoe. Nobody else was warm for the idea—they mostly felt the notes were the doing of a crank. But Morgan has Bay’s ear, and he got the top man to go along with it.”

  “In what way did Fred alienate the church staff?” Wolfe asked.

  Cramer leaned back and ran a hand over a ruddy cheek, frowning. “He told them he thought the notes were an inside job, that somebody on the payroll was writing them. Needless to say, that ticked everybody off, including even Morgan.”

  Wolfe drew in a bushel of air and exhaled slowly. “When did Fred drop this bomb?”

  “Last night, at some sort of staff meeting. Apparently sent the place up for grabs. Anyway, sometime after the meeting broke up, Meade was found dead in his office, shot twice in the head with bullets from Durkin’s thirty-eight. And Durkin’s prints were the only ones on the weapon. He claims he’d hung his suitcoat on a hook in a hallway with the gun in its holster under it and—”

  The doorbell rang, and with Fritz still out, I played butler. Cramer went on with his narrative as I walked to the front hall and peered through the one-way glass. Standing on the stoop was Nathaniel Parker, all six-feet-four of him, looking elegant and urbane in a three-piece brown suit and without a single salt-and-pepper hair out of place. And next to him, disheveled and drained, was Fred Durkin, who is about an inch shorter than my five-eleven but who hauls around at least fifteen pounds more than I do, maybe twenty. Droplets of perspiration covered the Irish forehead that continued unbroken to the top of his head, where a few tufts of red hair kept him from being classified as bald.

  I opened the door, holding an index finger to my lips, and motioned them into the front room. “I’ll be damned,” I said once we all were in and I shut the door to the hall. “I’ve got questions, and so does Wolfe, but right now, Cramer’s in with him, and you can guess what that conversation’s about.” Fred nodded numbly. “I’m going back. Sit tight until he’s gone. And enjoy the magazines,” I said, closing the door behind me.

  As I reentered the office, Cramer was winding up his recap. “… anyway, your Durkin is dead meat, you can bank on it,” he told Wolfe, making no attempt to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. “The only people who could’ve plugged Meade are Durkin and a bunch of sparkling-clean church honchos. Which leaves Durkin. Period.”

  Wolfe looked questioningly at me. “That was Mr. Wilson at the door,” I told him. “He delivered your order.”

  He picked up on the verbal code and turned back to Cramer. “Your faith in the corporate character of religious leaders is heartwarming, although difficult to justify,” Wolfe said. “I am sure you remember the priest last autumn who admitted helping himself to more than twenty thousand dollars from the collection plate over a period of years. And the deacon in that Protestant church on Long Island who beat a parishioner to death one night in the sanctuary when she resisted his advances. And the—”

  “Oh, balls!” Cramer bellowed as he stood up. “You can sit there forever stewing in that smugness of yours, for all I care, but I’m telling you that you’d better find yourself another free-lance, because where Durkin’s going, he’s not going to be on call to do your keyhole-peeping chores anymore.” He flung his cigar at the wastebasket, missing as usual, and left the office as fast as he’d entered. I trailed him down the hall to the front door, which he yanked open without my help, not bothering to close it behind him as he lumbered down the steps to the unmarked black sedan at the curb.

  “All clear,” I said, opening the door to the front room. Parker put down The New Yorker he’d been reading and unfolded himself, while Fred, who apparently had passed the time contemplating his shoe tips, struggled to his feet from the sofa, looking as if it took every bit of the energy he had. They followed me to the office, where Parker staked his claim to the red leather chair and Fred dropped into a yellow one.

  Wolfe dipped his chin at them both, then looked at Parker, obviously awaiting an answer.

  The lawyer shrugged. “I thought you’d be surprised to see us. Frankly, I’m a little surprised myself, at least by the speed of things. But the judge at the bond hearing is an old friend,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “And he, well … owes me a favor or two, from way back. Our case for bail was strong anyway, even though it’s a murder. Circumstantial evidence, no witnesses, a defendant with no previous record and not likely to flee the jurisdiction. Even though the media heat’s going to be intense, the state—grudgingly—stipulated to the half-million figure, which I felt was reasonable, and which means of course that we put up ten percent.” Fred, elbows on knees, continued looking at the floor.

  “And the money?” Wolfe asked.

  “Oh, I took care of that,” Parker said with a casual wave of a hand. “I know you’re good for it.”

  “Thank you, sir. Archie will supply you with a check today.” He turned his attention to Fred, who even in tension-free situations is uncomfortable around Wolfe. Now he looked like a kid who’d been hauled into the principal’s office after he’d been caught cheating on tests three times in a week.

  “I would like a summary of your investigation, right up to the murder—no more than ten minutes,” Wolfe said sharply, aware of Fred’s tendency to ramble.

  He ran a hand up his forehead. “Well, you know that Archie referred me for this job. I appreciate that, Arch, even with what’s happened. Anyway, it was … uh, a week ago Saturday that I went over to Staten Island—that’s some spread the church has there—and I met with Lloyd Morgan. He showed me the notes, six of ’em, which he said you both had already seen. He told me they wanted to find out who was writing them, and that I could have the run of the place, including evenings. I met a few of the staff, including Bay, that day.”

  “What was Mr. Bay’s attitude toward you?” Wolfe asked.

  Fred shrugged. “He seemed, I don’t know, sort of embarrassed, like he wished the whole business would just go away. He didn’t really seem to like the idea of having a P.I. around, although he was decent enough to me. Said he couldn’t for the life of him think who’d write this sort of stuff to him.”

  “And you were there for Sunday services?”

  “Two weeks running. I watched the collection being taken from different places in the balcony the first Sunday at all the services, and from the main floor the second Sunday. Nobody put nasty notes in either week, but if they had, you couldn’t tell anyway. They use these bags, and people put their hands right down into them with their money or whatever. It’d be easy to slip something small like a note in without anybody spotting it, even the person sitting next to you. I wanted to talk to the ushers who pass the offering bags, but Morgan said no; he didn’t want a lot of people to know what was going on, for fear it would get out. Bad publicity.”

  Wolfe made a face. “As you know, Inspector Cramer was just here. He said you felt these missives were written by someone on the staff.”

  Fred nodded. “Yeah, and I probably shouldn’t have said so until there was some way I could be more sure of it, but they—particularly Morgan—were pushing for a progress report. It sure caused a hell of a ruckus last night, and then—well …” He spread his hands.

  “Of course, you were correct.”

  Fred looked at Wolfe with his mouth open. “You believe me?”

  “Certainly. But tell us why you reached the conclusion the writer was on the church staff.”

  “Okay,” he said with a hint of enthusiasm in his voice. “Morgan told me the only ones who knew that I was on the case were Bay’s inner circle—eight people in all, and that includes Bay. Plus the dead man, Meade. The notes came for six straight Sundays, until the first Sunday that I sh
owed up. Then they stopped.”

  “Possibly a coincidence,” Wolfe remarked.

  “Maybe,” Fred said. “But there’s this: After each service, the offering bags are taken to a walk-in vault in the basement by the ushers. The bags are put in the vault while one of that inner circle watches, and the vault is shut and locked after each service. The only people with the combination are those eight. The money—they get thousands in cash at every service, besides all the checks—doesn’t get counted until Monday morning. In the meantime, any of the eight could have put a note in one of the bags.”

  “Speculation,” Wolfe replied. “Any church member or visitor also could easily have slipped notes into a pouch undetected during the offering. You suggested that yourself.”

  “I thought you said you believed my theory,” Fred responded with a hangdog expression.

  “I do. Would anyone like something to drink? I’m having beer.”

  Parker and Fred opted for coffee, and Fred followed me out to the kitchen. Fritz was back, working on lunch, so I took on the responsibility for Wolfe’s beer order, while Fred carried in two cups of coffee from the pot that is kept hot all morning. We got resettled in the office as Wolfe poured beer into his glass and dropped the bottle cap into his center desk drawer. Years ago, he got it in his head that he might be drinking too much beer, so he started keeping track by saving the bottle caps and counting them once a week. As far as I can tell, the bottle-cap census hasn’t curbed his consumption one ounce.

  “How many people at the church knew the purpose of your investigation?” he asked after taking a healthy swallow.

  “As far as I know, just the eight I mentioned. Bay likes to call them his ‘Circle of Faith.’ That’s Bay, of course; Morgan; Bay’s wife, Elise; Meade; Roger Gillis, who runs the education program; Sam Reese, who they call Minister of Evangelism; his wife, Carola, a soloist with the choir; and Marley Wilkenson, who heads up the church’s music program. Bay didn’t want to get his board of trustees involved, at least not yet.”