Rex Stout
The Gun with Wings
I
The young woman took a pink piece of paper from her handbag, got up from the red leather chair, put the paper on Nero Wolfe’s desk, and sat down again. Feeling it my duty to keep myself informed and also to save Wolfe the exertion of leaning forward and reaching so far, I arose and crossed to hand the paper to him after a glance at it. It was a check for five thousand dollars, dated that day, August fourteenth, made out to him, and signed Margaret Mion. He gave a look and dropped it back on the desk.
“I thought,” she said, “perhaps that would be the best way to start the conversation.”
In my chair at my desk, taking her in, I was readjusting my attitude. When early that Sunday afternoon, she had phoned for an appointment, I had dug up a vague recollection of a picture of her in the paper some months back, and had decided it would be no treat to meet her, but now I was hedging. Her appeal wasn’t what she had, which was only so-so, but what she did with it. I don’t mean tricks. Her mouth wasn’t attractive even when she smiled, but the smile was. Her eyes were just a pair of brown eyes, nothing at all sensational, but it was a pleasure to watch them move around, from Wolfe to me to the man who had come with her, seated off to her left. I guessed she had maybe three years to go to reach thirty.
“Don’t you think,” the man asked her, “we should get some questions answered first?”
His tone was strained and a little harsh, and his face matched it. He was worried and didn’t care who knew it. With his deep-set gray eyes and well-fitted jaw he might on a happier day have passed for a leader of men, but not as he now sat. Something was eating him. When Mrs. Mion had introduced him as Mr. Frederick Weppler I had recognized the name of the music critic of the Gazette, but I couldn’t remember whether he had been mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the event that had caused the publication of Mrs. Mion’s picture.
She shook her head at him, not arbitrarily. “It wouldn’t help, Fred, really. We’ll just have to tell it and see what he says.” She smiled at Wolfe — or maybe it wasn’t actually a smile, but just her way of handling her lips. “Mr. Weppler wasn’t quite sure we should come to see you, and I had to persuade him. Men are more cautious than women, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Wolfe agreed, and added, “Thank heaven.”
She nodded. “I suppose so.” She gestured. “I brought that check with me to show that we really mean it. We’re in trouble and we want you to get us out. We want to get married and we can’t. That is — if I should just speak for myself — I want to marry him.” She looked at Weppler, and this time it was unquestionably a smile. “Do you want to marry me, Fred?”
“Yes,” he muttered. Then he suddenly jerked his chin up and looked defiantly at Wolfe. “You understand this is embarrassing, don’t you? It’s none of your business, but we’ve come to get your help. I’m thirty-four years old, and this is the first time I’ve ever been—” He stopped. In a moment he said stiffly, “I am in love with Mrs. Mion and I want to marry her more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.” His eyes went to his love and he murmured a plea. “Peggy!”
Wolfe grunted. “I accept that as proven. You both want to get married. Why don’t you?”
“Because we can’t,” Peggy said. “We simply can’t. It’s on account — you may remember reading about my husband’s death in April, four months ago? Alberto Mion, the opera singer?”
“Vaguely. You’d better refresh my memory.”
“Well, he died — he killed himself.” There was no sign of a smile now. “Fred — Mr. Weppler and I found him. It was seven o’clock, a Tuesday evening in April, at our apartment on East End Avenue. Just that afternoon Fred and I had found out that we loved each other, and—”
“Peggy!” Weppler called sharply.
Her eyes darted to him and back to Wolfe. “Perhaps I should ask you, Mr. Wolfe. He thinks we should tell you just enough so you understand the problem, and I think you can’t understand it unless we tell you everything. What do you think?”
“I can’t say until I hear it. Go ahead. If I have questions, we’ll see.”
She nodded. “I imagine you’ll have plenty of questions. Have you ever been in love but would have died rather than let anyone see it?”
“Never,” Wolfe said emphatically. I kept my face straight.
“Well, I was, and I admit it. But no one knew it, not even him. Did you, Fred?”
“I did not.” Weppler was emphatic too.
“Until that afternoon,” Peggy told Wolfe. “He was at the apartment for lunch, and it happened right after lunch. The others had left, and all of a sudden we were looking at each other, and then he spoke or I did, I don’t know which.” She looked at Weppler imploringly. “I know you think this is embarrassing, Fred, but if he doesn’t know what it was like he won’t understand why you went upstairs to see Alberto.”
“Does he have to?” Weppler demanded.
“Of course he does.” She returned to Wolfe. “I suppose I can’t make you see what it was like. We were completely — well, we were in love, that’s all, and I guess we had been for quite a while without saying it, and that made it all the more — more overwhelming. Fred wanted to see my husband right away, to tell him about it and decide what we could do, and I said all right, so he went upstairs—”
“Upstairs?”
“Yes, it’s a duplex, and upstairs was my husband’s soundproofed studio, where he practiced. So he went—”
“Please, Peggy,” Weppler interrupted her. His eyes went to Wolfe. “You should have it firsthand. I went up to tell Mion that I loved his wife, and she loved me and not him, and to ask him to be civilized about it. Getting a divorce has come to be regarded as fairly civilized, but he didn’t see it that way. He was anything but civilized. He wasn’t violent, but he was damned mean. After some of that I got afraid I might do to him what Gif James had done, and I left. I didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Mion while I was in that state of mind, so I left the studio by the door to the upper hall and took the elevator there.”
He stopped.
“And?” Wolfe prodded him.
“I walked it off. I walked across to the park, and after a while I had calmed down and I phoned Mrs. Mion, and she met me in the park. I told her what Mion’s attitude was, and I asked her to leave him and come with me. She wouldn’t do that.” Weppler paused, and then went on, “There are two complications you ought to have if you’re to have everything.”
“If they’re relevant, yes.”
“They’re relevant all right. First, Mrs. Mion had and has money of her own. That was an added attraction for Mion. It wasn’t for me. I’m just telling you.”
“Thank you. And the second?”
“The second was Mrs. Mion’s reason for not leaving Mion immediately. I suppose you know he had been the top tenor at the Met for five or six years, and his voice was gone — temporarily. Gifford James, the baritone, had hit him on the neck with his fist and hurt his larynx — that was early in March — and Mion couldn’t finish the season. It had been operated, but his voice hadn’t come back, and naturally he was glum, and Mrs. Mion wouldn’t leave him under those circumstances. I tried to persuade her to, but she wouldn’t. I wasn’t anything like normal that day, on account of what had happened to me for the first time in my life, and on account of what Mion had said to me, so I wasn’t reasonable and I left her in the park and went downtown to a bar and started drinking. A lot of time went by and I had quite a few, but I wasn’t pickled. Along toward seven o’clock I decided I had to see her again and carry her off so she wouldn’t spend another night there. That mood took me back to East End Avenue and up to the twelfth floor, and then I stood there in the hall a while, perhaps ten minutes, before my finger went to the pushbutton. Finally I rang, and the maid let me in and went for Mrs. Mion, but I had lost my nerve or something. All I did was suggest that we should have a talk with Mion together. She agreed, and we went upstairs and—”