6 No Smoking
James Drake was by no means the only smoker among the small membership of the Black Widowers, but he certainly made the greatest single contribution to the pall that commonly hovered over the monthly banquets of that august body.
It was perhaps for that reason that the dour-faced Thomas Trumbull, arriving toward the end of the cocktail hour, as he usually did, and having un-parched himself with a scotch and soda that had been handed him deftly and without delay by the invaluable Henry, hunched his lapel ostentatiously in Drake's direction.
“What's that?” asked Drake, squinting through the smoke of his cigarette.
“Why the hell don't you read it and find out?” said Trumbull with somewhat more than his usual savagery. “If the nicotine has left you any eyesight with which to read, that is.”
Trumbull's lapel bore a button which read: “Thank you for not smoking.”
Drake, having peered at it thoughtfully, puffed a mouthful of smoke in its direction and said, “You're welcome. Always glad to oblige.”
Trumbull said, “By God, I'm a member of the most oppressed minority in the world. The non-smoker has no rights any smoker feels bound to observe. Good Lord, don't I have any claim to a measure of reasonably clean and unpolluted air?”
Emmanuel Rubin drifted toward them. His sparse and straggly beard lifted upward—a sure sign that he was about to pontificate—and his eyes blinked owlishly behind the magnifying thickness of his glasses.
“If you live in New York,” he said, “you inhale, in automobile exhaust, the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day, so what's the difference?” And he ostentatiously lit a cigarette.
“All the more reason why I don't want any more on top of the exhaust I breathe,” said Trumbull, scowling.
“Don't tell me,” said Drake in his softly hoarse voice, “that you believe this hogwash that—”
“Yes, I believe it,” snapped Trumbull, “if you want to risk heart attacks, emphysema, and lung cancer, that's your business, and I wish you joy of any or all of them. I wouldn't interfere with your pleasure for the world if you want to do it off in a closed room somewhere. But why the hell should / breathe your foul smoke and run the risk of disease so that you might have your perverse pleasure—”
He broke off since Drake, who was visibly attempting not to, had one of his not too infrequent coughing spells.
Trumbull looked pleased. “Happy coughing,” he said. “When's the last time you could breathe freely?”
Roger Halsted, who occasionally smoked but was not doing so at the moment, said, with the mild stutter with which he was sometimes afflicted, “Why are you so upset, Tom? What makes this meeting different from any other?”
“Nothing at all, but I've had enough. I've overflowed. Every time I come home after an evening with you smoldering garbage piles, my clothes smell and I have to burn them.”
“What I think,” said Drake, “is that he found that button when he was reaching into a subway trash can for a newspaper, and it's made a missionary out of him.”
“I feel like a missionary,” said Trumbull. “I would like to push a law through Congress that would place tobacco in the same category with marijuana and hashish. By God, the evidence for the physiological damage caused by tobacco is infinitely stronger than for any damage caused by marijuana.”
Geoffrey Avalon, always sensitive to any reference to his own profession of law, stared down austerely from his seventy-four inches and said, “I would not advise another law legislating morality. Some of the finest men in history have tried to reform the world by passing laws against bad habits, and there is no record of any of them working. I'm old enough to remember Prohibition in this country.”
Trumbull said, “You smoke a pipe. You're an interested party. Am I the only non-smoker here?”
“I don't smoke,” said Mario Gonzalo, raising his voice. He was in another corner, talking to the guest.
“All right then,” said Trumbull. “Come here, Mario. You're host for the evening. Set up a no-smoking rule.”
“Out of order. Out of order,” said Rubin heatedly. “The host can only legislate on Black Widower procedures, not on private morality. He can't order the members to take off their clothes, or to stand on their heads and whistle 'Dixie, or to stop smoking—or to start smoking, for that matter.”
“It could be done,” said Halsted gently, “if the host proposed the measure and put it to a vote, but the smokers are four to two against you, Tom.”
“Wait awhile,” said Trumbull. “There's Henry. He's a member. What do you say, Henry?”
Henry, the perennial waiter at the Black Widowers' banquets, had nearly completed setting the table. Now he lifted his smooth and unwrinkled face which, as always, belied the fact that he was a sexagenarian, and said, “I do not myself smoke and would welcome a ban on smoking, but I do not demand it.”
“Even if he did,” said Rubin, “it would be four to three, still a majority on the side of vice.”
“How about the guest?” said Trumbull doggedly, “Mr.—”
“Hilary Evans,” said Avalon severely. He made it his business never to forget a guest's name, at least for the evening of the dinner.
Trumbull said, “Where do you stand, Mr. Evans?”
Hilary Evans was short and tubby, with cheeks that were plump, pink, and smooth. His mouth was small and his eyes were quick-moving behind the lightly tinted lenses of his metal-rimmed spectacles. His hair, surprisingly dark in view of the lightness of his complexion, lay back smoothly. He might have been in his middle forties.
He said in a tenor voice, “I smoke occasionally and do not often mind if others do, but I have current reasons for sympathy with you, sir. Smoking has been the occasion for misery for me.”
Trumbull, one eye nearly closing as he lifted the side of his mouth in a snarl, looked as though he would have pressed the matter further, but Rubin said at once, “Five to three. Issue settled,” and Henry imperturbably announced that the dinner was served.
Trumbull scrambled to get the seat next to Gonzalo, the other non-smoker, and asked him in an undertone, “Who is this- Evans?”
Gonzalo said, “He's personnel manager for a firm in whose advertising campaign I was involved. He interviewed me and, even though he's rather a queer guy, we got along. I thought he might be interesting.”
“I hope so,” said Trumbull, “though I don't think much of a guy who votes with the enemy even though he sympathizes with me.”
Gonzalo said, “You don't know the details.”
“I intend to find out,” said Trumbull grimly.
The dinner conversation had trouble getting off the subject of tobacco. Avalon, who had reduced his second drink to the usual half-way mark and had then left it severely alone, remarked that cigarette smoking was the only new vice introduced by modern man.
“How about LSD and the mind-expanding drugs?” said Gonzalo at once and Avalon, having thought about that for a moment, owned defeat.
Rubin loudly demanded the definition of “vice.” He said, “Anything you don't like is a vice. If you approve of it, it isn't. Many a temperance crusader was addicted to food as viciously as anyone could be addicted to drink.” And Rubin, who was thin, pushed his soup away half eaten, with a look of ostentatious virtue.
Halsted, who was not thin, muttered, “Not many calories in clear turtle soup.”
Trumbull said, “Listen, I don't care what you do, or whether it's a vice or a virtue, as long as you keep it to yourself and to those you practice it with. If you drink whisky and I don't want to, no alcohol gets into my blood; if you want to pick up a dame, there's no risk of my picking up anything that goes along with that. But when you drag at a cigarette I smell the smoke, I get it in my lungs, I run the risk of cancer.”
“Quite right,” said Evans suddenly. “Filthy habit,” and he glanced quickly at Drake, who was sitting next to him and who shifted his cigarette to his other hand, the one farther from Evans.
Avalon cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, there are no strictures against tobacco that can be considered new. Over three and a half centuries ago James I of England wrote a book called Counterblast to Tobacco in which he rehearsed every point that Tom could make, allowing for gains in scientific knowledge since then—”
“And you know what kind of a person James I was?” said Rubin with a snort. “Filthy and stupid.”
“Not really stupid,” said Avalon. “Henry IV of France called him the 'wisest fool in Christendom' but that merely indicated he lacked judgment rather than learning.”
“I call that stupid,” said Rubin.
“If lacking judgment were the criterion, few of us would escape,” said Avalon.
“You'd be first in line, Manny,” said Trumbull, and then allowed his expression to soften as Henry placed a generous sliver of pecan pie, laden with ice cream, before him. Trumbull approved of pecan pie as he approved of few things.
Over the last of the coffee Gonzalo said, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! I think it's time to leave the general for the specific. Our guest is now the subject and, Tom, are you willing—”
Trumbull said with alacrity, “I am not only willing to take over the grilling, I insist on it. Let's have quiet. —Henry, you can bring the brandy at your convenience. —Mr. Evans, it is the custom of this organization to ask a guest, as our first question, how he justifies his existence. In this case, I will tell you how you may justify your existence as far as I am concerned. Please tell me why it is you have current reason to sympathize with my view on smoking, though you smoke yourself on occasions. Have you been cheated by the tobacco industry?”
Evans shook his head and smiled briefly. “It has nothing to do with the tobacco industry. I wish it had. I work for an investment firm and my reasons have to do with my activities there.”
“In what way?”
Evans looked rather gloomy. “That,” he said, “would be difficult to explain adequately. I might say that a matter of smoking has rather spoiled a hitherto perfect record of mine in the Sherlock Holmes way. But,” and here he sighed, “I'd rather not talk about it, to be perfectly honest.”
“Sherlock Holmes?” said Gonzalo delightedly. “Henry, if—”
Trumbull waved an imperious arm. “Shut up, Mario. I think, Mr. Evans, that the price of the meal is an honest attempt on your part to explain exactly what you mean. We have time and we will listen.”
Evans sighed again. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Mr. Gonzalo, in inviting me, you told me I would be grilled. I must confess I did not think the sore spot would be probed at the very start.”
Trumbull said, “Sir, I merely followed up your own remark. You have no one to blame but yourself for making it. Please do not spoil our game.”
Gonzalo said, “It's all right, Mr. Evans. I told you that nothing said in this room is ever repeated outside.”
“Never!” said Trumbull emphatically.
Evans said, “Not that there is anything in the least criminal or unethical about what happened to me. It is merely that I will be forced to—deflate myself. I imagine I could easily be made fun of if it were to become general knowledge that—”
“It will not get about,” said Trumbull and, anticipating the other's next remark out of weary experience, went on, “Nor will our esteemed waiter be a problem to you. Of us all, Henry is the most trustworthy.”
Evans cleared his throat and held his brandy glass between thumb and forefinger. “The point is that I am personnel manager. It is my job to help decide on whether this one or that one is to be hired, fired, promoted, or left behind. Sometimes I turn out to be the court of last resort, for I have proven myself to be expert at the job. —You see, since I have been assured of the confidentiality of what I say, I can afford to praise myself.”
“Tell the truth even if it be self-praise,” said Trumbull. “In what way have you proved yourself to be expert?”
“In hiring a man to a sensitive position,” said Evans, “and many of our positions are extremely sensitive since we routinely handle very large sums of money, we, of course, rely on all sorts of reference data which the applicant, whether coming from outside or facing promotion from inside, may be unaware of. We know much about his background, his character, his personality, his experience.
“Yet that, you see, if often not enough. To know that a person has done well in a certain position is no certain augury that he will do well in another more responsible position, or one that is merely different. To know that he has done well in the past does not tell us what strains he is under that might cause him to do ill in the future. We may not know to what extent he dissimulates. The human mind is a mystery, gentlemen.
“It may happen, then, that on certain occasions there is left room for doubt, despite all the information we have, and it is then that the judgment is left up to me. For many years my judgments have been justified by subsequent experience with those I have chosen for one position or another, and in many cases by indirect experience with those I have turned away. At least this has been so until—”
Evans removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes as though aware that an inner sight had failed him. “My superiors are kind enough to say that one mistake in twenty-three years is excusable, but it doesn't help. I shall not be trusted in future as I have been before. And rightly so, for I acted too soon, and on the basis of a prejudice.”
Gonzalo, who was putting the final touches on the sketch of the guest, and making him look preternaturally prim with a mouth pursed to a dot, said, “Against whom or what were you prejudiced?”
Rubin said, “Artists, I hope.”
Trumbull cried out, “Let the man talk. —The prejudice had something to do with smoking?”
Evans replaced his glasses carefully and fixed his gaze on Trumbull. “I have a system which is impossible to describe in words, for it is based partly on intuition and partly on experience. —I am a close observer of the minutiae of human behavior. I mean the small things. I select something highly characteristic of a particular person, out of some instinctive feeling I appear to have.
“It might be smoking, for instance. If so, I note how he handles the cigarette; how he fiddles with it; the manner in which he puffs; the interval between puffs; how far down he smokes the stub; how he puts it out. There is infinite complexity in the interaction between a person and his cigarette—or anything else, his tie clasp, his ringers, the table before him. I have studied the complexity of small behavior all my adult life, first out of curiosity and amusement and, soon enough, out of serious intent.”
Drake smiled narrowly and said, “You mean those little things tell you something about the people you interview?”
“Yes, they do,” said Evans emphatically.
“All right. That's where the Sherlock Holmes angle comes in. And what can you tell us about ourselves, then?”
Evans shook his head. “I have been paying little professional attention to any of you. Even if I had, the conditions here are not proper for my purposes and I am without the ancillary knowledge that more standardized investigations would have placed on my desk. I can say very little about you.”
Trumbull said, “This isn't a parlor game anyway, Jim. Mr. Evans can tell you're a tobacco addict who flips ashes into his soup—”
Evans looked surprised and said hastily, “As a matter of fact, Dr. Drake did get some ashes in his soup—”
“And I noticed it too,” said Trumbull. “What are the proper conditions for you to study your victim?”
“The conditions I have standardized over the years. The person to be interviewed enters my office alone. He sits in a certain chair under a certain light. He is under a certain tension I do nothing to relieve. I take some time to choose what it is I will observe in detail, and then we start.”
“What if you don't find anything you can observe? What if he's a complete blank?” asked Gonzalo.
“That never happens. Something always shows up.”
Gonzalo said, “Did something show up when you interviewed me?”
Evans shook his head. “I never discuss that sort of thing with the individuals involved, but I can tell you this. There was a mirror in the room.”
Gonzalo bore up under the general laughter and said, “A handsome man has his problems.”
Trumbull said, “Someone must have told you that. —Mr. Evans, could you get to the crux of your story: your embarrassment.”
Evans nodded and looked unhappy. He turned slightly and said to Henry, “I wonder if I might have another cup of coffee.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Henry.
Evans sipped at it and said thoughtfully, “The trouble is, you see, that I have watched smoking so meticulously on so many occasions that I have developed a dislike for smokers; a prejudice, if you will; even though I smoke myself on occasion. It is not nearly as strong as yours, Mr. Trumbull, but on occasion it explodes and it did so to my own hurt on one occasion.
“The story concerns two men who had worked in a branch office of ours; we can call them—uh, Williams and Adams.”
Avalon cleared his throat and said, “If I were you, Mr. Evans, I would use their real names. In the course of telling the story, you are very likely to do so anyway. Remember that you speak here in confidence.”
Evans said, “I will attempt the substitution in any case. The two men were quite different in appearance. Williams was a large, bulky man with something of a stoop and with a slow way of talking. Adams was smaller, straighter, and could be very eloquent indeed.
“Both were of an age, both in their early thirties; both were equally competent, it appeared, and had fulfilled their jobs with equal satisfaction; both seemed to be qualified to fill a key opening that had become available in the home office. Both were bachelors, both rather withdrawn. Both led quiet lives and did not seem to show elements of instability in their socializing—”
Halsted interrupted. “What does that mean? Instability?”
Evans said, “Neither gambled to a dangerous extent. Neither exhibited sexual or personal habits so at variance with their social surroundings as to make them unduly conspicuous. Neither exhibited strong likes or dislikes that might twist them into unexpected actions. They had come to be friendly in a mild sort of way while working in the same office, but it was symptomatic of the lack of intensity of emotion in both men that, although it was the closest friendship either had, as far as we knew, it was merely a casual relationship.”
Rubin, leaning back in his chair, said, “Well, that churns up ray writer's soul. Here we have two mild buddies, going down life's pathway in parallel paths, both quiet milksops— and now they find that they are competing for the same job, a job with more money and more prestige, and suddenly the lambs become lions and turn on each other—”
“Nothing of the kind,” said Evans impatiently. “There was competition between the two, of course. That couldn't be helped. But neither before nor after was there any sign that this rivalry would find a release in violence.
“Both had taken advantage of the company's policy of encouraging further education and had been involved in courses in computer technology which we supervised. Both had done very well. It was hard to choose between them. All the data we had indicated, rather surprisingly, that Williams —slow, bumbling Williams—was actually a trifle the more intelligent of the two. Yet there was hesitation; he somehow didn't seem more intelligent than the quick and articulate Adams. So they left it up to me, with their usual confidence in my methods—”
Trumbull said, “Do you mean to tell us that your company knew you judged men by how they fiddled with paper clips and so on?”
“They knew this,” said Evans a little defensively, “but they also knew that my recommendations were invariably proven accurate in the aftermath. What more could they ask?”
He finished his coffee and went on. “I saw Williams first, since I rather had the suspicion that he might be the man. I would not turn down the better-qualified man simply because he was slow-spoken. I suppose,” and he sighed, “everything would have been entirely different if 1 had seen Adams first, but we can't adjust past circumstances to suit our convenience, can we?
“Williams seemed distinctly nervous, but that was certainly not unusual. I asked some routine questions while I studied his behavior. I noticed that his right forefinger moved on the desk as though it were writing words, but that stopped when he caught me looking at his hand; I should have been more careful there. In fact I had not really settled on what I was to study, when he reached for the cigarettes and matches.”
“What cigarettes?” asked Rubin.
“I keep an unopened pack of cigarettes on the desk, together with a matchbook, some paper clips, a ball-point pen, and other small objects within easy reach of the person being interviewed. There is a great tendency to handle them and that can be useful to me. The pack of cigarettes is often played with, for instance, but it is rarely opened.
“Williams, however, opened the pack and that caught me rather by surprise, I must confess. His dossier had not mentioned him to be a heavy smoker, and for someone to help himself to the interviewer's cigarettes without asking permission would require a strong addiction.”
Evans closed his eyes as though he were reproducing the scene upon the inner surface of his eyelids and said, “I can see it now. I became aware of an incongruity in the proceedings when he placed a cigarette between his lips with an attempt at simulating self-possession that utterly failed. It was then that I began to watch, since the incompatibility of the arrogance that led him to take a cigarette without permission and the timorousness with which he handled the cigarette caught my attention.
“His lips were dry, so that he had to remove the cigarette briefly, and wet his lips with his tongue. He then put it back between his lips and held it there as though he were afraid it would fall out. He seemed more and more nervous and I was now watching nothing else, only his hand and his cigarette. I was sure they would tell me all I wanted to know. I heard him scratch a match to life and, still holding onto the cigarette, he lit it with the match in his left hand.
“He seemed to hesitate, taking one or two shallow puffs while I watched and then, as though somehow aware I was not impressed by his performance, he inhaled deeply, and instantly went into a prolonged and apparently dangerous fit of coughing. —It turned out that he didn't smoke.”
Evans opened his eyes. “That came out at once, of course. Apparently, he felt that by smoking he would impress me as a suave and competent fellow. He knew that he had a bumbling appearance and wanted to counteract it. It did quite the reverse. It was an attempt to use me, to make a fool of me, and I was furious. I tried not to show it but I knew at once that under no circumstances would I recommend Williams for the job.
“And that was disastrous, of course. Had I seen Adams first, I would surely have interviewed him in my most meticulous fashion. As it was, with Williams out, I am afraid I treated Adams casually. I recommended him after the barest interaction. Do you wonder that my prejudice against smoking has intensified and that I am more inclined now than I was before to sympathize with your views, Mr. Trumbull?”
Trumbull said, “I take it that Mr. Adams proved incompetent at the job.”
“Not at all,” said Evans. “For two years he filled it in the fashion that I had predicted in my report after my inadequate examination of him. In fact, he was brilliant. In a number of cases he made decisions that showed real courage and that proved, in the aftermath, to have been correct.
“He was, in fact, in line for another promotion when one day he disappeared, and with him over a million dollars in company assets. When the situation was studied, it seemed that he had been intelligent enough and daring enough to play successful games with a computer, and his courageous decisions, which we had all applauded, had been part of the game. You see, had I examined him as thoroughly as I should have done, I would not have missed that streak of cunning and of patience. It was obvious he had been planning the job for years and had studied computer technology with that thought in mind and with the object of qualifying himself for the promotion which he finally gained. —Quite disastrous, quite disastrous.”
Drake said, “Over a million is quite disastrous all right.”
“No, no,” said Evans. “I mean the blow to my pride and to my standing in the company. Financially, it is no great blow. We were insured and we may even get the stolen items back someday. In fact, justice has been done in a crude sort of way. Adams did not get away with it; in fact, he's dead.” Evans shook his head and looked depressed.
“Rather brutally, too, I'm afraid,” he went on. “He had lost himself, quite deliberately and successfully, in one of the rabbit warrens of the city, disguised himself more by a new way of life than by anything physical, lived on his savings and didn't touch his stealings, and waited patiently for time to bring him relative safety. But he got into a fight somehow and was knifed. He was taken to the morgue and his fingerprints identified him. That was about six months ago.”
“Who killed him?” asked Gonzalo.
“That's not known. The police theory is this— The privacy index of a slum is low and somehow the fact that Adams had something hidden must have gotten around. Perhaps he drank a bit to forget the rather miserable life he was leading while waiting to be safely rich, and perhaps he talked a bit too much. Someone tried to cut himself in on the loot; Adams resisted; and Adams died.”
“And did whoever killed him take the loot?”
Evans said, “The police think not. None of the stolen items have surfaced in the six months since Adams' murder. Adams might have the patience to sit on a fortune and lie in hiding, but the average thief would not. So the police think the hoard is still wherever Adams kept it.”
Halsted made his characteristic brushing gesture up along his high forehead, as though checking to see if the hairline had yet come down to its original place, and said thoughtfully, “Could you check on the company's knowledge of the details of Adams' life and personality and work out a kind of psychological profile that would tell where the stolen goods would have been placed?”
“I tried that myself,” said Evans, “but the answer we came up with is that a man like Adams would hide it most ingeniously. And that does us no good.”
Avalon said with a sudden slap of his hand on the table, “I have an idea. Where is Williams? The other man, the one who lost out, I mean?”
Evans said, “He's still at his old job, and doing well enough.”
Avalon said, “Well, you might consult him. They were friends. He might know something the company doesn't; something vital that he himself wouldn't dream is vital.”
“Yes,” said Evans dryly. “That occurred to us and he was interviewed. It was useless. You see, the friendship between the two men had been mild enough to begin with, but it had ceased completely after the incident of the interviews.
“Apparently Adams had, in apparent friendliness, advised Williams to practice smoking in order to demonstrate self-possession and nonchalance. Adams had often told the large, slow-speaking Williams that he made an unfortunate first impression and that he should do something about it.
“Adams' often-repeated advice had its effect at precisely the wrong moment for Williams. Sitting in my office and keenly aware that he made a poor appearance, he could not resist reaching for the cigarettes—with disastrous results. The poor man blamed Adams for what happened, although the action was his own and he must bear the responsibility himself. Still, it ended the friendship and we could learn nothing useful from Williams.”
Gonzalo interrupted excitedly, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Couldn't Adams have deliberately set it up that way; sort of hypnotized Williams into the act? Couldn't he have arranged it so that Williams was sure to reach for a cigarette at some crucial point? The interview would be the crucial point; Williams would be eliminated; Adams would get the job.”
Evans said, “I don't accept such Machiavellianism. How would Adams know that there would be cigarettes at hand on just that occasion? Too unlikely.”
“Besides,” said Avalon, “that sort of Iago-like manipulation of human beings works on the stage but not in real life.”
There was a silence after that and then Trumbull said, “So that's it, I suppose. One crook, now a dead man, and one bundle of stolen goods, hidden somewhere. Nothing much we can do with that. I don't think that even Henry could do anything with that.” He looked toward Henry, who was standing by the sideboard patiently. “Henry! Could you tell us, by chance, where the hiding place of the ill-gotten pelf might be?”
“I think I might, sir,” said Henry calmly.
Trumbull said, “What?”
Evans said in Trumbull's direction, “Is he joking?”
Henry said, “I think it is possible, on the basis of what we have heard here this evening, to work out what may really have happened.”
Evans said indignantly, “What really happened other than what I have told you? This is nonsense.”
Trumbull said, “I think we ought to hear Henry, Mr. Evans. He's got a knack too.”
“Well,” said Evans, “let him have his say.”
Henry said, “It occurs to me that because of Mr. Williams' foolish behavior at the interview you were virtually forced to recommend Mr. Adams—yet it is hard to believe that Mr. Williams could be so stupid as to imagine he could pretend to smoke when he was a non-smoker. It is common knowledge that a non-smoker will cough if he inhales cigarette smoke for the first time.”
Evans said, “Williams says he was tricked into it by Adams. It was more likely, stupidity. It may be hard to believe that a person could be stupid, but under pressure some quite intelligent people do stupid things and this was one of those occasions.”
“Perhaps it was,” said Henry, “and perhaps we are looking at the matter from the wrong end. Perhaps it was not Adams who tricked Williams into attempting to smoke, thus forcing you to recommend Adams for the job. Perhaps it was Williams who did it deliberately in order to force you to recommend Adams for the job.”
“Why should he do that?” said Evans.
“Might the two not have been working together, with Williams the brains of the pair? Williams arranged to have Adams do the actual work while he remained in the background and directed activities. Then might not Williams, after arranging a murder as cleverly as he had arranged the theft, have taken the profits? And if all that is so, would you not expect Williams, right now, to know where the stolen goods are?”
Evans merely stared in utter disbelief and it fell to Trumbull to put the general stupefaction into words. “You've pulled that from thin air, Henry.”
“But it fits, Mr. Trumbull. Adams could not have arranged the smoking attempt. He wouldn't have known the cigarettes would be there. Williams would know; he was sitting there. He might have had something else in mind to force Adams into the job but, seeing the cigarettes, he used those.”
“But it's still out of whole cloth, Henry. There's no evidence.”
“Consider,” said Henry earnestly. “A non-smoker can. scarcely pretend to be a smoker. He will cough; nothing will ( prevent that. But anyone can cough at will; a cough need never be genuine. What if Williams was, in actual fact, an accomplished smoker who had once given up smoking? It would have been the easiest thing for him to pretend he was a non-smoker by pretending to cough uncontrollably.”
Evans shook his head stubbornly. “There is nothing to indicate Williams was a smoker.”
“Isn't there?” said Henry. “Is it wise of you, sir, to concentrate so entirely on one particular variety of behavior pattern when you interview a prospect? Might you not miss something crucial that was not part of the immediate pattern you were studying?”
Evans said coldly, “No.”
Henry said, “You were watching the cigarette, sir, and nothing else. You were not watching the match with which it was lit. You said you heard him scratch the match; you didn't see it.”
“Yes, but what of that?”
Henry said, “These days, there is no occasion to use matches for anything but cigarettes. A non-smoker, in an age when electricity does everything and even gas stoves have pilot lights, can easily go years without striking a match. It follows that a non-smoker who cannot inhale smoke without coughing cannot handle a matchbook with any skill at all. Yet you described .Williams as having held his cigarette with his right hand and having used his left hand only to light it.” “Yes.”
“An unskilled smoker,” said Henry, “would surely use two hands to light a cigarette, one to hold the matchbook and one to remove the match and strike it on the friction strip. A skilled smoker pretending to be unskilled might be so intent on making sure he handled the cigarette with the properly amateurish touch that he might forget to do the same for the match. In fact, forgetting the match altogether, he might, absent-mindedly, use the kind of technique that only an accomplished smoker could possibly have learned and have lit the match one-handed. I have seen Dr. Drake do such a thing.”
Drake, who had, for the last minute, been laughing himself into a quiet coughing fit, managed to say, “I don't do it often anymore, because I use a cigarette lighter these days, but here's how it goes.” Holding a book of matches in his left hand, he bent one of the matches double with his left thumb so that the head came up against the friction strip. A quick stroke set it aflame.
Henry said, “This is what Williams must have done, and that one-handed match strike indicates an accomplished smoker far more surely than any number of coughs would indicate a non-smoker. If the police look back into his past life far enough, they'll find a time when he smoked. His act in your office will then seem exactly what it was—an act.” “Good God, yes,” said Trumbull, “and you can preserve Black Widower confidentiality. Just tell the police that you remember—what you actually remember, what you've told us tonight.”
“But to have not realized this,” said Evans confusedly, “will make me seem more a fool than ever.”
“Not,” said Henry softly, “if your statement leads to a solution of the crime.”
6 Afterword
“No Smoking” appeared in the December 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the title of “Confessions of an American Cigarette Smoker.”
I'm growing ever more fanatical on the subject of smoking. Trumbull in this story is speaking for me. I allow no smoking in either my apartment or my office, but one is limited in one's dictatorial powers elsewhere. The meetings of the Trap Door Spiders are indeed made hideous with smoke— as are almost all other meetings I attend.
There's nothing I can do about it directly, of course, except to complain when the law is with me. (I once plucked the cigarette out of the hand of a woman who was smoking under a “No Smoking” sign in an elevator and who wouldn't put it out when I asked her, politely, to do so.) It helps a bit, though, to write a story expressing my views.