Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (3 page)

“Yes.” Wellman hesitated, opening his mouth and
closing it again. He glanced at me and returned to Wolfe. “I tell you, Mr. Wolfe, I am willing to admit that what I am doing is vindictive and wicked. My wife thinks it is, and so does the pastor of my church. I was home one day last week, and they both said so. It is sinful to be vindictive, but here I am, and I’m going through with it. Even if it was just a hit-and-run accident I don’t think the police are going to find him, and whatever it was I’m not going back to Peoria and sell groceries until he’s found and made to pay for it. I’ve got a good paying business, and I own some property, and I never figured on dying a pauper, but I will if I have to, to get the murderous criminal that killed my daughter. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know you too well, I only know you by reputation, and maybe you won’t want to work for a man who can say an unchristian thing like that, so maybe it’s a mistake to say it, but I want to be honest about it.”

Wellman took his glasses off and started wiping them with a handkerchief. That showed his better side. He didn’t want to embarrass Wolfe by keeping his eyes on him while Wolfe was deciding whether to take on a job for such an implacable bastard as John R. Wellman of Peoria, Illinois.

“I’ll be honest too,” Wolfe said dryly. “The morality of vengeance is not a factor in my acceptance or refusal of a case. But it was a mistake for you to say it, because I would have asked for a retainer of two thousand dollars and now I’ll make it five thousand. Not merely to gouge you, though. Since the police have turned up nothing in seventeen days, it will probably take a lot of work and money. With a few more facts I’ll have enough to start on.”

“I wanted to be honest about it,” Wellman insisted.

When he left, half an hour later, his check was under
a paperweight on my desk, along with the copy of Joan Wellman’s last letter home, and there was an assortment of facts in my notebook—plenty, as Wolfe had said, for a start. I went to the hall with him and helped him on with his coat. When I opened the door to let him out he wanted to shake hands, and I was glad to oblige.

“You’re sure you won’t mind,” he asked “if I ring you fairly often? Just to find out if there’s anything new? I’ll try not to make a nuisance of myself, but I’m like that. I’m persistent.”

“Any time,” I assured him. “I can always say ‘no progress.’”

“He is good, isn’t he? Mr. Wolfe?”

“He’s the best.” I made it positive.

“Well—I hope—all right.” He crossed the sill into an icy wind from the west, and I stood there until he had descended from the stoop to the sidewalk. The shape he was in, he might have tumbled down those seven steps.

Returning down the hall, I paused a moment before entering the office, to sniff. Fritz, as I knew, was doing spareribs with the sauce Wolfe and he had concocted and, though the door to the kitchen was closed, enough came through for my nose, and it approved. In the office, Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed. I picked up Wellman’s check, gave it an admiring glance, went and put it in the safe, and then crossed to Wolfe’s desk for another look at one of the prints of Joan Wellman’s likeness. As near as you can tell from a picture, it would have been nice to know her.

I spoke. “If you’re working, knock off. Dinner in ten minutes.”

Wolfe’s eyes opened.

I asked, “Have we got a murder or not?”

“Certainly we have.” He was supercilious.

“Oh. Good for us. Because she wouldn’t go for a walk in the park in February?”

“No.” He humphed.” “You should have a better reason.”

“Me? Thanks. Me have a reason?”

“Yes, Archie. I have been training you for years to observe. You are slacking. Not long ago Mr. Cramer showed us a list of names on a sheet of paper. The seventh name on that list was Baird Archer. The evening she was killed Miss Wellman had an appointment with a man named Baird Archer. Leonard Dykes who wrote that list of names was murdered. It would be silly not to hypothesize that Miss Wellman was also murdered.”

I turned on my heel, took the two paces to my swivel chair, turned it so I would face him, and sat. “Oh, that,” I said carelessly. “I crossed that off as coincidence.”

“Pfui. It never struck you. You’re slacking.”

“Okay. I am not electronized.”

“There is no such word.”

“There is now. I’ve used it.” I was getting indignant. “I mean I am not lightning. It was six weeks ago that Cramer showed us that list of names, and I gave it the merest glance. I know you did too, but look who you are. What if it were the other way around? What if I had remembered that name from one short glimpse of that list six weeks ago and you hadn’t? I would be the owner of this house and the bank account, and you would be working for me. Would you like that? Or do you prefer it as it is? Take your pick.”

He snorted. “Call Mr. Cramer.”

“Right.” I swiveled to the phone and dialed.

I
f you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed. No matter which, I had known that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer would have to put up with it that evening, because that is always a part of my reaction to sauerkraut. I don’t glory in it or go for a record, but neither do I fight it back. I want to be liked just for myself.

If either Cramer or Wolfe noticed it he gave no sign. I was where I belonged during an evening session in the office and, with Wolfe behind his desk and Cramer in the red leather chair, I was to one side of the line of fire. It had started off sociable enough, with Wolfe offering refreshment and Cramer choosing bourbon and water, and Fritz bringing it, and Cramer giving it a go and saying it was good whisky, which was true.

“You said on the phone,” he told Wolfe, “you have something I can use.”

Wolfe put his beer glass down and nodded. “Yes, sir. Unless you no longer need it. I’ve seen nothing in the paper recently about the Leonard Dykes case—the body fished out of the river nearly two months ago. Have you got it in hand?”

“No.”

“Any progress?”

“Nothing—no.”

“Then I would like to consult you about something because it’s a little ticklish.” Wolfe leaned back and adjusted himself for comfort. “I have to make a choice. Seventeen days ago the body of a young woman named Joan Wellman was found on a secluded road in Van Cortlandt Park. She had been struck by an automobile. Her father, from Peoria, Illinois, is dissatisfied with the way the police are handling the matter and has hired me to investigate. I saw him just this evening; he left only two hours ago, and I phoned you immediately. I have reason to think that Miss Wellman’s death was not an accident and that there was an important connection between the two homicides—hers and Dykes’s.”

“That’s interesting,” Cramer conceded. “Something your client told you?”

“Yes. So I’m faced with an alternative. I can make a proposal to your colleague in the Bronx. I can offer to tell him of this link connecting the two deaths, which will surely be of great help to him, on the condition that he collaborates with me, within reason, to satisfy my client—when the case is solved—that I have earned my fee. Or I can make that proposal to you. Since the death of my client’s daughter occurred in the Bronx and therefore is in your colleague’s jurisdiction, perhaps I should go to him, but on the other hand Dykes was killed in Manhattan. What do you think?”

“I think,” Cramer growled, “I expected something like this and here it is. You want me to pay for information about a murder by promising to help you collect a fee, and you threaten to take it to the Bronx if I won’t buy. If he won’t buy either, then you withhold it? Huh?”

“I have no information to withhold.”

“Goddam it, you said you—”

“I said I have reason to think the two deaths are connected. It’s based on information, of course, but I have none that the police do not have. The Police Department is a huge organization. If your staff and the Bronx staff get together on this it’s likely that sooner or later they’ll get where I am. I thought this would save you time and work. I can’t be charged with withholding information when I know nothing that the police don’t know—collectively.”

Cramer snorted. “Some day,” he said darkly, and snorted again.

“I offer this,” Wolfe said, “because you might as well have it, and because the case looks complex enough to need a lot of work and my resources are limited. I make the offer conditional because if with my hint you solve it in a hurry without further consultation with me, I don’t want my client to refuse to pay my bill. I am willing to put it like this: if, when it’s finished, you think it likely that the Wellman case would not have been solved if Mr. Wellman had not come to me, you tell him so, not for publication.”

Wolfe levered himself forward to reach for his glass and drink.

“I’ll take it that way,” Cramer stated. “Let’s have it.”

Wolfe wiped his lips with his handkerchief. “Also Mr. Goodwin is to be permitted to look over the two files—on Dykes and on Miss Wellman.”

“I don’t have the Wellman file.”

“When I explain the connection you’ll get it.”

“It’s against Department regulations.”

“Indeed? I beg your pardon. It would be mutually helpful to share information, and it would waste my time and my client’s money to collect again the facts you
already have, but of course a violation of regulations is unthinkable.”

Cramer glared at him. “You know,” he said, “one of the many reasons you’re hard to take is that when you’re being sarcastic you don’t sound sarcastic. That’s just one of your offensive habits. Okay, I’ll see you get facts. What’s this connection?”

“With the condition as stated.”

“Hell yes. I’d hate to see you starve.”

Wolfe turned to me. “Archie. That letter?”

I got it from under the paperweight and handed it to him.

“This,” he told Cramer, “is a copy of a letter Miss Wellman wrote to her parents on Thursday, February first. She was killed the evening of the next day, Friday.” He held it out, and Cramer got up to take it. “Read it all if you like, but the relevant part is the marked paragraph.”

Cramer ran over it. He took his time, and then sat frowning at it. Looking up at Wolfe, he kept the frown. “I’ve seen that name somewhere. Baird Archer. Isn’t that it?”

Wolfe nodded. “Shall we see how long it takes you to dig it up?”

“No. Where?”

“On the list of names written by Leonard Dykes which you came here to show me six weeks ago. It was seventh on the list, I think—possibly eighth. Not sixth.”

“When did you first see this letter?”

“This evening. My client gave it to me.”

“I’ll be damned.” Cramer gawked at him and at the relevant paragraph. He folded the letter with slow deliberate fingers and put it in his pocket.

“The original,” Wolfe told him, “is in the possession of your colleague in the Bronx. That’s my copy.”

“Yeah. I’ll borrow it.” Cramer reached for his glass, took a swallow, and focused his eyes on a corner of Wolfe’s arcwood desk. He took another swallow and went back to studying the desk. So alternating, two more swallows with intervals for desk study emptied the glass. He put it down on the little table.

“What else have you got?”

“Nothing.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing. Since I saw that letter, I have dined.”

“I bet you have.” Cramer came up out of his chair, still springy in spite of his years. “I’ll be going. Damn it, I was going home.”

He headed for the hall. I followed.

When I returned to the office after letting the law out, Wolfe was placidly opening a bottle of beer.

“What do you say,” I suggested, “I get on the phone and call in Saul and Fred and Orrie, and you lay it out, and we set a deadline, sundown tomorrow would do, for solving
both
cases? Just to make a monkey out of Cramer?”

Wolfe scowled at me. “Confound it, don’t bounce like that. This will be no skirmish. Mr. Cramer’s men have been looking, more or less, for a Baird Archer for seven weeks. The Bronx men have been looking for one for seventeen days. Now they’ll get serious about it. What if there isn’t one?”

“We know there was enough of one to date Joan Wellman for February second.”

“We do not. We know only that she wrote her parents that a stranger on the telephone had said he was Baird Archer, and that a manuscript of a novel bearing that name had been submitted to her employers, read by her, and returned in the mail to a Baird Archer at General Delivery.” Wolfe shook his head. “No, this will
be more than a skirmish. Before we’re through Mr. Wellman may indeed be a pauper unless his rancor wears thin. Let the police do their part.”

Knowing him as I did, I didn’t care for that. I sat down. “Sitzlust again?” I demanded offensively.

“No. I said let the police do their part. This will take work. We’ll start with the assumption, not risky I think, that Miss Wellman’s letter to her parents was straightforward. If so, it had something for us besides the name of Baird Archer. He asked her if anyone else had read his manuscript and she said no. It could have been an innocent question, but in the light of what happened to her it raises a point. Was she killed because she had read the manuscript? As a conjecture that is not inane. How many public stenographers are there in the city? Say in Manhattan?”