Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 07

by Over My Dead Body

  Contents

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The World of Rex Stout

  Copyright

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds from his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erie Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  Introduction

  I met Rex Stout in the aftermath of a crime. Beg pardon, alleged crime. The creator of Mr. Wolfe and Archie didn’t believe any crime had been committed.

  The year was 1962; the place, Rochester, New York. I was working there as a copywriter in an ad agency whose major account was Eastman Kodak, irreverently known as Big Yellow. I was also one of the youngest, if not the youngest, board members of the Friends of the Rochester Public Library. This was the first of several Friends groups I became associated with out of my general love of, and need for, libraries, and it stands out as one of the most vigorous and progressive.

  The crime, so-called, was not the kind that figures in one of these fine Stout reprints. It was what some term a victimless crime. But to the authorities in Rochester, especially the district attorney, whose press statements seemed to reek of puritanical hellfire and political ambition, it was a crime of the most dangerous kind.

  To wit: selling a book.

  The book was the Grove Press edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Sale of the allegedly obscene book was prohibited in New York State and a lot of other states as well. The alleged perp was a smallish, mild-appearing bookseller, whom I’ll call Norman B. Norman B. ran a large independent store not far from the massive granite block of the main library, on the bank of the Genesee River. Along with the usual array of semilurid girlie magazines and sexy paperbacks, in which the raciest word was something like “nipples,” the bookstore offered Miller’s novel for sale.

  Which got Norman B. in a peck of trouble.

  Now I honestly don’t remember whether he was actually served with an arrest warrant, or just ordered by the D.A. to get rid of the Miller or else. But I do remember the quick response. Certain members of the Friends, including several stouthearted technical writers from Kodak, formed an ad hoc group called Audience Unlimited. Its purpose was to advertise and write letters objecting to the law coming down hard on Norman B. and, more pertinently, on the freedom to read. Yours truly was part of the new group.

  Norman B. himself immediately took countermeasures, instituting a legal action to overturn the Tropic ban. In 1964 the case was decided in his favor by the New York State courts, some four months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the book not obscene.

  In the midst of the Sturm und Drang unleashed by the Tropic affair, Mr. Stout came to town.

  He came not to defend Norman B. or Henry M. but as a guest speaker at the sixth annual Friends Literary Award presentation. The award that year was given to Lewis Stiles Gannett, a native of Rochester and a journalist, author, and at that time editor of Doubleday’s marvelous Mainstream of America series of historical studies.

  The award ceremony was held in the great main hall of the Rochester library, with a small social gathering preceding. As a Friends board member, I was invited to attend the reception. The words “high excitement” hardly describe my state; the honored guest was a Famous Name Writer, and I was a devoted fan of his mysteries.

  I vividly recall my first sight of Rex Stout, who was at that time seventy-five. His hair was white and so was his splendid long beard, and I remember thinking that he looked like an American cousin of Shaw. Of course he was a godlike figure to me—I was thirty, slogging along fairly unsuccessfully with one third-rate pulp novel after another. But I approached him, shook his hand, muttered a few words, and I remember that he was friendly and humorous: kindness personified.

  He was less friendly and humorous when it was his turn to speak. Of course he was appropriately warm and complimentary to his friend Gannett. But then he la
unched into a jeremiad against book-banners. He said, “Efforts to censor what people read are not justified under the American system.” He thrilled me with his remarks. The audience gave him an ovation when he finished.

  Which brings me around to the real point of this Introduction.

  Rex Stout was a lifelong champion of writers, and a lifelong foe of those who would take advantage of them or suppress their work. As a highly successful writer himself, he obviously believed in giving something back to the profession for the benefit of others who weren’t so successful.

  Virtually his whole life testifies to this. Stout became a member of the Authors League in 1915. He was president of the League, the umbrella organization for the Authors Guild and the Dramatists Guild, from 1951 to 1955 and again from 1961 to 1969.

  He served the Authors Guild as president from 1943 to 1945 and was a member of the Guild Council from 1942 until the time of his death in 1975. As the Guild’s Bulletin said in its obituary, “He was always ready to give of his time and spirit to Guild business.” Of his many activities, probably none was more important than his presidency of the Authors League Fund, which helps professional writers who happen to fall into dire financial distress.

  A man named Olin Miller has said, “Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” That’s more than a little self-serving; millions of men and women in other jobs would make the same statement about their work. But it’s also true that writers have few defenders beyond themselves.

  That’s why the Authors League was formed, and its two guilds as well.

  That’s why Rex Stout gave so much of himself to Guild and League causes.

  That’s why he came to Rochester and spoke out against the immoral banning of Miller’s novel. (Who knows what he thought of the book? He might have hated it; I’ve never been wild about it myself. But it was a serious book, and if you allow the yahoos to ban one such, you open the door to suppression of all of them—and a lot of other art besides. Which is hardly big news but is, regrettably, a recurring problem.)

  Rex Stout gave me great pleasure through his novels. I expect he has done the same for you and will certainly do so again in Over My Dead Body.

  But he also gave me great pride in my chosen profession and a sure knowledge that, someday, if ever I could, I had to give something back too.

  I’ll never forget the day Rex Stout came to Rochester. If you’d been there, you wouldn’t either.

  —John Jakes

  Chapter 1

  The bell rang and I went to the front and opened the door and there she was. I said good morning. “Pliz,” she said, “I would like to see Misturr Nero Wolfe.”

  Or you might have spelled it plihz or plizz or plihsz. However you spelled it, it wasn’t Middle West or New England or Park Avenue or even East Side. It wasn’t American, and naturally it irritated me a little. But I politely invited her in and conducted her to the office and got her a chair, and then extracted her name, which I had to ask her to spell.

  “Mr. Wolfe will be engaged until eleven o’clock,” I told her, with a glance at the wall clock above my desk, which said ten thirty. “I’m Archie Goodwin, his confidential secretary. If you’d like to save time by starting on me …”

  She shook her head and said she had plenty of time. I asked if she would like a book or magazine, and she shook her head again, and I passed her up and resumed at my desk, where I was heading up a bunch of hybridizing cards for use upstairs. Five minutes later I had finished and was checking them over when I heard her voice behind me:

  “I believe I would like a book. May I?”

  I waved at the shelves and told her to help herself and went on with the checking. Presently I looked up when she approached and stood beside me with a volume in her hand.

  “Misturr Wolfe reads this?” she asked. She had a nice soft low voice which would have sounded all right if she had taken the trouble to learn how to pronounce words. I glanced at the title and told her Wolfe had read it some time ago.

  “But he stoodies it?”

  “Why should he? He’s a genius, he don’t have to study anything.”

  “He reads once and then he is through?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  She started for her chair and then turned again. “Do you read it perhaps?”

  “I do not,” I said emphatically.

  She half smiled. “It’s too complicated for you, the Balkan history?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t tried it. But I understand all the kings and queens got murdered. I like newspaper murders better.”

  She turned off the smile and went and sat down with the book, and appeared to be absorbed in it a few minutes later when, the checking finished, I jiggled the handful of cards neatly together and departed with them, and mounted the two flights of carpeted stairs to the top floor and the steeper flight to the roof level, where the entire space was glassed-in for the orchids except the potting room and the corner where Horstmann slept. Passing through the first two rooms, down the aisles with silver staging and concrete benches and thousands of pots holding everything from baby seedlings to odontoglossums and dendrobiums in full bloom, I found Nero Wolfe in the warm room, standing with his thumbs on his hips, frowning at Horstmann, who in turn was scowling reproachfully at an enormous coelogyne blossom with white petals and orange keels. Wolfe was muttering:

  “A full two weeks. At the very least, twelve days. As Per Hansa says, I don’t know what God expects to accomplish by such management. If it were only a question of forcing—well, Archie?”

  I handed Horstmann the cards. “For that batch of miltonias and lycastes. The germination dates are already in where you had them. There’s a female immigrant downstairs who wants to borrow a book. She is twenty-two years old and has fine legs. Her face is sullen but well-arranged and her eyes are dark and beautiful and worried. She has a nice voice, but she talks like Lynn Fontanne in Idiot’s Delight. Her name is Carla Lovchen.”

  Wolfe had taken the cards from Horstmann to flip through them, but he stopped to send me a sharp glance. “What’s that?” he demanded. “Her name?”

  “Lovchen.” I spelled it, and grinned. “Yeah, I know, it struck me too. You may remember I read The Native’s Return. She seems to be named after a mountain. The Black Mountain. Mount Lovchen. Tsernagora. Montenegro, which is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero, and your name is Nero. It may be only a coincidence, but it’s natural for a trained detective—”

  “What does she want?”

  “She says she wants to see you, but I think she came to borrow a book. She took that United Yugoslavia by Henderson from the shelf and asked if you’ve read it, and do you stoody it, and am I reading it and so on. She’s down there with her pretty nose in it. But as I say, her eyes look worried. I had a notion to tell her that because of the healthy condition of the bank account—”

  I turned it off because he was ignoring me and giving his attention to the cards. Reflecting that that was an unusually childish gesture even for him, since it lacked only three minutes till eleven o’clock, the hour when he invariably proceeded from the plant rooms to the office, I snorted audibly, wheeled, and went for the stairs.

  The immigrant was still in the chair, reading, but had abandoned the book for a magazine. I looked around for it to return it to the shelf, but saw that she had already done so; it was back in its place, and I gave her a good mark for that because I’ve noticed that most girls are so darned untidy around a house. I told her Wolfe would be down soon, and had just got my notes cleared away and the typewriter lowered when I heard the door of his personal elevator clanging, and a moment later he entered. A pace short of his desk he arrested his progress to acknowledge the visitor’s presence with a little bow which achieved only one degree off the perpendicular, then continued to his chair, got deposited, glanced at the vase of cattleyas and the morning mail under the weight, put his thumb to the button to summon beer, leaned back and adjust
ed himself, and sighed. The visitor, with the magazine closed on her lap, was gazing at him through long lowered lashes.

  Wolfe said abruptly and crisply, “Lovchen? That is not your name. It is no one’s name.”

  Her lashes fluttered. “My name,” she said with a half smile “Is what I say it is. Would you call it a convenience? Not to irritate the Americans with a name like Kraljevitch?”

  “Is that yours?”

  “No.”

  “No matter.” Wolfe sounded testy—as far as I could see, for no reason. “You came to see me?”

  Her lips parted for a soft little laugh. “You sound like a Tsernagore,” she declared. “Or a Montenegrin if you prefer it, as the Americans do. You don’t look like one, since Tsernagores grow up and up, not out and all around like you. But when you talk I feel at home. That’s exactly how a Tsernagore speaks to a girl. Is it what you eat?”

  I turned my head to enjoy a grin. Wolfe demanded, almost bellowing at her, “What can I do for you, Miss Lovchen?”

  “Oh yes.” Her eyes showed the worry again. “I was forgetting on account of seeing you. You are a famous man, I know that, of course, but you don’t look famous. You look more like—” She stopped, made a little circle with her lips, and went on, “Anyway, you’re famous, and you have been in Montenegro. You see, I know much about you. Hvala Bogu. Because I want to engage you on account of some trouble.”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Not my trouble,” she continued rapidly. “It’s a friend of mine, a girl who came with me to America not long ago. Her name is Neya Tormic.” The long black lashes flickered. “Just as mine is Carla Lovchen. We work together at the studio of Nikola Miltan on 48th Street. You know, perhaps? Dancing and fencing are taught there. You know him?”

  “I’ve met him,” Wolfe admitted gruffly, “at the table of my friend Marko Vukčić. But I’m afraid I’m too busy at present—”

  She swept on in front. “We’re good fencers, Neya and I. Corsini in Zagreb passed us with foils, épée, and sabre. And the dancing, of course, is easy. We learn the Lambeth Walk in twenty minutes, we teach it to rich people in five lessons, and they pay high, and Nikola Miltan takes the money and pays us only not so high. That is why, in this foolish trouble Neya has got into, we can pay you not so much as you might expect from some people, but we can pay you a little, and added to that is the fact that we are from Zagreb. It’s not a little trouble Neya has got into, it’s a big one, through no fault of hers, because she is not a thief, as anyone but an American fool would be aware. They’ll put her in jail, and you must act quickly, at once—”