Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19

by Murder by the Book

  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, was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but 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, worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which 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 of 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 Erle 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 as a 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-nine. 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 first encountered Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe the summer before my senior year of high school while I was camping out in California’s Sequoia National Forest with my good friend Cecil Nelson Widdifield. Now, this was a real he-guy outing. Two men’s men seated around the campfire pondering the meaning of life while puffing on big, smelly cigars and savoring the subtle bouquet of Red Mountain Hearty Burgundy. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. No shaving. No girls—none would come with us. No matter. This was what men did.

  Mostly, we froze. Our campsite was a good 9,000 feet up in the mountains. When the sun was directly overhead it warmed the forest floor to a toasty 50 degrees. Nights and mornings the temperature plunged into the 20s. We were desperate for hot showers and our mommies (not necessarily in that order), but we were too proud to come down off that mountain. So we stayed up there for five days and nights wrapped in our sleeping bags, teeth chattering. We read a ton. We’d brought along an excellent supply of he-guy literature. Ian Fleming’s James Bond was this particular teen’s absolute favorite. I loved everything about Agent 007. His cars. His women. His Beretta .25 in the chamois holster (I pronounced it cha-moize). But after three days we’d run through our supply of Bond adventures and were down to the handful of other books Cecil had grabbed off his father’s shelf. One of them was a Nero Wolfe—Some Buried Caesar, as it happens.

  From the moment I opened its cover I knew I had happened onto something truly special. I immediately wanted to be Archie Goodwin. I wanted to know Nero Wolfe. Who wouldn’t want to know Wolfe? A man who has his life exactly the way he wants it. A man who is sure of who he is and what he knows—and what you don’t. I was hooked instantly, a goner. I even tingled all over, though that may have been the onset of frostbite. A lifelong love was born.

  You don’t read the Nero Wolfe books, you belong to them. Archie and Wolfe aren’t mere characters—they’re real people. Think about how well you get to know Wolfe, all one-seventh of a ton of him. Think about how quickly you can rattle off his traits and preferences. Likes: The London Times crossword puzzle, his orchids, his beer, Fritz Brenner’s mouth-watering meals, the old town house on New York’s West 35th Street. Dislikes: Leaving the old town house on West 35th Street, women, physical exertion of any kind, discussing business while eating, shaking hands with strangers, anything that causes a break in his daily routine, which is anchored by the four hours he spends tending his orchids with Theodore Horstmann. Wolfe is gruff, grouchy, and superior. He scowls, he snorts, he bellows. When he’s thinking deep thoughts he pushes his lips in and out. You know the man as well as you know a member of your own family. His house is your house. The plant rooms. The pool table in the basement. His office, with the red leather chair for his most important guests (and yellow chairs for everyone else). You even know how many steps there are from the sidewalk up to the front door—seven.

  And then there’s Archie, our storyteller, who is everything Wolfe is not. Archie is young and chipper, a ladies’ man, a wisecracker. He does Wolfe’s legwork, sleeps under his roof, takes his criticisms and, on occasion, his praise (“Satisfactory” is the great detective’s highest accolade). Wolfe is a master of deduction, a pure intellect. Archie is a man of action and something of a romantic. Indeed, his answer to what’s wrong with our civilization is that we’ve quit drinking champagne from ladies’ slippers. It’s safe to say that Archie and Wolfe would be lost without each other. I know we readers of crime literature would be lost without them.

  I think the highest compliment you can pay any murder-mystery novel is to say that you’d enjoy it even if nobody got killed. This is definitely the case with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfes. The characters are so well drawn, the relationships so engaging, the dialogue so sharp that they make for highly entertaining reading without any crime whatsoever. Ah, but crime there is, of course, and at this Stout was a master. His plots are absorbing and baffling, yet remarkably free of contrivance. They’re seamless. They’re what we who write mysteries aspire to.

  The one you are holding, Murder by the Book, is the story of three murder victims—a legal clerk, an editor, and a typist—and of the unsolicited novel that may or may not tie their deaths together. This one happens to be a particular favorite of mine, I g
uess because it takes place in the world of New York publishing. The publishing scene has changed some in the forty years since Stout wrote it. Quaint, tweedy little family-run houses like his Scholl and Hanna have largely given way to huge, multinational media conglomerates. The business isn’t nearly as gentlemanly or personal as it once was, and it’s a lot more about money than it is great literature. All of which makes it even more appropriate to ask the vital question Stout poses here: Is there such a thing as a manuscript worth killing for? To be honest, I know of at least two agents and a half-dozen editors who would promptly reply yes—provided they were sure they could get away with it. But that’s in the so-called real world. In the world of Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe is on the case. And when he is, nobody gets away with anything.

  Through the years I’ve come back to Wolfe again and again. It never seems to matter if I’ve read the book before. If anything, Wolfes improve on a second reading. They are a precious resource. If you’re new to them, Murder by the Book will make for a splendid introduction. Pull up a chair. If you’re an old friend, then Nero Wolfe needs no introduction whatsoever and I’m merely holding up your progress.

  I leave you to it.

  —David Handler

  Chapter 1

  Something remarkable happened that cold Tuesday in January. Inspector Cramer, with no appointment, showed up a little before noon at Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and, after I had ushered him into the office and he had exchanged greetings with Wolfe and lowered himself into the red leather chair, he said right out, “I dropped in to ask a little favor.”

  What was remarkable was his admitting it. From my chair at my desk I made an appropriate noise. He sent me a sharp glance and asked if I had something.

  “No, sir,” I told him courteously, “I’m right on top. You just jolted that out of me. So many times I’ve seen you come here for a favor and try to bull it or twist it, it was quite a shock.” I waved it away tolerantly. “Skip it.”

  His face, chronically red, deepened a shade. His broad shoulders stiffened, and the creases spreading from the corners of his gray-blue eyes showed more as the eyelids tightened. Then, deciding I was playing for a blurt, he controlled it. “Do you know,” he asked, “whose opinion of you I would like to have? Darwin’s. Where were you while evolution was going on?”

  “Stop brawling,” Wolfe muttered at us from behind his desk. He was testy, not because he would have minded seeing either Cramer or me draw blood, but because he always resented being interrupted in the middle of a London Times crossword puzzle. He frowned at Cramer. “What favor, sir?”

  “Nothing strenuous.” Cramer relaxed. “A little point about a homicide. A man’s body fished out of the East River a week ago yesterday, off Ninetieth Street. He had been—”

  “Named Leonard Dykes,” Wolfe said brusquely, wanting to make it brief so he could finish the puzzle before lunch. “Confidential clerk in a law office, around forty, had been in the water perhaps two days. Evidence of a severe blow on the head, but had died of drowning. No one charged by last evening. I read all the homicide news.”

  “I bet you do.” That having slipped out by force of habit, Cramer decided it wasn’t tactful and smiled it off. He could smile when he wanted to. “Not only is no one charged, we haven’t got a smell. We’ve done everything, you know what we’ve done, and we’re stopped. He lived alone in a room-and-bath walk-up on Sullivan Street. By the time we got there it had been combed—not torn apart, but someone had been through it good. We didn’t find anything that’s been any help, but we found one thing that might possibly help if we could figure it out.”

  He got papers from his breast pocket, from them selected an envelope, and from the envelope took a folded sheet of paper. “This was inside a book, a novel. I can give you the name of the book and the numbers of the pages it was found between, but I don’t think that has a bearing.” He got up to hand the paper to Wolfe. “Take a look at it.”

  Wolfe ran his eyes over it, and, since I was supposed to be up on everything that went on in that office so as to be eligible for blame if and when required, I arose and extended a hand. He passed it over.

  “It’s in Dykes’s handwriting,” Cramer said. “The paper is a sheet from a scratch pad there on a table in his room. There were more pads like it in a drawer of the table.”

  I was giving it a look. The paper was white, ordinary, six by nine, and at the top was the word “Tentative,” underscored, written with pencil in a neat almost perpendicular hand. Below it was a list of names:

  Sinclair Meade

  Sinclair Sampson

  Barry Bowen

  David Yerkes

  Ernest Vinson

  Dorian Vick

  Baird Archer

  Oscar Shiff

  Oscar Cody

  Lawrence McCue

  Mark McCue

  Mark Flick

  Mack Flick

  Louis Gill

  Lewis Gill

  I handed it back to Cramer and returned to my chair.

  “Well?” Wolfe asked impatiently.

  “I was on my way uptown and dropped in to show it to you.” Cramer folded the sheet and put it in the envelope. “Not so much to get help, it probably has nothing to do with the homicide, but it’s got me irritated and I wondered what you’d say, so I dropped in. A list of fifteen names written by Dykes on a piece of his scratch paper, and not one of them can be found in any phone directory in the metropolitan area! Or anywhere else. We can find no record anywhere of a man with any of those names. None of Dykes’s friends or associates ever heard of a man with one of those names, so they say. I mean, taking the first and last names together, as they are on that list. Of course we haven’t checked the whole damn country, but Dykes was a born and bred New Yorker, with no particular connections elsewhere that we know of. What the hell kind of a list of names is that?”

  Wolfe grunted. “He made them up. He was considering an alias, for himself or someone else.”

  “We thought of that, naturally. If so, no one ever used it that we can find.”

  “Keep trying if you think it’s worth it.”

  “Yeah. But we’re only human. I just thought I’d show it to a genius and see what happened. With a genius you never know.”

  Wolfe shrugged. “I’m sorry. Nothing has happened.”

  “Well, by God, I hope you’ll excuse me”—Cramer got up. He was sore, and you couldn’t blame him—“for taking up your time and no fee. Don’t bother, Goodwin.”

  He turned and marched out. Wolfe bent over his crossword puzzle, frowned at it, and picked up his pencil.

  Chapter 2

  Cramer’s crack about no fee had of course been deserved. Wolfe hated to start his brain going on what he called work, and during the years I had been on his payroll the occasions had been rare when anything but a substantial retainer had jarred him into it. But he is not a loafer. He can’t be, since his income as a private detective is what keeps that old house going, with the rooms on the roof full of orchid plants, with Theodore Horstmann as tender, and Fritz Brenner serving up the best meals in New York, and me, Archie Goodwin, asking for a raise every time I buy a new suit, and sometimes getting it. It takes a gross of at least ten thousand a month to get by.

  That January and the first half of February business was slow, except for the routine jobs, where all Wolfe and I had to do was supervise Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, and for a little mix-up with a gang of fur hijackers during which Fred and I got shot at. Then, nearly six weeks after the day Cramer dropped in to see what would happen if he showed a piece of paper to a genius, and got a brush-off, a man named John R. Wellman phoned on Monday morning for an appointment, and I told him to come at six that afternoon. When he arrived, a few minutes early, I escorted him to the office and sat him in the red leather chair to wait until Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, sliding the little table near his right elbow, for his convenience if he needed to do any writing, for insta
nce in a checkbook. He was a plump short guy, going bald, without much of a nose to hold up his rimless glasses. His plain gray suit and haberdashery didn’t indicate opulence, but he had told me on the phone that he was a wholesale grocer from Peoria, Illinois, and there had been time to get a report from the bank. We would take his check if that was on the program.

  When Wolfe entered, Wellman stood up to shake hands. Sometimes Wolfe makes an effort to conceal his dislike of shaking hands with strangers, and sometimes he doesn’t. This time he did fairly well, then rounded the corner of his desk and got his seventh of a ton deposited in the only chair on earth that really suits him. He rested his forearms on the arms of the chair and leaned back.

  “Yes, Mr. Wellman?”

  “I want to hire you,” Wellman said.

  “For what?”

  “I want you to find—” He stopped short, and his jaw muscles began to work. He shook his head violently, took off his glasses, dug at his eyes with his fingertips, put the glasses back on, and had trouble getting them adjusted. “I’m not under very good control,” he apologized. “I haven’t had enough sleep lately and I’m tired. I want you to find the person who killed my daughter.”

  Wolfe shot a glance at me, and I got my notebook and pen. Wellman, concentrating on Wolfe, wasn’t interested in me. Wolfe asked him, “When and where and how did she die?”

  “She was run over by a car in Van Cortlandt Park seventeen days ago. Friday evening, February second.” Wellman had himself in hand now. “I ought to tell you about her.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “My wife and I live in Peoria, Illinois. I’ve been in business there over twenty years. We had one child, one daughter, Joan. We were very—” He stopped. He sat completely still, not even his eyes moving, for a long moment, and then went on. “We were very proud of her. She graduated from Smith with honors four years ago and took a job in the editorial department of Scholl and Hanna, the book publishers. She did well there—I have been told that by Scholl himself. She was twenty-six last November.” He made a little gesture. “Looking at me, you wouldn’t think I’d have a beautiful daughter, but she was. Everybody agreed she was beautiful, and she was extremely intelligent.”