Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19

by Murder by the Book

  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?”

  “I don’t know. Five hundred. Five thousand.”

  “Not thousands surely. People who make presentable copies of documents or manuscripts from drafts.”

  “That’s typing services, not public stenographers.”

  “Very well.” Wolfe drank beer and leaned back. “I thought of suggesting this to Mr. Cramer, but if we’re to spend some of Mr. Wellman’s money this is as good a way to start as any. I would like to know what that novel was about. Baird Archer may have typed the manuscript himself, but he may not. We’ll put Saul and Fred and Orrie on a round of the typing services. Have them here at eight in the morning and I’ll give them instructions. There is a possibility not only of learning about the novel, but also of getting a description of Baird Archer.”

  “Right.” This was more like it. “It wouldn’t hurt me to stretch my legs too.”

  “You will. There’s a chance, though this may be slimmer, that the novel had previously been submitted to another publisher. It’s worth trying. Start with the better firms, of the class of Scholl and Hanna. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow get all you can from the police files on both Miss Wellman and Dykes, covering everything. For instance, did Dykes have a typewriter in his apartment?”

  I lifted a brow. “Do you think Dykes was Baird Archer?”

  “I don’t know. He wrote that list of names, obviously inventions. He certainly wasn’t Baird Archer on February second, since he had been dead five weeks. You will also go to Scholl and Hanna. In spite of what Miss Wellman wrote her parents, it’s possible that someone else read that manuscript, or at least glanced through it. Or Miss Wellman may have said something about it to one of her associates. Or, less likely, Baird Archer may have delivered the manuscript in person and be remembered—of course that was last fall, months ago.”

  Wolfe heaved a sigh and reached for his glass. “I suggest that you extend the deadline beyond sundown tomorrow.”

  “What the hell,” I said generously, “I’ll give you till Friday.”

  It was just as well I didn’t say what Friday.

  Chapter 4

  What with getting Saul and Fred and Orrie sicked onto the typing services, and dealing with the morning mail, and going to the bank to deposit Wellman’s check, it was well after ten o’clock Tuesday when I got to Cramer’s office on Twentieth Street. He wasn’t there but had left instructions with Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I am one of the few people Purley knows that he has not completely made up his mind about. Since I’m a private detective, the sooner I die, or at least get lost outside the city limits, the better—of course that’s basic, but he can’t quite get rid of the suspicion that I might have made a good cop if I had been caught in time.

  I not only got a look at the files, I even got to talk with two of the help who had worked on Dykes and one from the Bronx who had worked on Joan Wellman. By the time I left, a little before three, I had a lot in my notebook and more in my head.

  For here I’ll trim it down. Leonard Dykes, forty-one, found banging up against a pipe in the East River on New Year’s Day, had for eight years been a clerk, not a member of the bar, in the office of the law firm of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs. Up to a year ago the firm’s name had been O’Malley, Corrigan and Phelps, but O’Malley had been disbarred and there had been a reorganization. Dykes had been unmarried, sober, trustworthy, and competent. He had played cards every Tuesday evening with friends, for small stakes. He had twelve thousand dollars in government bonds and a savings account, and thirty shares of United States Steel, which had been inherited by a married sister who lived in California, his only close relative. No one discoverable had hated or feared him or wished him ill. One sentence in one report said, “No women at all.” There was a photograph of him after he had been hauled out of the river, not attractive, and one of him alive that had been taken from his apartment. To be objective, I’ll put it that he had been less unattractive before drowning than after. He had had popeyes, and his chin had started backing up about a quarter of an inch below his mouth.

  The other thousand or so facts in the file on Dykes had as little discernible bearing on his murder as those I have given for samples.

  On Joan Wellman, the Bronx had not been as much in love with the hit-and-run theory as Wellman suspected, but it was just as well that her father did not have access to the police file. They didn’t care much for Joan’s version of her Friday date in her letter home, especially since they could find no one among her office associates to whom she had mentioned it. I gave them a low mark on that, knowing how full offices are of petty jealousies and being willing to give our client’s daughter credit for enough sense to keep her mouth shut about her private affairs. Aside from the search for the car that had run over her, the Bronx had mostly concentrated on her boy friends. If you want to give the average dick a job he really likes, sit him down with a man who has been seen fairly recently in the company of a pretty girl who has just died a sudden and violent death. Think of the questions he can ask. Look at the ground he can cover, no matter who the man is, with no risk of a comeback that will cost him anything.

  So the Bronx had done the boy friends up brown, especially an advertising copywriter named Atchison, apparently because his name began with “A” and had a “c” and an “h” in it, and it had dawned upon some eagle eye that Archer did too, and what more do you want? Luckily for Atchison, he had taken a four-thirty train Friday afternoon, February second, to spend the weekend with friends at Westport. Two dicks had worked like dogs trying to pry that alibi loose, with no success.

  As far as I could tell from the file, it looked as if Joan had had not only beauty and intelligence but also good old-fashioned virtue. The three boy friends who had been flushed were unanimous on that. They had admired and respected her. One of them had been after her for a year to marry him and had had hopes. If any of them had had reason to prefer her dead, the Bronx had failed to dig up a hint of it.

  I went back home and typed it all up for Wolfe, and got reports on the phone from Saul and Fred and Orrie.

  I spent most of Wednesday at the office of Scholl and Hanna on Forty-fifth Street. What I got out of it was a respectful appreciation of the book-publishing business as a means of corralling jack. The office took up two whole floors, with nothing spared anywhere in the way of rugs and furniture. Scholl was in Florida, I was told, and Hanna never got in until ten-thirty. I was escorted down a hall to the room of a junior executive who needed a haircut and was chewing gum, and when I showed him the note I had from our client he said they would b
e glad to cooperate with the bereaved father of their late employee, and I could ask questions of any of the staff I cared to see, starting with him if I wanted to. But would I please tell him, had something new turned up? City detectives, three of them, had been there again yesterday, for hours, and now here was Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin. What was stirring? I told him something harmless and began on him.

  The fact that Wolfe never leaves the office on business, unless there is an incentive more urgent than the prospect of a fee, such as saving his own skin, has a lot to do with the way I work. When I’m out on a case and get something helpful I like to recognize it before I deliver it to Wolfe, but as I left Scholl and Hanna’s I couldn’t see a crumb. It was hard to believe that I had spent nearly five hours in the office where Joan Wellman had worked, questioning everybody from the office boy to Hanna himself, without getting a single useful item, but that was how it looked. The one thing that tied in at all was an entry in the columns of a big book I had been shown. I give it with the column headings:

  NUMBER: 16237

  DATE: Oct. 2

  NAME AND ADDRESS: Baird Archer, General Delivery, Clinton Station, N. Y. City

  TITLE: Put Not Your Trust

  DETAIL: Novel 246 pp.

  POSTAGE ENCLOSED: 63¢

  READ BY: Joan Wellman

  DISPOSITION: Rejected ret’d. mail Oct. 27

  That was my haul. The manuscript had been received by mail. No one had ever heard of Baird Archer, except for that entry. No one else had looked at the manuscript or remembered anything about it. If Joan had made any comment on it to anyone they had forgotten it. She had not mentioned the phone call from Baird Archer or her appointment with him. I could go on with negatives for a page.

  When I reported to Wolfe that evening I told him, “It looks to me as if we’re all set. Two hundred and forty-six sheets of typewriter paper weigh a lot more than twenty-one ounces. Either he wrote on both sides, or he used thin light paper, or he didn’t enclose enough postage. All we have to do is find out which and we’ve got him.”

  “Harlequin,” he growled.

  “Have you a better suggestion? From what I’ve brought in?”

  “No.”

  “Did I get anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. That’s what I mean. Two days of me, nothing. Two days of the boys calling on typing services, nothing. At two hundred bucks a day, four C’s of Wellman’s money already gone. This would be all right for an agency or the cops, that’s how they work, but it’s not your way. I’ll bet you a week’s pay you haven’t turned your brain on it once during the forty-eight hours!”

  “On what?” he demanded. “I can’t grapple with a shadow. Get me something of him—a gesture, an odor, a word, a sound he made. Bring me something.”

  I had to admit, though of course not to him, that he had a point. You could say that Cramer had a trained army looking for Baird Archer, but it wouldn’t mean much. They had no idea what he looked like. They had no evidence that anyone had ever known him, or even met him, by that name. There was no proof that Baird Archer had ever been anything but a name. It would be about the same if you just made up a name for a man, say Freetham Choade, and then tried to find him. After you look in the phone book, what do you do next?

  I spent the rest of that week collecting some very interesting data about the quality and tone of publishers’ offices. I learned that Simon and Schuster, in Rockefeller Center, had fallen hard for modern and didn’t give a damn what it cost; that Harper and Brothers liked old desks and didn’t care for ashtrays; that the Viking Press had a good eye for contours and comeliness when hiring female help; that the Macmillan Company had got itself confused with a Pullman car; and so on. I covered the whole trade, big and little, and the only concrete result was a dinner date with a young woman at Scribner’s who struck me as worth following up on the chance that she might have something I would like to know about. No one anywhere knew anything about a Baird Archer. If he had submitted the manuscript of “Put Not Your Trust” to any other firm than Scholl and Hanna, there was no record or memory of it.

  Over the weekend I had a couple of talks with Purley Stebbins. If we were getting nowhere fast, so were the cops. They had uncovered a Baird Archer somewhere down in Virginia, but he was over eighty and couldn’t read or write. Their big idea was to find some link between Leonard Dykes and Joan Wellman, and three of Cramer’s best men were clawing away at it. When I reported that to Wolfe Sunday evening he snorted.

  “Jackassery. I gave them the link.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said sympathetically. “That was what tired you out.”

  “I am not tired out. I am not even tired.”

  “Then I lied to our client. The second time he called today I told him that you were exhausted with overwork on his case. I had to tell him something drastic because he’s getting impatient. What’s wrong with the beer? Too cold?”

  “No. I am considering you. Most of these typing services are run by women, aren’t they?”

  “Not most. All.”

  “Then you will start on that tomorrow morning. You may be luckier than Saul and Fred and Orrie, but they will continue at it too. We’ll finish that job before we try something else. Some of the women are surely young and personable. Don’t overwork.”

  “I won’t.” I gazed at him admiringly. “It’s uncanny, these flashes of inspiration you get. Absolutely brilliant!”

  He exploded. “Confound it, what have I got? Get me something! Will you get me something?”

  “Certainly.” I was composed. “Drink your beer.”

  So the next day, Monday, after finishing the morning office chores I took a geographical section of the list Saul and I had compiled, and went at it. The other three had covered downtown Manhattan up to Fourteenth Street, the Grand Central section, and the West Side from Fourteenth to Forty-second. That day Fred was in Brooklyn, Orrie in the Bronx, and Saul on the East Side. I took the West Side from Forty-second Street up.

  At ten-thirty I was in bedlam, having entered through a door inscribed BROADWAY STENOGRAPHIC SERVICE. In a room big enough to accommodate comfortably five typewriter desks and typists, double that number were squeezed in, hitting the keys at about twice my normal speed. I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf.

  “A woman like you should have a private room!”

  “I have,” she said haughtily, and led me through a door in a partition to a cubbyhole. Since the partition was only six feet high, the racket bounced down on us off the ceiling. Two minutes later the woman was telling me, “We don’t give out any information about clients. Our business is strictly confidential.”

  I had given her my business card. “So is ours!” I shouted. “Look, it’s quite simple. Our client is a reputable firm of book publishers. They have a manuscript of a novel that was submitted to them, and they’re enthusiastic about it and want to publish it, but the page of the script that had the author’s name and address got lost somehow and can’t be found. They remember the author’s name, Baird Archer, but not the address, and they want to get in touch with him. They might not be so anxious if they didn’t want to publish the novel, but they do. His name is not in any phone book. The manuscript came in the mail, unsolicited. They’ve advertised and got no answer. All I want to know, did you type a manuscript of a novel for a man named Baird Archer, probably last September? Sometime around then? The title of the novel was ‘Put Not Your Trust.’”

  She stayed haughty. “Last September? They’ve waited long enough to inquire.”

  “They’ve been trying to find him.”

  “If we typed it a page couldn’t have got lost. It would have been fastened into one of our folders.”

  The boys had told me of running into that one. I nodded. “Yes, but editors don’t like to read fastened scripts. They take the folders off. If you typed it for him, you can bet he would want you to help us find him. Give the guy a break.”

&nbs
p; She had remained standing. “All right,” she said, “I’ll look it up as soon as I get something straightened out.” She left me.

  I waited for her twenty minutes, and then another ten while she fussed through a card file. The answer was no. They had never done any work for a Baird Archer. I took an elevator up to the eighteenth floor, to the office of the Raphael Typing Service.

  Those first two calls took me nearly an hour, and at that rate you can’t cover much ground in a day. They were all kinds and sizes, from a big outfit in the Paramount Building called Metropolitan Stenographers, Inc., down to two girls with their office in their room-bath-and-kitchenette in the upper Forties. For lunch I had cannelloni at Sardi’s, on John R. Wellman, and then resumed.

  It was warm for February, but it was trying to make up its mind whether to go in for a steady drizzle, and around three o’clock, as I dodged through the sidewalk traffic to enter a building on Broadway in the Fifties, I was wishing I had worn my raincoat instead of my brown topcoat. My quarry in that building was apparently one of the small ones, since its name on my list was just the name of a woman, Rachel Abrams. The building was an old one, nothing fancy, with Caroline, women’s dresses, on the left of the entrance, and the Midtown Eatery on the right. After stopping in the lobby to remove my topcoat and give it a shake, and consulting the building directory, I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The elevator man told me to go left for 728.

  I went left, rounded a corner to the right, continued, turned right again, and in ten paces was at Room 728. The door was wide open, and I stuck my head in to verify the number, 728, and to see the inscription:

  RACHEL ABRAMS

  Stenography

  and Typing

  I stepped into a room about ten by twelve, not more, with a typewriter desk, a little table, a couple of chairs, a clothes rack, and an old green metal filing cabinet. A woman’s hat and cloth coat hung on the rack, and an umbrella, and at the back of the typewriter desk was a vase of yellow daffodils. On the floor were some sheets of paper, scattered around. That was accounted for by the fact that the one window was raised, way up, and a strong draft was whirling through.