Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02

by Bad for Business

  Though Thomas Tingley no longer occupied that room, certainly his office furniture did. The old-fashioned roll-top desk was battered and scarred, the varnish on the chair seats had long since been rubbed away, and the ancient massive safe was anything but streamlined. Wherever shelves and cabinets left enough wall space for a large framed photograph, one was there, the oldest and most faded, of a hundred or more men and women in strange and ludicrous costumes, bearing the hand-printed legend: Tingley’s Titbits Employees Picnic, Colton Beach, Long Island, July 4th, 1891. A large folding screen of green burlap, at Amy’s right as she entered, concealed, as she knew, a marble wash basin with hot and cold running water which, say what you please about it, had once been so de luxe as to be next door to sybaritic.

  She knew all three of the people whose conversation her entrance had interrupted. The plump fussy-looking man at the desk, with hair not really gray but showing signs of it, was Arthur Tingley, grandson of the name on the door. The one with hair completely gray, even white, standing like a parson with his hands behind his back and four buttons on his coat, all buttoned, was Sol Fry, the sales manager. The woman, somewhere between the two men as to age, who in case of need could have been transformed instantly into the commanding officer of a Women’s Battalion by merely buying her a uniform, was G. Yates, devoid of title in the unincorporated firm, but actually in charge of production. No one was supposed to know that the G. stood for Gwendolyn; Amy had learned it inadvertently from Phil Tingley.

  They greeted her, Sol Fry and G. Yates amicably enough though without exuberance, Arthur Tingley with a frown of irritation and a voice to match. The greetings over, he demanded brusquely:

  “I suppose that Bonner woman sent you here? Have you accomplished anything?”

  Amy counted three, as she had decided to do, knowing in advance that this interview would require self-control in the face of provocation. “I’m afraid,” she said calmly and, she hoped, not aggressively, “we haven’t accomplished much. But Miss Bonner didn’t send me. I came personally—I mean not officially—not from Miss Bonner. There’s something I think I ought to tell you.” She glanced at the other two. “Privately.”

  “What do you mean?” He was glancing at her. “Do you mean a private matter? What kind of a private matter? This is a business firm and these are business hours!”

  “We’ll go,” said G. Yates in a decided but surprisingly soprano voice. “Come on, Sol—”

  “No!” Tingley snapped. “You stay.”

  But the woman had Sol Fry’s elbow and was steering him to a door; not the one Amy had entered by. As she opened it she turned:

  “She’s your niece and she wants to talk with you. We ought to be taking a look anyhow.”

  The closing door rattled the partition. Tingley frowned at it, then at his niece, and snapped. “Well? Now that you’ve interrupted an important conference to bother me with your private affairs—”

  “I didn’t say it was my private affair. I didn’t know I was interrupting a conference. I was told to come on in.”

  “Certainly you were! I wanted to tell you something! I wanted to tell you that I learned only this morning that it was you who had been put to work on this thing, and I told that Bonner woman that I didn’t trust you and I wouldn’t have it!” Tingley slapped the desk with his palm. “And I won’t! If she has already told you and that’s what you came to see me about, I’ll give you three minutes by my watch!” He pulled it from his vest pocket.

  Amy felt that she was trembling, and knew that she was beyond the point where counting three would help any. He was simply too impossible. But though she had failed to control her adrenaline, she would at all events control her voice, and she succeeded. “You may be my mother’s brother,” she said firmly and clearly, “but you’re a troglodyte,” and turned and left the room, paying no attention to the sputtering behind her.

  She retraced her way through the labyrinth of partitions, on through the anteroom, to the head of the creaky old stairs, and descended to the street, and walked east at a brisk and determined pace. She was good and mad. So the miserable creature had told Miss Bonner he didn’t trust her, had he? But that was nothing worse than a minor irritation, since she had explained things to Miss Bonner when the assignment had been given her. She considered that for a block, and passed on to other aspects. At Seventh Avenue she turned south and, getting warm, unfastened the gray fur coat to let in some air.

  If she lost her job, that would be bad. She had to have a job, and this was a pretty good one. But it was a very complicated and confused situation. Very. In spite of that, she had decided what to do, and had gone to do it, and had failed because she had got mad at Uncle Arthur when he had acted as she had known he would act. Now it was just as complicated and confused as ever.

  Preoccupied, buried in her problem, she bumped into people twice, which wasn’t like her. At Fourteenth Street she did something more perilous. Stepping down from the curb and emerging incautiously from behind a parked taxi, she walked smack into the bumper of a passing car and was knocked flat.

  Chapter 2

  Hands helped her to her feet and supported her. Though she was not ordinarily testy, she was unreasonably irritated at being supported by strange hands, and shook herself loose; and nearly fell again from dizziness. Voices asked if she was hurt, and she made a vaguely negative reply. A cop came trotting up, grasped her arm firmly, and escorted her to the sidewalk.

  Her head cleared enough for her to realize that she was filled with rage. She told the cop in a quavering voice, “Please let go of me. I’m not hurt. I walked right into it. Let me—”

  “Wait a minute,” put in a voice not the cop’s. “My car hit you. Look at you, you’re covered with dirt. You don’t know whether you’re hurt or not. I’ll drive you to a doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor.” Amy, still a little dizzy, raised her head and was looking into a face with brown eyes, a nose and chin not quite pointed, and a mouth that smiled at the corners. It was the compelling and convincing quality of the eyes, focused at hers, though she didn’t stop to consider it, that led her to add immediately, “But you can drive me home—if you—it isn’t very far—”

  The cop put in, “I’d better look at your license.”

  The man produced it. The cop took it and read the name, and looked up with a grin of surprised interest. “Oh, yeah? Pleased to meetcha.” He handed it back. Amy took the man’s proffered arm, found in three steps that she didn’t need it, and permitted herself to be assisted into the front seat of a dark-blue Wethersill convertible. Her right knee hurt a little and she wanted to look at it, but decided to wait. There was another man in the back seat. As the car rolled forward the man beside her asked:

  “Up or down?”

  “Down, please. 320 Grove Street.”

  After the car circled south into the clutter of traffic on Seventh Avenue nothing was said for three blocks, when the man driving spoke abruptly, keeping his eyes straight ahead:

  “Your fingers are short.”

  “Not only that,” came from the back seat, in a baritone with a strong foreign accent that sounded deliberately musical, “but her eyes are the color that they painted the front bathroom upstairs.”

  “Excuse me,” said the driver. “That’s Mr. Pokorny back there. Miss—”

  “Duncan,” said Amy, feeling too shaken to twist her head for confirmation of her acquaintance with Mr. Pokorny. “He seems to be whimsical. As far as that’s concerned, so do you. I regret my fingers being too short, but I’m perfectly satisfied—”

  “I said short, not too short. It was meant as a compliment. I don’t like women who look as if their fingers and legs and necks had undergone a stretching process.”

  “Everyone in America,” said the back seat, “regards Russians as whimsical.”

  Amy tried turning her head. It gave her a twinge in the left shoulder, but she made it far enough to see a round innocent face whose owner might have been anything betwe
en thirty and fifty, with baby-blue wide-open eyes. One of the eyes winked at her with an indescribably cheerful carnality, and she winked back without meaning to.

  She faced around to look at the driver and inquired, “And your name?”

  “Fox.”

  “Fox?”

  “Fox.”

  “Oh.” She regarded his profile, and saw that from the side his nose looked more pointed and his chin less. “That might account for the cop’s being pleased to meet you. I’d better look at your license.”

  Without glancing aside, he got the little leather folder from his pocket and handed it to her. She opened it and saw the name neatly printed in accordance with instructions: TECUMSEH FOX.

  “The sword of justice and the scourge of crime,” said Pokorny. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Certainly.” Amy returned the license. “I would anyway, only it happens that I’m a detective too, though of course infinitely obscure compared to him.”

  “Now who’s being whimsical?” Fox demanded.

  “Not me. Really. I’m an operative for a private agency. I may not be tomorrow, but I am today—it’s farther down, there just the other side of the awning—”

  The car rolled to a stop at the curb in front of Number 320, and Pokorny emerged from the back and opened the front door on her side.

  “I’m glad no bones were broken,” said Fox.

  “So am I.” Amy didn’t move. “I walked right into you. If I felt like laughing, that would be especially funny.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh—” She fluttered a hand. “Reasons. You were very nice not to run over me.” She looked at him, full face now, hesitated, and then went on. “I’ve just made a decision. I’m not usually so impulsive—” She stopped.

  “Go ahead.”

  “But I’m in a jam, and if by pure luck I find myself on speaking terms with Tecumseh Fox—of course I don’t know whether detectives exchange professional courtesies the way doctors do—you know a doctor never charges another doctor for treatment or advice—and you have a reputation for a heart as warm as your head is cool—”

  “And your fingers are short,” said Pokorny from the sidewalk.

  Fox was frowning at her. “Which do you need, treatment or advice?”

  “Advice. I’ll make it as brief as I can—but there’s no use sitting out here in the cold—”

  “All right, climb out.” Fox followed her to the sidewalk, and turned to Pokorny: “There’s a drugstore at the corner. Would you mind phoning Stratton we’ll be late and waiting here in the car?”

  “I would,” Pokorny declared. “I’m fairly cold myself.”

  “Then you can wait in the drugstore and drink chocolate. If you heard Miss Duncan’s story you’d base a new theory of human conduct on it, and you have too many already.”

  Pokorny took it with a cheerful nod and another wink at Amy, and they left him. She limped a little, but declined assistance mounting the stairs. In the living room of her apartment, Fox insisted that she should first go and take a look at herself, so she hobbled to the bedroom and made enough of an examination to establish that except for soiled clothing, ruined stockings, and a bruised knee, the damage was slight. Then she returned and sat on the sofa with him on a chair facing her, and told him:

  “The chief trouble is: I think I have to quit my job, and I can’t afford to and don’t want to.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Bonner & Raffray. They have an office on Madison Avenue—”

  Fox nodded. “I know. Run by Dol Bonner. Based on the fact that most men get careless sooner or later when they’re talking to a pretty woman, especially if the woman is also clever and can guide a conversation. But I should think your eyes would put a man on guard.”

  “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

  “Nothing. They’re very interesting. Excuse me. Go ahead.”

  “Well, I’ve been working there about a year. I lived in Nebraska with my parents, and five years ago, when I was twenty, my mother died, and soon afterwards I came to New York and my uncle gave me a job in his office. I didn’t like it much, mostly on account of my uncle, but I stayed nearly a year and then left and got a job in a law office.”

  “If your incompatibility with your uncle is important, tell me about it.”

  “I don’t know that it’s important, but it has a bearing—that’s why I mentioned it. He’s ill-mannered and quick-tempered and generally disagreeable, but the quarrel—what brought it to a head was his attitude about unmarried mothers.”

  “Oh.” Fox nodded.

  “Oh, no.” Amy shook her head. “Not me. It was a girl who worked in the canning department, but I learned that it had happened twice before in previous years. He simply fired her, and you should have heard him. I got mad and told him what I thought of him, and quit before he could fire me too. I had been working in the law office for three years, and was the secretary of a member of the firm, when I met Miss Bonner and she offered me a job and I took it. Do you know her?”

  “Never met her.”

  “Well—talk about clever women.” Amy, without thinking, started to cross her knees, grimaced, and forbore. “You ought to hear her coaching me on a job. I’m the youngest of the four women on what she calls her siren squad. When I’m on a case I’m not allowed to go to the office and if I meet her accidentally I’m not supposed to speak to her. Last spring I got evidence for—but I guess I shouldn’t tell you that.”

  “Are you on a case now?”

  “Yes. Have you ever heard of Tingley’s Titbits?”

  “Certainly. Appetizers in glass jars with a red label showing a goat eating a peacock’s tail. Lots of different varieties. Expensive but good.”

  “They’re better than good, they’re the best you can buy. I admit that. But a month ago they began to have quinine in them.”

  Fox cocked a surprised eye at her. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes, they did. Complaints began to come in that they tasted bitter, couldn’t be eaten, and thousands of jars were returned by dealers, and when they were analyzed some of them were found to contain quantities of quinine. Tingley—Mr. Arthur Tingley, the present head of the firm—engaged Dol Bonner to investigate.”

  “Do you know how he happened to pick Miss Bonner?”

  Amy nodded. “For quite a while P. & B. has been trying to buy the Tingley business—”

  “Do you mean the Provisions & Beverages Corporation?”

  “That’s it. The food octopus. They offered three hundred thousand dollars for the business. One of their vice-presidents has been working on it quite a while, but Tingley refused to sell. He said the name alone, with the prestige it has established over seventy years, was worth half a million. So when this trouble occurred, the only thing they could think of was that P. & B. had bribed someone in the factory to put in the quinine, to give Tingley such a headache that he would be glad to sell and get out. They started their own investigation among the employees, but they thought something might be done from the other end.”

  “And they set Bonner on the P. & B.”

  “Yes. A woman named Yates is in charge of production at the Tingley factory, which is up on Twenty-sixth Street. She knew of Miss Bonner because they are both members of the Manhattan Business Women’s League. At her suggestion Tingley engaged Dol Bonner, and I was assigned to work on the P. & B. vice-president who had been trying to make a deal with Tingley. I told Miss Bonner that Arthur Tingley was my uncle and that I had once worked for him, and had quarreled with him and quit, but she said that shouldn’t disqualify me for the job and the rest of the squad were busy.”

  “Was it agreeable to Tingley?”

  “He didn’t know about it. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he didn’t even know I was working for Bonner & Raffray. At least I don’t suppose he did. But he told me this afternoon that he had learned this morning that I was working on his case, and he had told Miss Bonner that he didn’t trust me and he wouldn�
�t have it.”

  “And you’re afraid you’ll lose your job and that’s the jam you’re in.”

  Amy shook her head. “That’s not it. Or only a small part of it. I got acquainted with—uh—the P. & B. vice-president three weeks ago, and started—that is, I proceeded with the investigation. He’s young and quite presentable, competent and assured and rather—I imagine pretty aggressive as a business man. We got—on fairly good terms. Then, Saturday afternoon, I saw him in a booth at Rusterman’s Bar, having what appeared to be a very confidential conversation with Dol Bonner.”

  “The poor devil,” Fox laughed. “With two of you after him—”

  “Oh, no,” Amy protested. “That’s the trouble. If she had been working him, she would certainly have let me know. I was given to understand that she had never met him or even seen him. This morning, when I phoned her, I gave her an opening to tell me about her meeting with him Saturday, but she still pretended she had never seen him. So obviously she is double-crossing Tingley. And making a fool of me.”

  Fox frowned and pursed his lips. “Not obviously. Conceivably.”

  “Obviously,” Amy insisted stubbornly. “I’ve tried to think of another explanation, and there isn’t any. You should have seen how confidential they were.”

  “They didn’t see you?”

  “No. I’ve been trying to decide what to do. Much as I dislike my uncle, I can’t just go ahead with it as if I thought it was on the square. Miss Bonner pays me, but the money comes from Tingley’s Titbits, and while I may not be a saint I hope I have my share of plain ordinary honesty. Just after I phoned her this morning, before I stopped to think I called up—the vice-president and canceled two dates I had with him. That was silly, because it didn’t really settle anything. Then I—excuse me—”

  The telephone was ringing. She went to it, at a corner of the table, and spoke:

  “Hello … Oh, hello … No, I haven’t … No, really … I’m sorry, but I can’t help it if you misunderstood….”