The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe
Page 11
Nero Wolfe was still up in the plant rooms when I let the first arrivals into the old brownstone house on West 35th Street. There were five of them—Corvin Mabbs, Lucy Weld, Yett Gardner, Mischa Cernik, and Norman Rudworth. Mabbs was still wearing the bruises he’d collected the night before last when he tried to rush me. They were followed, two minutes later, by Roger Millington, Beryl Jeff, Foden Grice, Suzy Bettridge, Jefferson Stark, Mabel Stark, Bernard Leigh, and Israel Kerstein. When I’d got them inside, I seated them in that order, being careful to put Millington and Kerstein twenty feet apart. I told them Wolfe was up in the plant rooms but would be down soon. The last to arrive were Oliver Mayne, Iris McKinlay, Richard Haddon, Wilton Mozelle, Cecil Thomason, Tukuo Yamazaki, and Than Toole. I thought I saw Iris McKinlay wink at me, and decided to verify it by inviting her onto my knee, but at that moment Jefferson Stark, saying he preferred to stand anyway, offered her his chair with a show of chivalry that would have killed Wolfe if he hadn’t been up in the plant rooms. It didn’t seem to please Mrs. Stark from where I stood. Iris took the seat, thanking him gracefully, and then they were all in position. I reckoned that when Inspector Cramer came I could still squeeze him in if—which wasn’t likely—he was prepared to junk that unlighted cigar of his. Nero Wolfe was still up in the plant rooms.
Foden Grice was the first to speak. “I think,” he began weightily, “that I speak for you, Bernard, and for Suzy, Cecil, Iris, and Yett, when I say—”
“You don’t speak for me,” interrupted Gardner. “The only reason I’ve come to this old brownstone house on West 35th Street is because—”
“You want to see Mr. Wolfe wiggle a finger,” finished Stark.
“Oh, Jefferson, do be quiet,” begged his wife. “We all want to see Mr. Wolfe wiggle a finger. And hear him say Pfui.” She looked around at the assembly. “Don’t we?”
Millington, Cernik, Thomason, Rudworth, and Iris McKinlay nodded. Bernard Leigh didn’t seem to have heard her. Beryl Jeff and Yamazaki were studying the carpet. Mabbs coughed noncommittally.
Wilton Mozelle demurred. “I have seen Mr. Wolfe wiggle a finger,” he said quietly. “It is a gesture with which I am well acquainted. But since one of us appears to be a murderer—”
“We know one of us is a murderer,” interrupted Mayne irritably. “For heaven’s sake, Wilton, don’t belabor the obvious.” He looked at me. “How long is this flapdoodle going to take, Goodwin?”
“Mr. Wolfe,” said Iris McKinlay, “would have said ‘flummery.’”
“He won’t call this little session flummery,” I told them. “And that’s for sure.”
“All right,” said Mayne. “But I’d still like to know—when is he coming down from the plant rooms? I’ve got,” he said nastily, “a few orchids of my own to attend to.”
“Pfui,” remarked Lucy Weld. “You’ve got one withered cattleya.”
“Let’s relax for a few minutes, shall we?” I said. “If I know Mr. Wolfe—”
“And don’t you?” asked Suzy Bettridge demurely.
“—you’ll all be back in your homes within two hours.” I paused. “Except one.” My gaze lingered on Suzy for just long enough to make her wish she’d kept her trap closed.
That was when Wolfe came down from the plant rooms. They watched him enter the room and lower his three hundred pounds into the oversized chair. He looked at them all in turn.
“Inspector Cramer,” he said, “will be here presently. In the meantime, I do not propose to dissemble. I am not a juggins, and it would be doltish of me to infer that your presence in my house—”
“—on West 35th Street,” murmured Richard Haddon absently.
“—has been voluntary.”
“That’s not fair,” objected Roger Millington. “I wanted to see you ring for beer.”
Wolfe turned to me. “Archie. Enlighten them.”
I gulped. “Sorry to disappoint you all. But we’ve run out.”
There was a murmur of resentment. Rudworth half rose to his feet. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “we’re not going to see you drink it—and wipe your lips afterwards?”
Wolfe wiggled a finger. “There is no beer. Now I adjure you, sir, to be silent. As I said a few moments ago, I do not intend to equivocate. Nor shall I detain you with flummery. I invited you here on a pretext you may find questionable, but I am not a mountebank. I wished to determine …”
When they had gone, Cecil Thomason to meet his Maker, I asked him would he be needing me tomorrow night. For some reason, the question seemed to embarrass him. In fact, he squirmed. Barely an inch, mind, but if it wasn’t a squirm then the house is built of marble.
“I have no desire,” he began carefully, “to intrude on your personal affairs. But may I ask why?”
“Yes, sir. You may.”
“Very well—why?”
“I hope to take Iris McKinlay to dinner.”
“I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you,” he said. He was practically writhing now. “Miss McKinlay has already accepted an invitation from me.”
I gaped. “You’re leaving the house? Going out into the open air?”
He shuddered. “By no means. Miss McKinlay is coming here.” To cover his nervousness, he rang for beer—forgetting that there wasn’t any. “I have invited her up to the plant rooms. She expressed an interest,” he added desperately, “in the odontoglossums.”
For ten long seconds I goggled at him. Then I came to. He may have forestalled me socially, but I could still pip him on dialogue.
“Pfui,” I said. “I beg your pardon.” I selected a finger and wiggled it at him. “Pfui,” I repeated.
The Sidekick Case
by Patrick Butler
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second Wolfean parody from Martin Levin’s “Phoenix Nest” page in The Saturday Review, appearing in the October 26, 1968, issue and credited to Patrick Butler. “Patrick Butler” is a fairly common name: a Patrick Butler is today the vice president of programs at the International Center for Journalists, another spent eighteen years as a senior vice president at the Washington Post Company and is currently president and chief executive officer of America’s Public Television Stations, yet another is an Irish rugby union player … and John Dickson Carr published two novels about a defense attorney named Patrick Butler in the 1950s. The item is clearly a reaction to an unfortunate choice of words in a review of Rex Stout’s And Four to Go that appeared in Paperbound Books in Print, which was in fact edited by Olga S. Weber, assisted by Lindalee Mesiano, Phyllis Levy, and Sharon Stone. (No, not that Sharon Stone, a different one. In 1968, when this piece was published, that Sharon Stone was only ten years old. …)
When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, the gang from Paperbound Books in Print had already gathered in his office. Olga S. Weber, editor, was in the red leather chair directly in front of Wolfe’s desk. Behind her, chattering girlishly, were assistants Lindalee Mesiano, Phyllis Levy, and Sharon Stone. I sat on the far side of the room in the yellow leather chair.
Wolfe crossed immediately to his desk and lowered his bulk into the specially constructed chair. He made a face.
“I am Nero Wolfe,” he began, “and this is Mr. Goodwin, my assistant. The unlovely business at hand can be settled, I am certain, with dispatch and amiability. You are intelligent women. You owe your livelihood to words, your own and those of other people. You know their importance.”
He picked up a magazine distastefully.
“I have a copy of your publication, Paperbound Books in Print. On page nineteen, the annotation given a book called And Four to Go by Rex Stout reads: ‘Included are four complete Nero Wolfe mystery novelettes featuring the famous detective and his sidekick Archie.’”
The girls looked bewildered.
“I don’t see—” began a dark-haired beauty who was either Lindalee Mesiano or Phyllis Levy.
&
nbsp; “I realize you do not see,” interrupted Wolfe. He wiggled a finger at her. “That is why you are here. I summoned you only after careful deliberation, and this episode is as distasteful to me as it must be to you. I am, as noted in your publication, a detective. Mr. Goodwin here is my assistant. He is, of course, also my employee. In a sense, he may be considered my partner. But he is not my sidekick.”
Wolfe leaned back in the big chair, closed his eyes, and after thirty seconds asked the room at large: “Do I look like the sort of man who would have a sidekick? Archie, do you consider yourself my sidekick?”
“No, sir, I do not,” I replied. “Your chattel, maybe, but not your sidekick.”
The blonde (Sharon Stone?) giggled, so I went on.
“Sidekicks call their employers by their first name, or otherwise they call them ‘Boss.’ Sidekicks wear funny hats and fall off horses—”
“Pfui,” said Wolfe. “Enough, Archie. In spite of his proclivity toward buffoonery, ladies, Mr. Goodwin is no sidekick. Now, Miss Weber, can you propose a course of action that would alleviate the distress you have caused me?”
“Well, I am sorry, Mr. Wolfe, but I guess we just used the term ‘sidekick’ to indicate Mr. Goodwin’s position as assistant.”
“You did indeed, Miss Weber,” said Wolfe. “That you acted without malice, I am certain. But you acted thoughtlessly in your capacity as editor, and the result—inadvertent though it may have been—has been to hold me up to ridicule. Since you appear to believe, however, that ‘sidekick’ is synonymous with ‘assistant,’ carrying with it no debasing connotation, justice can be done quite simply. In your next issue, I suggest that your staff be listed on the masthead as follows: ‘Editor, Olga S. Weber. Sidekicks: Lindalee Mesiano, Phyllis Levy, Sharon Stone.’ If I hear no demurrer from you, I shall consider the case closed.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes.
I ushered the girls out. The blonde was still giggling.
When I returned, Wolfe’s eyes were shut and his lips were pushing in and out.
I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. And to wait for the next issue of Paperbound Books in Print.
The Case of the Disposable Jalopy
by Mack Reynolds
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrestled with the question of whether or not to include Mack Reynolds’s story in this collection, mainly because of its length. As originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1976, it was quite a bit longer than you’ll find it here, going into—unsurprisingly, given where it appeared—much greater length and depth about the engineering details of the disposable car and including an additional character and subplot. It paints such an entertaining picture of the aging Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, though, that I finally decided to edit out some of the extraneous-for-our-purposes detail and allow you to enjoy it. (For readers unfamiliar with the literature of science fiction, I should perhaps point out that the last names of all the secondary characters in the story have been “borrowed” from a galaxy of the genre’s all-stars. …)
That morning I came down late from my room on the second floor of the old brownstone at 918 West 35th Street, a stone’s throw from the Hudson. I’d been up into the wee hours the night before, playing penny ante with Saul and Lon. Of course, none of us had any pennies, but our weekly poker games have a long tradition—and, besides, it gives me an excuse not to spend the evening sitting and watching Fatso guzzling beer and reading the moth-eaten old paperbacks that purport to tell of his early coups as a sleuth. From time to time, he’ll read aloud a select passage or so, forgetting that it was me who wrote them. Currently, he was on one of the very first, The Red Box, a crime—if I recall correctly, and I probably don’t—that involved a strawberry-blond prostitute.
I went into the kitchen and said, “What’s for breakfast, uh, Franz?”
He looked at me, his aged meek eyes expressing sorrow.
“That is, uh, Felix,” I said. “Felipe? Don’t tell me. I have it on the tip of my tongue.”
“Baldie,” he quavered, “there is mush for breakfast.”
“Mush? Again? Whatever happened to orange juice, English muffins, griddle cakes with thyme honey from Greece, country sausages and eggs in black butter?”
He gave a sigh for yesteryear before saying, “Baldie, you know very well that four old men on Negative Income Tax cannot afford such luxuries, even when they pool their resources.” He sighed again. “Besides, where would one get the ingredients?” He looked down sorrowfully at a paper packet in his hand. “Dehydrated wine, Beaujolais, vintage of ’88,” he moaned. “For lunch we will have soybean hamburgers, and tonight Escoffier hash.”
“Escoffier hash? That sounds like something you smoke. What’s in it?”
“To give you an idea,” he said, “today is the day I clean the kitchen.”
It was then that the doorbell rang.
I went to answer it and peered through the one-way glass. There were three of them, and they didn’t look like bill collectors. They ranged in age from about forty to fifty: kids. I put the chain on, opened the door several inches, and said, “You’ve got the wrong address. This is the home of Caligula, uh, that is, Tiberius, uh, I mean Claudius—wait a minute, don’t tell me, I know his name as well as I know my own. Same name as one of the early Roman emperors.”
The oldest and tallest of the three said loftily, “We are at the home of the most famed private detective of the last century, I take it?”
“You can take it or leave it,” I told him. “That was the last century. The boss’s three most recent clients all wound up guillotined.”
“Guillotined?” the smallest and youngest of the three said. “Is that the method of execution these days? I’m not really up on such matters, don’t you know.” He wore an anachronistic goatee and fiddled with it as though checking the correctness of its point.
“Electric chairs were decided against when capital punishment was reinstated to take care of the terrorists,” I explained. “There’s so many of them, these days, there’d be blackouts if you tried to electrocute them all.” A startling thought came to me. “Are you clients?”
“Of course,” the chubby one said in disgust. “You don’t fancy we’re standing here on the stoop of this slum tenement, or whatever you call it, soliciting for charity, do you?”
“We couldn’t contribute a handful of bird seed to a canary refuge,” I said, opening the door.
They filed into the hallway.
“I’ll see if the boss is available,” I said, strictly formal now.
“Available?” the tall one said, looking up and down the hallway, taking in the bedraggled rug and the chair with the broken leg. “How long has it been since you’ve had a case, my dear fellow?”
“Three years,” I admitted. “But we cracked it, more or less. Your names, gentlemen?”
The older one said, “My name is Clarke. This is Mr. Aldiss, and this is Mr. Brunner.”
“First names?” I said politely.
“We’re all named Charles. It’s the thing in England now, you know. Practically all British males are named after His Majesty.”
I ushered them back to the office.
Clarke took the well-worn red leather chair which sat at the end of Fatso’s desk, and Aldiss and Brunner took two of the less prestigious yellow ones.
I said apologetically, “I don’t have a watch. Hocked it last year. The boss usually gets down from the plant rooms at eleven. That shouldn’t be too long.”
“Plant rooms?” Clarke said.
“Yeah, up on the top floor. He raises petunias. It used to be some other flower, I forget what, but they got to be too expensive. Now it’s petunias. He spends two hours every morning up there with his gardener, Ted, and another two in the afternoon.” I thought about it vaguely. “I’ve often wondered what the two of them do all that time.”
He crossed his long legs. “We’re scientists,” he told me, affecting a modest self-deprecation that didn’t quite come off.
“Scientists?”
“That is correct,” Aldiss said. “We work for the Ruptured Motors Company, with offices in the Welfare State Building.”
I made a note, wondering if I’d remember how to decipher my shorthand later. “You mean to tell me that, with ninety percent of the country on Negative Income Tax as a result of the almost complete automation and computerization of production, distribution, communications, transportation, and everything else, an automobile company imports its employees from England?”
Clarke said, “Absolutely necessary, dear boy. I understand that it started some half a century ago. You Ammedicans began to ask each other, ‘Why can’t Johnny read?’ It seems that your high schools were graduating students who lacked the ability to read and write. Two decades later, a college degree was no guarantee that its bearer wasn’t, ah, I believe the term is ‘functionally illiterate.’ That is, they lacked the skills to cope with an increasingly complex technological society. Many couldn’t balance a checkbook or fill out a job application or their income-tax forms.”
“You mean,” I said wistfully, “that over in England your college graduates can make out their own tax forms?”
At that moment, I heard the groaning of the elevator coming down from the plant rooms. It came to a halt, and the beer barrel that walks like a man came in, glaring.