The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe

by Josh Pachter

  WOLFE: Please be seated.

  (ARCHIE leads MRS. HEROLD across to WOLFE’s desk and seats her in a red leather chair.)

  MRS. HEROLD: It’s good of you to see me. I know I should have called first.

  WOLFE: Archie?

  ARCHIE: Yes, sir?

  WOLFE: Take notes. (ARCHIE picks up a pen and a notebook.) When you are ready, madam, proceed.

  MRS. HEROLD: All the way here on the train I thought about what I’d say.

  WOLFE: Whence did you come?

  MRS. HEROLD: Beg pardon?

  ARCHIE: Where did you get on the train and begin to do your thinking?

  MRS. HEROLD: Saint Paul, Minnesota. (She takes a business card from her purse and reads it aloud.) Herold’s Hardware. 1738 University Avenue. “What we don’t have, you don’t need.” (She places the card on WOLFE’s desk and continues.) My husband opened the store in 1932. Keeping it open in the middle of the Depression killed him. I’ve run it on my own for over twenty years now. Biggest hardware store in town.

  WOLFE: How may I help you?

  MRS. HEROLD: Mr. Wolfe, I’m guilty of an injustice. I’ve ruined Paul’s life—I’m sure of it.

  WOLFE: Who is Paul?

  MRS. HEROLD: My son. What I did to him was wrong. I’ve got to fix things—if I can. But first I have to find him.

  WOLFE: What is the nature of this injustice?

  MRS. HEROLD: Eleven years ago, money was stolen from the store’s bank account. I was sure Paul had done it. Are you familiar with the Ten Commandments?

  WOLFE: Intimately, madam. My livelihood depends upon them being broken.

  MRS. HEROLD: “Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie. Thou shall honor thy mother and father that thy days may be long upon the land.” Paul broke every one of them. I ordered him out of the house. Told him I never wanted to see him again.

  WOLFE: An extreme response.

  MRS. HEROLD: I live by the word of God. I expect others to do the same.

  WOLFE: You must be frequently disappointed.

  MRS. HEROLD: I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran. I’m used to it.

  WOLFE: Did your son defend himself against your accusation?

  MRS. HEROLD: He tried, but I didn’t believe him.

  WOLFE: Belief comes easy when there’s no room for doubt. It’s a far more difficult task when one has to deal with the ambiguous and the circumstantial.

  MRS. HEROLD: I don’t like your tone.

  WOLFE: Nothing compels you to listen to it. Mr. Goodwin will see you out at any time.

  MRS. HEROLD: Of all the—

  ARCHIE: Mrs. Herold?

  MRS. HEROLD: I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. But you’ve got a point. I didn’t trust my son, and I should have. What happened is all my fault.

  WOLFE: Not entirely. There was a theft. How much money was taken?

  MRS. HEROLD: Fifty-seven thousand dollars. Everything I had—gone like that. Almost closed the store for good.

  WOLFE: When did you find out your son wasn’t guilty?

  MRS. HEROLD: Two months ago. Turned out it was one of the bank clerks. He’d been dipping into people’s accounts for years. When we found out what he was up to, he blew his brains out. Suicide note explained it all. My son is innocent.

  WOLFE: You think he’s in New York City?

  MRS. HEROLD: Paul always dreamed about New York. There’s no other place he’d go.

  WOLFE: But Missing Persons had no luck.

  MRS. HEROLD: They said too much time had gone by. The trail is cold.

  ARCHIE: After eleven years, it’s frozen stiff.

  MRS. HEROLD: They did what they could. I hired a couple of private detectives. They couldn’t find Paul, either. I have their reports here. (She takes a large manila envelope from her purse and places it on WOLFE’s desk. WOLFE opens it and goes through the papers it contains.) Some of those so-called detectives couldn’t find their way out of a burning barn. That’s a photo of Paul. That’s the ad I ran in the New York papers.

  ARCHIE: Any results?

  MRS. HEROLD: Nothing that panned out.

  WOLFE: Did your son take any luggage with him when he left?

  MRS. HEROLD: A trunk and a suitcase.

  WOLFE: Were his initials on either of those pieces?

  MRS. HEROLD: They were on both.

  WOLFE: Does your son possess a middle initial?

  MRS. HEROLD: Just PH. Why?

  WOLFE: Initials on luggage have dictated a thousand aliases. If your son changed his name, no doubt he found it convenient to keep the PH. Even so, the job promises to be toilsome.

  MRS. HEROLD: I’ve got to find him and make amends. Right is right.

  WOLFE: A legitimate search could take months and may require substantial funds. My fees are not insignificant. Nor are they contingent on success.

  MRS. HEROLD: You need a retainer. (She takes a sheaf of bills from her purse and drops it on WOLFE’s desk.) Will five thousand dollars be enough?

  WOLFE: That will suffice.

  MRS. HEROLD: Any questions—any news—don’t hesitate to call. I’ll be at the store. I always am.

  ARCHIE: When do you go back home?

  MRS. HEROLD: My train leaves tomorrow.

  ARCHIE: Since you’re in town, why not see a show? My Fair Lady’s packing ’em in at the Mark Hellinger. Supposed to be pretty good.

  MRS. HEROLD: I’m not here on vacation. ’Sides, you know what a Broadway show costs these days? Four dollars and ninety cents!

  ARCHIE: Would you like a receipt?

  MRS. HEROLD: I would not. I’m from the Midwest. We trust people. A handshake will do. (She extends a hand to WOLFE.)

  ARCHIE: I do the handshaking around here. (ARCHIE and MRS. HEROLD shake hands.) I’ll see you out.

  (They exit. WOLFE presses a buzzer on his desk. ARCHIE returns. He takes the money from WOLFE’s desk and puts it in the wall safe.)

  ARCHIE: Never thought I’d see the day. A stranger appears, and you let her in. She wants to put you to work, and you agree. A hopeless case, and you accept it. It had to be the lunch.

  WOLFE: Pfui.

  ARCHIE: Kind of hard on the lady, weren’t you?

  WOLFE: Orthodoxy irks me. It is the enemy of reason.

  ARCHIE: We’ll need all the reason we can get. I wouldn’t wish this case on Inspector Cramer. Well, maybe Inspector Cramer, but no one else. Missing Persons beats the bushes for Paul Herold, sees how hopeless it is, and sticks you with a first-class, gold-plated gazookis. (FRITZ enters with a tray holding a bottle of beer and a glass.) This case is a complete washout. Right, Fritz?

  FRITZ: There are no washouts in this house. Not with Mr. Wolfe on the job—and you. You will solve it. You will make much fuss, but you will solve it. Shad roe for dinner.

  (FRITZ exits.)

  ARCHIE: Here’s how we find Paul Herold: Saul Panzer and I disguise ourselves as members of the Salvation Army. He starts at the Battery, works his way north. I start at Van Cortlandt Park, work my way south. We meet at Grant’s Tomb on Christmas Eve and compare notes. Then we hit Brooklyn. How does that sound?

  WOLFE: You’re right, Archie. We’ve been handed, as you say, a “gazookis.”

  ARCHIE: So how do we play it?

  WOLFE: Paul Herold doesn’t want to be found. His mother’s advertisements have only put him on the alert. He will not be easily driven from cover. Your notebook.

  ARCHIE: Yes, sir.

  WOLFE: Heading, in large boldface: “To P.H.” In smaller type: “Your innocence is known. The injustice done you is regretted.”

  ARCHIE: “… regretted.”

  WOLFE: No.

  ARCHIE: It’s not regretted?

  WOLFE: Deplored.

  ARCHIE: “… the injustice done you is deplored.”

&
nbsp; WOLFE: “Do not let bitterness prevent the righting of a wrong. The true culprit has been exposed.” Add my name, address, and telephone number. Call the Gazette and the Times and have them run the ad. We shall see what—if anything—comes of it.

  The Damned Doorbell Rang

  by Robert Lopresti

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: For me it started in the fifth grade. The Plainfield (New Jersey) Public Library had a wonderful children’s room, but I used it up. Not that I read everything, but I devoured all the books I wanted to read. That meant I had to make guerrilla raids down a long corridor full of looming microfilm readers to the cathedral-ceilinged main room. Children were not allowed there—so, if I was spotted, I knew I would be chased back to Winnie-the-Pooh land.

  I discovered that the best place to hide from reference librarians was directly behind the reference desk, and that was the Mystery section. There I discovered Rex Stout. I wish I knew which was the first of his books I read. The Mother Hunt and Gambit were among the earliest. The language and characters sucked me in. There is no voice like Archie’s.

  The last Wolfe novel, A Family Affair, came out while I was in college. I remember stumbling around the house in shock after the murderer was revealed. Powerful stuff.

  A few years later, when people my age were heading into New York City to hear punk bands at CGBG, I made a special trip to attend one of the first Wolfe Pack events: the world premiere of the TV movie Nero Wolfe, starring Thayer David. (It wasn’t bad, but David was too darned skinny.)

  In December 2012, I made another Stout-related trip to New York, this time to receive the Black Orchid Novella Award, sponsored by the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. That trip was all the more exciting because mass transport hadn’t yet recovered from Superstorm Sandy. Good times.

  As long as I am laying out my Wolfean (lupine?) credentials, I should point out that my only contribution to the late-lamented magazine The Armchair Detective was an article in which I proved (to my own satisfaction, at least) that the entire plot of Gambit was an attack on Webster’s Third International Dictionary.

  When Josh Pachter told me about this book, I told him I would love to read it but couldn’t imagine coming up with a contribution. And then, all of a sudden, the story that follows burst into my brain. Consider it a love letter to Mr. Stout for thousands of hours of pleasure.

  Melissa rushed in, slamming the back door, and ran past her grandparents.

  Jack, who had been pulling a batch of his famous scones out of the oven, turned to look at his wife. “What’s got into her now?”

  “She’s fourteen,” said Eve, finishing the work on their second pot of coffee of the day. “It’s a crisis every hour.”

  “Can’t be fourteen already. Can she?”

  Eve sighed. “You were at her birthday party last month. Remember the sign on the wall?”

  “Oh yeah. You go talk to her. I’ll be in with a plate in a minute.”

  “Bring me a cup, too.”

  Eve found Melissa exactly where she expected, the same place the girl had been running since age four whenever things went wrong: in the den, stretched out on the sofa (which they really needed to replace one of these days, or at least re-cover). Melissa was facedown, arms stretched out, but she wasn’t actually crying, so maybe this wasn’t such a bad storm, after all.

  “Hey, sweetheart. What’s the problem?”

  The girl didn’t look up. “Why do we have to live in this dump?”

  Eve sat down in her La-Z-Boy. “Well, thanks a lot. I happen to think this house is pretty nice. Plus, you don’t live here, you live six houses—”

  “Oh, Grandma.” Melissa pushed up into a sitting position. Correcting people usually took her mind off her problems, at least temporarily. “I don’t mean this house. I mean Saddle River, New Jersey.” She said it like you might say Hicksville, or maybe Mordor.

  Eve resisted the urge to reach out and stroke her hair. Melissa hadn’t liked being petted since she was ten. “And what exactly is wrong with Saddle River?”

  “It’s boring. There’s nothing to do here!”

  “Says who?” said Jack. He was carrying a tray loaded with scones, plates, and more. “Didn’t I take you bowling last week?”

  “Last month. Two months ago, really. And I hated it.”

  “Well, excuse me.” He placed the tray carefully on the coffee table. “Maybe if you’d stopped the damned texting for five minutes, you would have had more fun. Here’s a scone, and here’s your milk.”

  Melissa frowned. “Can’t I have coffee? I’ve been drinking coffee since I was twelve.”

  “Not in this house you haven’t,” said Eve. “So, tell us, what’s the problem?”

  “My parents,” said Melissa. “They have no idea what century we’re living in.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full. What have those old codgers done to you now?”

  “They’re ruining my life, that’s all. Did you ever hear of Android Parsnip?”

  “Let’s assume we haven’t,” said Jack, settling into his easy chair. “What is it?”

  “They’re the best band in the world. And they’re performing in New York next month. Everybody’s going!”

  “Ah,” said Eve. “Everybody except you.”

  Melissa bounced on the couch. “Exactly! Can you talk to them?”

  “How do you plan to get there?” asked Jack.

  “A bunch of us are taking the train.”

  “Without adults? Absolutely not.”

  “Grandpa! You’re just as bad as they are.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” said Eve.

  Melissa threw herself back on the sofa, arms folded, working herself up to a genuine snit. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you two. Didn’t you both grow up in the city?”

  “We did,” said Jack. “And got out while the getting was good.”

  “But why? Didn’t you love it all? The theater. The museums. The music!”

  “The muggings,” said Eve. “The dog doo on the streets. Sometimes the people doo on the streets.”

  “Let’s be honest,” said Jack, sipping coffee. “We did love it when we were young.”

  “Young, but older than you, sweetheart. Young but adults.”

  “What really chased us out of the city was the worst neighbors anybody ever had.”

  That got her attention. “What, worse than the Califanos?”

  “The Califanos were pretty bad,” Eve agreed. “Those all-night arguments. And that pit bull. Your mother was afraid to let you out of the house.”

  “But these clowns were even worse,” said Jack. “This was back in the early sixties, when your grandma and I had just started our business.”

  “I started it. You were still doing the books for that tavern.”

  Jack frowned. “Yeah, and bringing in the only income we had until you started getting customers. Just because you got famous designing textiles, don’t forget the little people who made it possible.”

  “Little people. You left little behind about a hundred scones ago.”

  Melissa waved her milk glass, spilling a bit. “Tell me about the neighbors.”

  “Oh. Well, we had one floor of a brownstone in the West Thirties, way over by the Hudson River.”

  “That whole area’s torn down now,” said Jack. “Good riddance.”

  “The place had a lot of character,” said Eve. “But the real characters lived next door. A bunch of men, although you couldn’t tell how many actually lived there, because so many of them showed up at all hours.”

  “Just men?” asked Melissa. “Were they gay?”

  “How do you know about gay?” asked Jack.

  She rolled her eyes. “TV. Movies. My friend Douglas. And my other friend Kai is trans, but their parents won’t admit it.”

 
“Well, they might have been gay,” said Jack. “There was one fat guy who hardly ever came out, but when he did he dressed like he was ready for a Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. A cowboy hat and a fur coat, plus a big walking stick.”

  “Fur? Ooh, gross.”

  “It wasn’t a fur coat,” said Eve. “Just the collar.”

  “Still gross.”

  “Anyway, the young one was definitely not gay,” said Eve.

  “How do you know?” asked Melissa.

  “Because he gave me the eye.” She winked.

  Jack frowned. “You never told me that.”

  “You had a temper in those days. I didn’t want you to get beaten up.”

  “By that clown? I could have taken him.”

  “Oh no, you couldn’t.”

  Melissa grinned. “Was he cute, Grandma?”

  “Very, sweetheart.”

  Jack snorted. “Cute, hell. He barely had a nose.”

  “Oh, he had one.” Eve winked again.

  “Something wrong with your eye?” asked Jack.

  “And they had the most amazing visitors. I’d see movie stars coming by. Politicians. You never knew who would show up.”

  “God only knows what was going on in there,” mumbled Jack.

  “One day, I remember like it was yesterday, our doorbell rang, and guess who was outside?”

  “Not this story again.”

  “Who, Grandma?”

  “J. Edgar Hoover! He was as close to me as you are.”

  “You did not see Hoover,” said Jack. “Back then, you thought everybody you saw on the street was a damned celebrity.”

  Eve put down her cup, a little harder than necessary. “It was him. You couldn’t mistake that piggy face.”

  “Come to think of it, maybe it was. Didn’t I hear he liked ladies’ clothing?” Jack sipped coffee thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s what they were doing in there.”

  “Anyway,” said Eve, “I saw him. As I recall, you weren’t home that day. You were at the racetrack.”

  “My boss invited me. What was I supposed to do? I was bringing in the only income—”

  “I’ve heard of Jay Hoover,” said Melissa. “Didn’t he help impeach Richard Nixon or something?”

  “Or something,” said Jack.