by Rex Stout
"I have it. What if he wants particulars?"
"You're not prepared to give him any."
"That's a good way to put it. I am certainly not prepared. Give the genius my regards."
He meant it, but he knew I knew exactly what he would put in a long footnote. I dialed another familiar number to make another request and then went up to my room for a quick shave and change. The ten minutes before breakfast hadn't been enough.
It was too hot to walk the more than two miles to East Sixty-third Street, and anyway I had told Lily I
wouid be there by eleven-thirty. It was five minutes short of that when I pushed the button at the penthouse door and got a mild surprise when Mimi opened it. When I am expected at a certain hour it's nearly always Lily who comes, I think on account of some kind of a notion she has about a maid admitting a man who has a key. I have never tried to dope it. Other people's notions are none of my business unless they get in the way. Then I got a second mild surprise. I had told Lily on the phone that I wanted to see both her and Miss Denovo, but even so, why were they out on the terrace at that hour with a pitcher of iced tea when they should have been inside working? The penthouse was air-conditioned. Was Lily actually still… To hell with it. / was working. I moved another chair over, between them, sat, accepted an offer of tea with lime and mint, and said, "Don't mind my manners, I have a busy day ahead." I turned to Lily. "We're working on a problem for Miss Denovo. We've been on it-" "Archie! No."
That was an example of a client's notion getting in the way. "I'm talking," I told her distinctly and returned to Lily. "It's very personal and she doesn't want anyone to know about it, not even you, and I'm proud and happy that she trusts me so much that she calls me Archie, so about her problem I'll only say that she is not responsible for it. Other people created it; she merely wants to solve it. She came to see Nero Wolfe two weeks ago today." "Why do you-" Amy started, and stopped. Lily was smiling at me. "Ole, Escamillo," she said, and put a kiss on a fingertip and flipped it to me.
"Last night," I told Amy, "there was a development. With Miss Rowan here I can't give you the details, and I wouldn't anyhow at this stage. But it is now more than a wild guess that your mother's death wasn't just an accidental hit-and-run, that it was deliberate murder, and _ if so it's possible that he has ideas about you. We don't know-" "He? Who?"
"You have probably never heard the name we're interested in, and you won't hear it now. We don't know what motive he might have had for your mother, or if
he has one for you, but once in a situation like this we made a bad mistake and once is enough." I turned to Lily. "Can she stay here? I mean stay. Not even go out in the hall. This terrace is okay; I doubt if he has a helicopter. Until we know more than we do now. Perhaps just a couple of days, but it could be a couple of weeks. You could get a lot of work done on the book." "Why not?" Lily said. "Certainly." Amy was squinting at me, squinting and frowning. "But you can't expect me… You can't just tell me…" She looked at Lily. "If you don't mind, Miss Rowan, I want to ask him something. I mean alone."
"I don't mind," Lily said, "but I know him better than you do. He's working. When he's playing he's wonderful s -usually-but when he's working he's impossible. He said he wouldn't give you any details, but if you want to try I don't mind."
"I do," I told Amy. "I've got things to do, and anyway there's nothing I could or would teU you. This development may be a dud, and I've got to find out." I stood up. "You'll want to go to your apartment to bring things, but don't take all day." To Lily: "The standard rate for bodyguarding is six dollars an hour, but you shouldn't count the hours you're working on the book." "May I take her to the country for the weekend?" "No. It's barely possible we'll need her." "You didn't drink the tea."
"And I'm thirsty." I picked up the glass, took a couple of swallows, kissed the top of her head, and went.
Before long the day will come, maybe in a year or two, possibly as many as five, when I won't be able to write any more of these reports for publication. There will be nothing to report because it will be so close to impossible to move around in the city of New York that doing detective work will be restricted to phone calls and distances you can walk, and what could anyone detect? It took a taxi forty-nine minutes that Friday to cover the four miles from East Sixty-third Street to the building where the New York Telephone Company keeps a file of old directories available for researchers, but once there, I needed only nine minutes to learn that Vance, Floyd, was listed in the 1944 Manhattan directory and his address had been Tea
East Thirty-ninth Street. It had to be a business address, because there were no residential buildings in that block. That was satisfactory on two counts: one, that he had been around in 1944, and two, that his office had been in walking distance of Tufitti's restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street for lunch or dinner. The next step, naturally, was to have a look at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street, but it had to wait because Saul was expected for lunch and a conference. When my taxi turned into Thirty-fifth Street from Ninth Avenue, Saul was just getting out of one double-parked in front of the old brownstone.'
The next hour, at the lunch table, provided nourishment for both my stomach and brain. For the stomach, sweetbreads amandine in patty shells and cold green-corn pudding. For the brain, a debate on the question whether music, any music, has, or can have, any intellectual content. Wolfe said no and Saul said yes. I backed Saul because he weighs only about half as much as Wolfe, but I thought he made some very good points, which impressed me because one recent Thursday evening at his apartment he had been playing a piece by Debussy, I think it was, on the piano for Lon Cohen and me while we waited for the others to come for poker, and Lon had said something about the piece's intellectual force, and Saul had said no music could possibly have intellectual force. As the woman said to the parrot, it depends on who you're talking to.
In the office after lunch I told Wolfe what Saul and I had decided about the approach, including my phone calls to Nathaniel Parker and Lily, and then reported. "I did one thing," I said, "and learned one thing. I arranged for the client to stay put in Miss Rowan's penthouse until further notice, and I learned that in nineteen forty-four Floyd Vance had a telephone at an office at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. There wasn't time to go and have a look, but I know that the wreckers haven't got to that block and the old buildings on the south side are still there. Unless Saul got something hotter we'll go and surround it."
Wolfe looked at Saul.
"Nothing even warm," Saul said. "It always helps to see a subject, but Archie had already seen him, so it's no
news that he's a middle-aged slouch who may have been quite a fine figure twenty-three years ago. He has two little rooms, with him in one and a blonde with too much lipstick in the other, and when I asked about his past and present clients he either had very little to show or he wasn't showing me. Of course he wanted to know who Parker's client was, that was natural, but he pressed me on it more than he should have. I was getting so little that I almost made a mistake. I thought of asking him if he had ever had a television producer for a client, but of course I didn't. I was thinking on my way there that it might be possible to g&t something with a nice collection of his fingerprints on it, but he was right there with me in that little room. If he locks the door when he leaves that would be no problem. The lock's an ordinary Wingate. Archie or I could open it with our eyes shut."
Wolfe shook his head. "We have no use for fingerprints now. Possibly later."
"I know, but I thought it would be nice to have them. I mention it only because I can't match what Archie got -that nineteen forty-four address." Saul looked at me. "It's still August and the weekend starts in a couple of hours." He got up. "Let's go, you can plan it on the way."
For two able-bodied, quick-witted, well-trained men Saul and I accomplished a lot in the next two days. He got a haircut, which is quite a feat on a Saturday or Sunday in summer for a man who lives in midtown Manhattan. I detected it when I met him Monday mor
ning. As for me, I frittered away $23.85 of the client's money on taxi fares and tips between ten a.m. and seven p.m. Saturday, which is also quite a feat. Just three doors away from Ten East Thirty-ninth Street was a lunchroom, Dwyer's, with a long fountain counter, and the manager told me it had been there for thirty years. He had himself been there nineteen years, and that meant only since 1948, but he knew the name of the man who had preceded him and he had an address in the Bronx where he had lived. The name was Herman Gottschalk, and I spent nine hours trying to track him down so I could show him photographs of seven young women.
That wasn't dumb; it was merely desperate. Of course the obvious place to look for someone to ask about the
tenants and frequenters of that building in 1944 was the building itself, but Saul and I had pretty well covered that Friday afternoon. There was no elevator man or other service man who had been there more than four years except the building superintendent. He had got the job in 1961, soon after the building had been acquired by its present owner, and he told Saul his predecessor had been there only five years. He didn't even know the name of the former owner or agent. He did know that none of the present tenants had been there as long as twenty-three years. At the Third Avenue office of the East and West Realty Corporation, the current agent, the only personnel on duty Saturday morning were a girl whose mother should have made her wear teeth braces and an old man with a glass eye who didn't even know the name of the previous owner or agent.
I accomplished something else on Sunday. I took Lily Rowan and Amy Denovo to a double-header at Shea Stadium, and got the client back to the penthouse safe and sound.
Monday morning a sunburned woman at the East and West Realty Corporation gave us the name of the previous agent, Kauffman Management Company, and at their office on Forty-second Street we were lucky enough to find a smart and active young man who believed in giving service. He spent half an hour looking up old records. The man who had been the superintendent at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street in 1944, named William Polk, had died in 1962. There was no record of the names of any of the service personnel, but there was a complete list of the 1944 tenants-twenty-two of them, counting Floyd Vance-and we copied it. The smart young man said there was no one active in the Kauffman Management Company who had been there for twenty-three years. Bernard Kauffman, who had founded it, was dead.
Saul and I each took half of the list of tenants and went to work on them. I could make a full report on the first four I tackled, but this is not a treatise on economics or sociology. It was the fifth one that rang the gong, a little before five o'clock in the afternoon-a woman named Dorothy Sebor, fifty, gray-haired and blue-eyed and fully as smart as the young man at the Kauffman Management
Company-who beaded and probably owned the Sebor Shopping Service in a tenth-floor suite at Rockefeller Center. She was busy. The forty minutes I spent with her wouldn't have been more than half that if the phone hadn't interrupted several times, and I might have had a problem getting to her if I hadn't sent in word that I wanted to ask her something about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. When I entered her room she asked if I was the Archie Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe, and when I said yes she asked, "But what can I possibly tell you about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street? I left eighteen years ago. I loved that dump. Sit down."
I sat. "I don't know what you can tell me, Miss Sebor, but I know what I want to ask. A job we're on goes back pretty far and it's nineteen forty-four we're interested in. Would you mind telling me what floor you were on?"
"No, why should I? The ninth. In the rear."
"We understand that another of the tenants was named Floyd Vance. Did you know him?"
"I wouldn't say I knew him. I knew him by sight, he was on the same floor, the ninth, down the hall toward the front. We exchanged nods, remarks about the weather; you know how it is."
My hand didn't want to go to my pocket. It had pulled those damn pictures out too many times for too many people. But it obeyed orders and out came lie seven photographs. "The quickest way," I said, "is for you to take a look at these and tell me if you recognize anyone." As I stretched an arm to hand them to her the phone rang, and she put the pictures on the desk. When she finished telling someone what to do and hung up she picked them up and started looking. At the fourth one-I always had it in the middle-she widened her eyes, looked at me, looked at the photograph again, and said, "It's… not Vance… Vaughn, that's it. Carlotta. Carlotta Vaughn." The blue eyes aimed at me, a little narrowed. "I saw her name not long ago, in an ad in two papers. The ad said something about alias somebody."
"You knew her?"
"Yes. She worked for that Floyd Vance. Or with him,
I didn't know which." –
I had two strong conflicting impulses simultaneously:
to give her a good hug and kiss her on both cheeks, and to pull her nose for not answering the ad a week ago. I put one of them into words. "Miss Sebor," I said, "you are the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on and if I knew what color you like I would buy you ten do/en roses. With our client's money, of course."
She smiled, more with her eyes than her mouth. "My shopping service hasn't worked much on florists, but it would be interesting to try. Apparently I've dealt you an ace."
"Four of them. You've answered a question that I was beginning to think would never be answered. If you will-"
"Is Carlotta Vaughn your client? No, of course not, not if you placed that ad. You're trying to find her?"
"No. She's dead. I'd like to tell you about it, but you're busy and it's a long story, and as our client says, it's very personal. If you'll answer a few more questions I'll be extremely grateful. Was it in-"
The phone. That time it took longer; she was telling someone what not to do. She finally finished it and returned to me. "I'll ask you a question, Mr. Goodwin. I liked Carlotta Vaughn, and she impressed me as a very competent young woman. I didn't see a lot of her-we had lunch together a few times-but I saw enough of her to be impressed. I was trying to get my business started and it was hard going, and I tried to persuade her to go in with me, as a partner, but she wouldn't. I liked her very much. You say she's dead. Would she approve of what you're doing?"
I lied. I could have dodged and wriggled, a lot of guff, that I hadn't known Carlotta Vaughn and therefore could only guess, and if and but and even so, but I preferred a straight lie. "Yes," I said, "she certainly would. It was a long time ago, but you may remember. When did you first see her?"
"That's easy. I'll never forget that first winter; I still have the scars. I started, rented that one room, in the fall • of nineteen forty-three, and I first saw Carlotta the next spring-early spring, April, or it could have been March. I suppose the first time was in the hall or the elevator, I don't remember."
"Then she was there in the spring and summer of nineteen forty-four."
She nodded. "That's right, nineteen forty-four."
"Do you remember when you saw her last?"
"Not definitely, no. Not to name a date, but when I hadn't seen her for a while I asked Floyd Vance about her and he said…" She frowned and shook her head. "Something vague. She had gone somewhere or something."
"Was that in summer, or fall, or winter?"
"Not winter. By November my business was beginning to show some signs of life, and I wanted to tell Carlotta, but she wasn't there. It was probably in October."
"That would make it a total of six or seven months. You said you didn't know if she worked for Floyd Vance, or with him. But she was there every day, in his office?"
"I don't know about every day. But most of the time, yes, she was there. He was in public relations. I don't know if he still is, I know nothing about him. He left Number Ten-I think it was two years after Carlotta left."
"I have the impression that your liking for Carlotta didn't extend to him,"
"It didn't. I didn't know him, really, and I didn't want to. He thought he was handsome and charming, and perhaps he was, but I thought he was-well,
flashy. Not the kind of man I would work either for or with. And if you -good lord, is he your client?"
"He is not. I doubt if there are many men of any kind you would work for or with."
She smiled, more with her mouth than her eyes. "I've never tried and don't intend to. I wouldn't mind having a man of your kind working for me. How much does Nero Wolfe pay you?"
"Nothing. I work for love of the job. I meet interesting people like you. If I get fed up and quit I'll come and remind you. Speaking of quitting, do you suppose Carlotta quit Vance because her opinion of him was about the same as yours? She might have said-"
The phone again-an important customer, judging from the conversation-and then she made calls to two employees, giving one of them detailed instructions and the
other one hell. As she hung up she looked at her watch. "It's getting late," she said, "and I have a pile of work."
"So have I, thanks to you." I rose to my feet. "Do you suppose your opinion of Vance rubbed off on Carlotta?"
"I doubt it. If it did she wouldn't have told me. She was very… self-contained."
"Do you shake hands with men?"
She laughed-a good healthy laugh. "Occasionally. If I want them to do something."
"Then I qualify." I put a hand out. "You want me to leave."
Her grip was firm and friendly. "If you get fed up," she said, "I could pay you fifteen thousand to start."