by Rex Stout
The phone rang, and I took it. It was the hoarse man who had previously invited me to meet him at the Seven-Eleven Club, and he still hadn’t found time to clear his throat. This time he wanted Wolfe, and Wolfe, after I had covered the transmitter and told him about the previous call, got on. I stayed on too, as I always do when not told to get off, but I’ll only report one end. “Nero Wolfe speaking… Your name, please?… I’m sorry, sir, I never speak to people without a name; I must have your name… F-A-B-I-A-N?… Thank you. Hold the line a moment, please.”
Wolfe asked Schwartz, “Have you ever heard of a man named Fabian?”
“Yes.” Schwartz was frowning and all his fingers were gripping the edge of his briefcase.
“So have I,” I said emphatically.
“Yes, Mr. Fabian, what is it?… I see. I never make appointments outside my house… No, no indeed, I assure you I’m not frightened at all… Yes, I realize that, but I seldom go out… Well, I have a suggestion. Why don’t you come to my office, say at two o’clock today?… Good… That’s right. You have the address?… Good.”
He hung up. I did likewise, with a vicious bang. Schwartz said, in a different tone from any he had used, “I was about to say when the phone rang that Mr. Perrit’s associates are men of action. To put it baldly, they will kill both you and your assistant the first chance they get. I was about to suggest certain precautions. Frankly, as I said, my personal interest is concerned. The best way-”
“Mr. Fabian says he wants to ask me something.”
“But great heavens!” Schwartz was looking green. “He’s the most notorious-to invite him-to let him in-”
“If he is really dangerous,” Wolfe said stiffly, “and if he has drawn the sort of inferences you fear, my own office is the only safe place to meet him. This business has to be settled sooner-” The phone rang again. I reached for it, told it, “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking,” and got a shock in my ear in the shape of an agitated voice declaring loud enough to be heard out in the kitchen, “You said your name was Harold Stevens!”
I said sharply, “Hold it a second. Stay on,” and turned to Wolfe and told him in a bored tone, “It’s the friend of that law student. May go on for an hour. Shall I go upstairs and take it?”
“Yes. We might as well get it over with. She can come any time. Arrange it properly.”
I never bothered with the elevator, and anyhow, up three steps at a time was quicker. Up in my room, with the door shut, I didn’t take time to make myself comfortable in a chair, but grabbed the phone and told it, “Sorry to keep you waiting, but there were people around and I came upstairs. What’s the trouble?”
“You said your name was Stevens!”
“Yeah. Of all the millions of details in the world, one of the most unimportant right now is my name. My name is mud. Stevens or Goodwin, mud.”
“It’s important to me.”
“Thank you very much. Is that what you called to say?”
“No, it isn’t. I want to know about the man that got killed and how you happened-”
“Wait a minute. Collect yourself and start at the beginning. What have you seen, heard, and done?”
“I’ve seen pictures, just now in the Gazette . One is of a man named Dazy Perrit, and I know him-I don’t really know him well, but I know him in a certain way, and he has been killed, and for a certain reason that’s bad news for me. Another picture is of you, it’s a very good likeness, and it says your name is Archie Goodwin and you work for Nero Wolfe-it calls you his legman-and it says you were with Dazy Perrit when he was killed. So I want to know-”
“Excuse me,” I cut her off, “but the kind of things you want to know are not a good kind for a telephone. I would like to come up there for a talk but I have things to do. Why don’t you hop on the subway and come down here? Will you do that?”
“I certainly will! I will be there-”
“Excuse me again. The sidewalk in front of our house is the scene of two murders and therefore temporarily conspicuous. Get this. From Thirty-fourth Street and Eleventh Avenue go east on Thirty-fourth Street. It’s ninety-two paces for me, so it will be about a hundred and twenty for you. At that point there is a narrow passage between two buildings-a loading platform on the left of it and a wholesale paper products place on the right. Go in along the passageway and I’ll meet you at the far end of it and let you in at our back door. Have you got it?”
“Certainly. It ought to take me about half an hour.”
“Okay. I’ll be there, but if I’m not, wait for me.”
“All right. Tell me just one thing, was Dazy Perrit’s daughter-”
I told her nothing doing and ended it. A glance at my wristwatch, on the fly as I headed for the stairs, showed me eleven-fifty-two. At the bottom I slowed to a normal pace, to enter the office with an attitude of indifference, but that proved unnecessary because L. A. Schwartz was gone. Wolfe sat at his desk pouring beer. “She saw pictures of Perrit and me in the Gazette ,” I reported. “She’ll come the back way and be here in half an hour.”
“Satisfactory.” He put the bottle down. “Take her straight upstairs to the south room. She must be seen by no one.” He scowled at me. “Confound it, I suppose she must be invited to lunch. Sit down and tell me everything that happened last night.”
“I thought I was out of it. When did I get in again?”
“Pfui. Go ahead.”
Having been reporting uncombed events to Wolfe for over ten years, I had got expert at it, but this called for extra concentration since the time was limited. I tried to get it all in and make a clean job of it, but he had questions to put as usual, and was still asking them when the clock said twelve-twenty and I had to go. I left by way of the kitchen and the back stairs, emerging into our little private yard where Fritz grows chives and tarragon and other vegetation. Leaving the door through the solid board fence unlocked, since it wouldn’t get out of my sight, I skirted piles of rubbish on the premises south of us, and another twenty steps got me to the entrance of the passage.
There was no one there. But I didn’t wait long. Within a couple of minutes a figure appeared at the other end of the passage, looked in, and started toward me. Only it wasn’t Beulah. It was the law student. She was right behind him, and as they approached me she darted around to the front and spoke first.
“It’s all right that Morton came along, isn’t it? He wouldn’t let me come alone.”
“Well, he’s here,” I growled. “Hello.” My impulse was to tell him to go home and study, because we already had complications enough, but since we had made him so welcome the night before, and him practically a member of the family, I decided not to make an issue of it.
“Watch where you step,” I told them and led the way back around the rubbish piles, through the door in the fence, which I locked, into the basement, up to the kitchen, and on up two more flights to the south room, which was on the same floor as mine, at the other end of the hall. It wasn’t often used, but was by no means wasted space. On various occasions all kinds had slept in it, from a Secretary of State to a woman who had poisoned three husbands and was making a fourth one very sick.
Wolfe was there, standing by a window. There was no chair in that room that would take him without complaints from both him and the chair. He did his little bow, head forward eleven-sixteenths of an inch. “How do you do, Miss Page. And Morton. You came along?”
“Yes, sir.” Morton was firm. “I would like to know what this is all about. Goodwin saying his name was Stevens-”
“Of course. Not illegal, no felony, but at least odd. Miss Page deserves an explanation, and she’ll get it. Doubtless you’ll get it too, later, from her. Mr. Goodwin and I are taking Miss Page up to the plant rooms to show her my orchids and have a talk with her.” He waved a hand. “There are books and magazines here, or you may go down to the office if you prefer.”
The muscles of Morton’s jaw had set. “I must insist-”
“No. Don’t
try.” Wolfe was curt. “Since this concerns Miss Page, I do not intend to substitute my discretion for hers. We’ll rejoin you in half an hour or so. Archie, tell Fritz that there will be two luncheon guests, at one sharp.”
XI
Wolfe never tries to deny he’s vain, but I doubt if he’ll ever admit that it’s an exercise of vanity when he takes someone who is under a strain up to the plant rooms. He acts nonchalant, but I can tell when he’s enjoying himself.
Beulah met expectations. In the blaze of the Cattleya room she only looked dazed, but the Dendrobiums and Phalaenopsis really got her. She stopped dead and just looked, with her mouth open. “Someday,” Wolfe said, not sounding pleased, with his usual self-control, “you must spend an hour up here. Or two hours. Now I’m afraid we haven’t time.” He nudged her along to the potting room and told Theodore, the orchid nurse, that he had better go and see to the ventilators.
When Theodore had gone and Wolfe was in his chair and Beulah and I on stools, he said abruptly, “You’re not an infant, Miss Page. You’re nineteen years old.”
She nodded. “In Georgia I could vote.”
“So you could. Then I won’t have to use a nipple for this. We’ll ignore nonessentials; they can be dealt with later, at more leisure-as, for instance, why Mr. Goodwin chose such a name as Harold Stevens to lure you down here yesterday. Do you know what a hypothetical question is?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I’ll put one to you. Suppose these things: that with me as intermediary, your father has arranged to make available to you a considerable sum of money; that he is not in a position to disclose himself to you and cannot ever be expected to do so; that he has put it wholly within my discretion whether you shall be told his name and your mother’s name; and that the circumstances are such that it will be a deuce of a job to keep you from guessing his name and guessing it right. Supposing all that, here’s something for you to think over.”
Wolfe pointed a finger at her. “Do you want me to tell you the names or not?”
“I don’t need to think it over. I want you to tell me.”
“That’s an impulse.”
“It is not an impulse. Good lord, an impulse? If you only knew what I-for years-” Beulah made a little gesture. “I want to know.”
“What if your father is-say, a convicted pickpocket?”
“I don’t care what he is! I want to know!”
“Then you should. Mr. Perrit, your father, died last night.”
Wolfe inclined his head toward a window. “Out there on the sidewalk.”
“I knew it,” Beulah said calmly.
“The devil you did!”
But she wasn’t actually as calm as she sounded. Her hands were clasped tight together and she had started a swallowing marathon. She didn’t even try to resume the conversation, but just sat, and all signs indicated the same outcome.
The outcome arrived in something like a minute. It started with her shoulders going up and down in a minor convulsion, and then her head went forward and her hands went up to cover her face, and the regulation sounds began to come.
“Good God,” Wolfe muttered in a tone of horror, and got to his feet and went. In a moment, above the sounds Beulah was making, I heard the bang of his elevator door. I merely sat and waited, thinking it was natural for me to understand better than he did the most desirable and effective course of action when a young woman began to cry. After all, I thought, I see a good deal more of them than he does.
Time passed by. I was deciding the moment had come for a sympathetic hand on her shoulder when her face came up and she blurted, “Why haven’t you got sense enough to go too?”
It didn’t faze me. “I have,” I said politely, “but I was waiting for the noise to die down enough for you to hear me tell you that if you don’t want to go in the room where Morton is in your present condition, the room at the front on that floor is mine, is unlocked, and has a bathroom with a mirror.”
I left her alone with it. On the way out I warned Theodore what was going on in the potting room and advised him to find jobs elsewhere. On my floor I stopped in my room to make sure about clean towels in the bathroom and general appearances. As I returned to the hall the door of the south room opened and Morton was there.
“Where’s Miss Page?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
“She’s up looking at orchids,” I told him en route. “Relax. Lunch in ten minutes.”
Down in the office Wolfe was sitting at his desk, looking harassed.
I crossed to mine, sat, and told him, “They want a shoulder to cry on, but with her fiancй under the same roof I didn’t think it would be fitting. Morton is pacing-”
The phone rang. I answered it, and heard a voice I had been expecting to hear all day. I told Wolfe Inspector Cramer would like to speak to him. He got on and I stayed on.
“Nero Wolfe speaking, Mr. Cramer. How are you?”
“I’m fine. You?”
“The way I always am just before lunch. Hungry.”
“Well, enjoy it. This is just a friendly call. I wanted to let you know you were right as usual when you decided to keep it all to yourself and tell Rowcliff only one thing that was worth a damn, about Perrit’s daughter being wanted in Salt Lake. We got onto her through the Washington fingerprint files, as you knew we would. I don’t think she was his daughter at all. Her name was Angelina Murphy, though of course she used others. She had about ten years coming. I just wanted to tell you that, but I suppose I might as well ask if you have anything to add.”
“No-no, I think not.”
“Nothing at all? About the job you took on for Perrit?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay, I didn’t expect it. Enjoy your lunch.”
I pushed the phone back. I turned to Wolfe and spoke with feeling. “At least I heard that before I died. Cramer knowing you’ve got things he could use and merely telling you to enjoy your lunch! No pressure, no hard words, nothing! Not even bothering to drop in on us! And you know why? He’s religious and he thinks it would be out of place! He thinks the only guy that belongs here now is a priest for the last rites!”
“Quite right,” Wolfe agreed. “It was in effect an obituary. If I were a sentimentalist I would be touched. Mr. Cramer has never before shown the slightest interest in my enjoyment of a meal. He thinks I haven’t long to live.”
“Including me.”
“Yes, you too, of course.”
“And what do you think?”
“I haven’t given it-”
The phone rang again. With a suspicion that it was Cramer, who had decided he had been too sentimental, I got it and spoke. The voice was as familiar as Cramer’s but it wasn’t his. “Saul Panzer,” I told Wolfe, and, since he didn’t give me the sign to keep off, I kept on. But it was brief and didn’t fill in any gaps for me.
“Saul?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you had lunch?”
“No, sir.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Eight to ten minutes.”
“There is a change or two in the program, dictated by circumstances. I’ll need you here earlier than I thought. Come and join us at luncheon-Miss Beulah Page, Mr. Morton Schane, Archie, and me.”
“Yes, sir. Probably eight minutes.”
XII
Whether Wolfe enjoyed his lunch or not, I didn’t. It is my habit to make big discounts anyhow, and that day I reached my all-time peak in skepticism. I didn’t think he had any program whatever. I thought his line that he needed Saul, and he knew what for, was unadulterated guff. I was sure that Cramer had laid off because he had all the stuff he wanted, through the flock of stools the police always know where to find, and he regarded Wolfe and me as bad company even for an inspector. I thought the only reason Wolfe asked Saul to lunch was to have someone to talk to about something pleasant.
The last thought proved to be sound. It was not a meal full of sparkle. Morton was aloof and not a bit
intimate. Beulah, who showed no traces of the recent irrigation, was trying to pretend she wasn’t somewhere else, without great success. I was so firmly convinced that it was a hell of a time for a man to sit and eat that I had to grit my teeth to stay in my chair, and you can neither chew nor talk very well with your teeth gritted. So the conversation was almost exclusively confined to Wolfe and Saul. Saul, in a suit that didn’t fit, and needing a shave as usual, could do almost anything better than anyone I knew-even talk. They discussed plant germination, the meat shortage, books about Roosevelt, and the World Series.
At one-fifty-five Wolfe pushed his chair back and said he was sorry to end the meal so abruptly but callers were expected. He thought it best for Beulah and Morton to leave the way they had come.
Beulah protested that she wasn’t going to leave, that there were things she wanted to ask about. She would wait until the callers had gone. Then, Wolfe said, she could go back to the plant rooms and do her waiting there, and also Morton if he wished to stay.
“We’ll do that,” Beulah agreed. She was out of her chair and moving to the dining-room door. “Come on, Morton.”
But the law student balked. The way the light was I could see his eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses, and they looked determined. His voice matched them. “I don’t like the way things look here. I don’t know what explanation you have given Miss Page about last night. Then what happened in front of this house afterwards. And asking Miss Page to sneak in the back way. Who are these callers you’re expecting?”
To my surprise, Wolfe obliged him. “One of them,” he said, “is a man named Fabian. The other is named Schwartz. L. A. Schwartz, a lawyer. A member of the bar.”
That was news to me. He must have invited Schwartz after I left the office.
“Are they connected with this-with Miss Page’s affairs?” Morton demanded.