by Rex Stout
“It isn’t,” Annabel asserted.
I glanced at Hammond and Pierce, but neither of them seemed to want the floor.
“So,” I continued, “unless the cops have got a trap set that you don’t know about, it’s one of those things. You never can tell. It would be a waste of money to pay me to go over the ground the cops have covered—or any other detective except Nero Wolfe, and he’s not around. There’s only one way to use me, or anyhow only one way to start, and stand a chance of getting your money’s worth, and that would be to give me a good eight or ten hours with each of you six people, each one separately. I have watched and listened to Nero Wolfe a good many years and I can now do a fair imitation. It might possibly turn out to be worth it to all of you—except one, as Mr. Pierce would say.”
I flipped a hand. “That’s the best suggestion I can offer. With nothing like a guarantee.”
Annabel said, “No one would tell you everything you asked. I haven’t myself, to the police.”
“Sure. I understand that. That’s part of it.”
“You would be working for me—for us. It would be confidential.”
“Things that weren’t used would be confidential. Nothing that was evidence would be.”
Annabel sat and regarded me. She had had her fingers twisted tight together, and now she loosened them and then they twisted again. “I want to ask you something, Mr. Goodwin. Do you think one of us killed Mrs. Rackham?”
“I do now. I don’t know what I would think after I had worked at it.”
“Do you think you know which one?”
“Nope. I’m impartial.”
“All right. You can start with me.” She turned her head. “Unless one of you would rather be first?”
No one moved or spoke. Then Calvin Leeds: “Count me out, Annabel. Not with Goodwin. Let him tell us first where Nero Wolfe is and why.”
“But Cal—you won’t?”
“Not with him I won’t.”
“Dana?”
Hammond looked unhappy. He got up and went to her. “Annabel, this was a mistake. The whole idea was no good. What can Goodwin do that the police couldn’t do? I doubt if you have any conception of how a private detective works.”
“He can try. Will you help, Dana?”
“No. I hate to refuse, but I must.”
“Oliver, will you?”
“Well.” The statesman was frowning, not at her, at me. “This seems to me to be a case of all or none. I don’t see how anything could be accomplished—”
“Then you refuse me too?”
“Under the circumstances I have no other course.”
“I see. You won’t even give me a straight no. Barry?”
“Certainly not. Goodwin has lied to the police about my wife’s visit to Wolfe. I wouldn’t give him eight seconds, let alone eight hours.”
Annabel left her chair and went toward the couch. “Lina, I guess it’s up to the women. You and me. She was darned good to us, Lina—both of us. What about it?”
“Darling,” Lina Darrow said. She sat up. “Darling Annabel. You know you don’t like me.”
“That isn’t true,” Annabel protested. “Just because—”
“Of course it’s true. You thought I was trying to squeeze you out. You thought I was making a play for Barry merely because I was willing to admit he might be human, so wait and see. You thought I was trying to snatch Ollie from you, when as a matter of fact—”
“Lina, for God’s sake,” Pierce implored her.
Her fine dark eyes flashed at him. “She did, Ollie! When as a matter of fact she got bored with you, and I happened to be near.” The eyes darted right to left, sweeping them. “And look at you now, all of you, and listen to you! You all think Barry killed her—all except one, you would say, Ollie. But you haven’t got the guts to say so. And this Mr. Goodwin of yours, darling Annabel, have you told him that what you really want him for is to find some kind of proof that Barry did it? No, I suppose you’re saving that for later.”
Lina arose, in no hurry, and confronted Annabel from springing distance. “I thought it would be something like this,” she said, and left us, detouring around Leeds’ chair and heading for the door to the reception hall. Eyes followed her, but no one said anything; then, as she passed out of sight, Barry Rackham got up and, without a glance for any of us, including his hostess, tramped from the room.
The remaining three guests exchanged looks. Leeds and Pierce left their chairs.
“I’m sorry, Annabel,” Leeds said gruffly. “But didn’t I tell you about Goodwin?”
She didn’t reply. She only stood and breathed. Leeds went, with not as much spring to his step as I had seen, and Pierce, mumbling a good night, followed. Dana Hammond went to Annabel, had a hand out to touch her arm, and then let it drop.
“My dear,” he said, appealing to her, “it was no good. It couldn’t be. If you had consulted me—”
“I’ll remember next time, Dana. Good night.”
“I want to talk with you, Annabel. I want to—”
“For God’s sake, let me alone! Go!”
He backed up a step and scowled at me, as if I were to blame for everything. I lifted my right brow at him. It’s one of my few outstanding talents, lifting one brow, and I save it for occasions when nothing else would quite serve the purpose.
He walked out of the room without another word.
Annabel dropped onto the nearest chair, put her elbows on her knees, and buried her face in her hands.
I stood looking down at her. “It was not,” I told her sympathetically, “what I would call a success, but anyhow you tried. Not to try to make you feel better, but for future guidance, it might have been wiser, instead of calling a convention, to tackle them one at a time. And it was too bad you picked Leeds to sell first, since he has a grudge against me. But the truth is you were licked before you started. The shape their nerves are in, touching them with a feather wouldn’t tickle them, it would give them a stroke. Thanks all the same for asking me.”
I left her. By the time I got out to the parking space the cars of the other guests were gone. Rolling down the curving driveway, I was thinking that my first incoming phone call hadn’t been so damned magnificent after all.
Chapter 12
One or two of my friends have tried to tell me that some of my experiences that summer are worth telling about, but even taking them at their word, I’m not going to drag it in here. However, it is true that after I ran an ad in the Gazette and word got around I soon quit keeping count of the incoming calls. All I’ll do here is summarize it by months:
May. Woman with pet cat stolen. Got it back; fifty dollars and expenses. Guy who got rolled in a joint on Eighth Avenue and didn’t want to call the cops. Pound her and scared most of it out of her. Two Cs for me. Man who wanted his son pried loose from a blond sharpie. Shouldn’t have tried; fell on my nose; took a C above expenses anyhow. Restaurant with a dumb cashier with sticky fingers; took only one afternoon to hook her; client beefed about my request for sixty-five dollars but paid it.
June. Spent two full weeks handling a hot insurance case for Del Bascom and damn near got my skull cracked for good. Cleaned it up. Del had the nerve to offer me 3 Cs; demanded a grand and got it. My idea was to net more per week than I had been getting from Wolfe, not that I cared for the money, but as a matter of principle. Found a crooked bookie for a man from Meadville, Pa. A hundred and fifty dollars. Man wanted me to find his vanished wife, but it looked dim and he could pay only twenty bucks a day, so I passed it. Girl unjustly accused, she said, of giving secret business dope to a rival firm, and fired from her job, pestered me into tackling it. Proved she was right and got her job back, doing five hundred dollars’ worth of work for a measly hundred and twenty, paid in installments. Her face wasn’t much, but she had a nice voice and good legs. Got an offer of a job from the FBI, my ninth offer from various sources in six weeks, and turned it down.
July. Took a whirl at supervising
ten men for a bunch of concessionaires at Coney Island; caught one of them taking a cut from doobey stands; he jumped me with a cooler and I broke his arm. Got tired of looking at a thousand acres of bare skin, mostly peeling, practically all nonseductive, and quit. Eight fifty for seventeen days. Had passed up at least two thousand worth of little chores. Screwball woman on Long Island had had jewelry stolen, uninsured, thought cops were in on it and stalling. Two things happened: I got some breaks, and I did a damn good piece of work. It took me into August. I got all the jewelry back, hung it on an interior decorator’s assistant with proof, billed her for thirty-five hundred gross, and collected.
August. I had drawn no pay from Wolfe’s checkbook since May sixth, I had not gone near my personal safe deposit box, and my personal bank balance had not only not sunk, it had lifted. I decided I had a vacation coming. The most I had ever been able to talk Wolfe out of was two weeks, and I thought I should double that at least. A friend of mine, whose name has appeared in print in connection with one of Wolfe’s cases, had the idea that we should take a look at Norway, and her point of view seemed sound.
Slow but sure, I was working myself around to an attitude toward life without Nero Wolfe on a permanent basis. One thing that kept it slow was the fact that early in July Marko Vukcic had asked me to bring him another check for five grand drawn to cash. Since if you wanted to eat in his restaurant you had to reserve a table a day in advance, and then pay six bucks for one helping of guinea hen, I knew he wasn’t using it himself, so who was? Another thing, the house hadn’t been sold, and, doing a little snooping on my own account, I had learned that the asking price was a hundred and twenty thousand, which was plain silly. On the other hand, if Marko was getting money to Wolfe, that didn’t prove that I was ever going to see him again, and there was no hurry about selling the house until the bank balance began to sag; and also there was Wolfe’s safe deposit box. Visiting his safe deposit box was one item on the select list of purposes for which Wolfe had been willing to leave his house.
I did not really want to leave New York, especially to go as far as Norway. I had a feeling that I would about be passing Sandy Hook when word would come somehow, wire or phone or letter or messenger, to Thirty-fifth Street or 1019, in a code that I would understand—if I was there to get it. And if it did come I wanted to be there, or I might be left out of the biggest charade Wolfe had ever staged. But it hadn’t been days or weeks, it had been months, and my friend was pretty good at several things, including riding me about hanging on forever to the short end of the stick, so we had reservations on a ship that sailed August twenty-sixth.
Four days before that, August twenty-second, a Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk at 1019, to keep an appointment with a man who had phoned. I had told him I was soon leaving for a month’s vacation, and he hadn’t felt like giving a name, but I thought I recognized the voice and had agreed to see him. When he walked in on the dot, at 3:15, I was glad to know that my memory for voices was holding up. It was my old cellmate, Max Christy.
I got up and we shook. He put his panama on the desk and glanced around. His black mop was cut a little shorter than it had been in April, but the jungle of his eyebrows hadn’t been touched, and his shoulders looked just as broad in gray tropical worsted. I invited him to sit and he did.
“I must apologize,” I said, “for never settling for that breakfast. It was a life-saver.”
He waved it away. “The pleasure was mine. How’s it going?”
“Oh—no complaints. You?”
“I’ve been extremely busy.” He got out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face and neck. “I certainly sweat. Sometimes I think it’s stupid, this constant back and forth, push and shove.”
“I hear you mentioned around.”
“Yes, I suppose so. You never phoned me. Did you?”
“The number,” I said, “is Churchill five, three two three two.”
“But you never called it.”
“No, sir,” I admitted, “I didn’t. One thing and another kept coming up, and then I didn’t care much for your line about if I got taken in and my being given a trial. I am by no means a punk, and the ink on my license dried long ago. Here, look behind my ears.”
He threw back his head and haw-hawed, then shut it off and told me soberly, “You got me wrong, Goodwin. I only meant we’d have to go slow on account of your record.” He used the handkerchief on his forehead. “I certainly do sweat. Since then your name has been discussed a little, and I assure you, you are not regarded as a punk. We have noticed that you seem to have plenty of jobs since you opened this office, but so trivial for a man like you. Why did you turn down the offer from the Feds?”
“Oh, they keep such long hours.”
He nodded. “And you don’t like harness, do you?”
“I never tried it and don’t intend to.”
“What have you got on hand now? Anything important?”
“Nothing whatever, important or otherwise. I told you on the phone, I’m taking a vacation. Sailing Saturday.”
He regarded me disapprovingly. “You don’t need a vacation. If anybody needs a vacation it’s me, but I don’t get one. I’ve got a job for you.”
I shook my head. “Not right now. When I get back maybe.”
“It won’t wait till you get back. There’s a man we want tailed and we’re short of personnel, and he’s tough. We had two good men on him, and he spotted both of them. You would need at least two helpers; three would be better. You use men you know, handle that yourself, and pay them and expenses out of the five hundred a day you’ll get.”
I whistled. “What’s so hot about it?”
“Nothing. It’s not hot.”
“Then who’s the subject, the Mayor?”
“I’m not naming him. Perhaps I don’t even know. It’s merely a straight tailing job, but it has to be watertight and no leaks. You can net three hundred a day easy.”
“Not without a hint who he is or what he looks like.” I waved it away. “Forget it. I’d like to oblige an old cellmate, but my vacation starts Saturday.”
“Your vacation can wait. This can’t. At ten o’clock tonight you’ll be walking west on Sixty-seventh Street halfway between First and Second Avenues. A car will pick you up, with a man in it that wants to ask you some questions. If your answers suit him he’ll tell you about the job—and it’s your big chance, Goodwin. It’s your chance for your first dip into the biggest river of fast dough that ever flowed.”
“What the hell,” I protested, “you’re not offering me a job, you’re just giving me a chance to apply for one I don’t want.”
It was perfectly true at that point, and it was still true ten minutes later, when Max Christy left, that I didn’t want the job, but I did want to apply for it. It wasn’t that I had a hunch that the man in the car who wanted to ask me some questions would be Arnold Zeck, but the way it had been staged gave me the notion that it was just barely possible; and the opportunity, slim as it was, was too good to miss. It would be interesting to have a chat with Zeck; besides, he might give me an excuse to take a poke at him and I might happen to inadvertently break his neck. So I told Christy that I would be walking on Sixty-seventh Street at ten that evening as suggested. I had to break a date to do it, but even if the chance was only one in a million I wanted it.
To get that point settled and out of the way, the man who wanted to quiz me was not Arnold Zeck. It was not even a long black Cadillac; it was only a ’48 Chevy two-door sedan.
It was a hot August night, and as I walked along that block I was sweating a little myself, especially my left armpit under the holster. There was a solid string of parked cars at the curb, and when the Chevy stopped and its door opened and my name was called, not loud, I had to squeeze between bumpers to get to it. As I climbed in and pulled the door shut the man in the front seat, behind the wheel, swiveled his head for a look at me and then, with no greeting, went back to his chauffeuring, and the car started forward.
>
My companion on the back seat muttered at me, “Maybe you ought to show me something.”
I got out my display case and handed it to him with the license—detective, not driver’s—uppermost. When we stopped for a light at Second Avenue he inspected it with the help of a street lamp, and returned it. I was already sorry I had wasted an evening. Not only was he not Zeck; he was no one I had ever seen or heard of, though I was fairly well acquainted, at least by sight, with the high brass in the circles that Max Christy moved in. This bird was a complete stranger. With more skin supplied for his face than was needed, it had taken up the slack in pleats and wrinkles, and that may have accounted for his sporting a pointed brown beard, since it must be hard to shave pleats.
As the car crossed the avenue and continued west, I told him, “I came to oblige Max Christy—if suggestions might help any. I’ll only be around till Saturday.”
He said, “My name’s Roeder,” and spelled it.
I thanked him for the confidence. He broadened it. “I’m from the West Coast, in case you wonder how I rate. I followed something here and found it was tied in with certain operations. I’d just as soon leave it to local talent and go back home, but I’m hooked and I have to stick.” Either he preferred talking through his nose or that was the only way he knew. “Christy told you we want a man tailed?”
“Yes. I explained that I’m not available.”
“You have got to be available. There’s too much involved.” He twisted around to face me. “It’ll be harder than ever now, because he’s on guard. It’s been messed up. They say if anyone can do it you can, especially with the help of a couple of men that Nero Wolfe used. You can get them, can’t you?”