Fer-De-Lance

by Rex Stout

  “This is Anna Fiore,” the woman said.

  I went over and shook hands with her. She was a homely kid about twenty with skin like stale dough, and she looked like she’d been scared in the cradle and never got over it. I told her my name and said that I had learned from Miss Maffei that she had heard Mr. Maffei answering the phone call before he went out Monday evening. She nodded.

  I turned to the woman. “I expect you’d like to get along back uptown, Miss Maffei. Anna and I will get along.”

  She shook her head. “If I’m back by dinner it will be all right.”

  I got a little gruff. The truth was that I agreed with Durkin that it was a washout and that there was nothing to be expected from it but fanning the air. So I told Maria Maffei that I could easily do without her and she’d better trot along and she’d hear from Wolfe if there was anything to hear. She shot a glance at the girl and showed her teeth to me, and left us.

  I pulled a couple of chairs face to face and got the girl deposited on one in front of me, and pulled out my notebook.

  “You’ve got nothing to be scared of,” I told her. “The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll do a favor to Miss Maffei and her brother and she might give you some money. Do you like Miss Maffei?”

  She seemed startled, as if surprised that anyone should think it worth the trouble to learn her likes and dislikes, but the answer was ready behind the surprise. “Yes, I like her. She is nice.”

  “Do you like Mr. Maffei?”

  “Yes, of course, everybody does. Except when he drinks, then a girl should stay away from him.”

  “How did you happen to hear the phone call Monday evening? Were you expecting it?”

  “How could I be expecting it?”

  “I don’t know. Did you answer the phone?”

  “No, sir. Mrs. Ricci answered it. She told me to call Mr. Maffei and I called upstairs. Then I was clearing the table in the dining-room and the door was open and I could hear him talking.”

  “Could you hear what he said?”

  “Of course.” She looked a little scornful. “We always hear everything anyone says on the telephone. Mrs. Ricci heard him too, she heard the same as I did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “First he said hello. Then he said well this is Carlo Maffei what do you want. Then he said that’s my business I’ll tell you when I see you. Then he said why not here in my room. Then he said no I’m not scared I’m not the one to be scared. Mrs. Ricci says it was it’s not me that’s scared, but she don’t remember right. Then he said sure I want the money and a lot more. Then he said all right seven-thirty at the corner. Then he said shut up yourself what do I care. Then he said all right seven-thirty I know that car.”

  She stopped. I said, “Who was he talking to?”

  I supposed of course that the answer would be that she didn’t know, since Maria Maffei had not known, but she said at once, “The man that called him up before.”

  “Before? When?”

  “Quite a few times. In May. One day twice. Mrs. Ricci says nine times before Monday altogether.”

  “Did you ever hear his voice?”

  “No, sir. Mrs. Ricci always answers.”

  “Did you ever hear this man’s name?”

  “No, sir. After Mrs. Ricci got curious she asked it, but he always just said never mind tell him he’s wanted on the phone.”

  I began to think there might be some fun in this somewhere, possibly even some money. Not that the money interested me; that was for Wolfe; it was the fun I was after. Anyway it might not be just a stick-up and a stiff in the East River. I decided to see what I could get, and I went after that girl. I had heard Wolfe do it many a time, and while I knew most of his results came from a kind of feeling that wasn’t in me, still a lot of it was just patience and hit-or-miss. So I went after her. I kept at it two hours, and collected a lot of facts, but not one that meant anything to me. Once I thought I might be getting warm when I learned that Carlo Maffei had two different women with whom he appeared publicly on different occasions, and one of them was married; but when I saw that wouldn’t tie up with the phone call I threw it out. Maffei had mentioned going to Italy but had given no details. He had pretty well kept his business in his own bosom. He had never had callers except his sister and a friend from his old prosperous days with whom he had occasionally gone to dine. I pumped her for two hours and couldn’t see a gleam anywhere, but something about that phone call kept me from calling it a dull day and putting on my hat. Finally I said to her: “You stay here a minute, Anna, while I go down and see Mrs. Ricci.”

  The landlady confirmed the girl’s version of the phone call and said she had no idea who the caller was though she had tried on several occasions to find out. I asked her a few questions here and there, and then requested permission to take Anna with me uptown. She said no, she couldn’t be left alone with the dinner to get, so I produced a dollar bill, and she asked what time she might expect the girl back, saying that it must not be later than nine o’clock.

  After taking my dollar, I told her, “I can make no promises, Mrs. Ricci, when my boss gets started asking questions nights and days are nothing. But she’ll be back safe and sound as soon as possible.”

  I went upstairs and got Anna and some of the stuff from the bureau drawer and when we got to the street was relieved to find that the roadster hadn’t lost a fender or a spare tire.

  I moseyed along uptown taking it easy, not wanting to reach Thirty-fifth Street too soon, since Wolfe was always upstairs with the plants from four to six and it wasn’t a good idea to disturb him during those two hours unless you had to. Anna was overwhelmed by the roadster; she kept her feet pulled back against the seat and her hands folded tight in her lap. That tickled me and I felt kindly toward her, so I told her that I might give her a dollar if she told my boss anything that would help him out. It was a minute or two after six when I pulled up in front of the old brownstone less than a block from the Hudson River where Wolfe had lived for twenty years and where I had been with him a third of that.

  Anna didn’t get home that night by nine o’clock. It was after eleven when Wolfe sent me to the Times office for the papers, and it was well past midnight when we finally hit on the spot that Anna recognized. By that time Mrs. Ricci had telephoned three times, and when I got to Sullivan Street with the girl a little before one the landlady was waiting out in front, maybe with a knife in her sock. But she didn’t say a word, only glared at me. I had given Anna her dollar, for something had happened.

  I had reported to Wolfe up in the front plant-room, the sun-room, leaving Anna down in the office. He sat there in the big chair with a red and tan orchid eight inches wide tickling the back of his neck, looking not interested. He really wasn’t interested. He barely glanced at the papers and things I had brought with me from Maffei’s room. He admitted that the phone call had a dash of possibility in it, but couldn’t see that there was anything to bother about. I tried to persuade him that since the girl was already downstairs he might as well take it up and see what he could get; and I added with malice: “Anyway, she cost a dollar. I had to give the landlady a dollar.”

  “That was your dollar, Archie.”

  “No, sir, it was an expense dollar. It’s down in the book.”

  I went with him to the elevator. If he had had to do his own lifting and lowering I don’t think he would ever have gone upstairs, even for the plants.

  He began on Anna at once. It was beautiful. Five years earlier I wouldn’t have appreciated it. It was beautiful because it was absolutely comprehensive. If there was anything in that girl, any bit of knowledge, any apparently forgotten shred of feeling or reaction, that could show us a direction or give us a hint, it simply could not have kept away from him. He questioned her for five hours. He asked her about Carlo Maffei’s voice, his habits, his clothing, his meals, his temper, his table manners, his relations with his sister, with Mrs. Ricci, with Anna herself, with everyone Anna had ever s
een him with. He asked her about Mrs. Ricci, about all the residents of the rooming-house for two years, about the neighbors, and about the tradesmen who delivered things to the house. All this he did easily and leisurely, careful not to tire her-quite different from the time I watched him with Lon Graves; him he wore down and drove halfway crazy in an afternoon.

  It seemed to me he got only one thing out of the girl, and that wasn’t much, only an admission that she had removed something from Maffei’s room that very morning. Wednesday. Little pieces of paper from his bureau drawer with mucilage on the back, and printed on the front S.S. LUCIA and S.S. FIORENZA. Of course they were steamship luggage stickers. From the newspaper file I learned that the Lucia had sailed on the 18th of May and the Fiorenza on the 3rd of June. Evidently Maffei had decided on Italy not once, but twice, and had given it up both times. Anna had taken them, she said, because they were pretty colors and she wanted to paste them on the box she kept her clothes in. During dinner, which the three of us ate together in the dining-room, he let Anna alone entirely and talked to me, mostly about beer, but with the coffee he moved us back to the office and went at it again. He doubled back and recovered the ground, he darted around at random on things so irrelevant and inconsequential that anyone who had never seem him pull a rabbit out of that hat before would have been sure he was merely a nut. By eleven o’clock I was through, yawning and ready to give up, and I was exasperated that he showed not the slightest sign of impatience or discouragement.

  Then all at once he hit it.

  “So Mr. Maffei never gave you any presents?”

  “No, sir. Except the box of chalk I told you about. And the newspapers, if you call that a present.”

  “Yes. You said he always gave you his morning paper. The Times.”

  “Yes, sir. He told me once he took the Times for the classified ads. You know, the job ads.”

  “Did he give you his paper Monday morning?”

  “He always gave it to me in the afternoon. Monday afternoon, yes, sir.”

  “There was nothing peculiar about it that morning, I suppose.”

  “No, sir.”

  Apparently Wolfe caught some faint flicker in her eye, some faint movement that I missed. Anyway he insisted.

  “Nothing peculiar about it?”

  “No, sir. Except-of course, the cut-out.”

  “The cut-out?”

  “A piece cut out. A big piece.”

  “Did he often cut out pieces?”

  “Yes, sir. Mostly the ads. Maybe always the ads. I used the papers to take the dirt up in and I had to watch for the holes.”

  “But this was a big piece.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not an advertisement then. You will pardon me, Miss Fiore, if I do not say ad. I prefer not to. Then it wasn’t an advertisement he cut out of Monday’s paper.”

  “Oh no, it was on the front page.”

  “Indeed. Had there ever been a piece cut out on the front page before?”

  “No, sir. I’m sure not.”

  “Never anything but advertisements before?”

  “Well, I’m not sure of that. Maybe only ads, I think it was.”

  Wolfe sat for a minute with his chin on his chest. Then he turned to me. “Archie, run up to Forty-second Street and get twenty copies of Monday’s Times.”

  I was glad for something to wake me up. Not that it was anything to get excited about, for I could see that Wolfe was just taking a wink at the only crack that had shown any chance of light; I wasn’t expecting anything and I didn’t think he was. But it was a fine June night, cool but soft and pleasant, and I filled my lungs with good air snatched from the breeze I made as I rolled crosstown to Broadway and turned north. At Times Square I saw a cop I knew, Marve Doyle who used to pound the cement down on Fourteenth Street, and he let me leave the car against the Broadway curb while I ran across the street to the Times office. The theater and movie mob was slopping off the sidewalks into the street, deciding between two dollars at a speak and two nickles at a Nedick’s.

  When I got back to the office Wolfe was giving the girl a rest. He had had Fritz bring in some beer and she was sipping at a glass like it was hot tea, with a stripe of dried foam across her upper lip. He had finished three bottles, though I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes at the outside. As I came in he said: “I should have told you city edition.”

  “Sure, that’s what I got.”

  “Good.” He turned to the girl. “If you don’t mind, Miss Fiore, it would be better if you did not overlook our preparations. Turn her chair around, Archie; there, the little table for her beer. Now the papers. No, don’t rip it off; better intact I think; that’s the way she first saw it. Remove the second sections, they’ll be a find for Miss Fiore, think of all the dirt they’ll hold. Here.”

  I spread open a first section on the desk before him and he pulled himself up in his chair to hunch over it. It was like seeing a hippopotamus in the zoo get up for a feed. I took out all the second sections and stacked them on a chair and then took a front page for myself and went over it. At the first glance it certainly looked hopeless; miners were striking in Pennsylvania, the NRA was saving the country under three different headings, two boys had crossed the Atlantic in a thirty-foot boat, a university president had had heart failure on a golf course, a gangster had been tear-gassed out of a Brooklyn flat, a negro had been lynched in Alabama, and someone had found an old painting somewhere in Europe. I glanced at Wolfe; he was drinking the whole page. The only thing that looked to me worth trying at all was the painting which had been found in Switzerland and was supposed to have been stolen from Italy. But when Wolfe finally reached for the scissors out of the drawer it wasn’t that one he clipped, it was the gangster piece. Then he laid the paper aside and called for another one. I handed it to him, and this time I grinned as I saw him go after the article about the painting; I came in second anyhow. When he called for a third paper I was curious, and as he ran the scissors around the edges of the story about the university president I stared at him. He saw me. He said without looking up, “Pray for this side, Archie. If it’s this one we shall have an Angrsecum sesquipedale for Christmas.” I could spell that because I kept his accounts for him on orchids as on everything else, but I could no more have pronounced it than I could have imagined any connection between the university president and Carlo Maffei.

  Wolfe said, “Show her one.”

  The last one he had clipped was on top, but I reached under it and got the next one; the painting piece had been in a large box in the lower right quarter of the page. As I held it out, spread open, to Anna, Wolfe said, “Look at that, Miss Fiore. Is that the way the piece was cut out Monday morning?”

  She gave it only a glance. “No, sir. It was a big piece out of the top, here, let me show you-”

  I snatched it out of the way before she could get hold of it, tossed it back to the table, and picked up another. I spread it in front of her. This time she took two glances, then she said, “Yes, sir.”

  “You mean that’s it?”

  “It was cut out like that, yes, sir.”

  For a moment Wolfe was silent, then I heard him breathe and he said, “Turn her around, Archie.” I took the arm of her chair and whirled it around with her in it. Wolfe looked at her and said, “How sure are you, Miss Fiore, that the paper was cut out like that?”

  “I know it was, sir. I’m sure.”

  “Did you see the piece he had cut out? In his room, in the wastebasket perhaps, or in his hand?”

  “No, I never saw it. It couldn’t have been in the wastebasket because there isn’t any.”

  “Good. If only all reasons were as good as that. You may go home now, Miss Fiore. You have been a good girl, good and patient and forbearing, and unlike most of the persons I avoid meeting by staying inside my house, you are willing to confine your tongue to its proper functions. But will you answer just one more question? I ask it as a favor.”

  The girl was co
mpletely tired out, but there was enough life left in her to let the bewilderment show in her eyes. She stared at him. Wolfe said, “Just one more question. Have you ever at any time seen a golf club in Carlo Maffei’s room?”

  If he was looking for a climax he got it, because for the first time in all these hours the girl shut up on him. It was funny how plain you could see it happen. For an instant she just looked, then when the question had clicked what little color she had left her till she was dead white and her mouth dropped half open; she looked absolutely like an idiot, and she began to tremble all over.

  Wolfe bored at her, quiet. “When did you see it?”

  All of a sudden she shut her lips tight, and her hands in her lap closed into fists. “No, sir.” It was just a mumble. “No, sir, I never did.”

  Wolfe looked at her a second, then he said, “All right. It’s quite all right, Miss Fiore.” He turned to me. “Take her home.”

  She didn’t try to stand up till I went over and touched her shoulder. Then she put her hands on the arms of the chair and got to her feet. He had certainly got her somehow, but she didn’t seem exactly scared, just caved in. I got her jacket from the back of a chair and helped her put it on. As she started for the door I turned to say something to Wolfe, and couldn’t believe my eyes. He was raising himself out of his chair to stand up! Actually. I had at one time seen him refuse to take that trouble for the departure from that room of a woman worth twenty-million American dollars who had married an English duke. But anyway I said what I had started to say: “I told her I’d give her a dollar.”