“Certainly you know.” She almost glared at me. “You can stop the talk. You can show that Mr. Naylor is nothing but a silly old fool. You can settle it, once and for all, that Waldo was killed by a hit-and-run driver and that’s all there is to it!”
“I see. That’s what you want.”
Her eyes had come back to me, and mine were at a slant to meet them. We went on looking at each other, and I had a distinct feeling, whether shared by her or not I didn’t know, that we were beginning to get acquainted. When a girl has patted a man’s head, and sat and let him look for ten seconds or more, and looked back at him, with no words exchanged, she can no longer maintain the attitude that he is a complete stranger.
“I’m not a policeman,” I said. “Whatever I am, I can’t settle it how and why he got killed, because that was settled nearly four months ago, the night of December fourth. It’s all down somewhere, all settled, and all I can do is try to dig up enough of it to satisfy everybody concerned. It helps to know that you’re already satisfied.”
“You’re working for Mr. Naylor,” she declared, her tone and look indicating that in all her long association with me she would never have supposed me capable of sinking so low.
“No.” I was emphatic. “I’m not.”
“You’re really not?”
“Really and positively.”
“But then—” She stopped, frowning at me but not for me. “But he has talked to you about Waldo, hasn’t he?”
“He has indeed. He’s a great talker.”
“What did he say?”
“That Moore was murdered.”
“Oh, I know that.” The frown was still there. “He put that on the report. The whole floor knows about it, which was what he wanted, that was why he had a floor girl type the reports instead of his secretary. What else did he say?”
“About Moore, nothing of any importance. He just says murdered. It’s an eeday feex.”
“What else did he say about anything?”
“Oh, my God. That eating cooked vegetables brought on the war. That a man who eats meat—”
“You know perfectly well what I mean!” She was actually scolding me. “What did he say about me?”
“Not a peep. Not a single word. He made only one remark that could possibly be construed as a reference to you. This morning, standing out there at the end of the arena, he said he doubted if there was a virgin in the room, but since you have your own office it probably didn’t apply to you.”
The question of virginity apparently wasn’t troubling her. She insisted, “He really hasn’t mentioned me?”
“Not yet.” I looked at my wrist, let the front legs of my chair come down to the floor, and stood up. “You have your letters to do, and I have some chores myself. I’m sorry it can’t all be settled the way you want it right now, I honestly am sorry. You say you really want to forget all about Moore?”
“Yes! I do!”
“Okay, we’ll keep that on the agenda.”
11.
The first chore on my list consisted of manual labor, with the typewriter in my room as the tool for it, so I went there and started to work.
I had asked, among other items, for some coated stock, letter size, and while the stuff they had sent was nothing to brag about, I inspected it again and decided it would serve. It was a quarter to four, only half an hour till my date with Jasper Pine, and therefore I had to step on it. Making a club sandwich of three sheets of the coated stock and two of carbon paper, I inserted them in the machine and typed in the upper right-hand corner in caps:
REPORT FROM THE
OFFICE OF NERO WOLFE
March 19 1947
Four spaces down, in the middle, I put:
CONFIDENTIAL TO
NAYLOR-KERR, INC.
914 William Street
New York City
There wasn’t time to do it up brown, giving all the little details, the way it should be done for most clients to make them feel they’re getting something for their dough, but I made it fairly comprehensive and in my opinion adequate. It conveyed the information the Kerr Naylor had introduced Moore’s name in the first three minutes, that he had invited me to lunch and flushed me by calling me by my right name, that he insisted Moore had been murdered but refused to furnish any specifications of anything, that he had agreed to go to see Wolfe, that he said he had told Deputy Police Commissioner O’Hara that Moore had been murdered, and that he also said that Moore had been recommended for employment by his sister. In addition to all that on Naylor my report had a summary of my talk with Dickerson, the head of the Correspondence Checkers Section, a statement that word had got around in the department that I was investigating Moore’s death, and a one-sentence paragraph to the effect that I had talked with one Hester Livsey, who had been engaged to Moore, without any result worth mentioning. The only incident the report passed up entirely was my brief interview with the non-speller, which didn’t seem to me to be relevant—and of course the phone call to Lon Cohen at the Gazette, which seemed to be a little too relevant.
Through at the typewriter, I signed the original, folded it and stuck it in my pocket, and did likewise with one of the carbons. The other carbon I didn’t fold. I went and unlocked the filing cabinet, opened the drawer I was using, removed all the folders, and with my handkerchief gave a good wipe to the inside of the metal drawer, sides and ends and bottoms. As I replaced the folders, which were made of green slick-surfaced cardboard, I wiped each one, all four surfaces. Inside the third folder from the top, on top of the papers that were already in it, I placed the second carbon of the report I had just typed, and on top of the report I carefully deposited four grains of tobacco which I had removed from the end of a cigarette. I put them in four selected spots and gently lowered the cardboard of the folder onto them. Closing the drawer, I wiped the whole front of the cabinet, and then I was confronted with a question which I would have liked to consider a little if it hadn’t been twelve minutes past four and me due upstairs in three minutes. Should I just leave it unlocked, or leave the key there in the lock? I voted for the former and stuck the key in my pocket.
I hotfooted it to the outside hall and the elevators, and, as I got off at the thirty-sixth floor, found myself faced by another question which I should have had an answer all ready for but had overlooked in the rush. For the veteran receptionists in the lobby of the executive offices, who was I? The day before, calling on Pine, I had been Goodwin. Was I now to be Truett and expect her to look straight at my intelligent face and think it credible that I didn’t know my own name? Impossible. I walked up to her desk and told her that Mr. Goodwin had an appointment with Mr. Pine for four-fifteen.
Then I had to sit and wait over ten minutes. Usually I am a good waiter, unruffled and relaxed, but that time it irritated me because I could have done a much better job of wiping if I hadn’t hurried. However, it couldn’t be helped, and I sat till I was summoned.
Pine looked tired, busy, and harassed. He stayed behind his desk and started talking before I got across to him.
“I can only give you a few minutes,” he said brusquely. “I already had a full schedule and things are piled up. What is it?”
I handed him the original of the report and stayed on my feet. “Of course you could take it and read it later, but I thought maybe—”
I chopped it off because he had started reading. He raced through it, three times as fast as Wolfe ever reads, and then went back and gave some of the paragraphs a second look.
A sharp glance came at me. “I knew Mr. Naylor had called on the Deputy Commissioner of Police.”
“Sure,” I conceded heartily. “You didn’t mention it, but a man can’t mention everything. Which reminds me, I’ve got a little problem. When Mr. Wolfe reads a copy of this, you see I know him pretty well, the first thing he’ll ask will be whether you knew Mr. Naylor’s sister had asked him to give Moore a job, and if so why you didn’t tell me.” I thought it was more diplomatic to say “Mr. Nayl
or’s sister” than to say “your wife.” I was going on, “Of course if you don’t—”
“Certainly I knew,” he snapped. “What has that got to do with it?”
“Nothing, so far as I know.” I was conceding everything. “But I need your advice. As I say, I know Mr. Wolfe. He’ll tell me to get Mr. Naylor’s sister on the phone, and ask her to come to his office to see him, and if and when she won’t come he’ll tell me to go to see her, and I’ll have to go. What would you advise me to do?”
“You work for Wolfe, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then do what he tells you to.”
“Okay, thanks. You have no suggestions or instructions?”
“No.” Pine made his little gesture of impatience. “If you mean I might want to protect my wife from annoyance, you will learn why it is unnecessary when you meet her. What I want to know is how did Mr. Naylor learn your identity? Can you tell me?”
“If I could,” I said, “it would be in that report. I’d like to know too. There are two possible ways. My picture has been in the paper a couple of times. It could be that he—or someone else had told him—remembered it well enough to recognize me, but the odds against it would go up into six figures. I like the other way better. How many people around here know about me? The receptionist outside, and who else? I believe you mentioned discussing it with two of your brother executives and a member of the Board of Directors.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he was not lost at sea. He liked the other way better too, and he was checking off names. The “—uh, complexities” were turning up again, and he wasn’t getting any pleasure out of them.
“Not the receptionist,” he said grimly. “I spoke to her myself about it. Miss Abrams has been with us twenty years, and there’s no question about her.” He was getting some satisfaction from the assurance that there was one around he could trust.
“Then …?” I asked meaningly.
He nodded, more to himself than to me. “I suppose so,” he muttered. He put the report on his desk, just so, nice and square, and gazed down at it, with his palms pressed together, the fingers out straight, rubbing slowly back and forth. “I suppose so,” he repeated gloomily but not despairingly. His face jerked to me. “I’ll give that some consideration. Disregard it. What about this young woman Moore was hoping to marry—what’s her name?” He fingered to the last page of my report. “Hester Livsey. Did she furnish any—uh, information?”
“Nothing to speak of, no. I’ll try her again—that is, if I’m to go on. Do you want me to come back tomorrow?”
“Certainly. Why not?”
“I just thought, since Naylor’s on to me, and probably by tomorrow noon everybody else will be too—”
“That doesn’t matter. Come by all means. I have no more time now, but ring me in the morning around ten. We’ve started this and we’re going through with it.” He reached for a fancy phone thing, a kind I hadn’t seen before, and told it he was ready for a Mr. Whosis, a name I didn’t catch.
I bowed out.
Quitting time at Naylor-Kerr was five o’clock. It was four-fifty-six as I went back down the corridor of the executive offices. On the elevator I said, “Thirty-four,” not on account of any scruple about chiseling the company to the tune of four minutes’ time, but because my hat and coat were in my room.
There was no sign that any visitors had called during my brief absence. Closing the door, I opened the drawer of the cabinet to give things a look, and found that the particles of tobacco were all present and accounted for. I stood by the window a while, going over the developments in my mind, including the talk with Pine, and considered the desirability of phoning Wolfe to suggest that it might be a good plan for me to intrude on Mrs. Jasper Pine before her husband got home from work. I probably would have done that if it hadn’t been for the coolness previously mentioned. Under the circumstances I voted no.
Outside my door I stopped short and surveyed the scene. It was a real shock. The place looked absolutely empty, in spite of all the hundred of desks and chairs and miscellaneous objects. The girls were gone, and what a difference it made! I stood and gazed around, making one or two quick changes in my philosophy. I decided that until you single one out and she gets personal to you, a hundred girls, or a thousand girls, are just a girl. So it wasn’t accurate to look at that empty room and say to yourself, the girls have gone; the way to say it was, the girl has gone. Nursing a strong suspicion that I had hit on something that was profound enough for three magazine articles or even a book, I made my way to the elevators and down to the street. A taxi in that part of town at that time of day wasn’t to be thought of, so I went to the corner and turned right on Wall Street, headed for the west side subway.
Since I have been in the detective business for over ten years and have done a lot of leg work, naturally I have both tailed and been tailed many times, and when I’m on a case and on the move outdoors it is almost as automatic with me to keep aware of my rear as it is for everybody to glance in the traffic direction before stepping down from a curb. It rarely happens that I have a tail without knowing it, but it did that time. She must have been in ambush in the downstairs lobby with an eye on the elevators, and followed me crosstown. I am not a loiterer, so she had probably had to trot to keep up. The first I knew of it, there in the home-going throng on the sidewalk, I felt a contact that was not merely a bump or a jostle; it was a firm and deliberate grip on my arm.
I stopped and looked down at her. She was at least nine inches below me. She kept the arm.
“You brute,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”
She looked good enough to eat.
12.
“You don’t know me, Mr. Truett,” she said. “You didn’t notice me today.”
“I’m noticing you now,” I told her. “Let go my arm. People will think I’m the father of your children or I owe you alimony.”
That may have been a mistake. It set the tone for my association with her, or at least the beginning of it, and the good view I was having of her made it my responsibility. With her black eyes saying plainly that they had never concealed anything and didn’t intend to, her lips confirming it and approving of it, and all of her making the comment on geometry that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points but you can’t prove it by me, she was obviously the kind of female that gets nicknamed. In Spain or Italy it would be something like The Rose Petal, and where I live it would be something like The Curves, but the basic idea is the same. That kind is often found in the neighborhood of trouble, or vice versa, and perhaps I should have given that a thought before setting the tone.
Passers-by glancing at us meant nothing to her. The only passer-by she would have been interested in was one she didn’t intend to let pass.
“I want to talk to you,” she stated. She had dimples, so tiny that the angle of light had to be just right to see them.
“Not here,” I said. “Come on.” We moved together. “Did you ever ride on the subway?”
“Only twice a day. Where are we going?”
“How do I know? I didn’t know we were going anywhere until you just told me. Maybe ladies’ night at one of my clubs.” I came to a sudden halt. “Wait here a minute. I have to make a phone call.”
I stepped into a cigar store, waited a minute or two for a phone booth to be vacated, slid in, and dialed the number I knew best. I knew it wouldn’t be answered by Wolfe himself, since four to six in the afternoon was always reserved for his visit with the orchids up in the plant rooms. It wasn’t.
“Fritz? Archie. Tell Mr. Wolfe I won’t be home to dinner because I’m detained at the office.”
“Detained—what?”
“At the office. Tell him just like that, he’ll understand.”
I went back to the sidewalk and asked The Curves, “About how long a talk do you think we ought to have?”
“As long as you’ll listen, Mr. Truett. I have a lot to tell you.”
> “Good. Dinner? If we eat together I’ll see that it gets paid for.”
“All right, that would be nice, but it’s early.”
I waved that aside and we aimed for the subway.
I took her to Rusterman’s. For one thing, it was the best grub in New York outside of Wolfe’s own dining-room. For another, the booths along the left wall upstairs at Rusterman’s were so well partitioned that they were practically private rooms. For another, Rusterman’s was owned and bossed by Wolfe’s old friend, Marko Vukcic, and I could sign the check there, whereas if I took her where I must part with cash Wolfe would have been capable of refusing to okay it as expense on the ground that I should have taken her home to eat at his table.
By the time we were seated in the booth I had collected bits of preliminary information, such as that her name was Rosa Bendini and she was assistant chief filer in the Machinery and Parts Section. I had also reached certain conclusions, among them being that she was twenty-four years old, that she had never been at a loss in any environment or circumstances, and that she was eligible as evidence in support of Kerr Naylor’s remark about virgins.
She said she didn’t care for cocktails but loved wine, which of course got her an approving glance from Vukcic, who had spotted me entering and had himself escorted us upstairs—honoring not me, but his old friend Wolfe. Then she evened up by turning him down flat on Shad Roe Mousse Pocahontas and preferring a steak. I trailed along with her to be sociable. When we had been left to ourselves she lost no time opening up.
“Are you a cop, Mr. Truett?”
I grinned at her. “Now listen, girlie. I’m easy to pick up, as you discovered, but I’m hard to take apart. You said you had a lot to tell me. Then we’ll see what I have to tell you. What makes you think I might be a cop?”
“Because you asked about Waldo Moore, and the only thing about him any more is how he got killed, and that’s a thing for a cop, isn’t it?”
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