by Rex Stout
“I’ll tell you, Pete.” Wolfe pushed his chair back and got his bulk comfortably settled in a new position. “If we are to join hands on your case I think I should tell you a few things about the science and art of detection. Mr. Goodwin will of course take it down, and when he types it he will make a copy for you. But first he’ll make a phone call. Archie, you have that license number. Call Mr. Cramer’s office and give them that number. Say that you have information that that car, or its owner or operator, may have been involved in a violation of a law in this city in the past two hours, and suggest a routine check. Do not be more definite. Say that our information is unverified and inquiry should be discreet.”
“Hey,” Pete demanded, “who’s Mr. Cramer? A cop?”
“A police inspector,” Wolfe told him. “You yourself suggested the possibility of murder. If there was a murder there is a corpse. If there is a corpse it should be found. Unless and until it is found, where’s your case? We have no idea where to look for it, so we’ll trick the police into finding it for us. I often make use of them that way. Archie. Of course you will not mention Pete’s name, since he doesn’t want to be marked.”
As I went across to the office, to my desk, and dialed the number of Manhattan Homicide West, I was reflecting that of all Wolfe’s thousand techniques for making himself obnoxious the worst was when he thought he was being funny. When I finished talking to Sergeant Purley Stebbins and hung up, I was tempted to just walk out and go up to watch Mosconi and Watrous handle their cues, but of course that wouldn’t do because it would have been admitting he had called me good, and he would merely have shooed Pete out and settled down with a book and a satisfied smirk.
So I marched back to the dining room, sat down and took up my pen, and said brightly, “All right, they’re alerted. Shoot the lecture on detection, and don’t leave anything out.”
Wolfe leaned back, put his elbows on the chair arms, and matched his fingertips. “You understand, Pete, that I shall confine myself to the problems and methods of the private detective who works at his profession for a living.”
“Yeah.” Pete had a fresh bottle of Coke. “That’s what I want, how to rake in the dough.”
“I had remarked that tendency in you. But you must not permit it to smother other considerations. It is desirable that you should earn your fees, but it is essential that you feel you have earned them, and that depends partly on your ego. If your ego is healthy and hardy, as mine is, you will seldom have difficulty—”
“What’s my ego?”
“There are various definitions, philosophical, metaphysical, psychological, and now psychoanalytical, but as I am using the term it means the ability to play up everything that raises your opinion of yourself and play down everything that lowers it. Is that clear?”
“I guess so.” Pete was frowning in concentration. “You mean, do you like yourself or don’t you.”
“Not precisely, but that’s close enough. With a robust ego, your feeling—”
“What’s robust?”
Wolfe made a face. “I’ll try to use words you have met before, but when I don’t, when one of them is a stranger to you, kindly do not interrupt. If you are smart enough to be a good detective, you are smart enough to guess accurately the meaning of a new word by the context—which means the other words I use with it. Also there is usually a clue. A moment ago I spoke of a healthy and hardy ego, and then, after your interruption, I spoke of a robust ego in the same connection. So obviously ‘robust’ means ‘healthy and hardy,’ and if you have the stuff of a good detective in you, you should have spotted it. How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“Then I should make allowances, and do. To continue: with a robust ego, your feeling about earning your fees can safely be left to your intelligence and common sense. Never collect or accept a fee that you feel you haven’t earned; if you do, your integrity crumbles and your ego will have worms. With that one reservation, get all you can. As you must not take what you feel you haven’t earned, so must you get what you feel you have earned. Don’t even discuss a case with a prospective client until you know about his ability to pay. So much—”
“Then why—” Pete blurted, and stopped.
“Why what?”
“Nothing. Only you’re discussing with me, just a kid.”
“This is a special case. Mr. Goodwin brought you in to me, and he is my trusted and highly valuable assistant, and he would be disappointed if I didn’t explore your affair thoroughly and let him take it down and type it.” Wolfe favored me with a hypocritical glance and returned to Pete. “So much for your ego and your fees. As for your methods, they must of course be suited to your field. I pass over such fields as industrial espionage and divorce evidence and similar repugnant snooperies, since the ego of any man who engages in them is already infested with worms, and so you are not concerned. But take robbery. Say, for instance, a woman’s jewel box has been looted, and she doesn’t want to go to the police because she suspects—”
“Let’s take murder. I’d rather start with murder.”
“As you will.” Wolfe was gracious. “You’re getting this, are you, Archie?”
“You bet. With my tongue out.”
“Good. But robbery or murder, no matter what, speaking generally, you must thoroughly understand that primarily you are practicing an art, not a science. The role of science in crime detection is worthy, honorable, and effective, but it has little part in the activities of a private detective who aspires to eminence. Anyone of moderate capacity can become adept with a vernier caliper, a camera, a microscope, a spectrograph, or a centrifuge, but they are merely the servants of detection. Science in detection can be distinguished, even brilliant, but it can never replace either the inexorable march of a fine intellect through a jungle of lies and fears to the clearing of truth, or the flash of perception along a sensitive nerve touched off by a tone of a voice or a flicker of an eye.”
“Excuse me,” I interposed. “Was that ‘a tone of voice’ or ‘a tone of a voice’?”
“Neither,” Wolfe lied. “It was ‘a tone of some voice.’” He resumed to Pete, “The art of detection has many levels and many faces. Take one. Shadowing a man around New York without losing him is an extremely difficult task. When the police undertake it seriously they use three men, and even so they are often hoodwinked. There is a man who often works for me, Saul Panzer, who is a genius at it, working alone. I have discussed it with him and have concluded that he himself does not know the secret of his superlative knack. It is not a conscious and controlled operation of his brain, though he has a good one; it is something hidden somewhere in his nervous system—possibly, of course, in his skull. He says that he seems somehow to know, barely in the nick of time, what the man he is following is about to do—not what he has done or is doing, but what he intends. That’s why Mr. Panzer might teach you everything he knows, and still you would never be his equal. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn all you can. Learning will never hurt you. Only the man who knows too little knows too much. It is only when you undertake to use what you have learned that you discover whether you can transform knowledge into performance.”
Wolfe aimed a thumb at me. “Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him—possibly in his brain, though I doubt it—a powerful and subtle governor. For instance, the sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster, doubtless occasionally on the very brink. I
t works similarly with the majority of his impulses and whims, but now and then it fails to intervene in time, and he suffers mishap, as this evening when he was impelled to badger me when a certain opportunity offered. It has already cost him—what time is it, Archie?”
I looked. “Eighteen minutes to nine.”
“Hey!” Pete leaped from his chair. “I gotta run! My mother—I gotta be home by a quarter to! See you tomorrow!”
He was on his way. By the time I was up and in the hall he had reached the front door and pulled it open, and was gone. I stepped to the threshold of the dining room and told Wolfe, “Damn it, I was hoping he would stay till midnight so you could finish. After that a billiard match will be pretty dull, but I might as well go.”
I went.
Chapter 2
Next day, Wednesday, I was fairly busy. A hardware manufacturer from Youngstown, Ohio, had come to New York to try to locate a son who had cut his lines of communication, and had wired Wolfe to help, and we had Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather out scouting around. That kept me close to my desk and the phone, getting reports and relaying instructions.
A little after four in the afternoon Pete Drossos showed up and wanted to see Wolfe. His attitude indicated that while he was aware that I too had a license as a private detective and he had nothing serious against me, he preferred to deal with the boss. I explained that Nero Wolfe spent four hours every day—from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon—up in the plant rooms on the roof, with his ten thousand orchids, bossing Theodore Horstmann instead of me, and that during those hours he was unavailable. Pete let me know that he thought that was a hell of a way for a private eye to spend his time, and I didn’t argue the point. By the time I finally got him eased out to the stoop and the door closed, I was ready to concede that maybe my governor needed oiling. Pete was going to be a damn nuisance, no doubt of it. I should have choked my impulse to invite him in as a playmate for Wolfe. Whenever I catch myself talking me into chalking one up against me, it helps to take a drink, so I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. As I returned to the office the phone was ringing—Orrie Cather making a report.
At the dinner table that evening neither Wolfe nor Fritz gave the slightest indication that starlings had ever come between them. As Wolfe took his second helping of the main dish, which was Danish pork pancake, he said distinctly, “Most satisfactory.” Since for him that was positively lavish, Fritz took it as offered, nodded with dignity, and murmured, “Certainly, sir.” So there were no sparks flying when we finished our coffee, and Wolfe was so agreeable that he said he would like to see me demonstrate Mosconi’s spectacular break shot I had told him about, if I cared to descend to the basement with him.
But I didn’t get to demonstrate. When the doorbell rang as we were leaving the dining room, I supposed of course it was Pete, but it wasn’t. The figure visible through the glass panel was fully twice as big as Pete, and much more familiar—Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Manhattan Homicide West. Wolfe went into the office, and I went to the front and opened the door.
“They went thataway,” I said, pointing.
“Nuts. I want to see Wolfe. And you.”
“This is me. Shoot.”
“And Wolfe.”
“He’s digesting pork. Hold it.” I slipped the chain bolt to hold the door to a two-inch crack, stepped to the office, told Wolfe Stebbins wanted an audience, stood patiently while he made faces, was instructed to bring the caller in, and returned to the front and did so.
Over the years a routine had been established for seating Sergeant Stebbins in our office. When he came with Inspector Cramer, Cramer of course took the big red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk, and Purley one of the yellow ones, which were smaller. When he came alone, I tried to herd him into the red leather chair but never made it. He always sidestepped and pulled up a yellow one. It wasn’t that he felt a sergeant shouldn’t sit where he had seen an inspector sit, not Purley. It may be he doesn’t like to face a window, or possibly he just doesn’t like red chairs. Some day I’ll ask him.
That day he got his meat and muscle, of which he has a full share, at rest on a yellow chair as usual, eyed Wolfe a moment, and then twisted his neck to confront me. “Yesterday you phoned me about a car—a dark gray fifty-two Cadillac, Connecticut license YY nine-four-three-two. Why?”
I raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I told you. We had information, not checked, that the car or its owner or driver might have been involved in something, or might be. I suggested a routine inquiry.”
“I know you did. Exactly what was your information and where did you get it?”
I shook my head. “You asked me that yesterday and I passed it. I still pass. Our informant doesn’t want to be annoyed.”
“Well, he’s going to be. Who was it and what did he tell you?”
“Nothing doing.” I turned a hand over. “You know damn well this is just a bad habit you’ve got. If something has happened that makes you think I’ve got to tell you who and what, tell me what happened and let’s see if I agree with you. You know how reasonable I am.”
“Yeah, I sure do.” Purley set his jaw and then relaxed it. “At six-forty this afternoon, two hours ago, a car stopped for a red light at the corner of Thirty-fifth Street and Ninth Avenue. A boy with a rag went to it and started wiping a window. He finished that side and started for the other side, and as he was circling in front of the car it suddenly jumped forward and ran over him, and kept going fast, across the avenue and along Thirty-fifth Street. The boy died soon after the ambulance got him to the hospital. The driver was a man, alone in the car. With excitement like that people never see much, but two people, a woman and a boy, agree about the license number, Connecticut YY nine-four-three-two, and the boy says it was a dark gray Cadillac sedan. Well?”
“What was the boy’s name? The one that was killed.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking.”
“His name was Drossos. Peter Drossos.”
I swallowed. “That’s just fine. The sonofabitch.”
“Who, the boy?”
“No.” I turned to Wolfe. “Do you tell it or do I?”
Wolfe had closed his eyes. He opened them to say, “You,” and closed them again.
I didn’t think it was necessary to tell Stebbins about the domestic crisis that had given me the impulse to take Pete in to Wolfe, but I gave him everything that was relevant, including Pete’s second visit that afternoon. Though for once in his life he was satisfied that he was getting something straight in that office, he asked a lot of questions, and at the end he saw fit to contribute an unfriendly comment to the effect that worthy citizens like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin might have been expected to show a little more interest in a woman with a gun in her ribs wanting a cop.
I wasn’t feeling jaunty, and that stung me. “Specimens like you,” I told him, “are not what has made this country great. The kid might have made it all up. He admitted he didn’t see the gun. Or the woman might have been pulling his leg. If I had told you yesterday who had told me what, you would have thought I was screwy to spend a dime on it for a phone call. And I did give you the license number. Did you check on it?”
“Yes. It was a floater. It was taken from a Plymouth that was stolen in Hartford two months ago.”
“No trace?”
“None so far. Now we’ll ask Connecticut to dig. I don’t know how many floater plates there are in New York this minute, but there are plenty.”
“How good a description have you got of the driver?”
“We’ve got four and no two alike. Three of them aren’t worth a damn and the other one may be—a man that had just come out of the drugstore and happened to notice the kid going to the car with his rag. He says the driver was a man about forty, dark brown suit, light complexion, regular features, felt hat pulled down nearly to his ears. He says he thinks he could identify him.”
Purley got up. “I’ll be going. I’ll admit I’m disappointed. I fully expected either I’d get a lead from you or I’d find you covering for a client.”
Wolfe opened his eyes, “I wish you luck, Mr. Stebbins. That boy ate at my table yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Purley growled, “that makes it bad. People have no business running over boys that ate at your table.”
On that sociable note he marched out, and I went to the hall with him. As I put my hand on the doorknob a figure rose to view outside, coming up the steps to the stoop, and when I pulled the door open there she was—a skinny little woman in a neat dark blue dress, no jacket and no hat, with puffed red eyes and her mouth pressed so tight there were no lips.
Stebbins was just back of me as I addressed her. “Can I help you, madam?”
She squeezed words out. “Does Mr. Nero Wolfe live here?”
I told her yes.
“Do you think I could see him? I won’t be long. My name is Mrs. Anthea Drossos.”
She had been crying and looked as if she might resume any second, and a crying woman is one of the things Wolfe won’t even try to take. So I told her he was busy, and I was his confidential assistant, and wouldn’t she please tell me.
She raised her head to meet my eyes straight. “My boy Pete told me to see Mr. Nero Wolfe,” she said, “and I’ll just wait here till I can see him.” She propped herself against the railing of the stoop.
I backed up and shut the door. Stebbins was at my heels as I entered the office and spoke to Wolfe. “Mrs. Anthea Drossos wants to see you. She says her boy Pete told her to. I won’t do. She’ll camp on the stoop all night if she has to. She might start crying in your presence. What do I do, take a mattress out to her?”
That opened his eyes all right. “Confound it. What can I do for the woman?”
“Nothing. Me too. But she won’t take it from me.”
“Then why the devil—pfui! Bring her in. That performance of yours yesterday—bring her in.”
I went and got her. When I ushered her in Purley was planted back in his chair. With my hand on her elbow because she didn’t seem any too sure of her footing, I steered her to the red leather number, which would have held three of her. She perched on the edge, with her black eyes—blacker, I suppose, because of the contrast with the inflamed lids—aimed at Wolfe.