Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19

by Murder by the Book

  “Which one?” Mabel Moore demanded.

  “We’ll vote on it. I nominate me. I’m already up.”

  There were cries of dissent. Claire Burkhardt, at Helen Troy’s left, got her elbow and pulled her back onto her chair. Nominations were made. Someone suggested they should draw lots. Half an hour earlier I would have let it slide, on the chance that Sue or Eleanor would get elected, which would have been a pleasant experience, but at this stage I didn’t want to risk having a tone set that it might be hard to jostle them out of. So I spoke up.

  “Don’t you think you ought to consult me?”

  “Don’t butt in,” Blanche Duke said rudely.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to. This is dangerous. If a certain one of you came close to me right now and put her arms around me and kissed me, I might be able to remember I’m your host and I might not. Whereas—”

  “Which one?” voices demanded.

  I ignored them. “Whereas if any other one did it, I couldn’t keep from showing my disappointment. You can’t expect me to tell you her name. We’ll forget it. Anyhow, nobody seconded the motion, so it would be illegal.”

  I pulled at my right ear. “Another thing, the motion was put wrong. Doing it that way, who would it please most? Not me. You. I would much rather kiss than be kissed. But don’t misunderstand me, you’re my guests, and I would be happy to do something to please you. I’d love to please you. If you have a suggestion?”

  Sue Dondero came through fine. “I have two.”

  “Good. One at a time.”

  “First, let all of us call you Archie.”

  “Easy. If I may call you Charlotte and Blanche and Dolly and Mabel and Portia and Eleanor and Claire and Nina and Helen and Sue.”

  “Of course. Second, you’re a detective. Tell us something about being a detective—something exciting.”

  “Well.” I hesitated and looked around, left and right. “Maybe I should treat it like the salad. Yes or no?”

  I wasn’t sure all of them said yes, but plenty of them did. Fritz had the coffee cups in place and was pouring. I edged my chair back a little, crossed my legs, and worked my lips, considering.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said finally, “what I think I’ll do. I could tell you about some old case that was finished long ago, but it might be more interesting if I pick one that we’re working on right now. I can skip the parts that we’re keeping to ourselves, if any. Do you like that idea?”

  They said they did. Except Mrs. Adams, whose lips had suddenly become a thin line, and Dolly Harriton, whose smart gray eyes might have been a little disconcerting if she had been closer.

  I made it casual. “I’ll have to hit only the high spots or it will take all night. It’s a murder case. Three people have been murdered: a man named Leonard Dykes, who worked in the office where you are, a girl named Joan Wellman, an editor in a publishing firm, and a girl named Rachel Abrams, a public stenographer and typist.”

  There were murmurings, and looks were exchanged. Nina Perlman said emphatically, in a soft satin voice that five or six Manhattans had had no effect on, “I didn’t do it.”

  “Three murders by one person?” Eleanor Gruber asked.

  “I’ll come to that. Our first connection with it, not much of one, a cop came and showed us a list of fifteen men’s names which had been written on a piece of paper by Leonard Dykes. They had found it between the pages of a book in Dykes’s room. Mr. Wolfe and I weren’t much interested and barely glanced at it. Then—”

  “Why did the cop show you the list?” Dolly Harriton put in.

  “Because they hadn’t found any men to fit any of the names, and he thought we might have a suggestion. We didn’t. Then, six weeks later, a man named John R. Wellman called and wanted us to investigate the death of his daughter, whose body had been found in Van Cortlandt Park—run over by a car. He thought she had been murdered, not killed by accident. He told us all about it, and showed us a copy of a letter Joan, his daughter, had written home. In it she said she had had a phone call from a man who gave his name as Baird Archer, author of a novel which he had submitted to Joan’s firm some months back.”

  “Oh, my God,” Blanche Duke said morosely. “Baird Archer again.”

  “I don’t want to bore you,” I declared.

  Most of them said I wasn’t.

  “Okay. Joan had read Archer’s novel and rejected it with a letter signed by her. On the phone he offered to pay her twenty dollars an hour to discuss his novel with him and tell him how to improve it, and she made a date to meet him the next day after office hours. So she said in her letter home. It was the evening of the next day that she was killed.”

  I reached for my coffee cup, drank some, and leaned back. “Now hold on to your hats. It had been six weeks since the cop had shown us that list of names, and we had just glanced at it. But when Mr. Wolfe and I saw Joan’s letter home we immediately recognized the name of Baird Archer as one of those on Dykes’s list. That proved there was some kind of connection between Leonard Dykes and Joan Wellman, and since they had both died suddenly and violently, and Joan had a date with Archer the day she died, it made it likely that their deaths were connected too, and connected with Archer. When you asked for something exciting about being a detective, if you meant something like tailing a murderer in Central Park and getting shot at, okay, that has its attractions, but it’s not half as exciting as our spotting that name. If we hadn’t, there would be one cop working on Dykes’s death in his spare time, and another one in the Bronx likewise on Joan Wellman, instead of the way it is, which you know something about. That’s what I call exciting.”

  It didn’t seem essential to give the precise circumstances of the recognition of Baird Archer’s name. If Wolfe had been there he would have told it his way, but he wasn’t, and I was. Glancing around to see that coffee refills were being attended to and that cigarettes and matches were at hand for everyone, I resumed.

  “Next I’m going to spill something. If it gets printed the cops won’t like it, and they sure won’t like me, but they don’t anyhow. A girl named Rachel Abrams was a public stenographer and typist with a little one-room office on the seventh floor of a building up on Broadway. Day before yesterday she went out the window and smashed to death on the sidewalk. More excitement for me as a detective, which is what I’m supposed to be talking about. It would probably have been called suicide or an accident if I hadn’t happened to walk into her office two or three minutes after she had gone out the window. In a drawer of her desk I found a little brown book in which she had kept a record of her receipts and expenses. Under receipts there were two entries showing that last September she had been paid ninety-eight dollars and forty cents by a man named Baird Archer.”

  “Ah,” Dolly Harriton said. There were other reactions.

  “I’ll be dreaming about Baird Archer,” Nina Perlman muttered.

  “I am already,” I told her. “As you can see, here’s a job for a detective if there ever was one. I won’t try to tell you how the cops are going at it, of course one or more of them has talked with all of you the past two days, but here’s how we see it, and how we’ll go on seeing it unless something shows we’re wrong. We believe that Dykes’s death was somehow connected with the manuscript of that novel. We believe that Joan Wellman was killed because she had read that manuscript. We believe that Rachel Abrams was killed because she had typed that manuscript. So naturally we want Baird Archer, and we want the manuscript. We’ve got to find one or both, or we’re licked. Any suggestions?”

  “Good lord,” Sue Dondero said.

  “Get a copy of the novel,” Portia Liss offered.

  Someone snickered.

  “Look,” I said impulsively, “unless you object I’m going to do something. There are a couple of people connected with this case upstairs now, waiting to see Mr. Wolfe. I think it would be interesting if they came down and told you about it.” I pressed the floor button with my toe. “Unless you’ve had enough?”
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br />   “Who are they?” Mrs. Adams wanted to know.

  “The father of Joan Wellman and the mother of Rachel Abrams.”

  “It won’t be very gay,” Dolly Harriton commented.

  “No, it won’t. Things and people mixed up with detectives are seldom gay.”

  “I want to see ’em,” Helen Troy said loudly. “It’s human nature.”

  Fritz had entered, and I spoke to him. “Where are Mrs. Abrams and Mr. Wellman, Fritz? In the south room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Will you please ask them to be good enough to come down here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He went. I inquired about drinks and got three orders.

  Chapter 9

  Blanche Duke darned near ruined it.

  When Wellman and Mrs. Abrams were ushered in by Fritz, ten pairs of eyes were focused on them, though in two or three cases the focusing required a little effort. I arose, performed the introductions, and brought them to the two chairs I had placed, one on either side of me. Mrs. Abrams, in a black silk dress or maybe rayon, was tight-lipped and scared but dignified. Wellman, in the same gray suit or its twin, was trying to take in all their faces without seeming to. He sat straight, not touching the back of the chair. I had my mouth open to speak when Blanche beat me to it.

  “You folks need a drink. What’ll you have?”

  “No, thanks,” Wellman said politely. Mrs. Abrams shook her head.

  “Now listen,” Blanche insisted, “you’re in trouble. I’ve been in trouble all my life, and I know. Have a drink. Two jiggers of dry gin, one jigger of dry vermouth—”

  “Be quiet, Blanche,” Mrs. Adams snapped.

  “Go to hell,” Blanche snapped back. “This is social. You can’t get Corrigan to fire me, either, you old papoose.”

  I would have liked to toss her out a window. I cut in. “Did I mix that right, Blanche, or didn’t I?”

  “Sure you did.”

  “Call me Archie.”

  “Sure you did, Archie.”

  “Okay, and I’m doing this right too. I do everything right. Would I let Mrs. Abrams and Mr. Wellman go without drinks if they wanted them?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then that settles it.” I turned to my right, having promised Mrs. Abrams that Wellman would be called on first. “Mr. Wellman, I’ve been telling these ladies about the case that Mr. Wolfe and I are working on, and they’re interested, partly because they work in the office where Leonard Dykes worked. I told them you and Mrs. Abrams were upstairs waiting to see Mr. Wolfe, and I thought you might be willing to tell them something about your daughter Joan. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “How old was Joan?”

  “She was twenty-six. Her birthday was November nineteenth.”

  “Was she your only child?”

  “Yes, the only one.”

  “Was she a good daughter?”

  “She was the best daughter a man ever had.”

  There was an astonishing interruption—at least, astonishing to me. It was Mrs. Abrams’ voice, not loud but clear. “She was no better than my Rachel.”

  Wellman smiled. I hadn’t seen him smile before. “Mrs. Abrams and I have had quite a talk. We’ve been comparing notes. It’s all right, we won’t fight about it. Her Rachel was a good daughter too.”

  “No, there’s nothing to fight about. What was Joan going to do, get married or go on with her career, or what?”

  He was still a moment. “Well, I don’t know about that. I told you she graduated from Smith College with honors.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was a young fellow from Dartmouth we thought maybe she was going to hitch up with, but she was too young and had sense enough to know it. Here in New York—she was here working for those publishers nearly four years—she wrote us back in Peoria about different—”

  “Where’s Peoria?” Blanche Duke demanded.

  He frowned at her. “Peoria? That’s a city out in Illinois. She wrote us about different fellows she met, but it didn’t sound to us like she was ready to tie up. We got to thinking it was about time, anyway her mother did, but she thought she had a big future with those publishers. She was getting eighty dollars a week, pretty good for a girl of twenty-six, and Scholl told me just last August when I was here on a trip that they expected a great deal of her. I was thinking of that yesterday afternoon. I was thinking that we expected a great deal of her too, her mother and me, but that we had already had a great deal.”

  He ducked his head forward to glance at Mrs. Abrams and came back to me. “Mrs. Abrams and I were talking about that upstairs. We feel the same way about it, only with her it’s only been two days, and she hasn’t had so long to think it over. I was telling her that if you gave me a pad of paper and a pencil and asked me to put down all the different things I can remember about Joan, I’ll bet there would be ten thousand different things, more than that—things she did and things she said, times she was like this and times she was like that. You haven’t got a daughter.”

  “No. You have much to remember.”

  “Yes, I have. What got me to thinking like that, I was wondering if I deserved what happened because I was too proud of her. But I wasn’t. I thought about it this way, I thought there had been lots of times she did something wrong, like when she was little and told lies, and even after she grew up she did things I didn’t approve of, but I asked myself, can I point to a single thing she ever did and honestly say I wish she hadn’t done that? And I couldn’t.”

  His eyes left me and went to my guests. He took his time, apparently looking for something in each face.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said firmly.

  “So she was perfect,” Claire Burkhardt remarked. It wasn’t really a sneer, but it enraged Blanche Duke. She blazed at Claire.

  “Will you kindly get lost, you night-school wonder? The man’s in trouble! His daughter’s dead! Did you graduate from college with honors?”

  “I never went to night school,” Claire said indignantly. “I went to Oliphant Business Academy!”

  “I didn’t say she was perfect,” Wellman protested. “She did quite a few things I didn’t think were right when she did them. All I was trying to tell you ladies, she’s dead now and it’s different. I wouldn’t change a thing about her if I could, not one single thing. Look at you here now, all this drinking—if your fathers were here or if they knew about it, would they like it? But if you got killed tonight and they had to take you home and have you buried, after they had had time to think it over, do you suppose they’d hold it against you that you’d been drinking? Certainly not! They’d remember how wonderful you’d been, that’s all, they’d remember all the things you had done to be proud of!”

  He ducked his head. “Wouldn’t they, Mrs. Abrams? Isn’t that how you feel about your Rachel?”

  Mrs. Abrams lifted her chin. She spoke not to Wellman but to the gathering. “How I feel about my Rachel.” She shook her head. “It’s been only two days. I will be honest with you ladies. While Mr. Wellman was talking I was sitting here thinking. My Rachel never took a drink. If I had ever seen her take a drink I would have called her a bad daughter in strong words. I would have been so angry it would have been terrible. But if it could be that she was here now, sitting at that table with you, and she was drinking more than any of you, so that she was so drunk she would look at me and not know me, I would say to her, ‘Drink, Rachel! Drink, drink, drink!’”

  She made a little gesture. “I want to be honest, but maybe I’m not saying it right. Maybe you don’t know what I mean.”

  “We know what you mean,” Eleanor Gruber muttered.

  “I mean only I want my Rachel. I’m not like Mr. Wellman. I have two more daughters. My Deborah is sixteen and she is smart in high school. My Nancy is twenty and she goes to college, like Mr. Wellman’s Joan. They are both smarter than Rachel and they are more fashionable. Rachel did not make eighty dollars every we
ek like Joan, with office rent to pay and other things, but she did good all the time and once she made one hundred and twelve dollars in one week, only she worked nights too. But you ladies must not think I put her nose down on it. Some of our friends thought that, but they were wrong. She was glad in her heart that Nancy and Deborah are smart, and she made Nancy go to college. If she got some dollars ahead I would say, ‘Buy yourself a pretty dress or take a little trip,’ and she would laugh and say, ‘I’m a working girl, Mamma.’ She called me Mamma, but Nancy and Deborah called me Mom, and that’s the whole difference right there.”

  She gestured again. “You know she is only dead two days?” It sounded rhetorical, but she insisted, “You know that?”

  There were murmurings. “Yes, we know.”

  “So I don’t know how it will be when it is longer, like Mr. Wellman. He has thought about it a long time and he is spending money for Mr. Wolfe to find the man that killed his Joan. If I had money like him maybe I would spend it that way too, but I don’t know. All I think about now is my Rachel. I try to see why it happened. She was a working girl. She did her work good and got paid for it the regular rates. She never hurt anybody. She never made any trouble. Now Mr. Goodwin tells me a man asked her to do work for him, and she did it good, and he paid her the regular rates, and then after some time goes by he comes back and kills her. I try to see why that happened, and I can’t. I don’t care how much explaining I get, I don’t think I can ever see why any man had to kill my Rachel, because I know so well about her. I know there’s not a man or woman anywhere that could stand up and say, ‘Rachel Abrams did a bad thing to me.’ You ladies know how hard that is, to be the kind of woman so that nobody can say that. I’m not that kind of woman.”

  She paused. She tightened her lips, and then released them to say, “I did a bad thing to my Rachel once.” Her chin started to quiver. “Excuse me, please.” She faltered, arose, and made for the door.