Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe - Too Many Women

by Too Many Women (lit)

  Naylor’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 tf 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 and 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 horning 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 hundreds 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 !t 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.

  CHAPTER Twelve

  “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 ad 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 Rerr 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?” “Sure. It’s also a thing for anyone who is interested. Let’s put it that I’m interested. Are you?” “You bet I am.” “In what way?” “I’m just interested. I don’t want to see anybody get away with murder!” There was a quick blaze in her eyes, one flash, up and out. She added, “He was a friend of mine.” “Oh, was he murdered?” “Certainly he was!” “By whom?” “I don’t know.” With sudden accurate movement, but nothing impetuous about it, she covered my hand, there on the tablecloth, with both of hers. Her fingers and palms were warm and firm, and neither too moist nor too dry. “Or maybe I do.

  What if I do know?” “Well, considering your character as I know it? I suppose you’d be a good little girl and tell papa.” She kept my hand covered. “I wish,” she said, “you had taken me where we could be alone. I don’t know how to talk to a man until after he has had his arms around me and kissed me. Then I know what he’s like. I could tell you anything then.” I sized her up. If I had let myself get cooped up in a booth at Rusterman’s with a chronic nymph and that was all there was to it, at least I could preserve my dignity by not letting it cost me anything but twenty bucks or so of Wolfe’s money. But I doubted if that was it. My analysis indicated that she simply had her own definite opinion of what constituted human companionship, and I wasn’t prepared to argue with her.

  I slid out clear of the table, got upright, drew the curtain across the entrance to the booth, got on my knees on the seat beside her, and enfolded her good. Her lips, like her hands, were warm and firm, and neither too moist nor too dry. She not only had her theory about companionship, she was willing to submit it to a thorough test, which is more than some people will do with their theories. When it was obviously time to go I backed off, went and pulled the curtain open, and got back into my seat. As I did so the waiter entered with our baked grapefruit.

  When he had it arranged and left us she asked: “What were you doing in Hester Livsey’s room? What you just did with me?” “There you go again,” I protested. “You said you had a lot to tell me, not to ask me. How do you know Moore was murdered?” She swallowed some grapefruit. “How did I know it would be all right if you held me and kissed me?” “Anybody would know that from looking at me. Thanks for the passing mark, anyway. You couldn’t tell Moore was murdered just by looking at him, with his head smashed flat. Even the cops and the city scientists couldn’t.” Her spoon had stopped in mid-air. “That’s an awful thing to say.” “Sure. Also it’s fairly awful to say a guy was murdered, especially when he was your friend. How good a friend?” She ate some grapefruit, but, as it seemed to me, not to gain time for deciding what to say, but just because she felt like eating. After three more sections had been disposed of she spoke.

  “I called him Wally, because I didn’t like Waldo, it sounds too intellectual, and anyway I often use nicknames, I just like to. My husband’s name is Harold, but I call him Harry. Wally and I were very close friends. We still were when he—got murdered. Didn’t I say I could tell you anything?” She spooned for grapefruit.

  “Your husband?” I tuned the surprise out. “Bendini?” “No, his name is Anthony, Harold Anthony. I was working at Naylor-Kerr when I was married, nearly three years ago, and I didn’t bother to change my name there. I’m glad I didn’t, because he’ll let me get a divorce sooner or later.

  When he got out of the Army he seemed to think he had left me put away in moth balls. Wally would never have been silly enough to think that about me. Neither would you.” “Never,” I declared. “Does your husband work at Naylor-Kerr?” “No, he’s a broker—I mean he works for a broker, on Nassau Street. He’s educated, some college, I can never remember which one. I haven’t been living with him for quite some months, but he isn’t reconciled to losing me, and I don’t seem to be able to persuade him that we’re incompatible, no matter how much I explain that it wasn’t true love, it was just an impulse.” She put her spoon down. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Truett. I really and truly loved Wally Moore. One way I know I did, I have never been jealous of anyone in my life, but I was with him. I was so jealous of all his other girls I would think of ways they might die. You wouldn’t think I could be like that, would you? I wouldn’t.” My reply was noncommittal because the waiter arrived with the steak. After he had served it, with grilled sweet potatoes and endive and the wine, and left the reserve there on our table over a brazier of charcoal, I picked up my knife and fork but was interrupted by Rosa.

  “This looks wonderful. I’ll bet that curtain’s stuck so you couldn’t close it again.” I went and closed the curtain. This time she left her seat too, and we had companionship standing. All the time it lasted the warm inviting smell of the steak came floating up to us, with a tang in it that came from the poured Burgundy, and the combination of everything made it a very pleasant experience.

  “We mustn’t let it get cold,” I said finally.

  She agreed, with good common sense, and I pulled the curtain open for air.

  That wrecked most of the remaining barriers. By the time the meal was finished I had enough to fill six pages, single-spaced. She gave me most of it in straight English, but on the two or three points where she merely implied I am supplying my own translation. Beginning with the day he started to work, Waldo Wilmot Moore had gone through the personnel of the stock department like a dolphin through waves. There could be no conservative estimate of the total score he had piled up, because there had been nothing conservative about it. I got the impression that he had tallied up into the dozens, but Rosa was probably exaggerating through loyalty to his memory, and only four names stood out—and two of those were men.

  GWYNNE FERRIS, according to Rosa, was a Perfect bitch. Being a born beckoner and promiser, she had tried her routine on Moore, had been caught off balance, and had had her beckoning and promising career abruptly terminated, or at least temporarily interrupted. She was about Rosa’s age, in her early twenties, and was still a stenographer in the reserve pool after nearly two years.

  BENJAMIN FRENKEL, a serious and intense young man who was assistant head of a section, and who was generally regarded as the third-best letter dictator in the whole department, had been beckoned and promised by Gwynne Ferris until he didn’t know which way was south. He had hated Waldo Moore with all the seriousness and intensity he had, or even a little extra.

  HESTER LIVSEY was a phony, a heel, and a halfwit. Moore had kidded her along and had never had the faintest intention of marrying her. He would never have
married anyone, but she was too dumb to know it. For a while she had actually believed that Moore was her private property, and when she had learned that he was still enjoying the companionship of Rosa, not to mention any others, she had gone completely crazy and had not recovered to date.

  SUMNER HOFF was something special, being a civil engineer and a technical adviser to the whole stock department. He had been the hero—or the villain, depending On where you stood—of the most dramatic episode of the whole Moore story. On a day in October, just before quitting time, at the edge of the arena outside Dickerson’s office, he had plugged Moore in the jaw and knocked him into the lap of a girl at a near-by desk, ruining a letter she was typing. He had implied, just before he swung, that what was biting him was a checker’s report Moore had made on a letter he had dictated, but according to Rosa that was only a cover and what was really biting him was Moore’s conquest of Hester Livsey.

  Sumner Hoff had been after Hester Livsey, strictly honorable, for over a year.

  I was beginning to understand why Pine had said that Moore was the type that stirs up gossip.

  For nearly two hours, sitting there working on the steak and its accessories, and another bottle of wine, and then pastry and coffee and brandy, Rosa told me things. When she got through I had a bushel of details, but fundamentally I didn’t know anything I hadn’t known before. It was no news that Moore had made various people sore in his capacity as a correspondence checker, or that his own section head hadn’t liked him or wanted him, or even that he was death on dames.