Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02

by Bad for Business

  “What shall I do if the stuff from Wynkoop comes before you get here in the morning?”

  “Take it and pay for it. I’ll sign a blank check.”

  “Oh.” She was getting her coat on. “I keep forgetting that Phil—I mean I can’t get used to being rich. He’s later than usual, but I suppose under the circumstances …”

  Fox, instantly abandoning the modest minnow he had come for at this splash hinting at a bigger and better fish, transferred his smile to the young woman and barred her way to the door.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but may I make a suggestion?” He pulled from his pocket the Womon Statement of the Basic Requirements of a World Economy. “A friend gave this to me, and I think it’s fascinating, but I don’t understand it very well. I want to ask some questions about it, but I’m hungry. You’re just leaving and I suppose you eat, so why don’t you eat with me and I can ask you the questions? My name is William Sherman.”

  “Good idea,” the man declared. “She can answer more questions than the rest of us put together.”

  “I always read while I eat,” said the young woman without enthusiasm, and in fact she had a heavy volume under her arm. She shrugged. “All right, come along.”

  “Here,” said the man. “Application for membership in the Womon League. Take it with you.”

  Fox took it, and his dinner companion, to the Red Herring on 44th Street, having decided that there was less oxygen there than any other place he could think of. In the bar she accepted a cocktail as a matter of fact, and a second one with no special reluctance. After they had been conducted to a booth for two in the back room, it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he asked for it and got it: Grace Adams.

  By the time they had finished with the mixed grill and were being served with salad, Fox was confronted with the fact that though his calculations had been sound, nevertheless his expectation had not been realized. The two cocktails, joined with the insufficiency of oxygen in the crowded and noisy room, and reinforced by a bottle of Burgundy of which she had tossed off her share without looking at it, had indeed loosened her tongue; but the looser it got the deeper she dived into the profound abstrusities of economic theory. She derided Keynes, pilloried Marx, excoriated Veblen, and consigned the gold standard to the crucible of hell. Unquestionably, Fox admitted, she got brilliant and even eloquent, but he was not buying a dinner at the Red Herring, which was expensive, for the sake of eloquence.

  Patiently and obdurately and deviously, time and again he spoke of his eagerness to contribute substantially to the cause of Womon, but she ignored it and went on with her fireworks. He tried other subtle and crafty approaches to the subject of the Womon exchequer and its present condition permitting nonchalant drawing of checks to meet obligations on the dot, but either she didn’t hear them or she evaded them with a devilish cunning, he couldn’t tell which. By the time the coffee was served he was beginning to get a sinking feeling that he was doomed to utter defeat at the hands, or rather the tongue, of this female pyrotechnic geyser.

  Then, lifting her demitasse, she spilled a little on the cloth and giggled, and Fox understood. She was simply soaring, and had been ever since the cocktails. He could have kicked himself. He looked her in the eye and demanded:

  “About Phil’s big contribution. How much was it?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “When did he make it?”

  “Today is—” She frowned in concentration.

  “Wednesday,” said Fox.

  “Yes. Wednesday. Yesterday was—”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Yes. Tuesday. Monday. He made it Monday.”

  “Was it a check, or cash?”

  “Cash. It was all in—” She stopped abruptly. “Now wait a minute. Don’t ask me about that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not supposed to—I mean I’m not supposed to—”

  “All right, forget it.” Fox turned and caught an eye. “Waiter! My check, please.”

  It was in fact desirable that Miss Adams should forget it, so he tried to get her spouting again, but she was silent. She said nothing until, out on the sidewalk, he attempted to get her into a taxi and she refused point-blank. With her heavy volume under her arm, she marched off in the direction of Grand Central. Fox watched her for ten paces, then turned and made for Sixth Avenue.

  But he didn’t find Philip Tingley at the Womon office. The man who ate too fast was there, and two others fussing around with literature, but no Phil. Fox stated that he would like to meet Mr. Tingley because he had been informed by Miss Adams that Tingley could polish off his understanding of Womon, but was told that Tingley hadn’t been there and nothing had been heard from him. Fox left, found a phone booth, called the residence of Arthur Tingley, deceased, and was told by the housekeeper that Philip Tingley wasn’t there and she knew nothing of his whereabouts. He walked to 41st Street, maneuvered his car out of its niche, and drove to Nine-fourteen East 29th Street.

  That dreary edifice was enough to convince anyone that a new world economy was needed there, even if nowhere else. Four flights up in the rear, Phil had said, and Fox climbed the smelly shaft, having found the vestibule door unlatched. The door in the rear on the fifth floor had no bell push, so he knocked, but got no response. After a couple of minutes he gave it up and returned to the street, sat in his car a moment considering alternatives, voted for home, and headed for the West Side Highway. At 10:20 he was winding along his private lane and crossing the little bridge he had built over the brook, toward the white house among trees on the knoll which was known in the neighboring countryside as The Zoo. In the house, he blew a kiss at Mrs. Trimble, asked Sam about the spraying, settled a bet for Pokorny and Al Crocker regarding the body temperature of a hibernating woodchuck, went to the cellar to see if Cassandra’s kittens had opened their eyes, played guitar duets with Joe Sorrento for an hour, and went upstairs and to bed.

  At 9:30 the next morning, Thursday, he was back in New York, in a phone booth in a barber shop on 42nd Street. He had already made four calls. To Nat Collins at his office: nothing new. To Amy Duncan at her apartment: the same. To the Tingley residence: the funeral would be at ten o’clock as scheduled, therefore Philip Tingley would not be available for conversation until afternoon. To the P. & B. Corporation: Mr. Cliff was in conference and could not be seen until later in the morning. Fox was now, his notebook open in his hand, talking to someone whom he had called Ray.

  “I call that real service. All right, I’ll hold the wire.” He did so for a wait of several minutes. Finally, he spoke again, listened a while, and then said, “Let me call them back to make sure. GJ11, GJ22, GJ33, GJ44, GJ55, GJ66, GJ77, and GJ88 are all Guthrie Judd. Eight cars, huh? Must save him a lot of shoe leather. Much obliged, Ray. Come up and look at my new tractor some time.”

  He left the booth and shop, walked to the Grand Central subway station, and took an express to Wall Street.

  The Metropolitan Trust Building was a microcosm, a fortress, a battlefield, a pirate’s corvette—depending on the point of view. The building had forty elevators and the company had thirty-eight vice-presidents, almost a tie. Fox, however, was aiming even higher than the highest vice-president. He got out at the elevator’s zenith and opened his attack on the Maginot Line that defended the approaches to his prey, his only artillery being a sealed envelope. Inside the envelope was one of his business cards on which he had written, “Urgent. Regarding Mr. Brown’s visit to Mr. T. at ten o’clock Tuesday morning.”

  The difficulty was hitting the target with the envelope. A receptionist condescended to phone someone. A suave young man appeared and wanted the envelope but didn’t get it, and vanished. An older and tougher man arrived and conducted Fox along a wide carpeted corridor to a room where a skinny middle-aged man sat at a desk with a stenographer on each side of him. To him Fox surrendered the envelope and he departed with it, the tough man standing by. In five minutes the skinny man
reappeared, beckoned to Fox, and escorted him through a door, a room, and another door, into a spacious chamber of authentic, though a bit spectacular, elegance.

  A man of threescore, seated stiff-backed behind an enormous flat-topped desk of amargoso wood with nothing on it but a newspaper, said, “All right, Aiken, thanks.”

  The skinny man went. Fox moved toward the desk. “Mr. Judd?”

  “Yes.” The voice struck Fox as a new and remarkable synthesis, an amalgam of silk and steel: “Tell me what you want, please.”

  Chapter 10

  Fox claimed a tenth of the desk’s area for his coat and hat, and a chair for himself. His accustomed smile was absent.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m a detective.”

  “I know who you are. What do you want?”

  “I was going to on to say. A detective forms a lot of funny habits connected with his trade, like anyone else. For instance, when I parked my car in front of Tingley’s Titbits Tuesday morning, a big Sackett town car was there at the curb, with a liveried chauffeur. I noticed its license number, GJ88, and upstairs in the anteroom a little later, when a well-dressed gentleman passed through on his way out, I jotted it down in my notebook. The next day, when my interest—and a lot of other people’s—in Tingley’s affairs had become acute on account of his death Tuesday evening, I was told that the tall well-dressed man who had called Tuesday morning was named Brown. There are so many Browns. I asked the Motor Vehicle Bureau which one has GJ88, and learned that this Brown must have been using a car which belongs to Guthrie Judd. I wished to ask you if he was doing so with your knowledge and consent, but seeing you, I recognize you as the man who called on Tingley Tuesday morning. Doubtless the secretary, and others there, would do the same. So now I would appreciate it if you will tell me what you talked about with Tingley when you went to see him day before yesterday under the name of Brown.”

  Aside from his eyes, Guthrie Judd’s face betrayed no reaction whatever to that careful and lucid narrative. The gleam in his eyes was more steel than silk. He asked, with no change of tone, “What else do you want me to tell you?”

  “That’s all for now, but of course where it might lead—”

  “It won’t lead anywhere. Go out by that other door, please.” Judd moved a finger to indicate it.

  Fox didn’t move. “I ask you to consider, Mr. Judd, that it will be more annoying to answer police questions about it than to tell me. Would you prefer to have me give my information to the police?”

  “I would prefer not to be bothered about it at all.” A faint curl of the lip might have been either irritation or derision. “Should the police ask a question I would of course answer it. Please leave by the other door?”

  “You know a murder case is apt to get messy.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t care about that?”

  “Really, Mr. Fox—”

  Fox got up, retrieved his coat and hat, and left by the other door as requested. As he waited in the corridor for the elevator, he muttered something unintelligible. In the alley called Wall Street, he sought the subway again, returned uptown to Grand Central, and emerged onto Park Avenue.

  The atmosphere of the reception room of the administrative offices of the P. & B. Corporation was permeated with the spirit of the decade which developed the public relations counsel in his glory. The receptionist was really, though a shade remotely, receptive, with nothing in her manner to suggest that it was an infernal imposition to ask her to convey a message to Mr. Cliff: and the young man who showed Fox the way and opened the door for him was positively cheerful about it.

  “Sit down,” said Leonard Cliff. “I’m busy as the devil, but I will be all day, so—” He looked, in fact, harried and a little puffy. “I’m glad you came. I want to thank you for that business yesterday—the way you removed that—uh—misunderstanding Miss Duncan had.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Though I admit you made a monkey of me, calling me the way you did on my offering Collins a retainer—”

  “You took it very well,” Fox declared. “It’s a good thing you don’t mind being made a monkey of, because I came to do it again, and since you’re busy and I am too, I won’t prolong it. You were wrong about that OJ55. It wasn’t OJ, it was GJ.”

  Cliff withdrew immediately, and in fairly good order. A flicker of his eye and a movement of his jaw, neither very pronounced, was the extent of his nerves’ treachery. He sounded properly bewildered: “That must be a code I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

  Fox smiled at him. “Let’s go at it another way. What newspaper did you work for?”

  “None. I’ve never been on a paper.”

  “Then where did you learn how to write without beginning sentences with ‘I’?”

  “I wouldn’t say I did learn how to write. But I wrote copy for Corliss & Jones for three years before I landed here.”

  “I knew you must have had practice.” Fox looked pleased with himself. “Regarding that anonymous letter Nat Collins got yesterday—”

  “What letter?”

  “One he got. Let me expound. You’re probably an excellent business executive, but you’d never make a good intriguer. When I asked you, there in Collins’s office, where you were Tuesday evening, your glance at Miss Duncan and your change of color gave you dead away. Obviously, during those two and a half hours you were doing something for, to, at, by, or with, Miss Duncan, the recollection of which you found embarrassing. That, however, told me nothing specific. But you went out to the anteroom where Philip Tingley was waiting, and you knew it was he because you had heard his arrival announced. While he was in with us, Collins got a phone call saying that the man who entered Tingley’s at 7:40 Tuesday evening was Philip Tingley. Since the anonymous informant had not known the identity of the man at the time he wrote the letter, he must have just discovered what Philip Tingley looked like. A little later I learned from Miss Larabee that you had been out for ten minutes at the time the phone call was received. So, as I say, I’m glad you don’t mind being made a monkey of. My odds are fifty to one that you wrote the letter and made the phone call.”

  Cliff, composed, shook his head. “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s a bad bet. A letter—a phone call about a man who entered Tingley’s—it’s all news to me—”

  “Come, Mr. Cliff. It’s a bad hand, throw it in.”

  “I know it’s bad,” Cliff admitted, “since I refuse to say where I was Tuesday evening. But I’m playing it.”

  “I implore you not to.” Fox sounded earnest. “Tell me about it. It’s more important than you know, and I guess I’ll have to tell you why. You think you’ve given us all the information you have that would help us, but you haven’t, because one detail of it is wrong. Your letter said that the registration number on the limousine was OJ55, but it couldn’t have been, because no such number has been issued. What I want to know is how close you were to the limousine and how plainly you could see the license plate, and whether you might not have mistaken a C or a G for an O.”

  Cliff shook his head again. “I tell you, you’re talking Greek—”

  “All right, here’s the point. There is a GJ55, and it belongs to Guthrie Judd.”

  Cliff looked startled. He straightened up and folded his arms. “The hell it does,” he said quietly.

  Fox nodded. “So you see.”

  “Yes. I see.” Cliff screwed up his lips, staring reflectively at Fox’s necktie.

  “With most kinds of people,” Fox continued, “a bold and bald statement of the fact would be enough. But in this case, I need to be sure of positive and immovable backing. If you can give it to me without an outrage on your optic nerve—”

  “That part of it’s all right. It might easily have been a G instead of an O, and since there is no OJ55 it must have been. It was dark and rainy, and I saw it from a distance as it drove off, and the light on the plate wasn’t very good. I would be quite willing to state positively that it was G,
at least for the purpose of pressure. But—” Cliff was silent, his eyes narrowed and his lips compressed, and finally shook his head. “But I can’t do it.” He shook his head again. “No, I simply can’t do it.”

  “That’s too bad. I got the impression that you were ready to go through fire and water, and maybe even splash around in the mud a little, to help Miss Duncan.”

  “I am. But it wouldn’t be worth—after all, the main thing is the fact, and you have that—”

  “Not enough. Not in this case.” Fox leaned forward to appeal to him: “It might never be needed for anything but the pressure, and I’m working for Miss Duncan, and I want it and need it. Don’t be so damn scared of a P. & B. vice-president getting his name in the paper.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s—” Cliff chopped it off, sat in uncertainty, and at length took a breath of resolution. “It’s Miss Duncan. I was acting like a lovesick jackass.”

  “Well,” Fox smiled, “evidently that’s what you are, so what’s wrong with that?”

  Cliff’s innermost concerns were much too deeply involved for him to return the smile. “I was watching her,” he blurted. “I was following her.”

  “You followed her to Tingley’s?”

  “Yes. We had had an engagement for dinner and a show Tuesday evening, and she had canceled it. I thought maybe she had another—I couldn’t help wanting to know what she did that evening. When I left the office—”

  “Just after Tingley phoned you. Twenty to six.”

  “Yes. I went to Grove Street and watched the entrance to her apartment—that is, the building. I watched from across the street for nearly an hour, but when it started to rain I moved along to a doorway, and just as I did so she came out. She took a taxi at the corner and I managed to flag one soon enough to follow—”

  “Wait a minute.” Fox was frowning. “The rain.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”