by Rex Stout
“Probably, the late editions,” I told him. “The Post and World-Telegram, we can try. The Gazette, yes, with Lon Cohen’s help.” I was back in my chair with notebook and pen. “Classified?”
“No. It must be conspicuous. Two columns wide, or three. Headed in thirty-six-point, boldface, extended, ‘To Mr. Knapp.’ Then in twelve-point: ‘The woman whose property is in your possession has engaged my services (period). She is now in my office (period). She has not told me what you said to her on the phone Monday afternoon (comma), and she will not tell me (period). I know nothing of the instructions you gave her (comma), and I do not expect or care to know (period). She has hired me for a specific job (comma), to make sure that her property is returned to her in good condition (comma), and that is the purpose of this notice (paragraph).
“‘For she has hired me for another job should it become necessary (period). If her property is not returned to her (comma), or if it is damaged beyond repair (comma), I have engaged to devote my time (comma), energy (comma), and talent (comma), for as long as may be required (comma), to ensure just and fitting requital (semicolon); and she has determined to support me to the full extent of her resources (period). If you do not know enough of me to be aware of the significance of this engagement to your future (comma), I advise you to inform yourself regarding my competence and my tenacity (period).’ Beneath, in fourteen-point boldface, ‘Nero Wolfe.’ To be billed to me. Can you do it by phone?”
“To Lon Cohen at the Gazette, yes. The others, maybe.” I swiveled and reached for the phone, but he stopped me.
“Just a moment.” He turned to Mrs. Vail. “You heard that. As you said, your husband may already be dead. If so, I am irrevocably committed by the publication of that notice. Are you? No matter what it costs in time and money?”
“Certainly. If they kill him—certainly. But I don’t—Is that all you’re going to do, just that?”
“I may not do it, madam, and if I don’t I shall do nothing. There’s nothing else I could do. I’ll proceed if, and after, you give me another check for fifty thousand dollars and phone your secretary to come here at once.” He slapped the chair arm. “Do you realize that I will be staking my repute, whatever credit I have established in all my years? That’s what you must pay for; and the commitment. If your husband is already dead, or if Mr. Knapp, not seeing my notice or ignoring it, kills him after he gets the money, I shall have no alternative; and what if you default? I might have to spend much more than sixty thousand dollars. Of course if your husband returns safely there will be no commitment and I’ll return some of it to you. How much will be in my discretion. Less if I learn that my notice was a factor; more if it wasn’t. I value my reputation, which I am risking in your interest, but I am not rapacious.” He looked up at the wall clock. “If what Mr. Knapp told you to do is to be done tonight, the notice must appear today to have any effect. It’s nearly one o’clock.”
The poor woman—or rather, the rich woman—had her teeth clamped on her lip. She looked at me. People often do that when they are being bumped around by Wolfe, apparently hoping I will come and pat them. Sometimes I wouldn’t mind obliging them, but not Althea Vail, Mrs. Jimmy Vail. She just didn’t warm me. Meeting her eyes, I let mine be interested but strictly professional, and when she saw that was all I had to offer she left me. She got out her checkfold, put it on the stand, and wrote, her teeth still clamping her lip. When she tore it out I was there to take it and hand it to Wolfe. Fifty grand. Wolfe gave it a glance, dropped it on his desk, and spoke.
“I hope you’ll get a large part of it back, madam. I do indeed. You may use Mr. Goodwin’s phone to call your secretary. When that’s done he’ll use it to place that notice, in all three papers if possible.”
She fluttered a hand. “Is it really necessary, Mr. Wolfe? My secretary?”
“Yes, if you want me to proceed. You’re going to your bank, and it will soon be lunchtime. Tell her to be here at three o’clock.”
She got up and went to my chair, sat, and dialed.
2
When Dinah Utley arrived at 3:05, five minutes late, Wolfe was at his desk with a book, The Lotus and the Robot, by Arthur Koestler. We had started lunch later than usual because Wolfe had told Fritz not to put the shad roe in the skillet until he was notified, and it was close to half past one when I finally quit trying to persuade the Post and World-Telegram to get the ad in. Nothing doing. It was all set for the Gazette, thanks to Lon Cohen, who knew from experience that he would get a tit for his tat if and when. It was also set for all editions of the morning papers. The bulldogs would be out around eleven, and if Mr. Knapp saw one after he got the money and before he erased Jimmy Vail, he might change the script.
Our client had left, headed for her bank, as soon as it was definite from Lon Cohen that the ad would be in the last two editions. Part of the time while I was phoning, for some minutes at the end, Wolfe was standing at my elbow, but not to listen to me. He had the note Mrs. Vail had got from Mr. Knapp in his hand, and he pulled my typewriter around and studied the keyboard, then looked at the note, then back at the keyboard; and he kept that up, back and forth, until Fritz came to announce lunch. That was no time for me to comment or ask a question, with sautéed shad roe fresh and hot from the skillet, and the sauce, with chives and chervil and shallots, ready to be poured on, and of course nothing relating to business is ever mentioned at the table, so I waited until we had left the dining room and crossed the hall back to the office to say, “That note was typed on an Underwood, but not mine, if that’s what you were checking. The ‘a’ is a little off-line. Also it wasn’t written by me. Whoever typed it has a very uneven touch.”
Sitting, he picked up The Lotus and the Robot. His current book is always on his desk, at the right edge of the pad, in front of the vase of orchids. That day’s orchids were a raceme of Miltonia vexillaria, brought by him as usual when he had come down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock. “Ummmp,” he said. “I was merely testing a conjecture.”
“Any good?”
“Yes.” He opened the book to his place and swiveled, giving me his acre or so of back. If I wanted to test a conjecture I would have to use one of my own. A visitor was due in ten minutes, and since according to him the best digestive-is a book because it occupies the mind and leaves the stomach in privacy, he darned well was going to get a few pages in. And when, a quarter of an hour later, I having spent most of it inspecting the note from Mr. Knapp with occasional glances at my typewriter keyboard, the doorbell rang, and I went to the hall and returned with the visitor, and pronounced her name, and put her in the red leather chair, Wolfe stuck with his book until I had gone to my desk and sat. Then he marked his place and put it down, looked at her, and said, “Are you an efficient secretary, Miss Utley?”
Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled. If she had been doing any crying jalong with her employer it had certainly left no traces. At sight I had guessed her age at thirty, but that might have been a couple of years short.
“I earn my salary, Mr. Wolfe,” she said.
She was cool—cool eyes, cool smile, cool voice. With some cool ones the reaction is that it would be interesting to apply a little heat and see what happens, and you wouldn’t mind trying, but with others you feel that they are cool clear through, and she was one of them, though there was nothing wrong with her features or figure. You could even call her a looker.
Wolfe was taking her in. “No doubt,” he said. “As you know, Mrs. Vail phoned you from here. I heard her tell you not to tell me what Mr. Knapp said to her on the phone yesterday, but you may feel that she is under great strain and your judgment on that point is better than hers. Do you?”
“No.” Very cool. “I’m in her employ.”
“Then I won’t try to cajole you. Do you always open Mrs. Vail’s mail?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that comes?”
“Yes.”
“How many items were there in yesterday morning’
s mail?”
“I didn’t count them. Perhaps twenty.”
“The envelope with that note in it, did you open it first or further along in the process?”
Of course that tactic is three thousand years old, maybe more, asking for a detail of a reported action, looking for hesitation or confusion. Dinah Utley smiled. “I always sort it out first, leaving circulars and other obvious stuff until later. Yesterday there were four—no, five—that I opened at once. The envelope with that note was the third one I opened.”
“Did you show it to Mrs. Vail at once?”
“Certainly. I took it to her room.”
“Were you present Sunday night when she phoned to the country to ask about her husband?”
“No. I was in the house, but I was in bed.”
“What time yesterday did the call come from Mr. Knapp?”
“Eight minutes after four. I knew that might be important somehow, and I made a note of it.”
“You listened to that conversation?”
“Yes. Mrs. Vail had told me to take it down, and I did.”
“Then you know shorthand?”
“Of course.”
“Are you a college graduate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you type with two fingers, or four?”
She smiled. “All of them. By touch.” She turned a hand over. “Really, Mr. Wolfe. Isn’t this rather silly? Is it going to get Mr. Vail back alive?”
“No. But it may conceivably serve a purpose. Naturally you want to be with Mrs. Vail, and she wants you; I won’t keep you much longer. There’s no point now in asking you about that man’s voice and diction; even if I got a hint that suggested another wording for the notice it’s too late. But you will please let Mr. Goodwin take samples of your fingerprints. Archie?”
That roused her a little. “My fingerprints? Why?”
“Not to get Mr. Vail back alive. But they may be useful later on. It’s barely possible that Mr. Knapp or an accomplice inadvertently left a print on that note. To your knowledge, has anyone handled it besides Mrs. Vail and you?”
“No.”
“And Mr. Goodwin and me. We shall get Mrs. Vail’s. Mr. Goodwin is an expert on prints, and even if Mr. Vail returns safely, as I hope he will, we’ll want to know if there are any unidentifiable prints on that note. Do you object to having your prints taken?
“Of course not. Why should I?”
“Then Archie?”
I had opened a desk drawer and was getting out the equipment—ink with dauber and surfaced paper. I prefer a dauber to a pad. Knowing now, as I did, what the conjecture was that Wolfe had been testing when he inspected my typewriter keyboard with the note from Mr. Knapp in his hand, and therefore also knowing why I was to take Dinah Utley’s prints, it wasn’t necessary to write her name on the paper, but I did anyway. She got up and came to my desk and I did her right hand first. She had good hands, firm, smooth, well kept, with long slender fingers. No rings. With her left hand, when I had done the thumb, index, and middle, and started to daub the ring finger, I asked casually, “What’s this? Scald it?”
“No. Shut a drawer on it.”
“The pinkie too. I’ll go easy.”
“It’s not very tender now. I did it several days ago.”
But I went easy, there being no point in making her suffer, since we had no use for the prints. As she cleaned her fingers with solvent and tissues she asked Wolfe, “You don’t really think a kidnaper would be fool enough to leave his fingerprint on that note, do you?”
“No,” Wolfe said, “not fool enough. But possibly distraught enough. One thing more, Miss Utley. I would like you to know that I’m aware that the primary concern is the safety of Mr. Vail. I have done all I can. Archie, show her a copy of the notice.
I got it from my desk and handed it to her. Wolfe waited until she had finished reading it to say, “That will appear, prominently, in today’s Gazette and the morning papers. If the kidnaper sees it, it may have an effect; it certainly will if he has some knowledge of me. For I will have publicly committed myself, and if he kills Mr. Vail he will be doomed inevitably. A month, a year, ten years; no matter. It’s regrettable that you or I can’t reach him, to make that clear to him.”
“Yes, it is.” Still perfectly cool. She handed me the notice. “Of course he may not have as high an opinion of your abilities as you have.” She turned to go, after three steps stopped and turned her head to say, “He might even think the police are more dangerous than you are,” and went. There ahead of her, and preceding her to the hall and the front door, I let her out; and, expecting no thanks or good day, got none.
Returning to the office, I stopped in front of Wolfe’s desk, stood looking down at him, and said, “So she typed it.”
He nodded. “Of course I didn’t—”
“Excuse me. I’ll do the spiel. When you first looked at it you noticed, as I did, that whoever typed it had an uneven touch. Later, while I was phoning, you looked at it again, got an idea, and came and compared it with the keyboard, and you saw that all the letters that were faint were on the left—not just left of center, but at the left end. W, E, A, S, and D. So you conjectured that the typist had been someone who used all his fingers, not just two or four, and that for some—”
“And probably typed by touch, because—”
“Excuse me, I’m doing the spiel. The touch was merely a probable. And for some reason the ring and little fingers of his left hand had not hit the keys as hard as the other fingers, not nearly as hard. Okay. I caught up with you after lunch, while you were reading, just before she came. You saw me comparing the note with the keyboard.”
“No. I was reading.”
“Let me not believe that. You miss nothing, though you often pretend to. You saw me all right. Then she came, and you went on ahead of me again, and I admit I ought to be docked. My eyes are as good as yours, and I had been closer to her than you were, but you noticed that the tips of those two fingers on her left hand were discolored and slightly swollen, and I didn’t. Of course when you told her we wanted her prints I saw it, and you will ignore what I said about being docked because I found out how and when the fingers got hurt. Any corrections?”
“No. It is still a conjecture, not a conclusion.”
“Damn close to it. One will get you fifty. That it is just a coincidence that she, a touch typist, living in that house, hurt just those two fingers, just at that time, just enough to make her go easy with them but not enough to stop using them—nuts. One will get you a hundred. So you had her read that notice and rubbed it in, thinking she’ll get in touch with Mr. Knapp. Why did you let her walk out?”
Wolfe nodded. “The alternative was obvious. Go at her. Would she have yielded?”
“No. She’s tough.”
“And if Mr. Vail is already dead, as he well may be, it would be folly to let her know what we suspect. If he is alive, no better. She would have flouted me. Detain her forcibly, as a hostage, on a mere suspicion, however well grounded, and notify Mr. Knapp that we would exchange her for Mr. Vail? That would have been a coup, but how to reach Mr. Knapp? It’s too late to get another notice in the paper. Have you a suggestion?”
“Yes. I go to see Mrs. Vail to ask her something, no matter what, and I manage somehow to get something written on the typewriter Dinah Utley uses. Of course she could have used another machine for the note, but if what I got matched the note, that would settle that.”
He shook his head. “No. You have ingenuity and can even be delicate, but Miss Utley would almost certainly get a hint. Besides, to ask a question she asked, would it help to get Mr. Vail back alive? No.” He glanced at the clock. In ten minutes he would leave for his four-to-six afternoon session in the plant rooms. Time enough for a few pages. He reached and got his book and opened to his place.
3
It’s possible that I have given a wrong impression of Jimmy Vail, and if so I should correct it.
Age, thirty-four; height, five fe
et ten; weight, 150. Dark eyes, sometimes lazy and dull, sometimes bright and very quick. Smooth dark hair, nearly black, and a neat white face with a wide mouth. I had seen him about as often as I had seen his wife, since they were nearly always together at a restaurant or theater. In 1956 he had made a big splash at the Glory Hole in the Village with a thirty-minute turn of personal chatter, pointed comments on everyone and everything. Althea Tedder, widow of Harold F. Tedder, had seen him there, and in 1957 she had married him, or he had married her, depending on who is talking.
I suppose any woman who marries a man a dozen years younger is sure to get the short end of the stick when her name comes up among friends, let alone enemies, no matter what the facts are. The talk may have been just talk. Women of any age liked Jimmy Vail and liked to be with him, there was no question about that, and undoubtedly he could have two-timed his middle-aged wife any day in the week if he felt like it, but I had never with my own eyes seen him in the act. I’m merely saying that as far as I know, disregarding talk, he was a model husband. I had expected her to ask Wolfe to put a tail on him because I assumed that her friends had seen to it that she knew about the talk.
She also had made a public splash, twenty-five years back—Althea Purcell as the milkmaid in Meadow Lark—and she had quit to marry a man somewhat older and a lot richer. They had produced two children, a son and daughter; I had seen them a couple of times at the Flamingo. Tedder had died in 1954, so Althea had waited a decent interval to get a replacement.
Actually, neither Jimmy nor Althea had done anything notorious, or even conspicuous, during the four years of their marriage. They were mentioned frequently in print only because they were expected to do something any minute. She had left Broadway in the middle of a smash hit to marry a middle-aged rich man with a prominent name, and he had left the mike in the middle of his smash hit to marry a middle-aged rich woman. With the Tedder house and the Tedder dough taken over by a pair like that, anything might happen and probably would. That was the idea.
