In the office after lunch I told Wolfe what Saul and I had decided about the approach, including my phone calls to Nathaniel Parker and Lily, and then reported. “I did one thing,” I said, “and learned one thing. I arranged for the client to stay put in Miss Rowan’s penthouse until further notice, and I learned that in nineteen forty-four Floyd Vance had a telephone at an office at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. There wasn’t time to go and have a look, but I know that the wreckers haven’t got to that block and the old buildings on the south side are still there. Unless Saul got something hotter we’ll go and surround it.”
Wolfe looked at Saul.
“Nothing even warm,” Saul said. “It always helps to see a subject, but Archie had already seen him, so it’s no news that he’s a middle-aged slouch who may have been quite a fine figure twenty-three years ago. He has two little rooms, with him in one and a blonde with too much lipstick in the other, and when I asked about his past and present clients he either had very little to show or he wasn’t showing me. Of course he wanted to know who Parker’s client was, that was natural, but he pressed me on it more than he should have. I was getting so little that I almost made a mistake. I thought of asking him if he had ever had a television producer for a client, but of course I didn’t. I was thinking on my way there that it might be possible to get something with a nice collection of his fingerprints on it, but he was right there with me in that little room. If he locks the door when he leaves that would be no problem. The lock’s an ordinary Wingate. Archie or I could open it with our eyes shut.”
Wolfe shook his head. “We have no use for fingerprints now. Possibly later.”
“I know, but I thought it would be nice to have them. I mentioned it only because I can’t match what Archie got—that nineteen forty-four address.” Saul looked at me. “It’s still August and the weekend starts in a couple of hours.” He got up. “Let’s go, you can plan it on the way.”
For two able-bodied, quick-witted, well-trained men Saul and I accomplished a lot in the next two days. He got a haircut, which is quite a feat on a Saturday or Sunday in summer for a man who lives in midtown Manhattan. I detected it when I met him Monday morning. As for me, I frittered away $23.85 of the client’s money on taxi fares and tips between ten a.m. and seven p.m. Saturday, which is also quite a feat. Just three doors away from Ten East Thirty-ninth Street was a lunchroom, Dwyer’s, with a long fountain counter, and the manager told me it had been there for thirty years. He had himself been there nineteen years, and that meant only since 1948, but he knew the name of the man who had preceded him and he had an address in the Bronx where he had lived. The name was Herman Gottschalk, and I spent nine hours trying to track him down so I could show him photographs of seven young women.
That wasn’t dumb; it was merely desperate. Of course the obvious place to look for someone to ask about the tenants and frequenters of that building in 1944 was the building itself, but Saul and I had pretty well covered that Friday afternoon. There was no elevator man or other service man who had been there more than four years except the building superintendent. He had got the job in 1961, soon after the building had been acquired by its present owner, and he told Saul his predecessor had been there only five years. He didn’t even know the name of the former owner or agent. He did know that none of the present tenants had been there as long as twenty-three years. At the Third Avenue office of the East and West Realty Corporation, the current agent, the only personnel on duty Saturday morning were a girl whose mother should have made her wear teeth braces and an old man with a glass eye who didn’t even know the name of the previous owner or agent.
I accomplished something else on Sunday. I took Lily Rowan and Amy Denovo to a double-header at Shea Stadium, and got the client back to the penthouse safe and sound.
Monday morning a sunburned woman at the East and West Realty Corporation gave us the name of the previous agent, Kauffman Management Company, and at their office on Forty-second Street we were lucky enough to find a smart and active young man who believed in giving service. He spent half an hour looking up old records. The man who had been the superintendent at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street in 1944, named William Polk, had died in 1962. There was no record of the names of any of the service personnel, but there was a complete list of the 1944 tenants—twenty-two of them, counting Floyd Vance—and we copied it. The smart young man said there was no one active in the Kauffman Management Company who had been there for twenty-three years. Bernard Kauffman, who had founded it, was dead.
Saul and I each took half of the list of tenants and went to work on them. I could make a full report on the first four I tackled, but this is not a treatise on economics or sociology. It was the fifth one that rang the gong, a little before five o’clock in the afternoon—a woman named Dorothy Sebor, fifty, gray-haired and blue-eyed and fully as smart as the young man at the Kauffman Management Company—who headed and probably owned the Sebor Shopping Service in a tenth-floor suite at Rockefeller Center. She was busy. The forty-five minutes I spent with her wouldn’t have been more than half that if the phone hadn’t interrupted several times, and I might have had a problem getting to her if I hadn’t sent in word that I wanted to ask her something about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. When I entered her room she asked if I was the Archie Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe, and when I said yes she asked, “But what can I possibly tell you about Ten East thirty-ninth Street? I left eighteen years ago. I loved that dump. Sit down.”
I sat. “I don’t know what you can tell me, Miss Sebor, but I know what I want to ask. A job we’re on goes back pretty far and it’s nineteen forty-four we’re interested in. Would you mind telling me what floor you were on?”
“No, why should I? The ninth. In the rear.”
“We understand that another of the tenants was named Floyd Vance. Did you know him?”
“I wouldn’t say I knew him, I knew him by sight, he was on the same floor, the ninth, down the hall toward the front. We exchanged nods, remarks about the weather; you know how it is.”
My hand didn’t want to go to my pocket. It had pulled those damn pictures out too many times for too many people. But it obeyed orders and out came the seven photographs. “The quickest way,” I said, “is for you to take a look at these and tell me if you recognize anyone.” As I stretched an arm to hand them to her the phone rang, and she put the pictures on the desk. When she finished telling someone what to do and hung up she picked them up and started looking. At the fourth one—I always had it in the middle—she widened her eyes, looked at me, looked at the photograph again, and said, “It’s … not Vance … Vaughn, that’s it. Carlotta. Carlotta Vaughn.” The blue eyes aimed at me, a little narrowed. “I saw her name not long ago, in an ad in two papers. The ad said something about alias somebody.”
“You knew her?”
“Yes. She worked for that Floyd Vance. Or with him, I didn’t know which.”
I had two strong conflicting impulses simultaneously: to give her a good hug and kiss her on both cheeks, and to pull her nose for not answering the ad a week ago. I put one of them into words. “Miss Sebor,” I said, “you are the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on and if I knew what color you like I would buy you ten dozen roses. With our client’s money, of course.”
She smiled, more with her eyes than her mouth. “My shopping service hasn’t worked much on florists, but it would be interesting to try. Apparently I’ve dealt you an ace.”
“Four of them. You’ve answered a question that I was beginning to think would never be answered. If you will—”
“Is Carlotta Vaughn your client? No, of course not, not if you placed that ad. You’re trying to find her?”
“No. She’s dead. I’d like to tell you about it, but you’re busy and it’s a long story, and as our client says, it’s very personal. If you’ll answer a few more questions I’ll be extremely grateful. Was it in—”
The phone. That time it took longer; she was telling someone what not to do.
She finally finished it and returned to me. “I’ll ask you a question, Mr. Goodwin. I liked Carlotta Vaughn, and she impressed me as a very competent young woman. I didn’t see a lot of her—we had lunch together a few times—but I saw enough of her to be impressed. I was trying to get my business started and it was hard going, and I tried to persuade her to go in with me, as a partner, but she wouldn’t. I liked her very much. You say she’s dead. Would she approve of what you’re doing?”
I lied. I could have dodged and wriggled, a lot of guff, that I hadn’t known Carlotta Vaughn and therefore could only guess, and if and but and even so, but I preferred to straight lie. “Yes,” I said, “she certainly would. It was a long time ago, but you may remember. When did you first see her?”
“That’s easy. I’ll never forget that first winter, I still have the scars. I started, rented that one room, in the fall of nineteen forty-three, and I first saw Carlotta the next spring—early spring, April, or it could have been March. I suppose the first time was in the hall or the elevator, I don’t remember.”
“Then she was there in the spring and summer of nineteen forty-four.”
She nodded. “That’s right, nineteen forty-four.”
“Do you remember when you saw her last?”
“Not definitely, no. Not to name a date, but when I hadn’t seen her for a while I asked Floyd Vance about her and he said …” She frowned and shook her head. “Something vague. She had gone somewhere or something.”
“Was that in summer, or fall, or winter?”
“Not winter. By November my business was beginning to show some signs of life, and I wanted to tell Carlotta, but she wasn’t there. It was probably in October.”
“That would make it a total of six or seven months. You said you didn’t know if she worked for Floyd Vance, or with him. But she was there every day, in his office?”
“I don’t know about every day. But most of the time, yes, she was there. He was in public relations. I don’t know if he still is, I know nothing about him. He left Number Ten—I think it was two years after Carlotta left.”
“I have the impression that your liking for Carlotta didn’t extend to him.”
“It didn’t. I didn’t know him, really, and I didn’t want to. He thought he was handsome and charming, and perhaps he was, but I thought he was—well, flashy. Not the kind of man I would work either for or with. And if you—good lord, is he your client?”
“He is not. I doubt if there are many men of any kind you would work for or with.”
She smiled, more with her mouth than her eyes. “I’ve never tried and don’t intend to. I wouldn’t mind having a man of your kind working for me. How much does Nero Wolfe pay you?”
“Nothing. I work for love of the job. I meet interesting people like you. If I get fed up and quit I’ll come and remind you. Speaking of quitting, do you suppose Carlotta quit Vance because her opinion of him was about the same as yours? She might have said—”
The phone again—an important customer, judging from the conversation—and then she made calls to two employees, giving one of them detailed instructions and the other one hell. As she hung up she looked at her watch. “It’s getting late,” she said, “and I have a pile of work.”
“So have I, thanks to you.” I rose up to my feet. “Do you suppose your opinion of Vance rubbed off on Carlotta?”
“I doubt it. If it did she wouldn’t have told me. She was every … self-contained.”
“Do you shake hands with men?”
She laughed—a good healthy laugh. “Occasionally. If I want them to do something.”
“Then I qualify.” I put a hand out. “You want me to leave.”
Her grip was firm and friendly. “If you get fed up,” she said, “I could pay you fifteen thousand to start.”
“I’ll remember. What color of roses do you like?”
“Green with black borders. If you sent me ten dozen roses I’d sell them to some customer. I’m a businesswoman.”
She certainly was.
Chapter 13
When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, I was sprawled in my chair, no necktie, with my shoes off and my feet up on one of the yellow chairs, reading a magazine. As he crossed to his desk I gave him a lazy nod, yawned, and returned to the magazine. The sound came of his chair taking the seventh of a ton. I didn’t see his glare because my back was turned, but I felt it. He demanded, “A stroke? The heat?”
I turned my head around casually. “No, sir, I’m fine. I’m just relaxing. Saul phoned a few minutes ago and I invited him to dinner. The job is finished. Floyd Vance is Miss Denovo’s father. I was going to ring her and tell her, but maybe you’d rather tell her yourself.”
“Pfui. Report.”
I got my feet to the floor, no hurry, straightened up, and bent over to put my shoes on. When I am doing desk work the door to the hall and most of the room are behind me, and on the wall back of my desk is a mirror five feet wide and four feet high, for keeping an eye on people. I used it to put my tie on, combed my hair with my fingers, swiveled, and said, “I don’t suppose you’ll ever want the painful details of what led up to it, but if you do I’ll be glad to oblige. An hour and a half ago a woman named Dorothy Sebor who runs, repeat runs, a shopping service in Rockefeller Center, said to me, ‘But what can I possibly tell you about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street? I left there eighteen years ago. I loved that dump. Sit down.’ If you don’t mind I’ll use my formula, not yours. I prefer ‘I’ and ‘she’ to ‘Goodwin’ and ‘Sebor.”’
I gave it to him verbatim, with him, as always, leaning back with his eyes closed. When I finished he sat for a full minute, no movement, and then moved only his lips to mutter, “Very satisfactory.”
“It was about time,” I said with feeling. “Questions.”
His eyes opened. “Why roses?”
I nodded. “I expected that. It came out without thinking, probably because she had struck me as not the type for orchids. She could probably get a lot more for Nero Wolfe orchids than for run-of-the-nursery roses.”
“We’ll send her some sprays of Phalaenopsis Aphrodite. They have never been finer. Having had time to consider it, you regard the job as finished?”
“I was just smacking my lips after so many hungry days. One will get you fifty that Floyd Vance is the father, but I admit it wouldn’t be enough for a jury. It might be enough for the client, but I also admit there are other angles.”
“Specify them.”
“Well. The angle most important to us is your honor. Four days ago I said to Cramer, ‘I am authorized to give you Mr. Wolfe’s word of honor that if we get anything you might be able to use we’ll pass it on to you before we make any use of it ourselves.’ I added, ‘At least two minutes before,’ but that didn’t cancel the commitment. We now have these items: One: Carlotta Vaughn became pregnant in the summer of nineteen forty-four and almost certainly wasn’t married. Two: she spent the entire summer of nineteen forty-four in close association with Floyd Vance. Three: on Monday, May twenty-second, nineteen sixty-seven, four days before Carlotta Vaughn, who was then Elinor Denovo, died, Floyd Vance tried to see her and was chased by the receptionist, and he had been trying to see her before. I’d hate to undertake to tell Cramer that those three items, taken together, are not something he might be able to use. Of course your honor is your lookout, but I mortgaged it.”
He grunted. “My lookout and my responsibility. Go on.”
“Then the angle that may interest me more than it does you. My honor isn’t involved, but my feelings are, because I got my ass kicked twice by Cyrus M. Jarrett and I would like to return the compliment. What kind of a connection was there, and is there, between Jarrett and Vance that caused Jarrett to start sending checks to Carlotta Vaughn, alias Elinor Denovo, two weeks after her baby was born and to keep on sending them until her death? That could be another item that Cramer might be able to use, but that’s not why I want to know. Also, of course, Miss Denovo would
like to know. I believe in satisfying the client. I also believe in satisfying me. All right, I withdraw my brag; the job is not finished. It’s your move.”
I expected him to start the lip act, but he merely cocked his head. “The point,” he said, “is that we don’t know which of two alternative situations faces us. If he is the father but not a murderer, establishing it will be difficult if not impossible. He did that many years ago. But if he is also a murderer the situation is much simpler; he did that only three months ago. We’ll resolve that and then decide how to proceed. Can you get him here this evening?”
“For what? Do I ask him if he still wants to meet you?”
“That would do to start. If he says no, tell him I want to meet him. Tell him I want to ask him why he didn’t reply to the advertisement requesting information about Carlotta Vaughn, alias Elinor Denovo.”
I had noted the listing of Vance’s home phone, but got the directory to check on the number, and found that my memory had it right. It was a quarter to seven when I dialed, and if he ate out I would probably get no answer. But after two rings I got a hello.
“Mr. Floyd Vance, please?”
“I’m Floyd Vance.”
“I’m Archie Goodwin. I work for Nero Wolfe. You may remember that we met at Lily Rowan’s place, and you—”
“I remember.”
“And you said you would like to meet Nero Wolfe to make a proposal. I reminded Mr. Wolfe of that just now when we were discussing something, and he decided he would also like to meet you. Could you come this evening, say at nine o’clock?”
Silence. Five seconds. “This is short notice.”
“I know. It’s not as urgent as a five-alarm fire, but if it’s not too inconvenient … the address is—”
“I know the address.” Silence. “You say nine o’clock?”
“Right. Or later if that would suit you better.”
“Don’t be so goddam polite. I’ll be there around nine.”
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