The Doorbell Rang

by Rex Stout

  Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed, but his mouth was tight, no curl at the corner. As I crossed to his desk he opened the eyes to slits. I picked up the check and inspected it. I had never seen one for an even, round, plain hundred grand, though I had seen bigger ones. I dropped it, went to my desk, sat, scribbled the license number of the tail car on the scratch pad, swung the phone around, dialed a number and got a man, a city employee for whom I had once done a king-size favor. When I gave him the license number he said it might take an hour, and I said I would hold my breath.

  As I hung up Wolfe’s voice came. “Is that flummery?”

  I swiveled. “No, sir. She is in real danger. A pair of them were in a car down the block. They switched on their lights as she got in, and as her Rolls turned into Tenth Avenue they were so close behind they nearly bumped it. An open tail, but they’re overdoing it. If the Rolls stops short they’ll bang it. She’s in danger.”

  “Grrrhh,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I agree. The point is, who are they? If it’s something private, that hundred grand could be earned maybe. Of course if it’s really G-men she’ll just have to endure her afflictions, as you said. We’ll know in an hour or so.”

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes to seven. He focused on me. “Is Mr. Cohen at his office?”

  “Probably. He usually quits around seven.”

  “Ask him to dine with us.”

  That was very foxy. If I said there was no point in it since the thing was preposterous, he would say that I was certainly aware of the importance of maintaining good relations with Mr. Cohen, which I was, and that he personally had not seen him for more than a year, which was true.

  I swiveled and got the phone and dialed.

  Chapter 2

  At nine o’clock we were back in the office, Lon in the red leather chair and Wolfe and I at our desks, and Fritz was serving coffee and brandy. The hour and a half in the dining room across the hall had been quite sociable, what with the clam cakes with chili sauce, the beef braised in red wine, the squash with sour cream and chopped dill, the avocado with watercress and black walnut kernels, and the Liederkranz. The talk had covered the state of the Union, the state of the feminine mind, whether any cooked oyster can be fit to eat, structural linguistics, and the prices of books. It had got hot only on the feminine mind, and Lon had done that purposely to see how sharp Wolfe could get. Lon took a sip of brandy and looked at his wristwatch. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “let’s get at it. I have to be somewhere at ten o’clock. I know you don’t expect me to pay for my dinner, but I also know that ordinarily, when there’s something you want to get or give, Archie just phones or drops in, so this must be something special. It will have to be fantastic to be as special as this cognac.”

  Wolfe picked up a slip of paper that was there on his desk, frowned at it, and put it down. I had put it there half an hour before. My dinner had been interrupted by a phone call from the city employee with the information I had wanted, and before returning to the dining room I had written “FBI” on a sheet from the scratch pad and put it on Wolfe’s desk. It hadn’t improved my appetite any. If she had been wrong about the tail it could have had great possibilities, including a fat raise for me in the form of a check for me, personally.

  Wolfe sipped coffee, put the cup down, and said, “I have fourteen bottles left.”

  “My God,” Lon said, and sniffed the brandy. It was funny about him. With his slicked-back hair and his neat little tight-skinned face he looked like nobody in particular, but somehow he always seemed to fit, whatever he was doing—in his room on the twentieth floor in the Gazette building, two doors down from the publisher’s corner room, or dancing with a doll at the Flamingo, or at the table with us in Saul Panzer’s apartment where we played poker. Or sniffing a fifty-year-old cognac.

  He took a sip. “Anything you want,” he said. “Barring nothing.”

  “Actually,” Wolfe said, “it isn’t very special. Certainly not fantastic. First a question: Do you know of any connection, however remote, between Mrs. Lloyd Bruner and the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

  “Sure I do. Who doesn’t? She sent a million people copies of Fred Cook’s book, including our publisher and editor. It’s the latest status symbol, and damn it, I didn’t get one. Did you?”

  “No. I bought mine. Do you know of any action the Bureau has taken in reprisal? This is a private and confidential conversation.”

  Lon smiled. “Any action they might take would also be private and confidential. You’ll have to ask J. Edgar Hoover—unless you already know. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Lon’s chin jerked up. “The hell you do. Then the people who pay his salary should know.”

  Wolfe nodded. “That would be your view, naturally. You seek information in order to publish it; I seek it for my private interest. At the moment I seek it only to decide where my interest lies. I have no client and no commitment, and I should make it clear that even if I commit myself and go to work I shall probably never be able to give you any publishable information, no matter what the outcome is. If I can, I will, but I doubt it. Are we in your debt?”

  “No. On balance, I’m in yours.”

  “Good. Then I’ll draw on it. Why did Mrs. Bruner send those books?”

  “I don’t know.” He sipped brandy and moved his lips and cheeks to spread it around before swallowing. “Presumably as a public service. I bought five copies myself and sent them to people who should read them but probably won’t. A man I know gave thirty copies as Christmas presents.”

  “Do you know if she had any private reason for animus against the FBI?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard any suggestion of such an animus? Any surmise?”

  “No. But evidently you have. Look, Mr. Wolfe. Strictly off the record, who wants to hire you? If I knew that, I might be able to furnish a fact or two.”

  Wolfe refilled his cup and put the pot down. “I may not be hired,” he said. “If I am, it’s quite possible that you will never know who hired me. As for facts, I know what I need. I need a list of all the cases on which FBI agents have recently worked, and are now working, in and around New York. Can you supply that?”

  “Hell no.” Lon smiled. “I’ll be damned. I was thinking—it was incredible, but I was thinking, or rather I was asking if it was possible that Hoover wanted you to work on Mrs. Bruner. That would be an item. But if you—I’ll be damned.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you going to perform a public service?”

  “No. Nor, it may be, a private one. I’m considering it. Do you know how I can get such a list?”

  “You can’t. Of course some of their jobs are public knowledge, like the jewel snatch at the Natural History Museum and the bank truck at that church in Jersey—half a million in small bills. But some of them are far from public. You read that book. Of course there’s talk, there’s always talk, not for print. Would that help?”

  “It might, especially if it was of something questionable, possibly extralegal. Is it?”

  “Certainly. It’s no fun talking about something that isn’t questionable.” He glanced at his watch. “I have twenty minutes. If I may have another small ration of brandy, and if it is understood that this is private, and if you’re headed where you seem to be, I’ll be glad to chip in.” He looked at me. “You’ll need your notebook, Archie.”

  Twenty minutes later his brandy glass was empty again, I had filled five pages of my notebook, and he was gone. I won’t report on the contents of the five pages because very little of it was ever used, and also because some of the people named wouldn’t appreciate it. At the time, as I returned to the office after seeing Lon out, my mind was on Wolfe, not the notebook. Was he actually considering it? No. Impossible. He had merely been passing the time, and of course trying to get a rise out of me. The question was how to handle it. He would be expecting me to blow my top. So I walked in and to my desk, grinned at him, said, “That was fu
n,” yanked the five pages from the notebook, tore them in half, and was going to tear again but he bellowed, “Stop that!”

  I raised one eyebrow, something he can’t do. “Sorry,” I said, perfectly friendly. “A souvenir?”

  “No. Please sit down.”

  I sat. “Have I missed something?”

  “I doubt it. You seldom do. A hypothetical question: If I told you that I have decided to keep that hundred thousand dollars, what would you say?”

  “What you said. Preposterous.”

  “That’s understood. But go on.”

  “In full?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would say that you should sell the house and contents and go live in a nursing home, since you’re obviously cracked. Unless you intend to gyp her, just sit on it.”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re cracked. You’ve read that book. We couldn’t even get started. The idea would be to work it so you could say to the FBI, ‘Lay off,’ and make it stick. Nuts. Merely raising a stink wouldn’t do it. They would have to be actually cornered, the whole damn outfit. Out on a limb. All right, say we try to start. We pick one of these affairs”—I tapped the torn sheets from the notebook—”and make some kind of a stab at it. From then on, whenever I left the house I’d spend all my time ditching tails, and good ones. Everyone connected with that affair would be pegged. Our phone would be tapped. So would other phones—for instance, Miss Rowan’s, and Saul’s and Fred’s and Orrie’s, whether we got them in or not. And of course Parker’s. They might or might not try a frame, probably they wouldn’t have to, but if they did it would be good. I’d have to sleep here in the office. Windows and doors, even one with a chain bolt, are pie for them. They could monitor our mail. I am not piling it on. How many of those things they would do would depend, but they can do all of them. They have all the gimmicks there are, including some I have never heard of.”

  I crossed my legs. “We’d never get to first base. But say we did, say we actually got a wedge started in some kind of a crack, then they would really operate. They have six thousand trained men, some of them as good as they come, and three hundred million dollars a year. I would like to borrow the dictionary to look up a stronger word than ‘preposterous.’“

  I uncrossed my legs. “Also, what about her? I do not believe that she is merely being annoyed. One will get you twenty that she’s scared stiff. She knows there’s some dirt somewhere, if not on her then on her son or daughter or something that would really hurt, and that would take a lot of sting out of the book. As for the hundred grand, for her that’s peanuts, and anyway she’s in a tax bracket that makes it petty cash.”

  I crossed my legs. “That’s what I would say.”

  Wolfe grunted. “The last part was irrelevant.”

  “I’m often irrelevant. It confuses people.”

  “You keep waving your legs around.”

  “That confuses them too.”

  “Pfui. You’re fidgety, and no wonder. I thought I knew you, Archie, but this is a new facet.”

  “It’s not new at all. It’s merely horse sense.”

  “No. Dog sense. You are moving your legs around because your tail is between them. This is what you said, in effect: I am offered a job with the largest retainer in my experience and no limit on expenses or fee, but I should decline it. I should decline it, not because it would be difficult and perhaps impossible—I have taken many jobs that seemed impossible—but because it would give offense to a certain man and his organization and he would retaliate. I decline it because I dare not take it; I would rather submit to a threat than—”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “It was implicit. You are cowed. You are daunted. Not, I concede, without reason; the hands and voices of many highly placed men have been stayed by the same trepidation. Possibly mine would be too if it were merely a matter of declining or accepting a job. But I will not return that check for one hundred thousand dollars because I am afraid of a bully. My self-esteem won’t let me. I suggest that you take a vacation for an indefinite period. With pay; I can afford it.”

  I uncrossed my legs. “Beginning now?”

  “Yes.” He was grim.

  “These notes are in my personal code. Shall I type them?”

  “No. That would implicate you. I’ll see Mr. Cohen again.”

  I clasped my hands behind my head and eyed him. “I still say you’re cracked,” I said, “and I deny that my tail was between my legs, since they were crossed, and it would be a ball to step aside and see how you went at it without me, but after all the years in the swim with you it would be lowdown to let you sink alone. If I get daunted along the way I’ll let you know.” I picked up the torn sheets. “You want this typed?”

  “No. For our discussion you will translate as required.”

  “Right. A suggestion. The mood you’re in, do you want to declare war by phoning the client? She left her unlisted number, and of course it’s tapped. Shall I get her?”

  “Yes.”

  I got at the phone and dialed.

  Chapter 3

  Going to the kitchen before going up to bed, around midnight, to check that Fritz had bolted the back door, I was pleased to see that batter for sour-milk buckwheat cakes was there in a bowl on the range. In that situation nice crisp toast or flaky croissants would have been inadequate. So when I descended the two flights a little after nine o’clock Wednesday morning I knew I would be properly fueled. As I entered the kitchen Fritz turned up the flame under the griddle, and I told him good morning and got my orange juice from the refrigerator. Wolfe, who breakfasts in his room from a tray taken up by Fritz, had gone up to the plant rooms on the roof for his two morning hours with the orchids; I had heard the elevator as usual. As I went to the little table by the wall where I eat breakfast I asked Fritz if there was anything stirring.

  “Yes,” he said, “and you are to tell what it is.”

  “Oh, didn’t he tell you?”

  “No. He said only that the doors are to be bolted and the windows locked at all times, that I am to be—what does ‘circumspect’ mean?”

  “It means watch your step. Say nothing to anyone on the phone that you wouldn’t want to see in the paper. When you go out, do nothing that you wouldn’t want to see on TV. For instance, girl friends. Stay away. Swear off. Suspect all strangers.”

  Fritz wouldn’t, and didn’t, talk while cakes were getting to just the right shade of brown. When they were before me, the first two, and the sausage, and were being buttered, he said, “I want to know, Archie, and I have a right to know. He said you would explain. Bien. I demand it.”

  I picked up the fork. “You know what the FBI is.”

  “But certainly. Mr. Hoover.”

  “That’s what he thinks. On behalf of a client we’re going to push his nose in. Just a routine chore, but he’s touchy and will try to stop us. So futile.” I put a bite of cake where it belonged.

  “But he—he’s a great man. Yes?”

  “Sure. But I suppose you’ve seen pictures of him.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of his nose?”

  “Not good. Not exactly épaté, but broad. Not bien fait.”

  “Then it should be pushed,” I forked sausage.

  So he was at ease when I finished and went to the office. The meals would be okay, at least for today. As I dusted the desks, tore sheets from the calendars, and opened the mail, which was mostly junk, I was considering an experiment. If I dialed a number, any number, say Parker’s, I might be able to tell if we were tapped. It would be interesting to know if they had already reacted to the call to Mrs. Bruner. I vetoed it. I intended to keep strictly to my instructions. Doing so, I got my pocket notebook and another item from a drawer of my desk, opened the safe to get the check, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz not to expect me for lunch and to the hall rack for my hat and coat, and departed.

  Heading east, I merely walked. It’s a cinch to spot a tail, even a good
one, especially on a winter day when a cold, gusty wind is keeping the sidewalk traffic down, but presumably they knew where I was going, so why bother? At the bank, on Lexington Avenue, I had the pleasure of seeing the teller’s eyes widen a little as he gave the check a second glance. The simple pleasure of the rich. Outside again, I turned uptown. I had two miles to go, but it was only twenty after ten. I am a walker, and if I had a tail it would be good for his lungs and legs.

  The four-story stone on Seventy-fourth Street between Madison and Park was at least twice as wide as Wolfe’s brownstone, but it wasn’t brown. The door to the vestibule, three steps down, was solid, but the inside one was a metal grille with glass. It was opened by a man in black with no lips who swung it wide only after he had my name. He led me down the hall to an open door on the left and motioned me in.

  It was an office, not large—filing cabinets, a safe, two desks, shelves, a cluttered table. On the wall back of the table was a blow-up of the Bruner building. My quick glance around came to rest on a face, a face that rated a glance, belonging to the female seated at one of the desks. Her hazel eyes were meeting the glance.

  “I’m Archie Goodwin,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’m Sarah Dacos. Have a seat, Mr. Goodwin.” She lifted the receiver from a phone and pressed a button, in a moment told someone I was there, hung up, and told me Mrs. Bruner would be down soon. Sitting, I asked her, “How long have you been with Mrs. Bruner?”

  She smiled. “I know you’re a detective, Mr. Goodwin, you don’t have to prove it.”

  I smiled back. “I have to keep in practice.” She was easy to smile at. “How long?”

  “Nearly three years. Do you want it exactly?”

  “Later maybe. Shall I wait until Mrs. Bruner comes?”

  “Not necessarily. She said you would ask me some questions.”

  “Then I will. What did you do before?”

  “I was a stenographer at the Bruner Corporation, and then Mr. Thompson’s secretary, the vice-president.”