by Rex Stout
Now, early on a Tuesday morning, he phoned to say he wanted to see Wolfe. When I told him that Wolfe would be occupied with the orchids, as usual, until eleven o’clock, he fussed a little and made a date for eleven sharp. He arrived five minutes ahead of time, and I escorted him into the office and invited him to deposit his big bony frame in the red leather chair. After he sat down he asked me, “Don’t I remember you? Aren’t you Major Goodwin?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not in uniform.”
“I was just noticing,” I said, “that you need a haircut. At your age, with your gray hair, it looks better trimmed. More distinguished. Shall we continue with the personal remarks?”
There was the clang of Wolfe’s personal elevator out in the hall, and a moment later Wolfe entered, exchanged greetings with the caller, and got himself, all of his two hundred and sixty-some pounds, lowered into his personal chair behind his desk.
Ben Jensen said, “Something I wanted to show you-got it in the mail this morning,” and took an envelope from his pocket and stood up to hand it across.
Wolfe glanced at the envelope, removed a piece of paper from it and glanced at that, and passed them along to me. The envelope was addressed to Ben Jensen, neatly hand-printed in ink. The piece of paper had been clipped from something, all four edges, with scissors or a sharp knife, and it had printed on it, not by hand, in large black script:
YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE-
AND I WILL WATCH YOU DIE!
Wolfe murmured, “Well, sir?”
“I can tell you,” I put in, “free for nothing, where this came from.”
Jensen snapped at me. “You mean who sent it?”
“Oh, no. For that I would charge. It was clipped from an ad for a movie called Meeting at Dawn. The movie of the century. I saw the ad last week in the American Magazine . I suppose it’s in all the magazines. If you could find-”
Wolfe made a noise at me and murmured again at Jensen, “Well, sir?”
“What am I going to do?” Jensen demanded.
“I’m sure I don’t know. Have you any notion who sent it?”
“No. None at all.” Jensen sounded grieved. “Damn it, I don’t like it. It’s not just the usual junk from an anonymous crank. Look at it! It’s direct and to the point. I think someone’s going to try to kill me, and I don’t know who or why or when or how. I suppose tracing it is out of the question, but I want some protection. I want to buy it from you.”
I put up a hand to cover a yawn. I knew there would be nothing doing-no case, no fee, no excitement. In the years I had been living in Nero Wolfe’s house on West Thirty-fifth Street, acting as a goad, prod, lever, irritant, and chief assistant in the detective business, I had heard him tell at least fifty scared people, of all conditions and ages, that if someone had determined to kill them and was going to be stubborn about it he would probably succeed. On occasion, when the bank balance was doing a dive, he had furnished Gather or Durkin or Panzer or Keems as a bodyguard at a hundred percent mark-up, but now they were all fighting Germans or Japs, and anyhow, we had just deposited a five-figure check from a certain client.
Jensen got sore, naturally, but Wolfe only murmured at him that he might succeed in interesting the police or that we would be glad to give him a list of reliable detective agencies which would provide companions for his movements as long as he remained alive-at sixty bucks for twenty-four hours. Jensen said that wasn’t it, he wanted to hire Wolfe’s brains. Wolfe merely made a face and shook his head. Then Jensen wanted to know what about Goodwin? Wolfe said that Major Goodwin was an officer in the United States Army.
“He’s not in uniform,” Jensen growled.
[Missing.]
Wolfe grunted. “He’ll waste his money. I doubt the urgency of his peril. A man planning a murder doesn’t spend his energy clipping pieces out of advertisements of motion pictures.”
That was Tuesday. The next morning, Wednesday, the papers headlined the murder of Ben Jensen on the front page. Eating breakfast in the kitchen with Fritz, as usual, I was only halfway through the report in the Times when the doorbell rang, and when I answered it I found on the stoop our old friend Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad.
II
Nero Wolfe said, “Not interested, not involved, and not curious.”
He was a sight, as he always was when propped up in bed with his breakfast tray.
The custom was for Fritz to deliver the tray to his room on the second floor at eight o’clock. It was now eight-fifteen, and already down the gullet were the peaches and cream, most of the unrationed bacon, and two-thirds of the eggs, not to mention coffee and the green tomato jam. The black silk coverlet was folded back, and you had to look to tell where the yellow percale sheet ended and the yellow pajamas began. Few people except Fritz and me ever got to see him like that, but he had stretched a point for Inspector Cramer, who knew that from nine to eleven he would be up in the plant rooms with the orchids and unavailable.
“In the past dozen years,” Cramer said in his ordinary growl, without any particular feeling, “you have told me, I suppose, in round figures, ten million lies.” The commas were chews on his unlighted cigar. He looked the way he always did when he had been working all night-peevish and put upon but under control, all except his hair, which had forgotten where the part went.
Wolfe, who was hard to rile at breakfast, swallowed toast and jam and then coffee, ignoring the insult. Cramer said, “He came to see you yesterday morning, twelve hours before he was killed. You don’t deny that.”
“And I have told you what for,” Wolfe said politely. “He had received that threat and said he wanted to hire my brains. I declined to work for him and he went away. That was all.”
“Why did you decline to work for him? What had he done to you?”
“Nothing.” Wolfe poured coffee. “I don’t do that kind of work. A man whose life is threatened anonymously is either in no danger at all, or his danger is so acute and so ubiquitous that his position is hopeless. My only previous association with Mr. Jensen was in connection with an attempt by an Army captain named Peter Root to sell him inside Army information for political purposes. Together we got the necessary evidence and Captain Root was court-martialed. Mr. Jensen was impressed, so he said, by my handling of that case. I suppose that was why he came to me when he wanted help.”
“Did he think the threat came from someone connected with Captain Root?”
“No. Root wasn’t mentioned. He said he had no idea who intended to kill him.”
Cramer humphed. “That’s what he told Tim Cornwall too. Cornwall thinks you passed because you knew or suspected it was too hot to handle. Naturally Cornwall is bitter. He has lost his best man.”
“Indeed,” Wolfe said mildly. “If that was his best man…”
“So Cornwall says,” Cramer insisted, “and he’s dead. Name of Doyle, been in the game twenty years, with a good record. The picture as we’ve got it doesn’t necessarily condemn him. Jensen went to Cornwall and Mayor yesterday about noon, and Cornwall assigned Doyle as a guard. We’ve traced all their movements-nothing special. In the evening Doyle went along to a meeting at a midtown club. They left the dub at eleven-twenty, and apparently went straight home, on the subway or a bus, to the apartment house where Jensen lived on Seventy-third Street near Madison. It was eleven-forty-five when they were found dead on the sidewalk at the entrance to the apartment house. Both shot in the heart with a thirty-eight, Doyle from behind and Jensen from the front. We have the bullets. No powder marks. No nothing.”
Wolfe murmured sarcastically, putting down his coffee cup and indicating that since I was there I might as well remove the tray, “Mr. Cornwall’s test man.”
“Nuts,” Cramer objected to the sarcasm. “He was shot in the back. There’s a narrow passage ten paces away where the guy could have hid. Or the shots could have come from a passing car, or from across the street-though that would have taken some shooting, two right in the pump. We haven�
�t found anybody who heard the shots. The doorman was in the basement stoking the water heater, the excuse for that being that they’re short of men like everybody else. The elevator man was on his way to the tenth floor with a passenger, a tenant. The bodies were discovered by two women on their way home from a movie. It must have happened not more than a minute before they came by, but they had just got off a Madison Avenue bus at the corner.”
Wolfe got out of bed, which was an operation deserving an audience. He glanced at the clock on the bed table. It was eight-thirty-five.
“I know, I know,” Cramer growled. “You’ve got to get dressed and get upstairs to your goddam horticulture. The tenant going up in the elevator was a prominent doctor who barely knew Jensen by sight. The two women who found the bodies are Seventh Avenue models who never heard of Jensen. The elevator man has worked there over twenty years without displaying a grudge, and Jensen was a generous tipper and popular with the bunch. The doorman is a fat nitwit who was hired two weeks ago only because of the manpower situation and doesn’t know the tenants by name. Beyond those, all we have is the population of New York City and the guests who arrive and depart daily and nightly. That’s why I came to you, and for God’s sake, give me what you’ve got. You can see I need it.”
“Mr. Cramer.”
The mountain of yellow pajamas moved. “I repeat. I am not interested, not involved, and not curious.” Wolfe headed for the bathroom.
Two minutes later, downstairs, as I opened the front door for Inspector Cramer’s exit, he turned to me with his cigar tilted up from the corner of his mouth to about a quarter to one and observed, “One thing about that black silk bed cover, it can be used for his shroud when the time comes. Let me know, and I’ll come and help sew on it.”
I eyed him coldly. “You scold us when we lie, and you scold us when we tell the truth. What does the city pay you for anyhow?”
Back in the office there was the morning mail, which had been ignored on account of the interruption of the early visitor. I got busy with the opener. There was the usual collection of circulars, catalogues, appeals, requests for advice without enclosed check, and other items, fully up to the pre-war standard, and I was getting toward the bottom of the stack without encountering anything startling or promising when I slit another envelope and there it was.
I stared at it. I picked up the envelope and stared at that. I don’t often talk to myself, but I said loud enough for me to hear, “My goodness.” Then I left the rest of the mail for later and went and mounted the three flights to the plant rooms on the roof. Proceeding through the first three departments, past everything from rows of generating flasks to Cattleya hybrids covered with blooms, I found Wolfe in the potting room, with Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, examining a crate of sphagnum that had just arrived.
“Well?” he demanded with no sign of friendliness. The general idea was that when he was up there I interrupted him at my peril.
“I suppose,” I said carelessly, “that I shouldn’t have bothered you, but I ran across something in the mail that I thought you’d find amusing,” and I put them on the bench before him, side by side: the envelope with his name and address printed on it by hand, in ink, and the piece of paper that had been clipped from something with scissors or a sharp knife, reading in large black script, printed but not by hand:
YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE-
AND I WILL WATCH YOU DIE!
“It sure is a coincidence,” I remarked, grinning at him.
III
I thought he would at least mutter “Indeed,” but he didn’t. He looked at the exhibits for a moment without touching them, sent me a sharp glance indicating an instantaneous suspicion that I was implicated, and said without any perceptible quiver, “I’ll look over the mail at eleven o’clock as usual.”
It was the grand manner all right. Seeing he was impervious, I retrieved the exhibits without a word, returned to the office, and busied myself with the chores-letters to write, vital statistics of orchids to enter on cards, and similar manly tasks. Nor did he fudge on the time. It was eleven on the dot when he came down, got into his oversized chair behind his desk, and began the routine-going through the mail I had not discarded, signing checks, inspecting the bank balance, dictating letters and memos, glancing down at his calendar pad, and ringing for beer. Not until Fritz had brought the beer and he had irrigated his interior did he lean back in his chair, let his eyes go half shut, and observe:
“Archie, you could easily have clipped that thing from the magazine, bought an envelope and printed my name and address on it, stamped it and mailed it. Nothing would have been simpler.”
I grinned at him and shook my head. “Not my style. Besides, what for? I never exert myself without a purpose. Besides again, would I be apt to infuriate and embitter you at this moment, when I know General Carpenter will phone for your opinion?”
“You will, of course, postpone your trip to Washington.”
I let my frank, open countenance betray surprise. “I can’t. I have an appointment with a lieutenant general; Anyhow, why?” I indicated the envelope and clipping on his desk. “That tomfoolery? No panic is called for. I doubt the urgency of your peril. A man planning a murder doesn’t spend his energy clipping pieces out of adver-”
“You are going to Washington?”
“Yes, sir. I have a date. Of course I could phone Carpenter and tell him your nerves are a little shaky on account of an anony-”
“When do you leave?”
“I have a seat on the six o’clock train, but I could take a later-”
“Very well. Then we have the day. Your notebook.” Wolfe leaned forward to pour beer and drink, and then leaned back again. “I offer a comment on your jocosity. When Mr. Jensen called here yesterday and showed us that thing we had no inkling of the character of the person who had sent it. It might have been merely the attempt of a coward to upset his digestion. We no longer enjoy that ignorance. This person not only promptly killed Mr. Jensen, with wit equal to his determination, but also killed Mr. Doyle, a stranger, whose presence could not have been foreseen. We now know that this person is cold-blooded, ruthless, quick to decide and to act, and an egomaniac.”
“Yes, sir. I agree. If you go to bed and stay there until I get back from Washington, letting no one but Fritz enter the room, I may not be able to control my tongue when with you but actually I will understand and I won’t tell anybody. You need a rest anyway. And don’t lick any envelopes.”
“Bah.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at me. “That thing was not sent to you. Presumably you are not on the agenda.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And this person is dangerous and requires attention.”
“I agree.”
“Very well.” Wolfe shut his eyes. “Take notes as needed. It may be assumed, if this person means business with me as he did with Mr. Jensen, that this is connected with the case of Captain Peter Root. I had no other association whatever with Mr. Jensen-learn the whereabouts of Captain Root.”
“The court-martial gave him three years in the cooler.”
“I know it. Is he there? Also, what about that young woman, his fiancйe, who raised such a ruction about it and called me a mongrel bloodhound? A contradiction in terms-not a good epithet. Her name is Jane Geer.” Wolfe’s eyes half opened for an instant. “You have a habit of knowing how to locate personable young women without delay. Have you seen that one recently?”
“Oh,” I said offhand, “I sort of struck up an acquaintance with her. I guess I can get in touch with her. But I doubt-”
“Do so. I want to see her. Excuse me for interrupting, but you have a train to catch. Also inform Inspector Cramer of this development and suggest that he investigate Captain Root’s background-his relatives and intimates-anyone besides Miss Geer who might thirst for vengeance at his disgrace. I’ll do that. If Captain Root is in prison, arrange with General Fife to bring him here. I want to have a talk with him. Where is the clipping received yesterday b
y Mr. Jensen? Ask Mr. Cornwall and Mr. Cramer. There is the possibility that this is not another one like it, but the same one.”
I shook my head. “No, sir. This one is clipped closer to the printing at the upper right.”
“I noticed that, but ask anyway. Inspect the chain bolts on the doors and test the night gong in your room. Fritz will sleep in your room tonight. I shall speak to Fritz and Theodore. All of this can easily be attended to by telephone except Miss Geer, and that is your problem. Do not for the present mention her to Mr. Cramer. I want to see her before he does. When will you return from Washington?”
“I should be able to catch a noon train back-my appointment’s at nine. Getting here around five.” I added earnestly, “If I can clear it with Carpenter to cross the ocean, I will of course arrange not to leave until this ad-clipper has been attended to. I wouldn’t want-”
“Don’t hurry back on my account. Or alter your plans. You receive a salary from the government.” Wolfe’s tone was dry, sharp, and icy, plainly intended to pierce all my vital organs at once. He went on with it, “Please get General Fife on the phone. We’ll begin by learning about Captain Root.”
The program went smoothly, all except the Jane Geer number. If it hadn’t been for her I’d have been able to make the six o’clock train with hours to spare.
Fife reported back on Root in thirty minutes, to the effect that Root was in the clink on government property down in Maryland and would be transported to New York without delay for an interview with Wolfe, which appeared to contradict the saying that democracies are always ungrateful. Cornwall said he had turned the clipping and envelope Jensen had received over to Inspector Cramer, and Cramer verified it and said he had it. But Cramer seemed to be too busy for an extended phone conversation, and I understood why when, shortly after we had finished lunch, he arrived at our place in person, sat down in the red leather chair and narrowed his eyes at Wolfe, emitted a hoarse, grating chuckle and said offensively: “Interested, involved, and curious.”
