Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 32 Read online

When I got back to the kitchen Fritz had broken the eggs and was stirring. I sat at the table by the wall, propped the morning Times on the rack, and sipped orange juice. Fritz asked, “A good case?”

  For him a good case is one which will not interfere with meals, will not last long enough to make Wolfe cranky, and will probably produce a nice fat fee. “So-so,” I told him. “All we have to do is read a couple of books. Maybe.”

  He put the skillet on. “That Miss Bonner is helping?”

  I grinned at Mm. He regards every woman who enters the house as a potential threat to his kitchen, not to mention the rest of his precinct, and he was particularly suspicious of Dol Bonner, Dol being short for Theodolinda, the only female owner and operator of a detective agency in New York. “No,” I said, “she came yesterday on a personal matter. Mr. Wolfe keeps phoning her to ask her to dinner, and she wants me to get him to stop annoying her.”

  He pointed the spoon at me. “Archie, if I could lie with your aplomb I would be an ambassador. You know women. You know quite well that one with eyes the color of that Miss Bonner and eyelashes of that length, her own, is a dangerous animal.”

  By nine o’clock the morning fog had gone entirely, thanks to the apricot omelet, griddle cakes with bacon and honey, and two cups of coffee, and I went to the office and dialed Philip Harvey’s number. From his reaction you might have thought it was not yet dawn. After smoothing him down and promising never to call him again earlier than noon, short of a real emergency, I told him what I wanted—the names of people at Best and Green and the Owl Press who could be expected to cooperate. He said he knew no one at either place, told me to call the executive secretary of NAAD, and hung up. A hell of a chairman. When I got the executive secretary she wanted to know what kind of cooperation I was going to ask for. I told her, and she wanted to know why Nero Wolfe wanted the books. I said that no good detective ever tells anybody why he wants something, and if I gave her a reason it would be a phony, and I finally wore her down and got a couple of names.

  Mr. Arnold Green of Best and Green was extremely suspicious. He didn’t come right out with it, but I gathered that he suspected that the Joint Committee on Plagiarism was a conspiracy, abetted by some of his competitors, to twist the nose of Best and Green by getting something on an author whose book they had published five years ago; and anyway, The Moth That Ate Peanuts was a flop and had been remaindered, and the only copies they had left, maybe four or five, were in the morgue. And more anyway, what did that book have to do with the investigation Nero Wolfe was making? When he had simmered down a little I said I fully appreciated his point of view, and I would tell Mr. Knapp and Mr. Dexter and Mr. Imhof that for some reason, probably a good one, he refused to send Mr. Wolf a copy of the book, and he said I misunderstood, that he wasn’t refusing, that there might possibly be a copy somewhere around the office. If so he would send it down by messenger, and if not he would send someone to the morgue for one.

  Mr. W. R. Pratt of the Owl Press was strictly business. When I said that Nero Wolfe had been hired to make an investigation by the Joint Committee on Flag—he cut in to say he knew that and what did I want; and when I said that Mr. Wolfe wanted a copy of Barrage at Dawn as soon as possible and would be obliged if he would kindly—he cut in again to say that if I would give the address to his secretary she would send it at once by messenger. He asked no questions, but his secretary did. Her first words were, “Whom do we bill?” That outfit was right on its toes.

  Barrage at Dawn arrived first, which didn’t surprise me, with an invoice enclosed which included an item of $1.50 for messenger service. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and was looking through the morning’s mail. When I handed him the book he made a face at it and dropped it on his desk, but in a couple of minutes he picked it up, frowned at the cover, and opened it. He was well into it when The Moth That Ate Peanuts arrived, and since, as I said, my function is whatever an occasion calls for, I tackled that one, looking for “aver” or “not for nothing” or something like “Barely had the moth swallowed the ten-thousandth peanut when it got a stomach-ache.” Also, of course, semicolons and paragraphing. I was more than halfway through when Wolfe asked for it, and I got up and handed it to him and took Barrage at Dawn.

  A little after one, with lunchtime approaching, Wolfe shut The Moth That Ate Peanuts, tossed it onto his desk, and growled, “Pfui. Neither one. Confound it.”

  I closed Barrage at Dawn and put it down. “I can see,” I said, “that you might cross Simon Jacobs off, but Alice Porter’s is a children’s book. You wouldn’t expect a moth to aver, even if it was a peanut addict. I would hate to give up Alice Porter. She started it and she’s repeating.”

  He glared at me. “No. She didn’t write those stories.”

  “If you say so. Why glare at me? I didn’t write them. Is this final or are you just sore because he or she was smart enough to wear gloves?”

  “It’s final. No one is that smart. Those two are eliminated.”

  “Then that leaves Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert.”

  “Jane Ogilvy is highly unlikely. The woman who wrote those three pseudo-poems and used the terms and locutions that appear in her testimony at the trial is almost certainly incapable of writing those three stories, including the one that she claimed she had written. Kenneth Rennert is of course a possibility, the only one left of the quartet. But his claim is based on a play outline, not a story, and we don’t have it. It might even be that his was an independent operation. Could we get copies of the television scripts he has written?”

  “I don’t know. Shall I find out?”

  “Yes, but there is no urgency. According to that report, they were dramatic in form and so contained nothing but dialogue, and would tell us next to nothing. I would like your opinion. Our job now is to find a person, man or woman: the person who in nineteen fifty-five read The Color of Passion, by Ellen Sturdevant, wrote a story with the title ‘There Is Only Love,’ incorporating its characters and plot and action, persuaded Alice Porter to use it as the basis for a claim of plagiarism, putting her name on it, the bait being presumably a share of the proceeds, and at an opportune moment somehow entered the summer home of Ellen Sturdevant and concealed the manuscript in a bureau drawer; who repeated the performance a year later with Hold Fast to All I Give You, by Richard Echols, using another accomplice, Simon Jacobs, changing only the method of establishing the existence and priority of the manuscript, suggested by the convenient circumstance that Jacobs had once sent a story to Echols’ agent and had it returned; who in nineteen fifty-seven again repeated the performance with Sacred or Profane, by Marjorie Lippin, using still another accomplice, Jane Ogilvy, following the same pattern, with the advantage of another convenient circumstance, the death of Marjorie Lippin. I would like your opinion. Is Kenneth Rennert that person?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know him well enough.”

  “You have read that report.”

  “Yeah.” I considered. “Offhand I would vote no. One will get you ten that he isn’t. From the general impression I got of him. Especially I doubt if he would monkey around with accomplices. A specific point: There is no evidence that he had any connection with writing or writers until he took a shot at television in nineteen fifty-five, so how did he get on to Alice Porter and Jacobs and Jane Ogilvy? Another one: If he used them on the first three, splitting the take with them, because he didn’t want to do it himself, why did he do it himself for the fourth and then go back to Alice Porter for the fifth?”

  Wolfe nodded. “I agree. We are caught in our own noose. By discovering that those three stories were written by the same person we thought we had simplified the problem. It now appears that we have complicated it. If those four were merely cat’s-paws, where is the monkey? He is presumably a United States citizen. There are a hundred and seventy million of them.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I averred. “He’s probably in the metropolitan area. Fifteen million. Not counting children, illiterat
es, millionaires, people in jail—”

  Fritz had appeared at the door. “Lunch is ready, sir.”

  “I have no appetite,” Wolfe growled.

  It was off a little. He only ate four Creole fritters with cheese sauce instead of the usual five.

  5

  So he pulled a mutiny, the first one in three years. His mutinies are like other people’s. Other people mutiny against the Army or Navy or some other authority, but he mutinies against himself. It was his house and his office, and he had taken the job, but now he turned his back on it. His discovery that the three stories had all been written by one person, which I admit was fairly neat, had backfired on him, and he quit. Of course business is never mentioned at the table, but from his mood I knew he was smoldering, so when we returned to the office after lunch I asked politely whether there would be instructions then or later.

  “Now,” he said. “You will see, at your convenience and theirs, Miss Porter, Miss Ogilvy, Mr. Jacobs, and Mr. Rennert. In whatever order you prefer. Make their acquaintance.”

  I stayed polite. “It will be a pleasure to meet them. What are we to talk about?”

  “Whatever occurs to you. I have never known you to be short of words.”

  “How about bringing them, one at a time, to make your acquaintance?”

  “No.”

  “I see.” I stood and looked down at him. That annoys him because he has to tilt his head to look up. “It must be wonderful to be a genius. Like that singer, Doria Ricco, whenever anything goes wrong she just walks out. Then she has a press conference. Shall I set one up for six o’clock? You could tell them that a great artist like you can’t be expected to take a setback which any ordinary detective would only—”

  “You will please keep your remarks to yourself.”

  So it was a mutiny, not just a passing peeve. If he had merely barked at me “Shut up!” as he does two or three times a week, I would have known he would snap out of it in an hour or so and go to work, but that was bad. It would take time, no telling how much. And he left his chair, crossed to the bookshelves, took a volume of Shakespeare from the set, returned to his seat, leaned back, and opened the book. Bowing out not only from the case, but from the country and the century. I went. Leaving the room and the house, I walked to Ninth Avenue and flagged a taxi and told the driver 632 West 21st Street.

  That building was a tenement not only as defined in the New York Tenement House Act, but also as what people usually mean when they say “tenement.” It was a dump. Having decided in the taxi how to start a conversation with Simon Jacobs, I found his name in the row, next to the top, and pressed the button. When the click sounded I pushed the door open, entered, and went to the stairs and started up, smelling garlic. The smell of garlic in Spanish sauce as Fritz makes it is a come-on, but in a tenement hall where it has been seeping into the plaster for fifty years it’s a pinch-nose. The best way is to pull in a long deep breath of it immediately and then your insides know it’s hopeless.

  Three flights up a woman was standing at an open door near the front of the hall, with a boy, nine or ten, at her elbow. As I approached, the boy said, “Oh, it’s not Tommy,” and disappeared. I asked the woman, “Mrs. Jacobs?”

  She nodded. She was a surprise. Simon Jacobs, now sixty-two, had been fifty-one when he had married in 1948, but she was no crone. There wasn’t a wrinkle showing, and there was no sign of gray in her soft brown hair. When I told her my name and I would like to speak with her husband, and she said he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working and would I please tell her what I wanted, and I said I wasn’t selling anything, it was a business matter and might be to his advantage, she turned and went, leaving the door open. After a long moment he appeared, a good likeness to the photograph—thin and scrawny, with enough wrinkles for two, and, as Title House’s lawyer had said, hair like Mark Twain’s.

  “Well, sir?” A thin high voice would have fitted him, but his was deep and full.

  “My name’s Goodwin, Mr. Jacobs.”

  “So my wife said.”

  “I’m on the staff of a magazine with national circulation. I won’t name it until I find out if you’re interested in an idea we are considering. May I come in?”

  “That depends. I’m right in the middle of a story. I don’t want to be rude, but what’s the idea?”

  “Well—we thought we might ask you to do an article for us. About how it feels to have a story you have written stolen by another author and turned into a best-seller. We thought ‘Plot It Yourself’ might be a good title for it. I’d like to tell you how we think it might be handled, and we can discuss—”

  He shut the door in my face. You may think I’m not much of a detective, that an experienced snoop should have had sense enough to have it blocked with his foot, but in the first place it was totally unexpected, and in the second place you don’t block a door unless you’re on the offensive. So I merely put my thumb to my nose and wiggled my fingers, turned, and made for the stairs. When I got to the sidewalk I took a long, deep breath to let my insides know they could relax. Then I walked to Tenth Avenue, stopped a taxi, and told the driver 37th and Lexington.

  That building, between Lexington and Third, was a house of a different color. It may have been nearly as old as the 21st Street tenement, but it had used make-up. Its brick front was painted silver-gray with bright blue trim, the doorframe was aluminum, and there were evergreens in boxes. There were eight names on the panel in the vestibule, two tenants to a floor, with a grill to talk through and a receiver on a hook. I pushed the button opposite Rennert and put the receiver to my ear, and in a moment had a crackle and then a voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “You don’t know me. My name’s Goodwin. Nothing to sell. I may want to buy something.”

  “Bill Goodwin?”

  “No. Archie Goodwin.”

  “Archie? Not by any chance Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin?”

  “In person.”

  “Well, well! I often wonder what detectives buy one-half so precious as the goods they sell. Come on up and tell me! Top floor.”

  I hung up and turned, and when the buzz sounded opened the door and entered. More aluminum, framing the self-service elevator. I stepped in and pushed the “4” button and was lifted. When it stopped and the door opened he was there in the little hall, shirt sleeves rolled up and no tie, virile, muscular, handsome, looking younger than thirty-four. I took his offered hand and returned his manly grip and was ushered through a door and was in the nice big room. It was even nicer and bigger than the report had led me to expect. He had me take a nice big chair and asked, “Scotch, rye, bourbon, gin?”

  I declined with thanks, and he sat on a nice big couch which probably doubled as a bed. “This is a pleasure,” he said, “unless you want my fingerprints to compare them with the ones you found on the dagger that was sticking in the back of the corpse. I swear I didn’t do it. I always stab people in front. I like that suit. Matthew Jonas?”

  I told him no, Peter Darrell. “Fingerprints wouldn’t help,” I said. “There were none on the dagger. It was one of those old Arabian antiques with a fancy handle. What I told you was straight. I may want to buy something—or rather, a client of Nero Wolfe’s may. He’s a guy with money who wants more. He gets ideas. He has the idea that he might like to buy your claim against Mortimer Oshin and Al Friend for stealing your play outline, ‘A Bushel of Love,’ and turning it into A Barrel of Love. He might pay ten thousand cash for an assignment of the claim and your affidavit supporting it, and another ten thousand if and when Oshin and Friend pay up. Of course he would expect you to testify without a subpoena if it goes to trial.”

  “Well, well.” He stretched a leg on the couch. “Who is this fairy godfather?”

  “A client of Mr. Wolfe’s. We handled a problem for him once, not this land. If we agree on a deal you’ll meet him. The ten thousand is ready in bills.”

  “What if they never pay up?”

  “Tha
t’s his risk. He would be out ten grand.”

  “Nuts. They’ll pay. They’ll pay ten times ten. At least.”

  “Possibly,” I conceded. “Some day. If it goes to trial, there’ll be lawyers’ fees and other expenses.”

  “Well.” He put his other leg up. “Tell him I might be interested. I’m willing to meet him and discuss it with him.”

  I shook my head. “I’m here to discuss it. The reason he got Mr. Wolfe to handle it, there are a couple of little details to arrange. For one, he would like to have some evidence in his possession that that’s not the only dramatic plot you ever hatched. That should be easy. I suppose you have copies of some of your television scripts.”

  “Sure. All of them.”

  “Fine. That would settle that. The other one, if it gets to court, it would help a lot to have some backing for your testimony that you wrote the outline with your name on it that was found in Jack Sandler’s office files, and the best backing would be to produce the typewriter that you wrote it on. Our client would want it. Of course he would pay you for it.”

  “That would be sweet of him.”

  “He’s not sweet. Between you and me, I don’t like him.”

  “Neither do I. He stole my play.” His legs swung around and he was on his feet. “All right, Hawkshaw. Beat it.”

  I stayed put. “Now listen, Mr, Rennert. I can understand how you—”

  “I said beat it.” He took a step. “Do you want help?”

  I arose and took two steps, and was facing him at arm’s length. “Would you like to try?”

  I was hoping he would. Wolfe’s mutiny had put me in a humor that would have made it a pleasure to take a swing at somebody, and this character was the right size and build to make it not only a pleasure but good exercise. He didn’t oblige me. His eyes stayed with mine, but he backed up a foot.

  “I don’t want to get blood on the rug,” he said.

  I turned and went. As I was opening the door he called to my back, “Tell Mortimer Oshin this is like one of his lousy plots!” The elevator was still there, and I stepped in and pushed the button.