Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 32 Read online

  On the sidewalk I looked at my wrist: 4:05. Carmel was only a ninety-minute drive, and it would be good for my nerves, but I would phone first. What was Alice Porter’s number? I stood at the curb and closed my eyes and concentrated, and dug it out of the cell that had filed it. Around the corner on Lexington Avenue I found a booth, dialed, counted fourteen rings, and hung up. No answer. I settled for a shorter drive. I hoofed it crosstown to Tenth Avenue and a block south to the garage, got the Heron sedan, which was Wolfe’s by purchase but mine by mandate, and headed for the West Side Highway.

  It was now twenty to one in my book, or maybe thirty to one, that Kenneth Rennert was not it. Whoever had planned and handled the campaign, writing the stories and picking the accomplices and taking advantage of the different circumstances for planting the manuscripts, was no fumbler, but Rennert was. Having suspected, or decided, that Mortimer Oshin was Wolfe’s client and I was trying to slip one over, which had not required any strain on the brain, if he had been half smart he would have played me along instead of bouncing me. He was just one of the chorus, not the star. I had filed him away by the time I left the Henry Hudson Parkway at Exit Eleven.

  Riverdale, whose streets were planned by someone who couldn’t stand the idea of a straight line, is a jungle for a stranger, but I had a good map and only had to turn around twice on my way to 78 Haddon Place. Rolling to the curb in front, I gave it a look. There was too much bigger stuff, everything from tulip beds up to full-grown trees, to leave much room for lawns, but what grass there was would have been fine for putting practice. The house was stone up to your chin and then dark brown wood with the boards running up and down instead of horizontal. Very classy. I got out and started up the walk.

  Hearing music as I neared the entrance, I stopped and cocked an ear. Not from inside; from the left. I took to the grass, rounded a corner of the house, passed a row of windows, turned another corner, and stepped onto a flagged terrace. The music, coming from a portable radio on a chair, had an audience of one: Jane Ogilvy. She was stretched out on a mat, on her back, with none of her skin covered except minimum areas at the two vital spots. Her eyes were closed. The deduction I had made from the photographs, in which she had been dressed, that she had a nice little figure, was confirmed. She even had good knees.

  I was deciding whether to retreat around the corner and make another approach with sound effects, or stay put and cough, when her eyes suddenly opened and her head turned. She squinted at me five seconds and spoke. “I knew someone had come. The felt presence though not perceived. You’re real, I suppose?”

  It was strange. It wasn’t like a hunch; it was more as if I had asked a question and she had answered it. When Wolfe had eliminated her because of her testimony at the trial and the three poems she had read, I had had my doubts, but those few words from her settled it. If Rennert was now thirty to one, she was a thousand to one.

  “Don’t speak,” she said, “even if you’re real. There’s nothing you could say that would be worthy of the moment when I felt you here. You may think I heard you, but I didn’t. My ears were filled with the music, all of me was, when I felt you. If it were the Eve of Saint Agnes—but it isn’t, and I am not supperless, and I’m not in bed.… But what if your name were Porphyro? Is it—no, don’t speak! Are you going to come closer?”

  I agreed with her absolutely. There was nothing I could say that would be worthy of the occasion. Besides, my name wasn’t Porphyro. But I didn’t want to turn and go with no response at all, so I reached to the trellis beside me and picked a red rose, pressed it to my lips, and tossed it to her. Then I went.

  At a phone booth in a drugstore a few blocks away I dialed Alice Porter’s number in Carmel, and again there was no answer. That left me with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Of course Wolfe’s idea in telling me to go and make the acquaintance of the quartet had been simply to get rid of me, since he knew that if I stuck around I would ride him; and even if I didn’t ride him I would look at him. So I dialed another number, got an answer, made a suggestion about ways of passing the time for the next eight or nine hours, and had it accepted. Then I dialed the number I knew best and told Fritz I wouldn’t be home for dinner. It was well after midnight when I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone on West 35th Street and used my key. There was no note for me on my desk. I left one in the kitchen for Fritz, telling him not to expect me for breakfast until ten o’clock. I can always use eight hours’ sleep, and if Wolfe snapped out of it during the night he knew where to find me.

  When I went down to breakfast Friday morning I had a packed bag with me, and at a quarter to eleven I took my second cup of coffee to the office, to my desk, and buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone. Wolfe’s voice came. “Yes?”

  “Good morning.” I was cheerful. “You may remember that I have accepted an invitation for the weekend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Should I call it off?”

  “No.”

  “Then I have a suggestion. I saw three of them yesterday, Jacobs and Rennert and Miss Ogilvy, but not Alice Porter. She didn’t answer her phone. As you know, Miss Rowan’s place, where I’m going, is near Katonah, and it’s less than half an hour from there to Carmel. Miss Rowan expects me at six o’clock. If I leave now I can go to Carmel first and have the afternoon for making the acquaintance of Miss Porter.”

  “Is there anything in the mail that requires attention?”

  “No. Nothing that can’t wait.”

  “Then go.”

  “Right. I’ll be back late Sunday evening. Do you want a report on the three I saw before I go?”

  “No. If you had anything exigent to report you would have said so.”

  “Sure. Miss Rowan’s phone number is on your desk. I’ll give her your regards. Don’t overdo.”

  He hung up. The big fat bum. I wrote the phone number on his memo pad, went to the kitchen to tell Fritz good-by, got my bag, and was gone.

  There is always traffic on the West Side Highway, twenty-four hours a day, but it thinned out beyond the city limits, and north of Hawthorne Circle I had long stretches to myself. After leaving Route 22 at Croton Falls and meandering through patches of woods and along shores of reservoirs for a few miles, I stopped for an hour at the Green Fence, known to me, where a woman with a double chin fries chicken the way my Aunt Margie did out in Ohio. Fritz does not fry chicken. At two o’clock I was rolling again, with only a couple of miles to go.

  There was no point in phoning, since I was there anyway, but I almost had to, to find out where her cottage was. The cop on Main Street had never heard of Alice Porter. The man in the drugstone had, he had put up prescriptions for her, but didn’t know where she lived. The man at the filling station thought her place was out toward Kent Cliffs but wasn’t sure. He advised me to consult Jimmy Murphy, who ran a taxi. Jimmy rattled it off: a mile and a half west on Route 301, right on a blacktop for a mile, right on dirt for half a mile, mailbox on the right.

  It checked. The half a mile of dirt was uphill, winding, narrow, and stony. The mailbox was at the mouth of a lane, even narrower, through a gap in a stone fence, no gate. I turned in and eased my way along the ruts to where the lane ended in front of a little house painted blue, one story. There was no car in sight. As I climbed out and shut the door a little bicolored mutt trotted up and started to growl, but his curiosity to see what I smelled like close up was too much for him, and the growl petered out. I reached down and scratched the back of his neck, and we were pals. He went with me to help knock on the door, and when, after knocking got no response, I tried the knob and found it was locked, he was as disappointed as I was.

  With my years of training as a detective, I reached a conclusion. Dogs have to be fed. There was no other house in sight, no nearby neighbor to pinch-feed for Alice Porter. Therefore she would return. A top-drawer detective, say Nero Wolfe, could have found out exactly when she would return by looking at the dog’s teeth and feeling its belly, but I’m not in that class. I loo
ked over the grounds—four young trees and half a dozen shrubs scattered here and there—and then moseyed around to the back. There was a neat little vegetable garden, no weeds, and I pulled some radishes and ate them. Then I went to the car and got a book from my bag, I forget what, but it wasn’t The Moth That Ate Peanuts, sat on one of two garden chairs in the shade of the house, and read. The mutt curled up at my feet and shut his eyes.

  She came at 5:28. A ’58 Ford station wagon came bumping along the ruts and stopped back of the Heron, and she scrambled out and headed for me. The mutt went bounding to meet her, and she halted to give him a pat. I shut my book and stood up.

  “You looking for me?” she asked.

  “I am if you’re Miss Alice Porter,” I said.

  She knew who I was. It’s easy to make a mistake on a thing like that, I had made plenty in my time, but it was in her eyes that she had recognized me or I had better quit the detective business and take up truck-driving or window-washing. That was nothing startling; it happened now and then. My picture hadn’t been in the papers as often as President Eisenhower’s, but it had once made the front page of the Gazette.

  “That’s my name,” she said.

  From her photograph I had guessed 150, but she had put on ten pounds. Her round face was bigger and her nose smaller, and her eyes were closer together. There was sweat on her brow.

  “Mine’s Archie Goodwin,” I said. “I work for Nero Wolfe, the private detective. Could you give me maybe ten minutes?”

  “I can if you’ll wait till I put some stuff in the refrigerator. While I’m doing that you might get your car around back of mine. Take it easy on the grass.”

  I did so. The grass was nothing like that at 78 Haddon Place, but no doubt she would see to that after she collected from Amy Wynn. I moved the Heron forward a car length, cramped the wheels and backed, and swung around past the Ford and back into the ruts. She had got an armload of bags from the Ford, declining my offer to help, and entered the house. I returned to the chair, and soon she came out and took the other one.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “If you’re Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe sent you clear out here, it’s not hard to guess what for. Or I should say who for. I might as well come right out with it. The Victory Press has hired him, or Amy Wynn has, to try to find something wrong about my claim for damages. If that’s what it is you’ve wasted a lot of gas. I’m not going to talk about it, not a word. I may not be very bright, but I’m not exactly a fool. Unless you came to make an offer. I’ll listen to that.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not a very good guess, Miss Porter, It’s about your claim against Amy Wynn, that much is okay, but she hasn’t hired Mr. Wolfe and neither has the Victory Press. I’m here on behalf of a New York newspaper that’s looking for a scoop. Nothing has been published about your claim, so I don’t know how the paper got onto it, but you know how that is, word gets around. What the paper is after, it wants to publish your story, ‘Opportunity Knocks,’ on which you base your claim, with an introductory statement by you. It wants to know how much you will take for what it calls first serial rights, and it’s not breaking any confidence to tell you that you can go pretty high. The reason they got Nero Wolfe to handle it instead of coming to you direct is that they want him to check on certain details. You understand that; it’s sort of tricky.”

  “There’s nothing tricky about my claim.”

  “I didn’t say there is. But there would be a risk of a libel suit against the paper, whether there is ground for it or not. Of course before the paper makes a definite commitment it would want to see the story. Mr. Wolfe thought you might have a carbon copy and would let me take it. Have you got one?”

  Her eyes met mine. They had been slanting off, first in one direction and then another, but now they came to me straight. “You’re pretty good,” she said.

  “Thanks.” I grinned at her. “I like to think so, but of course I’m biased. Good how?”

  “Good with your tongue. I’ll have to think it over. I’ll do that. I’ll think it over. Right now, as I said, I’m not going to talk about it. Not a word.” She arose.

  “But that was when you thought Mr. Wolfe had been hired by the Victory Press or Amy Wynn.”

  “I don’t care who hired him, I’m not talking. You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got things to do.” She headed for the door of the house. The mutt glanced at me and then at her, decided she was the best bet, and trotted after her. I went and got in the car and started the engine. On the stretch of blacktop a man with a bunch of wild columbine in his hand was following a herd of forty-seven cows (actual count; a detective is supposed to observe) who all had the same idea, that they would rather get hit by a Heron sedan than get milked, and it took me five minutes to get through.

  Saturday afternoon at Lily Rowan’s place, or it may have been Sunday afternoon, when half a dozen of us were loafing in the sun by the swimming pool, I told them about the incident on the terrace at Riverdale, leaving out the name and address and why I was there, and asked if they thought she was batty. The three women voted no and the two men yes, and of course that proved something but I still haven’t decided what.

  At midnight Sunday, full of air and with a sunburned nose, I dropped my bag in the hall of the old brownstone, went to the office, and found a note on my desk:

  AG:

  Mr. Harvey phoned Saturday morning. He will come with his committee Monday at 11:15.

  NW

  6

  This time there were seven instead of six. In addition to the three from the BPA—Gerald Knapp, Thomas Dexter, and Reuben Imhof—and the three from NAAD—Amy Wynn, Mortimer Oshin, and Philip Harvey—there was a middle-aged woman named Cora Ballard whose spine stayed as stiff as a poker both standing and sitting. Harvey had explained that she was not a committee member but was there ex officio. She was the executive secretary of the NAAD. Harvey had seen to it that she was seated next to him, at his left. I had noted glances directed at her by Dexter and Knapp which led me to suspect that in a national poll to choose the Secretary of the Year the book publishers’ vote would not go to Cora Ballard, and her return glances indicated that she most certainly wouldn’t want it to. She had a stenographer’s notebook on her lap and a pencil in her hand.

  Philip Harvey, in the red leather chair, was yawning, probably because he had had to get up and out before noon for the second time in a week. Gerald Knapp was explaining that he had been willing to cancel two appointments in order to be present because he agreed with Mr. Imhof that the charge now made by Alice Porter against Amy Wynn and the Victory Press made it imperative that immediate and vigorous action be taken, and he agreed with Mr. Harvey that they should see Mr. Wolfe in a body to learn what progress had been made. Wolfe, his lips pressed tight, sat and scowled at him.

  “That is,” Knapp finished, “if there has been any progress. Has there?”

  “No,” Wolfe said. “To the contrary. There has been regress.”

  They all stared. Cora Ballard said, “Really.” Mortimer Oshin demanded, “How the hell could there be?”

  Wolfe took a breath. “I’ll explain briefly, and if you would like me to return the five thousand dollars you have advanced you have only to say so. I told you last Tuesday that this may be a laborious and costly operation; it now appears that it may take more labor than I am prepared to give, and cost more than you are prepared to pay. You were assuming that Alice Porter’s success in hoodwinking Ellen Sturdevant had led others to imitate her, but you were wrong. Alice Porter was merely a tool, and so were Simon Jacobs, Jane Ogilvy, and Kenneth Rennert.”

  Cora Ballard looked up from her notebook. “Did you say ‘tool’?”

  “I did. Two steps brought me to that conclusion. The first resulted from my examination of the stories used by the three first-named as the bases of their claims. They were all written by the same person. The internal evidence—diction, syntax, paragraphing—is ineluctable. You are professional word-and-language people; s
tudy those stories and you’ll all agree with me.”

  “I’m not a writer,” Cora Ballard said. “I just work for writers.”

  “Not for,” Harvey corrected her. “You work with writers and on writers.” To Wolfe: “This is important, if true. I want to compare those stories.”

  “It’s not only important,” Knapp declared, “it’s remarkable. It seems to me you have made progress.”

  “So it seemed to me,” Wolfe said, “until I took the next step. All that remained, it seemed, was to learn which of the three had written the stories; then it would be simple. I procured a book written by Alice Porter, and one written by Simon Jacobs, and studied them, and I reread the testimony Jane Ogilvy had given on the witness stand, including the three poems she had recited. I shall not expound; I merely state that I am convinced that none of them wrote the stories.”

  “But damn it,” Imhof objected, “somebody did! And now Alice Porter is repeating.”

  “By God,” Oshin exclaimed, squashing a cigarette, “Rennert! Kenneth Rennert!”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I doubt it. The reasons for my doubt are not conclusive, but they are cogent.” He upturned a palm. “So. When you left here six days ago I thought I had four culprits to expose. When I had read the stories I thought I had just one and he could be easily identified; the others were only tools. That was progress. Now there is still just one, but who and where is he? The only approach to him, the only hope of finding him, is through the contacts he must have made with his tools. That kind of investigation does not fit my talents, and it will probably be prolonged and expensive. It will demand an exhaustive and meticulous inquiry into the movements and associations of those three people—four, with Kenneth Rennert included. That is regress.”

  “Do you mean you’re quitting?” Dexter asked.

  “I mean that it no longer seems to be my kind of job. To do it properly and with expedition at least a dozen competent operatives will be needed, with competent supervision. That will cost six hundred dollars a day or more, plus expenses, seven days a week. I would not supervise such an operation. But I should finish my report. As I told Mr. Harvey on the phone on Saturday, I sent Mr. Goodwin to call on those four people, and he has seen them. Archie?”