Prisoner's Base (11 page)

“I don’t know. I wish you—don’t do this!”

“This is what I came for. It may amount to nothing. The police may get it fast, today or tomorrow, and if so that settles it. But they may never get it, that has been known to happen, and a week or a month from now may be too late for Mr. Wolfe to start on it, and anyhow his client won’t wait. We can’t march in as the cops can. We have to have some way of getting at those people, we have to get a foot in, and this will do it. I’ll tell you, Mrs. Jaffee, I’m not going to contribute any cracks about your accepting dividend checks, but it is true that that business has been supporting you in pretty good style for a long time, and this isn’t much for it to ask in return, especially since you can be darned sure Priscilla Eads would be asking it too if she could talk. It won’t take—”

I stopped because only a sap goes on talking to someone who is walking out on him. As she left the divan and started off she said nothing, but she sure was walking out. At an arch at the far end of the room she turned and spoke. “I won’t do it! I won’t do that!”

She was gone. A moment later the sound came of a door closing—not slamming, but firmly closing. After standing and considering a little, and deciding that I was out of ammunition for that target at that time and place, I moved in the opposite direction to the one she
had taken, to the entrance foyer. Crossing it, my eye caught the hat on the table and the coat on the back of the chair.

What the hell, I thought, and picked them up and took them along.

I
t was going on noon when, having made three stops en route, I paid off my hackie at the corner of Twenty-ninth and Lexington and walked east. The first stop had been at a drugstore to phone Wolfe and report lack of progress; the second had been at the Salvation Army depot to donate the coat and hat; and the third had been at the restaurant where, according to Lon Cohen, Andreas Fomos was employed as a waiter. Informed that Fomos was taking the day off, I had proceeded to his residence.

Not with any high expectations. My main hope had been to escort Sarah Jaffee to Thirty-fifth Street for a session with Wolfe and Nathaniel Parker, the only lawyer Wolfe has ever sent orchids to, arranging details about the injunction. Having flubbed that one, this stab at Fomos, as instructed by Wolfe, struck me as a damn poor substitute motion. So it was not with any enthusiasm for the errand, but merely as routine through long training, that as I approached the number on East Twenty-ninth Street I cased the area with a sharp and thorough eye, and, focusing on a spot across the street, recognized something. Crossing over, I entered a dingy and cluttered shoe-repair shop, and confronted a man
seated there who, at my approach, had lifted a newspaper so as to hide his face from view.

I addressed the newspaper distinctly. “Get Lieutenant Rowcliff. I think I’m going to impersonate an officer of the law. I feel it coming.”

The newspaper came down, disclosing the plump features, not quite puffy yet, of a city employee named Halloran. “You got good eyes,” he said, just stating a fact. “If you mean disrespect for the lieutenant you mentioned, go right ahead.”

“Some other time. Right now I’m working. I was glad to see you because I may be walking into a trap. If I don’t come out in three days, phone Rowcliff. Is this a really serious tail, or are you on him alone?”

“I came in here for a pair of shoestrings.”

I apologized for interrupting, left him, and headed across the street. Apparently Homicide had by no means wrapped it up, since they thought it necessary to keep an eye on Fomos, who, so far as I knew from what I had read in the papers, was involved only in that he had been bereaved; but surely Fomos wasn’t really hot or I would have got a very different reaction from Halloran.

It was a five-story old red brick building. In the row of names under the mailboxes at the right of the vestibule, Fomos was next to the end. I pressed the button, waited half a minute for the click to come, pushed the door open, entered, and made for the stairs. There were three doors on each landing, one at each end and one in the middle. Three flights up, the one at the far end was sporting a big rosette of black ribbon with streamers hanging nearly to the floor. I went to it and pressed the button, and in a moment a gruff deep voice came at me through the wood. “Who is it?”

On the theory that I deserved to take a little something
for an hour and a half’s hard work, I called, “A friend of Sarah Jaffee’s! My name’s Goodwin!”

Abruptly the door popped open, wide open, and standing there was Hercules, in white shorts, dazzling white in contrast to his dark skin and his tousled mop of coal-black hair. “I’m in mourning,” he said. “What do you want?”

“You’re Andreas Fomos?”

“I’m Andy Fomos. No one says Andreas. What do you want?”

“I want to ask if you know why Priscilla Eads was going to make your wife a director of Softdown, Incorporated.”

“What?” He cocked his head. “Say that again.”

I repeated it. When he was sure he had it he turned his palms up. “Look,” he rumbled. “I don’t believe it.”

“That’s what Miss Eads told Mrs. Jaffee last week, that she was going to make your wife a director. A week ago today.”

“I still don’t believe it. Look. That Priscilla Eads was mixed up with some bad stars. She went crazy every two years. I have studied the history of it and I had it written down, but the police wanted it and I let them have it. I only met my wife and married her two years ago, but she told me the whole story. The Greenwich Village, the New Orleans, the Peru with a husband, the back here without him and getting even with men, the Reno, the Salvation Army!” His hands went up. “I ask you! My wife was with her through all that. Now you say she was going to make my wife a director—did I say I don’t believe it? Of course I believe it, why not? With that Priscilla Eads I could believe anything; but I don’t know about it. What do you want?”

“We could talk better inside,” I suggested, “if you don’t mind.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“No. I—”

“Are you a cop?”

“No. I work—”

I don’t know how many hundreds of times people have undertaken to close doors on me, but often enough so that my reaction has become routine and automatic—in fact, too automatic. When Andy Fomos jerked aside and started swinging the door to, my foot went out as usual, ready to hold the floor against pressure as usual, but with him usual wasn’t good enough. He was even faster and stronger than he looked, and instead of bringing his weight to it, which would have taken an extra half-second, he used muscle, and plenty. Before I could catch up the door banged shut and the lock clicked, and I was standing there with my nose flattened and a big scar across the polished toe of my second-best Bradley shoes.

I took my time descending the three flights to the ground floor. I was not buoyant. Whenever Wolfe sends me out to bring in something or someone, I like to deliver if possible, but I don’t expect to pass miracles. On this one, though, it was beginning to look as if nothing less than a miracle would do, and this was not merely a matter of satisfying a client and collecting a fee. I was the client, and I had roped Wolfe in. It was up to me. But it wasn’t like the day before, when I had been on my own and could take a notion to roll down to the Softdown building and crash a meeting; now Wolfe was handling it, and no notion of mine would count without his okay. Added to that, as I made the sidewalk and turned right, deciding not to check out with Halloran across the street, was the difficulty that I had nothing
remotely resembling a notion. At Lexington Avenue I got a taxi.

I did not like the way Wolfe took it. When I entered the office alone and announced that as far as I knew no company was expected, then or later, he grunted, settled back in his chair, and requested a verbatim report. Throughout the performance, covering all words and actions with both Sarah Jaffee and Andreas Fomos, he was motionless, his eyes closed and his fingers laced at the summit of his belly, and that was all right; that was perfectly normal. But when I had finished he asked not a single question, only muttering at me, “You’d better type it.”

“You mean complete?” I demanded.

“Yes.”

“It’ll take all afternoon and maybe more.”

“I suppose so.”

It was true that it was lunchtime, not a moment to expect him to do any digging in, and I skipped it temporarily. But later, after we had been to the dining room and enjoyed a good meal, during which he furnished me with pointed comments on all of the prominent candidates for the Republican nomination for President, I tried again. As he got comfortable with a magazine in his chair behind his desk I remarked, “I could use a program if you can spare the time.”

He glared, mildly. “I asked you to type that report.”

“Yeah, I heard you. But that was only a stall, and you know it. If you want me to sit here on the back of my lap until you feel like thinking of something to do, just say so. What’s the use of wasting a lot of paper and wearing out the typewriter?”

He lowered the magazine. “Archie. You may remember that I once returned a retainer of forty thousand dollars which a client named Zimmermann had
paid me, because he wanted to tell me how to handle his case instead of leaving it to me. Well?” He lifted the magazine. He lowered it again. “Please type the report.” He lifted it again.

It was absolutely true, and it sounded extremely noble the way he put it, but I was not impressed. He simply hated to work and didn’t intend to if he could get out of it. He had given me a chance to get something started, and I had returned empty-handed, and now there was no telling when—or if—he would really get on the job. I sat and looked at him with his damn magazine. It would have been a pleasure to take a gun from the drawer and shoot it out of his hand, and at that angle it would have been quite safe, but I regretfully decided it was inadvisable. Also I decided that nothing I could say or do would budge him right then. I had only two alternatives: take another leave of absence, or obey orders and get busy on the report. I swiveled, pulled the typewriter to me, got paper and twirled it in, and hit the keys.

Three and a half hours later, at six o’clock, several things had happened. I had typed nine pages. Four journalists had called on the phone, and two in person—not admitted. Fritz had asked me to help him move some furniture in the front room so he could roll up the rug to send to the cleaners, and I had obliged. Wolfe had gone up at four o’clock for his two hours in the plant rooms, and soon afterward there had been a phone call—not from a journalist. I do not gush to strangers on the phone when they ask for an appointment with Wolfe, but when I learned that one’s name and the nature of his business it was hard not to. I told him to come at ten minutes to six, and when he arrived, on the dot, I put him in the front room and closed the door that connected with the office.

When Wolfe came down, on schedule, and crossed to his desk, I thought it only fair to give him a chance to show that he had snapped out of it. But no. He sat and rang for beer, and when Fritz brought it he opened a bottle, poured, selected one from the stack of current books on his desk, leaned back, and sighed comfortably. He was going to have a wonderful time until Fritz announced dinner.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said gently. “There’s a man in the front room waiting to see you.”

His head turned, and a frown appeared. “Who?”

“Well, it’s like this. As you explained last night, you had to have some kind of a wedge to start an opening, and this morning I went out to get one and failed. Seeing how disappointed you were, I felt that I must somehow meet the challenge. I have met it. The man in there is a lawyer named Albert M. Irby, with an office on Forty-first Street. I phoned Parker, and he had never heard of Irby but reported back that he is a member of the New York bar in good standing. As for Irby, he says that he is representing Eric Hagh, the former husband of Priscilla Eads, and he would like to talk with you.”

“Where the devil did you get him?” It was a blurt of indignation.

“I didn’t exactly get him. He came. He phoned for an appointment at four-twenty-one.”

“What does he want?”

“To talk with you. Since you don’t like a client horning in on a case, I didn’t press him for particulars.”

Thereupon Wolfe paid me a high compliment. He gazed at me with a severely suspicious eye. Obviously he suspected me of pulling a fast one—of somehow, in less than two hours, digging up Albert M. Irby and his
connection with Priscilla Eads, and shanghaiing him. I didn’t mind, but I thought it well to be on record.

“No, sir,” I said firmly.

He grunted. “You don’t know what he wants?”

“No, sir.”

He tossed the book aside. “Bring him in.”

It was a pleasure to go for that lawyer and usher him in to the red leather chair, but I must admit that physically he was nothing to flaunt. I have never seen a balder man, and his hairless freckled dome had a peculiar attraction. It was covered with tiny drops of sweat, and nothing ever happened to them. He didn’t touch them with a handkerchief, they didn’t get larger or merge and trickle, and they didn’t dwindle. They just stood pat. There was nothing repulsive about them, but after ten minutes or so the suspense was quite a strain.

Sitting, he put his briefcase on the little table at his elbow. “Right off,” he said, in a voice that could have used more vinegar and less oil, “I want to put myself in your hands. I’m not in your class, Mr. Wolfe, and I won’t pretend I am. I’ll just tell you how it stands, and whatever you say goes.”

It was a bad start if he expected any favors. Wolfe compressed his lips. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” He was sitting forward in the big chair. “I appreciate your seeing me, but I am not surprised, because I know of your great services in the cause of justice, and that’s what I want, justice for a client. His name is Eric Hagh. I was asked to represent him by an attorney in Venezuela, in Caracas, with whom I had previously had dealings—his name is Juan Blanco. That was—”

“Spell it, please?” I requested, notebook in hand.