Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24 (9 page)

Cramer rose to his feet, shot a glance to his right to make sure Sergeant Stebbins was standing by, and moved to plant himself in front of Wolfe.

“Yeah, look at him now,” he growled, “and look at you! You and your helpful comments! That bargain you offered him—you say it’s inconceivable that he could have been such an ass as to agree to it if he had thought Lewent was still alive. Okay, but what about you? It’s also inconceivable that you could have been such an ass as to offer it if you had thought Lewent was still alive. God knows I could call you plenty of things, but not an ass. That stunt Goodwin pulled to get you up here—don’t try to tell me he would have pulled it, or that you would have come, if you hadn’t both known Lewent had been murdered! I want a comment on that!”

“Pfui,” Wolfe said mildly. “Don’t you think you have enough on your hands without—”

He stopped to watch a performance, and this time it went to show how women’s minds work. Mrs. O’Shea was on her feet and moving, slowly as if in a trance, toward her employer, with tears streaming from her eyes and down her cheeks and her arms crossed on her chest. She stopped three steps short of him.

“This is from heaven,” she said, in so low a voice that she could barely be heard. “The terror in my heart—oh, God, so long! You lied to me, and somewhere in me I knew it all the time! She did find out about us—she found out and told you so, and you killed her. Thank heaven, oh, thank heaven—”

Inspector Cramer was there and had her elbow. Another woman’s mind was working too. Sylvia Marcy left the couch, walked across through the group to the wheelchair, and placed an object on Theodore Huck’s lap, on top of the maroon quilt. It was after she had moved away and started
for the door that I saw what the object was—a wristwatch with a ring of red stones, maybe rubies.

I can’t report on the fate of the other two gifts whose presentation had been precipitated by my presence. Months have passed, and only last week a jury convicted Theodore Huck of first-degree murder, but as far as I know Mrs. O’Shea and Miss Riff still have their watches.

The Zero Clue

It began with a combination of circumstances, but what doesn’t? To mention just one, if there hadn’t been a couple of checks to deposit that morning I might not have been in that neighborhood at all.

But I was, and, approving of the bright sun and the sharp clear air as I turned east off Lexington Avenue into Thirty-seventh Street, I walked some forty paces to the number and found it was a five-story yellow brick, clean and neat, with greenery in tubs flanking the entrance. I went in. The lobby, not much bigger than my bedroom, had a fancy rug, a fireplace without a fire, more greenery, and a watchdog in uniform who challenged me with a suspicious look.

As I opened my mouth to meet his challenge, circumstances combined. A big guy in a dark blue topcoat and homburg, entering from the street, breezed past me, heading for the elevator, and as he did so the elevator door opened and a girl emerged. Four of us in that undersized lobby made a crowd, and we had to maneuver. Meanwhile I was speaking to the watchdog.

“My name’s Goodwin, and I’m calling on Leo Heller.”

Gazing at me, his expression changing, he blurted at me, “Ain’t you Archie Goodwin works for Nero Wolfe?”

The girl, making for the exit, stopped a step short of it and turned, and the big guy, inside the elevator, blocked the door from closing and stuck his head out, while the
watchdog was going on, “I’ve saw your picture in the paper, and look, I want Nero Wolfe’s autograph.”

It would have been more to the point if he had wanted mine, but I’m no hog. The man in the elevator, which was self-service, was letting the door close, but the girl was standing by, and I hated to disappoint her by denying I was me, as of course I would have had to do if I had been there on an operation that needed cover.

I’ll have to let her stand there a minute while I explain that I was actually not on an operation at all. Chiefly, I was satisfying my curiosity. At five in the afternoon the day before, in Nero Wolfe’s office, there had been a phone call. After taking it I had gone to the kitchen—where Fritz was boning a pig’s head for what he calls
fromage de cochon
—to get a glass of water, and told Fritz I was going upstairs to do a little yapping.

“He is so happy up there,” Fritz protested, but there was a gleam in his eye. He knows darned well that if I quit yapping the day would come when there would be no money in the bank to meet the payroll, including him.

I went up three flights, on past the bedroom floors to the roof, where ten thousand square feet of glass in aluminum frames make a home for ten thousand orchid plants. The riot of color on the benches of the three rooms doesn’t take my breath any more, but it is unquestionably a show, and as I went through that day I kept my eyes straight ahead to preserve my mood for yapping intact. However, it was wasted. In the intermediate room Wolfe stood massively, with an Odontoglossum seedling in his hand, glaring at it, a mountain of cold fury, with Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, standing nearby with his lips tightened to a thin line.

As I approached, Wolfe transferred the glare to me and barked savagely, “Thrips!”

I did some fast mood shifting. There’s a time to yap and a time not to yap. But I went on.

“What do you want?” he rasped.

“I realize,” I said politely but firmly, “that this is ill timed, but I told Mr. Heller I would speak to you. He phoned—”

“Speak to me later! If at all!”

“I’m to call him back. It’s Leo Heller, the probability
wizard. He says that calculations have led him to suspect that a client of his may have committed a serious crime, but it’s only a suspicion and he doesn’t want to tell the police until it has been investigated, and he wants us to investigate. I asked for details, but he wouldn’t give them on the phone. I thought I might as well run over there now—it’s over on East Thirty-seventh Street—and find out if it looks like a job. He wouldn’t—”

“No!”

“My eardrums are not insured. No what?”

“Get out!” He shook the thrips-infested seedling at me. “I don’t want it! That man couldn’t hire me for any conceivable job on any imaginable terms! Get out!”

I turned, prompt but dignified, and went. If he had thrown the seedling at me I would of course have dodged, and the fairly heavy pot would have sailed on by and crashed into a cluster of Calanthes in full bloom, and God only knew what Wolfe would have done then.

On my way back down to the office I was wearing a grin. Even without the thrips, Wolfe’s reaction to my message would have been substantially the same, which was why I had been prepared to yap. The thrips had merely keyed it up. Leo Heller had been tagged by fame, with articles about him in magazines and Sunday newspapers. While making a living as a professor of mathematics at Underhill College, he had begun, for amusement, to apply the laws of probability, through highly complicated mathematical formulas, to various current events, ranging from ball games and horse races to farm crops and elections. Checking back on his records after a couple of years, he had been startled and pleased to find that the answers he had got from his formulas had been 86.3 per cent correct, and he had written a piece about it for a magazine. Naturally requests had started coming from all kinds of people for all kinds of calculations, and he had granted some of them to be obliging, but when he had tried telling a woman in Yonkers where to look for thirty-one thousand dollars in currency she had lost, and she had followed instructions and found it and had insisted on giving him two grand, he side-stepped to a fresh slant on the laws of probability as applied to human problems and resigned his professorship.

That had been three years ago, and now he was sitting
pretty. It was said that his annual take was in six figures, that he returned all his mail unanswered, accepting only clients who called in person, and that there was nothing on earth he wouldn’t try to dope a formula for, provided he was furnished with enough factors to make it feasible. It had been suggested that he should be hauled in for fortunetelling, but the cops and the DA’s office let it lay, as well they might, since he had a college degree and there were at least a thousand fortunetellers operating in New York who had never made it through high school.

It wasn’t known whether Heller was keeping his percentage up to 86.3, but I happened to know it wasn’t goose eggs. Some months earlier a president of a big corporation had hired Wolfe to find out which member of his staff was giving trade secrets to a competitor. I had been busy on another case at the time, and Wolfe had put Orrie Cather on the collection of details. Orrie had made a long job of it, and the first we knew we were told by the corporation president that he had got impatient and gone to Leo Heller with the problem, and Heller had cooked up a formula and come out with an answer, the name of one of the junior vice-presidents, and the junior VP had confessed! Our client freely admitted that most of the facts he had given Heller for the ingredients of his formula had been supplied by us, gathered by Orrie Cather, and he offered no objection to paying our bill, but Wolfe was so sore he actually told me to send no bill—an instruction I disregarded, knowing how he would regret it after he had cooled off. However, as I was aware through occasional mutterings from him, he still had it in for Leo Heller, and taking on any kind of job for him would have been absolutely off the program that day or any other day, even if there had been no thrips within a mile of Thirty-fifth Street.

Back downstairs in the office, I phoned Heller and told him nothing doing. “He’s extremely sensitive,” I explained, “and this is an insult. As you know, he’s the greatest detective that ever lived, and—do you know that?”

“I’m willing to postulate it,” Heller conceded in a thin voice that tended to squeak. “Why an insult?”

“Because you want to hire Nero Wolfe—meaning me, really—to collect facts on which you can base a decision
whether your suspicion about your client is justified. You might as well try to hire Stan Musial as bat boy. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t sell the raw material for answers; he sells answers.”

“I’m quite willing to pay him for an answer, any amount short of exorbitance, and in cash. I’m gravely concerned about this client, this situation, and my data is insufficient. I shall be delighted if with the data I get an answer from Mr. Wolfe, and—”

“And,” I put in, “if his answer is that your client has committed a serious crime, as you suspect, he decides whether and when to call a cop, not you. Yes?”

“Certainly.” Heller was eager to oblige. “I do not intend or desire to shield a criminal—on the contrary.”

“Okay. Then it’s like this. It wouldn’t do any good for me to take it up with Mr. Wolfe again today because his feelings have been hurt. But tomorrow morning I have to go to our bank on Lexington Avenue not far from your place, to deposit a couple of checks, and I could drop in to see you and get the sketch. I suspect that I make this offer mostly because I’m curious to see what you look like and talk like, but I haven’t enough data to apply the laws of probability to it. Frankly, I doubt if Mr. Wolfe will take this on, but we can always use money, and I’ll try to sell him. Shall I come?”

“What time?”

“Say a quarter past ten.”

“Come ahead. My business day begins at eleven. Take the elevator to the fifth floor. An arrow points right, to the waiting room, but go left to the door at the end of the hall, and push the button, and I’ll let you in. If you’re on time we’ll have more than half an hour.”

“I’m always on time.”

That morning I was a little early. It was nine minutes past ten when I entered the lobby on Thirty-seventh Street and gave the watchdog my name.

I told the watchdog I would try to get Nero Wolfe’s autograph for him, and wrote his name in my notebook: Nils Lamm. Meanwhile the girl stood there facing us, frowning
at us. She was twenty-three or -four, up to my chin, and without the deep frown her face would probably have deserved attention. Since she showed no trace of embarrassment, staring fixedly at a stranger, I saw no reason why I should, but something had to be said, so I asked her, “Do you want one?”

She cocked her head. “One what?”

“Autograph. Either Mr. Wolfe’s or mine, take your pick.”

“Oh. You are Archie Goodwin, aren’t you? I’ve seen your picture too.”

“Then I’m it.”

“I—” She hesitated, then made up her mind. “I want to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

Someone trotted in from the street, a brisk female in mink, executive type, between twenty and sixty, and the girl and I moved aside to clear the lane to the elevator. The newcomer told Nils Lamm she was seeing Leo Heller and refused to give her name, but when Lamm insisted she coughed it up: Agatha Abbey, she said, and he let her take the elevator. The girl told me she had been working all night and was tired, and we went to a bench by the fireplace. Close up, I would still have said twenty-three or -four, but someone or something had certainly been harassing her. Naturally there was a question in my mind about the night work.