Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 (12 page)

“Not at all. Until twenty minutes to six.”

“What did you do then?”

“I walked to Broadway and ate something in an Automat, and then went to 38th Street and Sixth Avenue, where we have a little office.”

“We?”

“Womon.”

“Oh. Do you often go there in the evening?”

“Nearly every day. I give all the money and time I
can spare. I left there around seven with a bundle of throwaways advertising a meeting we’re going to have, and handed them out on 42nd Street. I got back there a little after eight and stayed until ten o’clock, when we close the office.”

“So from seven to eight you were on 42nd Street handing out throwaways.”

“That’s right.”

“Wasn’t it raining? You did that in the rain?”

“Certainly. That’s the best time for it. People collect in entrances and doorways and you have a bigger percentage of takes.” Phil’s mouth twisted. “If you’re trying to get Amy out of trouble by getting me in, I don’t think it will work.”

“You mean you don’t care to be implicated in the murder of your foster father.”

“I not only don’t care to be, I’m not going to be.”

“Well, that’s a strong position if you can hold it. Don’t forget, though, that you have one bad weak spot: you are Arthur Tingley’s heir.”

“Heir?” The curl of Phil’s lip was the next thing to a snarl. “You call it heir? With the business, such as it is, in a trust controlled by three decrepit relics?”

“The business is good enough for a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cash offer. And I suppose Tingley had other property besides the business, didn’t he?”

“He did,” said Phil bitterly. “And the whole works is locked up in that trust. Even his house and furniture.”

“Were you aware of the contents of his will?”

“You bet I was. That was his favorite club to threaten and coerce me with.”

“It must have been very disagreeable.” Fox, looking sympathetic, arose to his feet. “Thank you very much, Mr. Tingley, though you didn’t give us much.”
He crossed to get his coat and hat. “Those things I want to ask you, Miss Duncan, they’ll have to wait. I’ll get in touch with you in the morning. See you later, Nat.” He turned to go, but was halted by a voice:

“Here, wait a minute!” Phil Tingley pulled something from his pocket and extended it in his hand. “That’s the Womon Statement of the Basic Requirements of a World Economy. Read it over. I’ll send you a set of our bulletins—”

“Much obliged.
Very
much obliged.” Fox took it and strode out.

Though he seemed to be in a hurry, he halted abruptly in the front room. Leonard Cliff was in a chair against the wall, reading an evening paper. Fox crossed to where Miss Larabee sat at her desk, and bent down to her as if the recent little episode with Miss Duncan had been habit-forming; but instead of kissing her he merely murmured in her ear:

“Has he been here all the time?”

Miss Larabee was apparently averse to whispering or murmuring in a man’s ear. With no hesitation or change of expression, she swiveled to her typewriter, twirled in a sheet of paper, typed on it, and twirled it out again and handed it to Fox. He read it:

“Thanks.” Fox folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. “I’ll let you know if I have news.” He stepped across to where Leonard Cliff sat.

“Mr. Cliff. You said in there, regarding the adulteration of the Tingley product, that you suspected
Consolidated Cereals because you knew how they worked.”

Cliff, his newspaper lowered, nodded. “I know I did. I was indiscreet. But you promised to treat it as confidential.”

“I will. That is, I won’t disclose it where it isn’t already known. In a conversation I had with Arthur Tingley on Monday, he too mentioned Consolidated Cereals. Are they major competitors of yours?”

“Not yet. But they—” Cliff stopped, then shrugged and went on. “After all, anybody in the trade could tell you. About a year ago Guthrie Judd of the Metropolitan Trust closed in on Consolidated Cereals and took it over. For the bank, of course. Do you know Judd?”

“No, but I’ve heard tell.”

“Then I don’t need to tell you. When I said I knew how C. C. works, I meant I knew how Guthrie Judd works.”

“I see. Will you be at your office tomorrow?”

“Certainly.”

“I may be dropping in. Much obliged.”

Fox departed, descended to the street—where the early November darkness had already made it night—walked and dodged briskly to Madison Avenue and six blocks north, entered the lobby of another office building, and consulted the directory panel. Taking an elevator, he got out at the 32nd floor, and down a long corridor found a door with the inscription:

Entering, he was in a small and handsome anteroom that was the antithesis of the one at Tingley’s
Titbits. The walls were greenish cream, the lighting indirect, the floor’s rubber tiling dark maroon; chairs and a small table and a garment rack were of red and black lacquer with chromium trim. There was no one there. Fox glanced around, and as he did so a door from an inner room opened and Dol Bonner came through, with coat, hat and gloves on.

“Just in time,” said Fox. “I was afraid I’d miss you.”

She smiled without warmth. “I’m honored.” Her yellow-brown alert eyes met his. “I’m sorry—I have an appointment—”

“So have I, so I won’t keep you. Nice shiny place you have here. What were you and Leonard Cliff discussing at Rusterman’s Bar last Saturday afternoon?”

“Really.” Her smile showed, if not more warmth, more amusement. “That’s amazing. Do you get results like that?”

“When I have a good lever I do.” Fox smiled back at her. “As I have now. It would be cozier to sit down and chat and lead up to it, but we’re both in a hurry. The idea is, Cliff has told me his version of that conversation, and I’m getting yours to check up on him. You know the routine.”

“Yes, but I make better use of it.” The gleam in her eyes was certainly amusement. “Tecumseh Fox? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Who do you think I am, the downstairs maid that answered the phone call?”

“Nope. But you’re going to tell me. This isn’t your murder case, so why not stay out of it? It will be an awful nuisance if you get in—I mean for you. You may regard it as proper and ethical to let A hire you to investigate B, and then let B hire you to investigate C, but you know how the police are. They’ll get suspicious
and when they’re suspicious they’re obnoxious. Their smallest suspicion will be that you were double-crossing A, and maybe you were until he got murdered. I’m not interested in that, but I want what I asked for. Otherwise, and immediately because I can’t afford to wait, it’s Inspector Damon on the telephone, and orders to bring you in dead or alive, and all the questioning and please sign this statement and be here again in the morning and don’t leave the jurisdiction—”

“Damn you,” Miss Bonner said. The amusement was gone. “You can’t do it. How could you account for having it?”

“Easy. Use your head. I’ve already told you that I have it from Cliff and I’m only checking. Don’t my A, B and C prove it?”

“I wasn’t double-crossing Tingley.”

“Good. Had you ever met or seen Cliff before Saturday?”

“No.” Miss Bonner swallowed. “Damn you. He phoned the office and we arranged to meet at Rusterman’s. I thought I might get a break on the job I was doing for Tingley, but when I found out what he wanted I saw no reason why I couldn’t take his job too. It couldn’t harm Tingley any, and neither could it harm Cliff if he was on the level—”

“What did he want?”

“He suspected that Consolidated Cereals was responsible for the trouble at Tingley’s, and he wanted me to investigate and get proof if possible. The reasons he wanted it were, first, he expected to buy Tingley’s and didn’t want the property depreciated, and second, he wanted to expose Consolidated Cereals.”

“Did he mention anyone specially?”

“Yes. Guthrie Judd of the Metropolitan Trust. They recently took over Consolidated Cereals.”

“Was there anything else he wanted you to do?”

“No.”

“Did you tell him you were working for Tingley, investigating him?”

“No.”

“Did he phone you here about half an hour ago?”

“What?” Miss Bonner frowned. “Did who phone me?”

“Cliff. To tell you what to tell me?”

“He did not. You—you insufferable—”

“Save it. I’m sensitive. I don’t want to hear it. Thank you very much, Miss Bonner.”

Fox wheeled and tramped out. Apparently Miss Bonner was disinclined for any further association with him, for though he had to wait more than a minute for an elevator, since it was after six o’clock, she did not put in an appearance.

On the street again, he still did not return to where he had parked his car, but set out at a brisk pace, headed downtown. At 38th Street he turned west. When he reached Sixth Avenue he entered a drugstore and consulted a phone book, emerged and looked around, and crossed the avenue to the entrance of a building which had seen better days and would certainly soon suffer demolition now that the El was gone. After a look at the directory he took a creaky old elevator to the third floor, where a narrow hall led him to a door with a dirty glass panel which said “Womon” in the center, and in a corner said “Enter.”

He entered.

P
iles of literature were stacked high in all available spaces of the medium-sized room which housed the administrative, editorial, business and distribution departments of Womon. The furniture—two desks, five chairs, a typewriter, a mimeograph, cabinets and shelves—was unassuming but adequate. Standing beside one of the desks was a worried-looking man, dipping bicarbonate of soda from a package and stirring it into a glass of water. Seated at the other, sticking stamps on envelopes, was a young woman whose plain tan woolen dress conformed to her curves, with a face that might have been thought attractive for customary purposes but for the formidable intellectual power suggested by the capacity of her brow. They looked at Fox and he said how do you do.

“Good evening,” said the man. “Pardon me.” He swallowed the mixture in the glass and made a face. “I eat too fast.”

“Lots of people do.” Fox smiled at him. “Nice place you have here. Compact.”

“Nice? It’s a dump. I used to have an office—” The man waved that away. “What can I do for you?”

Fox opened his mouth to start the approach to the query he had come to make, but the young woman got a word in first. She had finished stamping the envelopes and arisen to put on her coat and hat, and spoke to the man:

“What shall I do if the stuff from Wynkoop comes before you get here in the morning?”

“Take it and pay for it. I’ll sign a blank check.”

“Oh.” She was getting her coat on. “I keep forgetting that Phil—I mean I can’t get used to being rich. He’s later than usual, but I suppose under the circumstances …”

Fox, instantly abandoning the modest minnow he had come for at this splash hinting at a bigger and better fish, transferred his smile to the young woman and barred her way to the door.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but may I make a suggestion?” He pulled from his pocket the Womon Statement of the Basic Requirements of a World Economy. “A friend gave this to me, and I think it’s fascinating, but I don’t understand it very well. I want to ask some questions about it, but I’m hungry. You’re just leaving and I suppose you eat, so why don’t you eat with me and I can ask you the questions? My name is William Sherman.”

“Good idea,” the man declared. “She can answer more questions than the rest of us put together.”

“I always read while I eat,” said the young woman without enthusiasm, and in fact she had a heavy volume under her arm. She shrugged. “All right, come along.”

“Here,” said the man. “Application for membership in the Womon League. Take it with you.”

Fox took it, and his dinner companion, to the Red Herring on 44th Street, having decided that there
was less oxygen there than any other place he could think of. In the bar she accepted a cocktail as a matter of fact, and a second one with no special reluctance. After they had been conducted to a booth for two in the back room, it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he asked for it and got it: Grace Adams.

By the time they had finished with the mixed grill and were being served with salad, Fox was confronted with the fact that though his calculations had been sound, nevertheless his expectation had not been realized. The two cocktails, joined with the insufficiency of oxygen in the crowded and noisy room, and reinforced by a bottle of Burgundy of which she had tossed off her share without looking at it, had indeed loosened her tongue; but the looser it got the deeper she dived into the profound abstrusities of economic theory. She derided Keynes, pilloried Marx, excoriated Veblen, and consigned the gold standard to the crucible of hell. Unquestionably, Fox admitted, she got brilliant and even eloquent, but he was not buying a dinner at the Red Herring, which was expensive, for the sake of eloquence.