The Red Box (2 page)

Young Mr. Frost quietly stared at him. “You’re having a grand time, Mr. Wolfe. Aren’t you?” Frost nodded. “Sure you are. A girl has been murdered. Another one—maybe more—is in danger. You offer yourself as an expert in these matters, don’t you? That part’s all right, there’s no question but that you’re an expert. And a girl’s been murdered, and others are in great and immediate peril, and you rant like Booth and Barrett about a taxicab in a maelstrom. I appreciate good acting; I ought to, since I’m in show business. But in your case I should think there would be times when a decent regard for human suffering and misfortune would make you wipe off the make-up. And if you’re really playing it straight, that only
makes it worse. If, rather than undergo a little personal inconvenience—”

“No good, Mr. Frost.” Wolfe was slowly shaking his head. “Do you expect to bully me into a defense of my conduct? Nonsense. If a girl has been murdered, there are the police. Others are in peril? They have my sympathy, but they hold no option on my professional services. I cannot chase perils away with a wave of my hand, and I will not ride in a taxicab. I will not ride in anything, even my own car with Mr. Goodwin driving, except to meet my personal contingencies. You observe my bulk. I am not immovable, but my flesh has a constitutional reluctance to sudden, violent or sustained displacement. You spoke of ‘decent regard.’ How about a decent regard for the privacy of my dwelling? I use this room as an office, but this house is my home. Good day, sir.”

The young man flushed, but did not move. “You won’t go?” he demanded.

“I will not.”

“Twenty blocks, eight minutes, your own car.”

“Confound it, no.”

Frost frowned at him. He muttered to himself, “They don’t come any stubborner.” He reached to his inside coat pocket and pulled out some papers, selected one and unfolded it and glanced at it, and returned the others. He looked at Wolfe:

“I’ve spent most of two days getting this thing signed. Now, wait a minute, hold your horses. When Molly Lauck was poisoned, a week ago today, it looked phony from the beginning. By Wednesday, two days later, it was plain that the cops were running around in circles, and I came to you. I know about you, I know you’re the one and only. As you know, I tried to get McNair and the others down here to your office and they wouldn’t come, and I tried to get you up there
and you wouldn’t go, and I invited you to go to hell. That was five days ago. I’ve paid another detective three hundred dollars for a lot of nothing, and the cops from the inspector down are about as good as Fanny Brice would be for Juliet. Anyhow, it’s a tough one, and I doubt if
anyone
could crack it but you. I decided that Saturday, and during the weekend I covered a lot of territory.” He pushed the paper at Wolfe. “What do you say to that?”

Wolfe took it and read it. I saw his eyes go slowly half-shut, and knew that whatever it was, its effect on his irritation was pronounced. He glanced over it again, looked at Llewellyn Frost through slits, and then extended the paper toward me. I got up to take it. It was typewritten on a sheet of good bond, plain, and was dated New York City, March 28, 1936:

I handed the document back to Wolfe and sat down and grinned at him. He folded it and slipped it under the block of petrified wood which he used for a paperweight. Frost said:

“That was the best I could think of, to get you. I had to have you. This thing has to be ripped open. I got Del Pritchard up there and he was lost. I had to get you somehow. Will you come?”

Wolfe’s forefinger was doing a little circle on the arm of his chair. “Why the devil,” he demanded, “did they sign that thing?”

“Because I asked them to. I explained. I told them that no one but you could solve it and you had to be persuaded. I told them that besides money and food the only thing you were interested in was orchids, and that there was nobody who could exert any influence on you but them, the best orchid-growers in America. I had letters of introduction to them. I did it right. You notice I restricted my list to the very best. Will you come?”

Wolfe sighed. “Alec Martin has forty thousand plants at Rutherford. He wouldn’t sign it, eh?”

“He would if I’d gone after him. Glueckner told me that you regard Martin as tricky and an inferior grower. Will you come?”

“Humbug.” Wolfe sighed again. “An infernal imposition.” He wiggled a finger at the young man. “Look here. You seem to be prepared to stop at nothing. You interrupt these expert and worthy men at their tasks to get them to sign this idiotic paper. You badger me. Why?”

“Because I want you to solve this case.”

“Why me?”

“Because no one else can. Wait till you see—”

“Yes. Thank you. But why your overwhelming interest in the case? The murdered girl—what was she to you?”

“Nothing.” Frost hesitated. He went on, “She was nothing to me. I knew her—an acquaintance. But the danger—damn it, let me tell you about it. The way it happened—”

“Please, Mr. Frost.” Wolfe was crisp. “Permit me. If the murdered girl was nothing to you, what standing will there be for an investigator engaged by you? If you could not persuade Mr. McNair and the others to come to me, it would be futile for me to go to them.”

“No, it wouldn’t. I’ll explain that—”

“Very well. Another point. I charge high fees.”

The young man flushed. “I know you do.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Look, Mr. Wolfe. I’ve thrown away a lot of my father’s money since I put on long pants. A good gob of it in the past two years, producing shows, and they were all flops. But now I’ve got a hit. It opened two weeks ago, and it’s a ten weeks buy.
Bullets for Breakfast
. I’ll have plenty of cash to pay your fee. If only you’ll find out where the hell that poison came from—and help me find a way.…”

He stopped. Wolfe prompted him, “Yes, sir? A way—”

Frost frowned. “A way to get my cousin out of that murderous hole. My ortho-cousin, the daughter of my father’s brother.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe surveyed him. “Are you an anthropologist?”

“No.” Frost flushed again. “I told you, I’m in show business. I can pay your fee—within reason, or even
without reason. But we ought to have an understanding about that. Of course the amount of the fee is up to you, but my idea would be to split it, half to find out where that candy came from, and the other half for getting my cousin Helen away from that place. She’s as stubborn as you are, and you’ll probably have to earn the first half of the fee in order to earn the second, but I don’t care if you don’t. If you get her out of there without clearing up Molly Lauck’s death, half the fee is yours anyhow. But Helen won’t scare, that won’t work, and she has some kind of a damn fool idea about loyalty to this McNair, Boyden McNair. Uncle Boyd, she calls him. She’s known him all her life. He’s an old friend of Aunt Callie’s, Helen’s mother. Then there’s this dope, Gebert—but I’d better start at the beginning and sketch it—hey! You going now?”

Wolfe had pushed his chair back and elevated himself to his feet. He moved around the end of his desk with his customary steady and not ungraceful deliberation.

“Keep your seat, Mr. Frost. It is four o’clock, and I now spend two hours with my plants upstairs. Mr. Goodwin will take the details of the poisoning of Miss Molly Lauck—and of your family complications if they seem pertinent. For the fourth time, I believe it is, good day, sir.” He headed for the door.

Frost jumped up, sputtering. “But you’re coming uptown—”

Wolfe halted and ponderously turned. “Confound you, you know perfectly well I am! But I’ll tell you this, if Alec Martin’s signature had been on that outlandish paper I would have thrown it in the wastebasket. He splits bulbs. Splits them! —Archie. We shall meet Mr. Frost at the McNair place tomorrow morning at ten minutes past eleven.”

He turned and went, disregarding the client’s
protest at the delay. Through the open office door I heard, from the hall, the grunt of the elevator as he stepped in it, and the bang of its door.

Llewellyn Frost turned to me, and the color in his face may have been from gratification at his success, or from indignation at its postponement. I looked him over as a client—his wavy light brown hair brushed back, his wide-open brown eyes that left the matter of intelligence to a guess, his big nose and broad jaw which made his face too heavy even for his six feet.

“Anyhow, I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Goodwin.” He sat down. “You were clever about it, too, keeping that Martin out of it. It was a big favor you did me, and I assure you I won’t forget—”

“Wrong number.” I waved him off. “I told you at the time, I keep all my favors for myself. I suggested that round robin only to try to drum up some business, and for a scientific experiment to find out how many ergs it would take to jostle him loose. We haven’t had a case that was worth anything for nearly three months.” I got hold of a notebook and pencil, and swiveled around and pulled my desk-leaf out. “And by the way, Mr. Frost, don’t you forget that you thought of that round robin yourself. I’m not supposed to think.”

“Certainly,” he nodded. “Strictly confidential. I’ll never mention it.”

“Okay.” I flipped the notebook open to the next blank page. “Now for this murder you want to buy a piece of. Spill it.”

S
o the next morning I had Nero Wolfe braving the elements—the chief element for that day being bright warm March sunshine. I say I had him, because I had conceived the persuasion which was making him burst all precedents. What pulled him out of his front door, enraged and grim, with overcoat, scarf, gloves, stick, something he called gaiters, and a black felt pirate’s hat size 8 pulled down to his ears, was the name of Winold Glueckner heading the signatures on the letter—Glueckner, who had recently received from an agent in Sarawak four bulbs of a pink Coellogyne pandurata, never seen before, and had scorned Wolfe’s offer of three thousand bucks for two of them. Knowing what a tough old heinie Glueckner was, I had my doubts whether he would turn loose of the bulbs no matter how many murders Wolfe solved at his request, but anyhow I had lit the fuse.

Driving from the house on 35th Street near the Hudson River—where Wolfe had lived for over twenty years and I had lived with him—to the address on 52nd Street, I handled the sedan so as to keep it as smooth as a dip’s fingers. Except for one I couldn’t resist; on Fifth Avenue near Forty-third there was an
ideal little hole about two feet across where I suppose someone had been prospecting for the twenty-six dollars they paid the Indians, and I maneuvered to hit it square at a good clip. I glanced in the mirror for a glimpse of Wolfe in the back seat and saw he was looking bitter and infuriated.

I said, “Sorry, sir, they’re tearing up the streets.”

He didn’t answer.

From what Llewellyn Frost had told me the day before about the place of business of Boyden McNair Incorporated—all of which had gone into my notebook and been read to Nero Wolfe Monday evening—I hadn’t realized the extent of its aspirations in the way of class. We met Llewellyn Frost downstairs, just inside the entrance. One of the first things I saw and heard, as Frost led us to the elevator to take us to the second floor, where the offices and private showrooms were, was a saleswoman who looked like a cross between a countess and Texas Guinan, telling a customer that in spite of the fact that the little green sport suit on the model was of High Meadow Loom hand-woven material and designed by Mr. McNair himself, it could be had for a paltry three hundred. I thought of the husband and shivered and crossed my fingers as I stepped into the elevator. And I remarked to myself, “I’ll say it’s a sinister joint.”

The floor above was just as elegant, but quieter. There was no merchandise at all in sight, no saleswomen and no customers. A long wide corridor had doors on both sides at intervals, with etchings and hunting prints here and there on the wood paneling, and in the large room where we emerged from the elevator there were silk chairs and gold smoking stands and thick deep-colored rugs. I took that in at a glance and then centered my attention on the side of
the room opposite the corridor, where a couple of goddesses were sitting on a settee. One of them, a blonde with dark blue eyes, was such a pronounced pippin that I had to stare so as not to blink, and the other one, slender and medium-dark, while not as remarkable, was a cinch in a contest for Miss Fifty-second Street.

The blonde nodded at us. The slender one said, “Hello, Lew.”

Llewellyn Frost nodded back. “ ’Lo, Helen. See you later.”

As we went down the corridor I said to Wolfe, “See that? I mean, them? You ought to get around more. What are orchids to a pair of blossoms like that?”

He only grunted at me.

Frost knocked at the last door on the right, opened it, and stood aside for us to precede him. It was a large room, fairly narrow but long, and there was only enough let-up on the elegance to allow for the necessities of an office. The rugs were just as thick as up front, and the furniture was Decorators’ Delight. The windows were covered with heavy yellow silk curtains, sweeping in folds to the floor, and the light came from glass chandeliers as big as barrels.