Rex Stout - And be a Villian
The following morning, Friday, we had a pair of visitors that we hadn't seen for quite a while: Walter B. Anderson, the Starlite president, and Fred Owen, the director of public relations. When the doorbell rang a little before noon and I went to the front and saw them on the stoop, my attitude was quite different from what it had been the first time. They had no photographers along, and they were clients in good standing entitled to one hell of a beef if they only knew it, and there was a faint chance that they had a concealed weapon, maybe a hatpin, to stick into Wolfe. So without going to the office to check I welcomed them across the threshold.
Wolfe greeted them without any visible signs of rapture, but at least he didn't grump. He even asked them how they did. While they were getting seated he shifted in his chair so he could give his eyes to either one without excessive exertion for his neck muscles. He actually apologized: “It isn't astonishing if you gentlemen are getting a little impatient. But if you are exasperated, so am I. I had no idea it would drag on like this. No murderer likes to be caught, naturally; but this one seems to have an extraordinary aversion to it. Would you like me to describe what has been accomplished?”
“We know pretty well,” Owen stated. He was wearing a dark brown double-breasted pin-stripe that must have taken at least five fittings to get it the way it looked.
We know too well,” the president corrected him. Usually I am tolerant of the red-faced, plump type, but every time that geezer opened his mouth I wanted to shut it and not by talking.
Wolfe frowned. “I've admitted your right to exasperation. You needn't insist on it.”
“We're not exasperated with you, Mr Wolfe,” Owen declared.
“I am,” the president corrected him again. “With the whole damn' thing and everything and every one connected with it. For a while I've been willing to string along with the idea that there can't be any argument against a Hooper in the high twenties, but I've thought I might be wrong and now I know I was. My God, blackmail! Were you responsible for that piece in the Gazette this morning?”
“Well…” Wolfe was being judicious. “I would say that the responsibility rests with the man who conceived the scheme. I discovered and disclosed it-”
“It doesn't matter.” Anderson waved it aside. “What does matter is that my company and my product cannot and will not be connected in the public mind with blackmail. That's dirty. That makes people gag.”
“I absolutely agree,” Owen asserted.
“Murder is moderately dirty too,” Wolfe objected.
“No,” Anderson said flatly. “Murder is sensational and exciting, but it's not like blackmail and anonymous letters. I'm through. I've had enough of it.”
He got his hand in his breast pocket and pulled out an envelope, from which he extracted an oblong strip of blue paper. “Here's a cheque for your fee, the total amount. I can collect from the others-or not. I'll see. Send me a bill for expenses to date. You understand, I'm calling it off.”
Owen had got up to take the cheque and hand it to Wolfe. Wolfe took a squint at it and let it drop to the desk.
“Indeed.” Wolfe picked up the cheque, gave it another look, and dropped it again. “Have you consulted the other parties to our arrangement?”
“No, and I don't intend to. What do you care? That's the full amount, isn't it?”
“Yes, the amount's all right. But why this headlong retreat? What has suddenly scared you so?”
“Nothing has scared me.” Anderson came forward in his chair. “Look, Wolfe. I came down here myself to make sure there's no slip-up on this. The deal is off, beginning right now. If you listened to the Fraser programme this morning you didn't hear my product mentioned. I'm paying that off too, and clearing out. If you think I'm scared you don't know me. I don't scare. But I know how to take action when the circumstances require it, and that's what I'm doing.”
He left his chair, leaned over Wolfe's desk, stretched a short fat arm, and tapped the cheque with a short stubby forefinger. “I'm no welcher! I'll pay your expenses just like I'm paying this! I'm not blaming you, to hell with that, but from this minute-you-are-not-working-for-me!”
With the last six words the finger jabbed the desk, at the rate of about three jabs to a word.
“Come on, Fred,” the president commanded, and the pair tramped out to the hall.
I moseyed over as far as the office door to see that they didn't make off with my new twenty-dollar grey spring hat, and, when they were definitely gone, returned to my desk, sat, and commented to Wolfe: “He seems to be upset.”
“Take a letter to him.”
I got my notebook and pen. Wolfe cleared his throat.
“Not dear Mr Anderson, dear sir. Regarding our conversation at my office this morning, I am engaged with others as well as you, and, since my fee is contingent upon a performance, I am obliged to continue until the performance is completed. The cheque you gave me will be held in my safe until that time.”
I looked up. “Sincerely?”
“I suppose so. There's nothing insincere about it. When you go out to mail it go first to the bank and have the cheque certified.”
“That shifts the contingency,” I remarked, opening the drawer where I kept letterheads, “to whether the bank stays solvent or npt.”
It was at that moment, the moment when I was putting the paper in the typewriter, that Wolfe really settled down to work on the Orchard case. He leaned back, shut his eyes, and began exercising his lips. He was like that when I left on my errand, and still like that when I got back. At such times I don't have to tiptoe or keep from rustling papers; I can bang the typewriter or make phone calls or use the vacuum cleaner and he doesn't hear it.
All the rest of that day and evening, up till bedtime, except for intermissions for meals and the afternoon conclave in the plant rooms, he kept at it, with no word or sign to give me a hint of what kind of trail he had found, if any. In a way it was perfectly jake with me, for at least it showed he had decided we would do our own cooking, but in another way it wasn't so hot. When it goes on hour after hour, as it did that Friday, the chances are that he's finding himself just about cornered, and there's no telling how desperate he'll be when he picks a hole to bust out through. A couple of years ago, after spending most of a day figuring one out, he ended up with a charade that damn near got nine human beings asphyxiated with ciphogene, including him and me, not to mention Inspector Cramer.
When both the clock and my wrist watch said it was close to midnight, and there he still was, I inquired politely: “Shall we have some coffee to keep awake?”
His mutter barely reached me: “Go to bed.”
I did so.
Chapter Twenty-One I needn't have worried. He did give birth, but not to one of his fantastic freaks. The next morning, Saturday, when Fritz returned to the kitchen after taking up the breakfast tray he told me I was wanted.
Since Wolfe likes plenty of air at night but a good warm room at breakfast time it had been necessary, long ago, to install a contraption that would automatically close his window at 6 a.m. As a result the eight o'clock temperature permits him to have his tray on a table near the window without bothering to put on a dressing gown. Seated there, his hair not yet combed, his feet bare, and all the yardage of his yellow pyjamas dazzling in the morning sun, he is something to blink at, and it's too bad that Fritz and I are the only ones who ever have the privilege.
I told him it was a nice morning, and he grunted. He will not admit that a morning is bearable, let alone nice, until, having had his second cup of coffee, he has got himself fully dressed.
“Instructions,” he growled.
I sat down, opened my notebook, and uncapped my pen. He instructed: “Get some ordinary plain white paper of a cheap grade; I doubt if any of ours will do. Say five by eight. Type this on it, single-spaced, no date or salutation.”
He shut his eyes. “Since you are a friend of Elinor Vance, this is something you should know. During her last year at college the death of a certain person was ascribed to natural causes and was never properly investigated. Another incident that was never investigated was the disappearance of a jar of cyanide from the electroplating shop of Miss Vance's brother. It would be interesting to know if there was any connection between those two incidents. Possibly an inquiry into both of them would suggest such a connection.”
“That all?”
“Yes. No signature. No envelope. Fold the paper and soil it a little; give it the appearance of having been handled. This is Saturday, but an item in the morning paper tells of the withdrawal of Starlite from sponsorship of Miss Fraser's programme, so I doubt if those people will have gone off for weekends.
You may even find that they are together, conferring; that would suit our purpose best. But either together or singly, see them; show them the anonymous letter; ask if they have ever seen it or one similar to it; be insistent and as pestiferous as possible.”
“Including Miss Vance herself?”
“Let circumstances decide. If they are together and she is with them, yes.
Presumably she has already been alerted by Mr drainer's men.”
“The professor? Savarese?”
“No, don't bother with him.” Wolfe drank coffee. “That's all.”
I stood up. “I might get more or better results if I knew what we're after. Are we expecting Elinor Vance to break down and confess? Or am I nagging one of them into pulling a gun on me, or what?”
I should have known better, with him still in his pyjamas and his hair tousled.
“You're following instructions,” he said peevishly. “If I knew what you're going to get I wouldn't have had to resort to this shabby stratagem.”
“Shabby is right,” I agreed, and left him.
I would, of course, obey orders, for the same reason that a good soldier does, namely, he'd better, but I was not filled with enough zeal to make me hurry my breakfast. My attitude as I set about the preliminaries of the operation was that if this was the best he could do he might as well have stayed dormant. I did not believe that he had anything on Elinor Vance. He does sometimes hire Saul or Orrie or Fred without letting me know what they're up to, or more rarely, even that they're working for him, but I can always tell by seeing if money has been taken from the safe. The money was all present or accounted for.
You can judge my frame of mind when I state that I halfway suspected that he had picked on Elinor merely because I had gone to a little trouble to have her seated nearest me the night of the party.
He was, however, right about the weekends. I didn't start on the phone calls until nine-thirty, not wanting to get them out of bed for something which I regarded as about as useful as throwing rocks at the moon. The first one I tried, Bill Meadows, said he hadn't had breakfast yet and he didn't know when he would have some free time, because he was due at Miss Eraser's apartment at eleven for a conference and there was no telling how long it would last. That indicated that I would have a chance to throw at two or more moons with one stone, and another couple of phone calls verified it. There was a meeting on. I did the morning chores, buzzed the plant rooms to inform Wolfe, and left a little before eleven and headed uptown.
