Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families Read online

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them. Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erie Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  Introduction

  I first met Nero Wolfe in 1954, when I was ten years old.

  My father, a Presbyterian pastor with an eclectic taste in literature, was bedridden that long, hot, coastal North Carolina summer and had sent an urgent note to the librarian: Please let Patti check out books for me. It was a great honor, and a great responsibility.

  Each Friday evening Mother and I made the five-mile trip into Wilmington. While she bought groceries at the local Colonial, I tiptoed from the children’s section to the grown-up shelves and savored titles, trying to pick books that would help my daddy feel better. I don’t know if it was his preference or my own, but I usually wound up with an armful of mysteries.

  During the twilit rides home, secluded in my backseat nest of brown-paper bags, I dipped into Daddy’s books, for it was—and still is—constitutionally impossible for me to ride five miles with an unopened book. One evening I discovered an enormous spider of a detective who waited amid his orchids for cases to come to him. When I was ten, spiders were fascinating. So was Nero Wolfe.

  As an adult, I see other reasons why Nero Wolfe tickled my ten-year-old’s fancy. For one thing, he was fat—so fat he overflowed his chair. He drank beer. Nobody in my daddy’s congregation admitted to drinking anything stronger than Pepsi. He sassed (insulted) people and got away with it. He got away with being a picky eater, too, and he never did anything he didn’t want to do. Nero Wolfe was the grown-up this child yearned to be!

  All through that stultifying summer, while Mother worried and Daddy dyed white sheets gold with sweat-soaked pajamas, I devoured stories about Nero Wolfe—including In the Best Families. I neither noticed nor cared who wrote them; at that age I assumed all authors were dead people.

  By autumn Daddy was well, I was sent back to the library’s children’s section, and Nero Wolfe was stored on the mental shelves of my childhood reserved for Forbidden Fruit. I forgot all about him.

  During the next thirty-eight years, I discovered dead Englishwomen writers and fell in love with whodunits. I tried a few hard-boiled American books but found them long on violence and profanity, short on conversation, puzzle, and plot. I concluded I didn’t like American mystery authors, especially male ones.

  Then, in the strange workings of Providence, which sometimes decrees that we shall become what we profess to eschew, in 1988 I myself became an American mystery author. In 1992 I was confined to bed with hepatitis, reduced to reading whatever other people brought me. Among one stack of offerings were three books by an unfamiliar author, Rex Stout.

  Only when I had read everything else within reach did I finally open The Mother Hunt. There, in paragraph two, with that keen joy reserved for the recovery of dear things we’ve forgotten we’ve lost, I found my old friend Nero Wolfe!

  He was just as fat, just as sassy, just as picky, just as adamantly immobile, and just as delightful as he’d been nearly forty years before.

  In his creator, however, I found something astonishing and far more subtle: the standards by which I still judge all mystery writing and toward which I strive in my own.

  In the Best Families illustrates where I learned to prefer detectives who are intelligent, cultured, nonviolent, and shrewd rather than those who lead with their fists or their gonads. Thugs and master criminals may use firearms and explosives. Archie Goodwin may feel more comfortable with a gun under his armpit. Nero Wolfe, however, invariably acts—as he instructs Goodwin in this case—“in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”

  Stout presumes intelligent readers as well. A random opening of this novel turns up words like shamus, scrutinized, and echelons, and a master criminal who explains to Archie Goodwin that “a basic requirement for continued success in illicit enterprises is a sympathetic understanding of the limitation of the human nervous system.” No wonder my vocabulary increased dramatically the summer I met Nero Wolfe!

  No wonder, too, that I subsequently found hard-boiled detectives immature and boring. No one taught by Stout to appreciate urbane maturity would ever confuse “adult” with mere prurience or repetitive profanity. I believe it was by Stout that I was first convinced, as one of my own characters would later say, that a writer who depends on frequent
profanity needs a larger vocabulary.

  In the Best Families also shows why I have always thought mysteries ought to be funny. Not slapstick, add-it-to-the-plot funny, but intrinsic-to-the-character funny. Stout taught me irony by creating a famous detective who, at the end of a case, calls his chef before he calls the police. And while, as a child, I scarcely noticed Archie Goodwin, I absorbed the bite and personality behind lines like “I solemnly assured her that we rarely notified the press when someone requested an appointment on business” and “[His] eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line. They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless.”

  Finally, Rex Stout’s books explain why I continue to believe that no matter how well drawn the characters, they cannot carry a mystery without a clever, well-contrived plot. In the Best Families twists and turns as Wolfe’s new client immediately gets murdered, Wolfe’s kitchen is bombed, and Wolfe decamps, leaving Archie to deal with a master criminal. Then Archie himself is embroiled in the criminal organization by a seamy Californian, and—No, read it yourself! See if you, like me, find it fascinating, clever, and wholly satisfying.

  — Patricia Sprinkle

  Chapter 1

  It was nothing out of the ordinary that Mrs. Barry Rackham had made the appointment with her finger pressed to her lips. That is by no means an unusual gesture for people who find themselves in a situation where the best they can think of is to make arrangements to see Nero Wolfe.

  With Mrs. Barry Rackham the shushing finger was only figurative, since she made the date speaking to me on the phone. It was in her voice, low and jerky, and also in the way she kept telling me how confidential it was, even after I solemnly assured her that we rarely notified the press when someone requested an appointment on business. At the end she told me once more that she would have preferred to speak to Mr. Wolfe himself, and I hung up and decided it rated a discreet routine check on a prospective client, starting with Mr. Mitchell at the bank and Lon Cohen at the Gazette. On the main point of interest; could she and did she pay her bills, the news was favorable: she was worth a good four million and maybe five. Calling it four, and assuming that Wolfe’s bill for services rendered would come to only half of it, that would be enough to pay my current salary—as Wolfe’s secretary, trusted assistant, and official gnat—for a hundred and sixty-seven years; and in addition to that, living as I did there in Wolfe’s house, I also got food and shelter. So I was fixed for life if it turned out that she needed two million bucks’ worth of detective work.

  She might have at that, judging from the way she looked and acted at 11:05 the next morning, Friday, when the doorbell rang and I went to let her in. There was a man on the stoop with her, and after glancing quickly east and then west she brushed past him and darted inside, grabbed my sleeve, and told me in a loud whisper, “You’re not Nero Wolfe!”

  Instantly she released me, seized the elbow of her companion to hurry him across the sill, and whispered at him explosively, “Come in and shut the door!” You might have thought she was a duchess diving into a hock shop.

  Not that she was my idea of a duchess physically. As I attended to the door and got the man’s hat and topcoat hung on the rack, I took them in. She was a paradox—bony from the neck up and ample from the neck down. On her chin and jawbone and cheekbone the skin was stretched tight, but alongside her mouth and nose were tangles of wrinkles.

  As I helped her off with her fur coat I told her, “Look, Mrs. Rackham. You came to consult Nero Wolfe, huh?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. She nodded and said right out loud, “Of course.”

  “Then you ought to stop trembling if you can. It makes Mr. Wolfe uneasy when a woman trembles because he thinks she’s going to be hysterical, and he might not listen to you. Take a deep breath and try to stop.”

  “You were trembling all the way down here in the car,” the man said in a mild baritone.

  “I was not!” she snapped. That settled, she turned to me. “This is my cousin, Calvin Leeds. He didn’t want me to come here, but I brought him along anyhow. Where’s Mr. Wolfe?”

  I indicated the door to the office, went and opened it, and ushered them in.

  I have never figured out Wolfe’s grounds for deciding whether or not to get to his feet when a woman enters his office. If they’re objective they’re too complicated for me, and if they’re subjective, I wouldn’t know where to start. This time he kept his seat behind his desk in the corner near a window, merely nodding and murmuring when I pronounced names. I thought for a second that Mrs. Rackham was standing gazing at him in reproach for his bad manners, but then I saw it was just surprised disbelief that he could be that big and fat. I’m so used to the quantity of him that I’m apt to forget how he must impress people seeing him for the first time.

  He aimed a thumb at the red leather chair beyond the end of his desk and muttered at her, “Sit down, madam.”

  She went and sat. I then did likewise, at my own desk, not far from Wolfe’s and at right angles to it. Calvin Leeds, the cousin, had sat twice, first on the couch toward the rear and then on a chair which I moved up for him. I would have guessed that both he and Mrs. Rackham had first seen the light about the same time as the twentieth century, but he could have been a little older. He had a lot of weather in his face with its tough-looking hide, his hair had been brown but was now more gray, and with his medium size and weight he looked and moved as if all his inside springs were still sound and lively. He had taken Wolfe in, and the surroundings too, and now his eyes were on his cousin.

  Mrs. Rackham spoke to Wolfe. “You couldn’t very well go around finding out things. Could you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said politely. “I haven’t tried for years, and I don’t intend to. Others go around for me.” He gestured at me. “Mr. Goodwin, of course, and others as required. You need someone to go around?”

  “Yes.” She paused. Her mouth worked. “I think I do. Provided it can be done safely—I mean, without anyone knowing about it.” Her mouth worked some more. “I am bitterly ashamed—having at my age, for the first time in my life—having to go to a private detective with my personal affairs.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come,” Leeds said mildly.

  “Then you have come too soon,” Wolfe told her.

  “Too soon? Why?”

  “You should have waited until it became so urgent or so intolerable that it would cause you no shame to ask for help, especially for one as expensive as me.” He shook his head. “Too soon. Come back if and when you must.”

  “Hear that, Sarah?” Leeds asked, but not rubbing it in.

  Ignoring him, she leaned forward and blurted at Wolfe, “No, I’m here now. I have to know! I have to know about my husband!”

  Wolfe’s head jerked around to me, to give me a look intended to scorch. But I met his eye and told him emphatically, “No, sir. If it is, she fibbed. I told her we wouldn’t touch divorce or separation evidence, and she said it wasn’t.”

  He left me and demanded, “Do you want your husband followed?”

  “I—I don’t know. I don’t think so—”

  “Do you suspect him of infidelity?”

  “No! I don’t!”

  Wolfe grunted, leaned back in his chair, squirmed to get comfortable, and muttered, “Tell me about it.”

  Mrs. Rackham’s jaw started to quiver. She looked at Leeds. His brows went up, and he shook his head, not as a negative apparently, but merely leaving it to her. Wolfe let out a grunt. She moved her eyes to him and said plaintively, “I’m neurotic.”

  “I am not,” Wolfe snapped, “a psychiatrist. I doubt if—”

  She cut him off. “I’ve been neurotic as long as I can remember. I had no brother or sister and my mother died when I was three, and my father didn’t enjoy my company because I was ugly. When he died—I was twenty then—I cried all during the funeral service, not because he was dead but because I knew he wouldn’t have wanted me so close to him all that time—in the church
and driving to the cemetery and there at the grave.”

  Her jaw started to quiver again, but she clamped it and got control. “I’m telling you this because it’s no secret anyway, and I want you to understand why I must have help. I have never been sure exactly why my first husband married me, because he had money of his own and didn’t really need mine, but it wasn’t long until he hated looking at me just as my father had. So I—”

  “That isn’t true, Sarah,” Calvin Leeds objected. “You imagined—”

  “Bosh!” she quashed him. “I’m not that neurotic! So I got a divorce with his consent and gratitude, I think, though he was too polite to say so, and I hurried it through because I didn’t want him to know I was pregnant. Soon after the divorce my son was born, and that made complications, but I kept him—I kept him and he was mine until he went to war. He never showed the slightest sign of feeling about my looks the way my father and my husband had. He was never embarrassed about me. He liked being with me. Didn’t he, Calvin?”

  “Of course he did,” Leeds assured her, apparently meaning it.

  She nodded and looked thoughtful, looking into space and seeing something not there. She jerked herself impatiently back to Wolfe. “I admit that before he went away to war, he got married, and he married a very beautiful girl. It is not true that I wished he had taken one who resembled me, even a little bit, but naturally I couldn’t help but see that he had gone to the other extreme. Annabel is very beautiful. It made me proud for my son to have her—it seemed to even my score with all the beautiful women I had known and seen. She thinks I hate her, but that is not true. People as neurotic as I am should not be judged by normal standards. Not that I blame Annabel, for I know perfectly well that when the news came that he had been killed in Germany her loss was greater than mine. He wasn’t mine any longer then, he was hers.”

  “Excuse me,” Wolfe put in politely but firmly. “You wanted to consult me about your husband. You say you’re divorced?”

  “Certainly not! I—” She caught herself up. “Oh. This is my second husband. I only wanted you to understand.”