The Doorbell Rang Read online

  REX STOUT

  The Doorbell Rang

  A NERO WOLFE MYSTERY

  Introduction by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  BANTAM BOOKS • NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Introduction

  The Doorbell Rang was the first Nero Wolfe novel I read. It turned out to be an odd, atypical choice but one that hooked me.

  At the time, I was more than just a fan of hard-boiled tales. Chandler, Thomas Dewey, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane were my idols. The only traditional P.I. I could tolerate was Sherlock Holmes; I had read The Complete Sherlock Holmes from cover to cover and back again four or five times, making notes in the margins and cursing Conan Doyle for not writing ten times as much about Holmes and Watson.

  I had assumed, judging by the blurbs on the backs of the paperbacks and the reviews in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times, that Rex Stout’s tales were of the ilk of Philo Vance and Hercule Poirot—delicate, hinging on tricks and quirks.

  I read The Doorbell Rang because I was grieving over the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I read the book as I read dozens of others—randomly, rocking on the El from Skokie to Chicago, trying not to think of the winter, trying to find a new voice with lots of volumes and volume behind it to rescue me from the 1960’s, which I found not the least satisfying and which I still regard without the saving grace of nostalgia.

  What I discovered when I opened the book and began to read was Archie Goodwin. The first few pages read like a Holmes tale with Archie simply Watsoning, but then Archie’s voice began to emerge. It was the hard-boiled, weary, witty, cynical, yet romantic voice I wanted to hear. “This isn’t a Nero Wolfe book,” I wanted to say to the tired woman with a shopping bag nodding off next to me. “This is an Archie Goodwin book.”

  I read on. When I got to work, I locked my door and kept reading. The hell with the article on heart transplants I was supposed to be writing.

  The plot was a blur to me. But Wolfe was there, and for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

  Since the day I turned the final page of the book, my answer to the question, “What fictional or historical character would you like to have dinner with?” has been Nero Wolfe, with Archie—sitting sullenly in the corner and Fritz serving clam cakes with chili sauce, beef braised in red wine, squash with sour cream and chopped dill, avocado with watercress and black walnut kernels, and Liederkranz. Following discussions of cooked oysters, the feminine mind, structural linguistics, and books, Fritz would serve coffee and brandy and I would say to myself, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  The Doorbell Rang inspired me. The references to historical characters, particularly J. Edgar Hoover, contributed to my desire to incorporate history into the hard-boiled detective tale. Archie’s voice inspired me. Wolfe’s eccentricity sent my imagination racing. If much of the inspiration for my Toby Peters character can be found in Archie, there is no small measure of Wolfe in my Jeremy Butler and Gunther Wherthman characters. The idea of an ensemble cast of central figures and an extended family—Saul Panzer is my favorite quasi-cousin—was a revelation to me. The inspiration and respect goes much further than this.

  I went back and read as many Goodwin-Wolfe books as I could find, in order. I watched the late-night listings for Nero Wolfe movies, and though I enjoyed the ones I saw, Lionel Stander and Edward Arnold were not really Archie and Wolfe to me. My ideal duo would be Robert Mitchum and Sidney Greenstreet.

  I gathered information about Stout, found a photo of him in a newspaper, and wondered if he and George Bernard Shaw were cousins or the same person. I learned that he wrote on an ancient typewriter, that he never rewrote, and that he did not work from outlines—he had no idea who his killer was till the answer revealed itself in the work in progress.

  This was confirmed for me when I heard a radio interview with Stout, who said that he had been writing a scene in which Wolfe was sitting at his desk working when there was a knock at his door. Wolfe told the visitor to come in.

  “And who,” asked Wolfe, “are you?”

  “Your son,” replied the man in the doorway.

  At this point in the radio interview Stout said something to the effect of, “I was amazed. I had no idea Wolfe had a son.”

  While Stout may have been exaggerating, the creative point had been made to me—write as if you are a reader. The great joy in writing is the same joy as in reading: the discovery, the desire to go on to the next page to find out what will happen, and the sound of the voices. And Stout’s voices are worth listening to.

  When Nero Wolfe came to television, I made my love of Archie and Wolfe known to NBC, and one of the great disappointments of my professional life is that the series was canceled after I had been assured that I would write the opening episode of the next season. I wanted to bring The Doorbell Rang to life even if it wasn’t the right Archie and Wolfe.

  Returning specifically to The Doorbell Rang, the last line, which is also the title of the book, became my favorite last line of a novel till Larry Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die twenty years later. It is, like much of Stout’s writing, deliciously understated. Ultimately, the Archie-Nero novels delight me most when I feel that Stout respects not only my taste but my intelligence, that I am in on Wolfe’s ironies, that I can see beyond the surface of Archie’s complaints to his insecurity and genuine love of Wolfe and the extended family.

  I had a classics professor at the University of Illinois who after giving a reading assignment said, with genuine emotion, “Oh, to be reading Boethius for the first time.”

  And so I say to you, “Oh, to be reading a Nero Wolfe mystery for the first time.”

  —Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Chapter 1

  Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe’s desk, where Mrs. Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.

  She had been there half an hour, having arrived a few minutes after six o’clock. Since her secretary had phoned for an appointment only three hours earlier there hadn’t been much time to check on her, but more than enough for the widow who had inherited the residual estate of Lloyd Bruner. At least eight of the several dozen buildings Bruner had left to her were more than twelve stories high, and one of them could be seen from anywhere within eye range—north, east, south, or west. All that had been necessary, really, was to ring Lon Cohen at the Gazette to ask if there was any news not fit to print about anyone named Bruner, but I made a couple of other calls, to a vice-president of our bank and to Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer. I got nothing, except at one point the vice-president said, “Oh … a funny thing …” and stopped.

  I asked what.

  Pause. “Nothing, really. Mr. Abernathy, our president, got a book from her…”

  “What kind of a book?”

  “It—I forget. If you will excuse me, Mr. Goodwin, I’m rat
her busy.”

  So all I had on her, as I answered the doorbell in the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and let her in, and ushered her to the office, was that she had sent a man a book. After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.

  He was regarding her without enthusiasm. The trouble was, a new year had just started, and it seemed likely that he was going to have to go to work. In a November or December, when he was already in a tax bracket that would take three-quarters—more, formerly—of any additional income, turning down jobs was practically automatic, but January was different, and this was the fifth of January, and this woman was stacked. He didn’t like it. “Mr. Goodwin named you,” he said coldly, “and I read newspapers.”

  She nodded. “I know you do. I know a great deal about you, that’s why I’m here. I want you to do something that perhaps no other man alive could do. You read books too. Have you read one entitled The FBI Nobody Knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t need to tell you about it. Did it impress you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Favorably?”

  “Yes.”

  “My goodness, you’re curt.”

  “I answered your questions, madam.”

  “I know you did. I can be curt too. That book impressed me. It impressed me so strongly that I bought ten thousand copies of it and sent them to people all over the country.”

  “Indeed.” Wolfe’s brow was up an eighth of an inch.

  “Yes. I sent them to the members of the cabinet, the Supreme Court justices, governors of all the states, all senators and representatives, members of state legislatures, publishers of newspapers and magazines, and editors, heads of corporations and banks, network executives and broadcasters, columnists, district attorneys, educators, and others—oh yes, chiefs of police. Do I need to explain why I did that?”

  “Not to me.”

  There was a flash in the brown-black eyes. “I don’t like your tone. I want you to do something, and I’ll pay you the limit and beyond the limit, there is no limit, but there’s no point in going on unless—You said that book impressed you favorably. Do you mean you agree with the author’s opinion of the FBI?”

  “With some minor qualifications, yes.”

  “And of J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it won’t surprise you to hear that I am being followed day and night. I believe ‘tailed’ is the word. So is my son, and my daughter, and my secretary, and my brother. My telephones are tapped. Some of the employees at the Bruner Corporation have been questioned. It occupies two floors of the Bruner Building and there are more than a hundred employees. Does that surprise you?”

  “No.” Wolfe grinned. “Did you send letters with the books?”

  “Not letters. My personal card with a brief message.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Well, I am. I was. I’m not just a congressman, or someone like an editor or a broadcaster or a college professor, with a job I can’t afford to lose. Does that megalomaniac think he can hurt me!”

  “Pfui. He is hurting you.”

  “No. He’s merely annoying me. Some of my associates and personal friends are being questioned—discreetly, of course, careful excuses, of course. It started about two weeks ago. I think my phones were tapped about ten days ago. My lawyers say there is probably no way to stop it, but they are considering it. They are one of the biggest and best firms in New York, and even they are afraid of the FBI! They disapprove; they say it was ‘ill-advised’ and ‘quixotic,’ my sending the books. I don’t care what they say. When I read that book I was furious. I called the publishers and they sent a man to see me, and he said they had sold less than twenty thousand copies. In a country with nearly two hundred million people, and twenty-six million of them had voted for Goldwater! I thought of paying for some ads, but decided it would be better to send the books, and I got a forty-percent discount on them.” She curled her fingers over the chair arms. “Now he’s annoying me and I want him stopped. I want you to stop him.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “Preposterous.”

  She reached to the stand at her elbow for her brown leather bag, opened it, took out a checkfold and a pen, opened the fold on the stand, no hurry, and wrote, the stub first, with care. Methodical. She tore the check out, got up and put it on Wolfe’s desk, and returned to the chair. “That fifty thousand dollars,” she said, “is only a retainer. I said there would be no limit.”

  Wolfe didn’t even give the check a glance. “Madam,” he said, “I am neither a thaumaturge nor a dunce. If you are being followed, you were followed here, and it will be assumed that you came to hire me. Probably another has already arrived to start surveillance of this house; if not, it will be started the instant there is any indication that I have been ass enough to take the job.” His head turned. “Archie. How many agents have they in New York?”

  “Oh …” I pursed my lips. “I don’t know, maybe two hundred. They come and go.”

  He went back to her. “I have one. Mr. Goodwin. I never leave my house on business. It would—”

  “You have Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather.”

  Ordinarily that would have touched him, her rattling off their names like that, but not then. “I wouldn’t ask them to take the risk,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect Mr. Goodwin to take it. Anyway, it would be futile and fatuous. You say ‘stop him.’ You mean, I take it, compel the FBI to stop annoying you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I.” He shook his head. “No, madam. You invited it, and you have it. I don’t say that I disapprove of your sending the books, but I agree with the lawyers that it was quixotic. The don endured afflictions; so must you. They won’t keep it up forever, and, as you say, you’re not a congressman or a drudge with a job to lose. But don’t send any more books.”

  She was biting her lip. “I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing.”

  “Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”

  “I said no other man alive could do it.”

  “Then you’re in a box.”

  She got her bag and opened it, took out the checkfold and pen, wrote again, the stub first as before, stepped to his desk and picked up the first check and replaced it with the new one, and returned to the chair.

  “That hundred thousand dollars,” she said, “is merely a retainer. I will pay all expenses. If you succeed, your fee, determined by you, will be in addition to the retainer. If you fail, you will have the hundred thousand.”

  He leaned forward to reach for the check, gave it a good look, put it down, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Knowing him, I knew what he was considering. Not the job; as he had said, it was preposterous; he was looking at the beautiful fact that with a hundred grand in the till on January fifth he would need, and would accept, no jobs at all for the rest of the winter, and the spring, and even into the summer. He could read a hundred books and propagate a thousand orchids. Paradise. A corner of his mouth twisted up; for him that was a broad grin. He was wallowing. That was okay for half a minute, a man has a right to dream, but when it got to a full minute I coughed, loud.

  He opened his eyes and straightened up. “Archie? Have you a suggestion?”

  So it had bit him good. It was conceivable that he might even commit himself, partially at least, and of course that wouldn’t do. The best way to prevent it was to get her out of there quick.

  “Not offhand,” I said. “No suggestion. I have a comment. You said that if she’s being tailed sh
e was followed here, but if her phone’s tapped they didn’t have to bother to tail her because they heard her secretary making the appointment.”

  He frowned. “And this house is under surveillance.”

  “Possibly. It could be that it isn’t as bad as she thinks it is. Of course she wouldn’t stretch it deliberately, but—”

  “I don’t ‘stretch’ things,” she cut in.

  “Of course not,” I told her. “But,” I told Wolfe, “people who aren’t used to being annoyed annoy easy. We can check the tailing part right now.” I turned. “Did you come in a taxi, Mrs. Bruner?”

  “No. My car and chauffeur are outside.”

  “Fine. I’ll take you out and wait there while you leave and see what happens.” I stood up. “Mr. Wolfe can let you know tomorrow what he decides.” I went to the couch for the sable.

  It worked. She didn’t like it. She had come to hire Nero Wolfe, and she hung on for five minutes trying to clinch it, but she soon saw that she was only riling him and got up and invited her coat. She was up on Wolfe all right. Aware that he didn’t like to shake hands, she didn’t offer, but when I followed her out to the stoop she gave my hand a firm warm clasp, having gathered that I was going to be in on the decision. There were a couple of icy spots on the seven steps of the stoop, and I took her elbow down to the sidewalk, and the chauffeur was there at the open car door to hand her in. Before she went to it she slanted the brown-black eyes up at me and said, “Thank you, Mr. Goodwin. Of course there will be a check for you, personally.”

  The chauffeur didn’t touch her; apparently she preferred to do it herself, so she wasn’t the kind of middle-aged widow who likes to feel a grip on her arm from a big strong male. When she was in he shut the door, got in front behind the wheel, and rolled; and thirty yards to the east, toward Ninth Avenue, a car whose lights had gone on and whose engine had started slid out and forward and came on by. Two men in the front seat. I stood there in the cold January wind long enough to see it take the turn into Tenth Avenue. It was laughable, so I laughed as I mounted the stoop, but I shut it off before I entered the hall.