Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 12 - Too Many Women Read online

  ARCHIE GOES TO WORK

  One good glance and I liked the job. The girls. All right there, all being paid to stay right there, and me being paid to move freely about and converse with anyone whomever, which was down in black and white. Probably after I had been there a couple of years I would find that close-ups revealed inferior individual specimens, Grade B or lower in age, contours, skin quality, voice or level of intellect, but from where I stood at nine-fifty-two Wednesday morning it was enough to take your breath away. At least half a thousand of them, and the general and overwhelming impression was of—clean, young, healthy, friendly, spirited, beautiful and ready. I stood and filled my eyes, trying to look detached. It was an ocean of opportunity.

  Bantam Books by Rex Stout

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  AND BE A VILLAIN

  AND FOUR TO GO

  CHAMPAGNE FOR ONE

  CURTAINS FOR THREE

  DEATH OF A DOXY

  DEATH OF A DUDE

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  THE FATHER HUNT

  FER-DE-LANCE

  GAMBIT

  HOMICIDE TRINITY

  IN THE BEST OF FAMILIES

  MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD

  THE MOTHER HUNT

  MURDER BY THE BOOK

  OVER MY DEAD BODY

  PRISONER’S BASE

  THE RED BOX

  A RIGHT TO DIE

  THE SECOND CONFESSION

  THREE DOORS TO DEATH

  THREE FOR THE CHAIR

  THREE MEN OUT

  THREE WITNESSES

  TOO MANY WOMEN

  TRIO FOR BLUNT INSTRUMENTS

  This low-priced Bantam Book has been completely reset in a type face designed for easy reading, and was printed from new plates. It contains the complete text of the original hard-cover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  TOO MANY WOMEN

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with The Viking Press, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Viking edition published October 1947

  Detective Book Club edition published February 1948

  Bantam edition published October 1949

  New Bantam edition published November 1955

  2nd printing December 1955

  3rd printing May 1967

  4th printing August 1968

  5th printing December 1972

  6th printing August 1975

  7th printing August 1985

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright, 1947, by Rex Stout.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Viking Press, Inc.,

  40 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76808-7

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  1.

  IT WAS THE same old rigmarole. Sometimes I found it amusing; sometimes it only bored me; sometimes it gave me a pronounced pain, especially when I had had more of Wolfe than was good for either of us.

  This time it was fairly funny at first, but it developed along regrettable lines. Mr. Jasper Pine, president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., 914 William Street, down where a thirty-story building is a shanty, wanted Nero Wolfe to come to see him about something. I explained patiently, all about Wolfe being too lazy, too big and fat, and too much of a genius, to let himself be evoked. When Mr. Pine phoned again, in the afternoon, he insisted on speaking to Wolfe himself, and Wolfe made it short, sour, and final. An hour later, after Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms, just to pass the time I dialed the number of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., managed to get through to Mr. Pine, and asked him why he didn’t come to see us. He snapped that he was too busy, and then he wanted to know, “Who are you?”

  I told him I was Archie Goodwin, the heart, liver, lungs, and gizzard of the private detective business of Nero Wolfe, Wolfe being merely the brains. He asked sarcastically if I was a genius too, and I told him no indeed, I was comparatively human.

  “I could run down now,” I said.

  “No.” He was curt but not discourteous. “I’m filled up for today. Come tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. Better make it ten-fifteen.”

  2.

  Those pyramids of profit down in the Wall Street section, sticking straight up nine hundred feet and more, are tenanted by everything from one-room midgets to ten-floor super-giants. Though the name of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., was vaguely familiar to me, it was not a household word, and I lifted the brows when I learned from the lobby directory that it paid the rent for three whole floors. The executive offices were on the thirty-sixth, so up I went. The atmosphere up there was of thick carpets, wood panels and plenty of space, but as for the receptionist, though she was not really miscast she was way past the deadline, having reached the age when it is more blessed to receive than to give.

  She received me at ten-fourteen, and at ten-nineteen I was escorted down a corridor to the office of the president. Naturally he had a corner room with batteries of big windows, but I had to admit that in spite of more panels and carpets and the kind of office furniture you see in Sloane’s window, it gave me the impression of a place where somebody got some work done.

  Mr. Jasper Pine was about the same age as the receptionist, a little short of fifty maybe, but on him it looked good. Except for his clothes, with the coat obviously cut for the stoop of his shoulders, he had more the appearance of a foreman or a job boss than a top executive of a big corporation. In the middle of the room he shook hands as if he were comparatively human too, and, instead of fencing himself off behind his desk, assigned us to a couple of comfortable chairs between two windows.

  “My morning’s a little crowded,” he told me in a deep voice that sounded as if all it needed was more breath to reach Central Park, and he could furnish the breath when necessary. I was sizing him up, not knowing then whether the job was a lead pencil leak in the supply room, which would have been beneath our notice, or wife-tailing, which was out of bounds for Nero Wolfe. On the phone he had refused to specify.

  “So,” he was going on, “I’ll sketch it briefly. Looking over some reports recently, I noticed that our employee turnover here in the home office, exclusive of the technical staff, was over twenty-eight per cent for the year ninet
een forty-six. That was excessive. I decided to look into it. As a first step I had a form drawn up and two thousand copies of it multigraphed, and sent a supply of it to all heads of departments, with instructions that one be filled out for each person who had left our employ during nineteen forty-six. The forms were to be returned direct to me. Here’s one that came from the head of the stock department.” He extended a hand with a paper in it. “Take a look at it. Read it through.”

  It was a single sheet, letter size, with a neat job of multigraphing on one side. At the top it said:

  RETURN TO THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT BY MARCH TENTH

  The blank spaces had been filled in with a typewriter. First came the name of the ex-employee, which in this case was Waldo Wilmot Moore. Age: 30. Unmarried. Home address: Hotel Churchill. Employment began: April 8, 1946. Hired through: Applied personally. Job: Correspondence checker. Salary: $100 weekly. Rises: To $150 weekly September 30, 1946. Employment ended: December 5, 1946.

  Other spaces had been filled in, about how well he had done his job, and his relations with other employees and his immediate superiors, and so forth, and then at the bottom came what was of course the key question. Reason for ending employment (give details). There were three inches of space after it, plenty of room for details, but for Waldo Wilmot Moore only one word had been thought necessary and there it was:

  Murdered.

  3.

  So apparently it wasn’t a lead pencil leak.

  I looked at Jasper Pine. “An excellent idea,” I said enthusiastically. “These reports will show you where the weak spots are, and you can take steps. Though Moore’s case was probably an exception. I don’t suppose many of the twenty-eight per cent got murdered. Incidentally, I keep track of murders for business reasons, and I don’t remember this one. Was it local?”

  Pine was shaking his head. “Moore was run over by a car, a hit-and-run driver—here in New York somewhere uptown. I believe that is called manslaughter, not murder, which requires malice aforethought. I’m not a lawyer, but I looked it up when this report—when I saw this.” He made a gesture of impatience. “The hit-and-run driver was not found. I want Nero Wolfe to find out if there is any basis for the supposition that it was murder.”

  “Just curiosity?”

  “No. I took it up with the head of the stock department, who made that report, because I didn’t think it desirable to have it in our files, stating that one of our employees had been murdered, unless that was actually the case. Also I wanted to know what reason he had, if any, to make that statement. He refused to give any reason. He agreed with my definition of murder and manslaughter, but he refused to change the report or to make another report using a different word or phrase. He insisted that the report is correct as it stands. He refused to elaborate. He refused to discuss it.”

  “Goodness.” I was impressed. “That ought to be a record. Four refusals to a corporation president from a mere head of a department! Who is he? Mr. Naylor? Or Mr. Kerr?”

  “His name is Kerr Naylor.”

  I thought for a second he was injecting comic relief, but the look on his face showed me quite the contrary. He was taking time out to light a cigarette, and it was easy to see that the purpose of the maneuver was to hide embarrassment. The president was unquestionably embarrassed.

  After a good puff he coughed explosively and explained, “Kerr Naylor is the son of one of the founders of this business. He was named Kerr after the other founder. He has had a—uh, varied career. Also he is my wife’s brother. He actually controls a large block of the corporation’s stock, but he no longer owns it because he gave it away. He refuses to be an officer of the company, and he refuses to serve on the Board of Directors.”

  “I see. He’s a dyed-in-the-wood refuser.”

  Pine made the gesture of impatience again. He did it with a little fling of a hand, and it was abrupt but not domineering. “As you see,” he said, “the situation is not simple. After Mr. Naylor’s refusal either to justify the report or to change it, I was inclined just to let the matter drop and merely destroy the report, but I mentioned it to two of my brother executives and to a member of the Board, and they were all of the opinion that it should be followed up. Besides that, news of the report, with that word on it, has got around among the employees of the department, presumably through the stenographer who typed it, and there is a lot of unhealthy gossip. This man Moore was the type—I’ll put it this way—he was the type that stirs up gossip in the circle he lives in, and now, nearly four months after his death, here he is stirring it up again. We don’t like it and we want it stopped.”

  “Oh. You said you wanted Mr. Wolfe to find out if there was any basis for using the word murdered. Now you want the gossip stopped. You’d better pick which.”

  “It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. If we find out he was murdered and the finding percolates, the gossip gauge will go right through the ceiling, not to mention other possible results.”

  Pine glanced at his wristwatch, reached to an ash tray to ditch his cigarette, and stood up. “Damn it,” he said, with more breath but not more noise, “do I have to explain that the situation is made more complicated by the fact that it was Mr. Kerr Naylor who signed that report? This is a damn nuisance and it’s taking my time that ought to be spent working! His father, old George Naylor, is still living and is Chairman of the Board, though he turned over his stock to his children long ago. This is the oldest and largest company in its field, the largest in the world, and it has built up a reputation and a tradition. It has also built up—uh, complexities. The directors and executives now managing its affairs—of whom I am one—want this thing looked into, and I want to hire Nero Wolfe to do the looking.”

  “You mean the corporation? Wants to hire him?”

  “Certainly!”

  “To do what? Wait a minute, can I put it this way? We’re either to make that word on that report good, or we’re to make this Mr. Kerr Naylor eat it. Is that the job?”

  “Roughly, yes.”

  “Do we get credentials for around here?”

  “You get all reasonable co-operation. The details will have to be arranged with me. More time gone. It will have to be handled with discretion—and delicately. I had an idea that a way to do it would be for Nero Wolfe to get a job in the stock department, under another name of course, and he could—what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Excuse me.” I stood up. The notion of Wolfe fighting his way down to William Street every morning or even with me driving him, and punching a time clock, and working all day in the stock department, had been too much for my facial control.

  “Okay,” I said, “I guess I know enough to put it up to Mr. Wolfe. Except about money. I ought to warn you that his charges have not joined in the postwar inflation because they were already so high that a boost would have been vulgar.”

  “This company never expects good work for low pay.”

  I told him that was fine and got my hat and coat.

  4.

  A coolness had sprung up between Wolfe and me. These coolnesses averaged about four a week, say, a couple of hundred a year. This particular one had two separate aspects: first, my natural desire for him to buy a new car opposed to his pigheaded determination to wait another year; and second, his notion of buying a noiseless typewriter opposed to my liking for the one we had.

  It happened that at that moment there were other coolnesses swirling around in the old brownstone house, on West Thirty-fifth Street not far from the Hudson River, which he owned and used both for a residence and an office. Four of us lived there, counting him, and we were all temporarily cool. Wolfe had somewhere picked up the idea of putting leaves of sweet basil in clam chowder, and Fritz Brenner, the cook and house manager, strongly disapproved. A guy in New Hampshire who was grateful to Wolfe for something had sent him an extra offering, three plants of a new begonia named Thimbleberry, and Wolfe had given them good bench space up in the
cool room, and Theodore Horstmann, the plant nurse, who thought that everything that grew except orchids was a weed, was fit to be tied.

  So the atmosphere around the place was somewhat arctic, and on my way down in the elevator the thought struck me that this Naylor-Kerr or Kerr Naylor or Pine-Kerr Naylor business might be used as an excuse to go somewhere out of the cold for a few days. Why couldn’t it be me who got a job in the stock department? Grabbing a taxi from under the chins of two other prospective customers, I considered it. Just any job, one that happened to be loose, didn’t seem practical. A little friendly conversation with the elevator starter had informed me that the line of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., was Engineers’ Equipment and Supplies, and I knew all of nothing about them except maybe overalls. Anyway, the job would have to be one that would let me roam around and rub elbows, or it might take months, and I didn’t want months. It would be hard enough to maneuver Wolfe into letting me try it for a week, since he needed me every hour and might need me any minute, for anything and everything from opening the mail to bouncing unwanted customers or even shooting one, which had been known to happen.

  Liking the idea, and being afraid of the dark when it comes to anything resembling murder, I told the taxi driver I had had a vision and asked him to go to the address of the Homicide Squad on West Twentieth Street. There by good luck I found that Purley Stebbins, my favorite sergeant, was on hand, and he obligingly got what I wanted with only three or four growls. A phone call to a brother sergeant downtown brought the information that the death of Waldo Wilmot Moore had occurred around midnight on December 4. The body had been discovered by a man and wife on Thirty-ninth Street a hundred and twenty feet east of Eleventh Avenue. The wife had phoned in while the man stood by, and a radio car had arrived on the scene at one-nineteen A.M. on Decem-5. It was a DOA, dead on arrival, with Moore’s head crushed and his legs broken. The car that hit him had been found the next morning, parked on West Ninety-fifth Street near Broadway. It was hot, having been stolen the evening of the fourth from where it was parked on West Fifty-fourth Street. Its owner had been checked up and down and backwards and forwards, and was out of it. No witnesses to the accident had been found, but the post-mortem report, plus laboratory examination of various particles clinging to the tires and fender of the stolen car, had satisfied everybody as to what had happened. It was filed as a routine hit-and-run and was still open. After the phone call Purley went through a door, and came back in a couple of minutes and told me that Homicide still had it and was working on it.