Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 44 - Death of a Dude

  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 Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War IIRex 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. Amonth 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

  The Hand in the Glove

  Double for Death

  Bad for Business

  The Broken Vase

  The Sound of Murder

  Red Threads

  The Mountain Cat Murders

  Introduction

  Some time ago I was visiting with a New York editor about the recent success of a mutual friend. The friend, a young writer from the Great Plains, had just received a prestigious award for his first novel.

  “What is it with you Kansas writers?” the editor chided, tongue-in-cheek, “Do you keep growing them out there?”

  “Well, our horizons are farther away, “I told him, cheek equally tongue-filled, “so we remain unfettered by the narrow provincialism of the coasts.”

  I wasn’t half-serious, but I’ve thought about it many times since. The heartland of America, the Great Plains, and the American West have produced writers in numbers and in stature out of all proportion to the population. I won’t even try to begin a list. If I did, however, it would surely include Rex Stout.

  I became enthralled with this author in about 1944, when I discovered some Nero Wolfe books. They were in a box that had been sent by the USO to the Pacific Islands, where I was vacationing at government expense during Word War II. (I was not aware until much later that in a tank destroyer unitlike ours on the other side of the island was an unpublished young writer named L‘Amour, but that’s another story.)

  I was also unaware that the creator of Nero Wolfe, the corpulent detective, was practically a neighbor back home. Rex Stout grew up in Wakarusa, Kansas, less than an hour’s drive from my present home. This brings me back to the far horizons theme: Rex Stout is a perfect example. His writing, his characters are cosmopolitan in nature, maybe because of this breadth of vision. He had the durability of the westerner, too. His first Nero Wolfe book was published at the age of forty-eight, after other successful careers. His last, at eighty-eight; he was still writing …

  Stout was not a western writer by any means, but the objectivity of the westerner does show in his characters. What wonderful, colorful characters inhabit the pages of a Rex Stout novel! Nero Wolfe, of course, the prototype of several movie roles involving Sidney Greenstreet as well as that of Cannon, television’s overweight private eye, played by William Conrad. Wolfe has had quite a weighty impact (pun intended) on the characters of fiction.

  The supporting cast, too: Archie Goodwin, the legman. I used to feel sorry for Archie because he’s frequently criticized and put down by his employer. But he’s not really a second-class character. He’s doing what he wants to do. He’s not a yes-man. He argues, resents his employer sometimes, but basically loves his job. And after all, he gets to tell the story, like Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson. Archie is possibly a stronger character than Watson, though, in my humble opinion.

  And Archie has a love interest, Lily Rowan. Lily moves in and out of the series, a major player in some of the books, not even seen in others, but a strong character. Rex Stout was ahead of his time with this capable lady. In the 1930s, when Nero Wolfe was born, female characters had only a few options in emergencies (i.e., scream, faint, or throw up). Lily Rowan does such things as assist the hero, even rescue him, just like in the real world.

  She has a key part in this book, Death of a Dude, which transports Nero Wolfe and Archie to Montana. If ever a character was a fish out of water, it is Nero Wolfe in a ranch setting. Here Stout’s western heritage comes to the fore. I can picture the author’s enjoyment in placing his beloved character at such a disadvantage. Without his treasured orchids, his gourmet chef, and his other creature comforts, he is still Nero Wolfe.

  We get the impression that Wolfe is somewhat concerned as to whether he might starve on nothing but rough frontier fare. He does quite well, however. By the book’s end he is trading gourmet recipes with Woody, the proprietor of Woodrow Stepanian’s Hall of Culture in Lame Horse, Montana, where cowboy dances are held every Saturday night.

  Woody is a colorful, though very minor, character. There are many such colorful minor characters here, as in any other Rex Stout book. Or maybe there are no “minor” parts. The county sheriff; the small-town lawyer; the ranch wife who is a former rodeo contestant and who cusses like a cowboy and can cook trout with brown sugar, onions, and ham to make the reader’s mouth water. (An old family recipe.) A westerner will recognize each of these people as someone he knows.

  And the “dudes” who inhabit Farnham’s dude ranch. Some love it; some hate it and are here under duress. There’s the flirt who stays in the ranch house and reads. Incidentally, what do you call a female dude? For want of a better word, Rex Stout creates one: she’s a dudine.

  If you’ve never read Death of a Dude, you’re in for a treat. If you have, you’ll enjoy a visit with folks you know. And if you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Nero Wolfe, there’s no time like the present.

  —Don Coldsmith

  Chapter 1

  I began it “NW” and signed it “AG” not to be different, but from habit. Nearly all of my written communications to Nero Wolfe over the years had been on a sheet of a memo pad, for Fritz to take up to his room on his breakfast tray, or put by me on his desk when he was upstairs in bed and I had returned from an evening errand. They had all begun “NW” and ended “AG” so this did too, though it wasn’t scribbled. It was typed on an Underwood on a table in a corner of the big room in Lily Rowan’s cabin in a corner of her ranch, and it was in the airmail envelope I poked through the slot in the post office in Timberburg, the county seat, that Saturday morning—on a letterhead that had Bar JR Ranch, Lame Horse, Montana in big type across the top. Not as elegant as the one with her New York penthouse address. Below, it said:

  Friday 8:13 pm

  August 2, 1968

  NW:

  It’s a real mess here and I’m stuck. I didn’t go into details on the phone Monday because someone at the exchange might be cooperating with the sheriff or the county attorney (in New York he would be distri
ct attorney), or there might even be a tap on Miss Rowan’s line. Modern science certainly gets around.

  Since you never forget anything or anybody you remember Harvey Greve, who once told you there in the office that he had bought a lot of livestock, horses and cattle and calves, for Roger Dunning, which helped do for Dunning. I believe I have mentioned that he has been running Miss Rowan’s ranch for the last four years, and he still is—or was until six days ago, last Saturday, when he was charged with murder and parked in the cooler—namely the county jail. A dude named Philip Brodell had been shot in the back and then in the front while he was picking huckleberries. As I have told you, these mountain huckleberries are different. This time I’ll try to bring you some.

  Miss Rowan and I have decided that Harvey didn’t do it, and I’m stuck. If it had been plain and simple that he did it I would have been back there to keep your desk dusted when I was supposed to, day before yesterday. Miss Rowan has hired a lawyer from Helena with a reputation that stretches from the Continental Divide to the Little Missouri, and it would be his problem. But I suspect he doesn’t see it as we do. His head’s on it, but I don’t think his heart’s in it. Mine is, and one will get you fifty that Harvey’s clean. So you see how it is, I’ve got a job. Even if I had no obligation to Miss Rowan as her guest and an old friend, I’ve known Harvey Greve too long and too well to bow out and leave him in a squeeze.

  Of course from July 31, day before yesterday, I’m on leave of absence without pay. I hope to be back soon, but as it stands now I have no suggestions for a replacement for Harvey in the jug, and it looks like—excuse it, as if—there’ll have to be one with good credentials. If you want to have Saul or Orrie at my desk, my strictly personal things are up in my room, so all my secrets are safe. Television here is often a bust, and I have got to be back in time for the World Series. Give Theodore my regards and tell Fritz my first thought every morning is him—the breakfast in his kitchen I’m missing. In these parts the two favorite nicknames for pancakes are torture disks and gut plasters.

  AG

  When he got it, probably Monday, he would lean back and glare at my chair for a good ten minutes.

  As I left the post office I took a look at my shopping list. The population of Timberburg was only 7463, but it was the biggest batch between Helena and Great Falls, and its customers covered a lot of territory—from the Fishtail River, where the hills graduated into mountains, east to where the range got so flat you could see a coyote two miles off. So in about an hour I got everything on my list, with four stops on the main drag and two on side streets. The items:

  Big Six Mix pipe tobacco for Mel Fox. With Harvey in the coop he was too busy at the ranch to go shopping.

  Fly swatters for Pete Ingalls. He never raised his foot to the stirrup without one dangling from his saddle horn, for horse flies.

  Typewriter ribbon for the Underwood. Tube of toothpaste and a belt, for me personally. My best belt had got chewed by a porcupine when I—but that’s a long story.

  A magnifying glass and a notebook that would go in my hip pocket, for me professionally. On a job in New York I never go on an errand without those two articles, and I was on a job now. Probably I wouldn’t have any use for them, but a habit is a habit. Psychology.

  My last stop was the public library, to consult a book that probably wouldn’t be there, but it was—Who’s Who in America. Not the latest, 1968–1969, but the 1966–67 was good enough. There was no entry for Philip Brodell, and there never would be since he was now a corpse, but his father, Edward Ellis Brodell, had about a third of a column. I knew he was still alive, having exchanged some words with him a week ago, when he had come to gather facts and raise some hell and get his son’s body to take home. Born in St. Louis in 1907, he had done all right and was now the owner and publisher of the St. Louis Star-Bulletin. Who’s Who had no information about who was going to kill his son.

  With all my purchases in the big paper bag I had requested for the fly swatters, I wasn’t much encumbered when I entered the Continental Cafe at a quarter past noon, sent my eyes around, spotted an attractive female in an olive-green shirt and dark green slacks at a table in the rear, and headed for her. When I got there and pulled a chair back she said, “Either you’re pretty fast or you didn’t finish your list.”

  “Got everything.” I sat and put the bag on the floor. “I may not be fast but I’m lucky.” I tipped my head at her martini glass. “Carson’s?”

  “No. They haven’t got any. You can’t tell me gins are all alike. There’s split-pea soup.”

  That was good news because his split-pea soup was the one dish the Continental cook had a right to be proud of. A waitress came and took our order for two double bowls of soup, plenty of crackers, one milk, and one coffee, and while we were waiting for it I fished in the bag for the belt and the magnifying glass to show Lily that Timberburg was as good as New York when you needed things.

  The soup was up to expectations. When our bowls were nearly empty and the crackers low I said, “I not only finished up my list, I dug up some facts. At the library in Who’s Who. Philip Brodell’s father’s father’s name was Amos. His father is a member of three clubs, and his father’s wife’s maiden name was Mitchell. That’s a break. Real progress.”

  “Congratulations.” She took a cracker. “Let’s go and tell Jessup. You’re the doctor, but how could Who’s Who possibly have helped?”

  “It couldn’t. But when you’re up a stump you always try things that can’t help and about once a year one does.” I swallowed the last spoonful of soup. “I’ve got to say something.”

  “Good. Like?”

  “Like it is. Look, Lily. I’m a good investigator with a lot of experience. But this is the sixth day since Harvey was charged and I have got nowhere. Not a glimmer of a lead. I may be only half as smart as I think I am, but also I’m handicapped. I don’t belong here. I’m a dude. I’m all right for things like packing in or fishing or a game of pinochle or even a dance at the hall, but this is murder, and I’m a dude. Hell, I’ve been out here a lot, and I’ve known Mel Fox for years, and even he has gone cagey on me. They all have. I’m a goddam dude. There must be private detectives in Helena, and there may be a good one. A native. Dawson would know.”

  She put her coffee cup down. “You’re suggesting that I hire a native to help you.”

  “Not to help me. If he’s any good he wouldn’t help me. He would just go to work.”

  “Oh.” Her blue eyes widened and fastened on me. “You’re checking out.”

  “I am not. In the letter I just mailed to Mr. Wolfe I said I hoped to be back for the World Series. I’m staying and making motions, but damn it, I’m handicapped. I’m only suggesting that maybe you should ask Dawson.”

  “Escamillo.” Her eyes had relaxed and were smiling. “Now really. Aren’t you the second-best detective in the world?”

  “Oh, sure. In my world, but this isn’t it. Even Dawson, haven’t you noticed? You’ve paid him a ten-grand retainer, but how does he take me? You must have noticed.”

  She nodded. “It’s one of the milder forms of xenophobia. You’re a dude, and I’m a dudine.”

  “You own a ranch. That’s different.”

  “Well.” She picked up her coffee cup, looked in it, decided it was too cool, and put it down. “It’s too bad Harvey can’t be bailed out, but Mel can handle it—for a while. How much time have we got?”

  “Until Harvey’s tried and convicted, apparently two or three months, from what Jessup says.”

  “And it’s two months to the World Series. You know, Archie, what I think of you personally has nothing to do with this. Not only are you a better detective than any native would be, but also you know darned well Harvey didn’t shoot a man in the back. But after a week or two of nosing around, the native would probably think he did. Dawson does. Admit I’m right.”

  “You’re always right sometimes.”

  “Then may I have some hot coffee?”

  My milk glass was empty, so I had coffee too. When we had finished it and I had paid the check, we left, and as we made our way through the clutter of tables and chairs about twenty pairs of eyes followed us, and about twenty other pairs pretended not to. Monroe County was pretty worked up about the murder of Philip Brodell. Its basic attitude to dudes was no help in bringing on the brotherhood of man, but after all, they brought a lot of dough to Montana and left it there, and shooting them when they were picking huckleberries was not to be encouraged. So the eyes at Lily and me weren’t very friendly; it was her ranch boss that had pulled the trigger. So it looked to them.