Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 12 - Too Many Women Page 2

  “Yeah,” I grinned at him, “I can imagine it—conferences, minute clues subjected to severe scrutiny, ten of your best men turning over stones all the way—”

  Purley pronounced a word. Having granted my slightest wish, he sneered, “Come and take my desk and do it. Now give. Who’s your client?”

  I shook my head. “About that noise you use for a voice, I know how you got it. Your mother had a longing for nutmeg graters when she was carrying you. It might be, say, an insurance company.”

  “Nuts. No insurance company pays Nero Wolfe prices. Who invited you in?”

  “Nothing for now.” I got erect. “Somebody had a dream, that’s all. If and when anything for the teeth is brought on, we’ll see that you get a bite. Much obliged, and give my love to your boss.”

  But I had a chance to do my own love-giving. On my way out there he was, striding in from the entrance, Inspector Cramer himself, concentrated and in a hurry.

  He saw me, stopped short, and demanded, “What do you want?”

  “Well, sir,” I said pleadingly, “I thought with my experience if you had a vacancy anywhere, I’d be willing to start as a patrolman and work my way—”

  “Natural-born clown,” he said personally. “Is it the Meredith case? Has Wolfe crashed the gate—”

  “No, sir, Mr. Wolfe would regard that as impertinent. As he was saying only yesterday, if ever Mr. Cramer—”

  He was on his way. I looked reproachfully at his broad manly back and then headed for the street.

  5.

  Seated at my desk in the office, I put the phone back in the cradle and told Nero Wolfe, “The bank says that Naylor-Kerr is good for anything up to twenty million.”

  Wolfe, seated behind his own desk, heaved a sigh and then was silent. I had given him the story complete, in a dry factual manner with no flavor or coloring on account of the coolness previously mentioned. His inclination, naturally, was to turn it down, since he was always annoyed at any hint of a prospect that he might have to use his brain, but I doubted if I would have to ride him hard on this because it looked like easy money and we could always use it.

  He sighed again.

  I spoke, still dry. “I suppose the best bet is that Pine killed Waldo Wilmot Moore himself and is keeping up appearances. What for being unknown to us, but surely not to everybody. Anyway, we would be paid by the corporation, not him. His suggestion that you get a job in the stock department under another name shows that he has given the problem a great deal of thought. You could call yourself Clarence Camembert, for instance, or Percy Pickerel. If they gave you too much to do you could bring things home and I’d be glad to help. They could pay you by weight—say, a dollar a pound a week. As you stand now, or at least sit, close to three hundred and forty pounds, it would come to an annual salary—”

  “Archie. Your notebook.”

  “Yes, sir.” I got it and flipped to a new page.

  “A letter to Mr. Pine, president and so on. Mr. Goodwin has reported his conversation this morning with you. I accept the job of investigating, on behalf of your company, the death of your former employee, Waldo Wilmot Moore. It is understood that the purpose of the investigation is to establish, with satisfactory evidence, the manner of his death—whether by accident or by the deliberate action, with intent, of some person or persons. The job does not, as I understand it, extend to the disclosure of the identity of the murderer—if there was a murder—nor to procurement of proof of guilt. Should such extension be desired, you may notify me. Paragraph.

  “The procedure promising quickest results, I think, will be for you to put Mr. Goodwin on the company payroll as a personnel expert. You can plausibly explain his presence as a part of your campaign to reduce your employee turnover. Thus he can spend his days there, moving freely about and conversing with anyone whomever, without causing comment or increasing the gossip you deplore. I suggest that you make his salary two hundred dollars weekly. Paragraph.

  “My fee will of course be determined by the amount of time spent on the case and the amount and kind of work required. No guarantee is given. No retainer is necessary unless you prefer it that way, in which case the check should be for two thousand dollars. Sincerely.”

  Wolfe, who always straightened up to some extent to dictate, leaned back again. “After lunch you can go down and give that to him.”

  If I had been cool before I was a glacier now. “Why lunch?” I demanded. “Why should I eat?”

  “Why not?” His eyes went open. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. But what I start I like to finish, and this may take weeks. There are one or two other little matters that need attention around here, and there’s a bare possibility that you may find it slightly inconvenient when you buzz me or call me or grunt at me, as you do on an average of ten times an hour, and I’m not here. Or, perhaps, that hadn’t occurred to me, perhaps you’re figuring on a replacement?”

  “Archie,” he murmured. His murmur is Wolfe at his worst. “I agree with someone, I forget who, that no man is indispensable. By the way, you may have noticed that I suggested the same salary as you receive from me. You can either endorse their checks over to me for deposit in my bank, and take my checks weekly as usual, or just keep their checks as your pay, whichever is simpler for your bookkeeping.”

  “Thank you very much.” I made no attempt to speak further. His deliberate use of the plural, checks, instead of check, three times, therefore got exactly the effect he intended it to. I got out paper and carbon and inserted them, and started on the typewriter in a way that left no possible doubt whether it was noiseless or not.

  Coolness.

  6.

  I started work as a personnel expert for Naylor-Kerr, Inc., the next day, Wednesday morning, March 19, the next to last day of winter.

  I knew just what I had known after my first call on Pine, and no more. Tuesday afternoon, when I took him Wolfe’s letter, he was co-operative about letting me ask questions, but he couldn’t supply many answers. He liked Wolfe’s idea on procedure, and proved he was a good executive by starting immediately to execute. That was simple. All he had to do was call in an assistant vice-president, introduce me, tell him about me, and instruct him to put me on the payroll and present me personally to all heads of departments. That was accomplished Tuesday afternoon, the presentations being made in the office of the assistant vice-president, to which the department heads were summoned. I found an opportunity to drop the remark that after looking over the reports and records I thought I would start in the stock department.

  Wednesday morning I was on the job in the stock department on the thirty-fourth floor. It handed me a surprise. I had vaguely supposed it to be something on the order of an overgrown hardware store, with rows of shelves to the ceiling containing samples of things that hold bridges together and related objects, but not at all. Primarily, as far as space went, it was a room about the size of the Yankee Stadium, with hundreds of desks and girls at them. Along each side of that area, the entire length, was a series of partitioned offices, with some of the doors closed and some open. No stock of anything was in sight anywhere.

  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.

  A voice at my elbow said, “I doubt very much if there’s a virgin in the room. Now if you’ll come to my office …”

  It was Kerr Naylor, the head of the s
tock department. I had reported to him on arrival, as arranged, and he had introduced me to a dozen or so of his assistants, heads of sections. All but two of them were men. One of them I had regarded with special interest was the head of the Correspondence Checking Section, since Waldo Wilmot Moore had been a correspondence checker, but I was careful not to give him any extra time or attention there at the start. His name was Dickerson, he could easily have been my grandfather, and his eyes watered. I gathered from our brief talk that the function of a correspondence checker was to mosey around, pounce and grab a letter when the whim seized him, take it to the checker’s office, and give it the works on content, tone, policy, style, and mechanical execution. So it could safely be assumed that his popularity quotient around the place would be about the same as that of an MP in the army, and that was bad. It presented the possibility that any letter-dictator or stenographer in the department might have felt like murdering Moore, including those who had lost their jobs—and the turnover had been twenty-eight per cent. For one man to sort out the whole haystack, a straw at a time, was not my idea of the pursuit of happiness, but it did have its good points as suggested above.

  Kerr Naylor’s office was also a corner room, but was considerably more modest in every respect than the president’s, two floors up. One whole wall was behind ceiling-high filing cabinets, and there were piles of papers around on tables and even two of the chairs. After we were seated, him at his desk and me at one end of it, I asked him:

  “Why do you refuse to hire virgins?”

  “What?” Then he tittered. “Oh, that was just a remark. No, Mr. Truett, this office has no prejudice against virgins. I merely doubt if there are any. Now how do you want to begin?”

  His voice matched his appearance. The voice was a thin tenor, and while he was not a pygmy they had been all out of large sizes the day he was outfitted. Also they had been low on pigments. His skin had no color at all, and the only thing that made it reasonable to suppose there was anybody at home inside it was the eyes. They too were without color, but they had a sharp dancing glint that wasn’t just on the surface but came from behind, deep.

  “This first day,” I said, “I guess I’ll just poke around and get my directions straight. No virgins at all? Who has picked all the flowers? You might as well call me Pete. Everybody does.”

  The name I had chosen to be introduced by was Peter Truett, liking the implication of the first syllable of the Truett. Pine had thought my own, Archie Goodwin, might be familiar to someone. I went back to virgins again because I wanted to keep the talk going to get acquainted with this bird. But apparently it had really been just a remark and the virgin question had not come to a boil in him, as it often does with men over fifty, for he ignored it and said:

  “As I understand it you are going to study the whole employee problem, past, present, and future. If you want to start with a specific case and spread out from there, I suggest the name of Waldo Wilmot Moore. He was with us last year, from April eighth to December fourth—a correspondence checker. He was murdered.”

  The glint in his eyes danced out at me and went back in again. I kept my own face under control, in spite of his splashing it out like that, but it is only natural and proper for anyone to betray a gleam of interest in murder, so I let one show.

  My brows went up. “Gosh,” I said, “no one told me it had gone that far. Murdered? Right here?”

  “No, no, not on the premises, up on Thirty-ninth Street at night. He was run over by a car. His head was smashed flat.” Mr. Naylor tittered, or maybe it wasn’t a titter but only a nerve untwisting somewhere in the network. “I was one of those requested to come and identify him, at the morgue, and I can tell you it was a strange experience—like trying to identify something you have known only as a round object, for instance an orange, after it has been compressed to make two plane surfaces. It was extremely interesting, but I wouldn’t care to try it again.”

  “Could you identify him?”

  “Oh, certainly. There was no question about that.”

  “Why do you say murdered? Did they catch the guy and hang it on him?”

  “No. I understand that the police regard it as an accident—what they call a hit-and-run.”

  “Then it wasn’t murder. Technically.”

  Naylor smiled at me. His neat little mouth wasn’t designed for anything expansive, but it was certainly meant for a smile, though it went as quick as it came. “Mr. Truett,” he said, “if we are to work together we should understand each other. I am rather perceptive, and it would probably surprise you to know how much I understand of you already. One little fact about me, I have always been a student of languages, and I am extraordinarily meticulous in my choice of words. I detest euphemisms and circumlocutions, and I am acquainted with all the verbs, including those of the argots, which mean to cause the death of. What did I say happened to this man Moore?”

  “You said he was murdered.”

  “Very well. That’s what I meant.”

  “Okay, Mr. Naylor, but I like words too.” I had a strong feeling that no matter what his reason had been for tossing this at me right off the bat, if I fielded it right I might at least end the inning, and possibly the game, that first morning. I tried. I grinned at him. “I have always been fond of words,” I declared. “I never got worse than B in grammar, clear to the eighth grade. Not that it’s any hide off of me, but since we’re speaking of words, when you say Moore was murdered I take it to mean that the driver of the car knew it was Moore, wanted him dead or at least hurt, and aimed the car at him. Doesn’t it come down to that?”

  Naylor was looking up at the wall behind me. His eyes stayed that way, with no glint showing because they were upraised, until I twisted my neck to see what he was looking at. All that was there was a clock. I untwisted back to him, and his gaze came down to my level.

  He smiled again. “Twenty minutes past ten,” he said resentfully. “I understand, Mr. Truett, that Mr. Pine has hired you to survey our personnel problems. What do you think he would say if he knew you were sitting here at your ease, prolonging a discussion of a murder which has no possible connection with your job?”

  The damn little squirt. The only satisfactory way to field that one would have been to pick him up and use him for a dust rag. Under the circumstances that satisfaction would have to be postponed. I swallowed it, stood up, and grinned down at him.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m a great talker. It was nice of you to listen. Why don’t you put through a voucher in triplicate, or however you do it, docking me for an hour? I deserve it, I really do.”

  I left. If the “uh, complexities” that Pine had mentioned included a desire on the part of his brother executives and him to tie a can to Kerr Naylor’s tail, I was all for it. He sure was tricky and mean. He had me so sore that I went from his office straight to the main arena, took a random course through the labyrinth of desks, glancing in all directions at faces, shoulders, and arms, and took my time picking one who had probably been a Powers model and got fired because she made all her colleagues look below standard.

  I sat on the corner of her desk and she looked up at me with the clear blue eyes of an angel and a virgin.

  I leaned to her. “My name is Peter Truett,” I told her, “and I’ve been hired as a personnel expert. If your section head hasn’t told you about me …”

  “He has,” she said, in a sweet musical voice, a contralto, which is my favorite.

  “Then please tell me, have you heard any gossip recently about a man named Moore? Waldo Wilmot Moore? Did you know him when he worked here?”

  She shook her head. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, sweeter than before if anything, “but I only started here day before yesterday, and I’m leaving on Friday. Just because I can’t spell! I never could spell.” Her lovely fingers were resting on my knee and her eyes were going straight to my heart. “Mr. Truman, do you know of any job where you don’t have to spell?”

  I forget exactly how I got awa
y.

  7.

  I had been assigned a room of my own, about the right size for an Irish setter but not big enough for a Great Dane, about midway of the row of offices that ran along the uptown side of the arena. It contained a cute little desk, three chairs, and a filing cabinet with a lock to which I had been given the key. Apparently there were nothing but shanties across the street, since the window had space outside, and if you took it at a slant there was a good view of the East River.

  I went there and sat.

  It seemed I had breezed into something with insufficient consideration of strategy and tactics. As a result I had already pulled two boners. When Kerr Naylor had unexpectedly jumped the gun by shoving Moore and murder at me, I should have shrugged it off as a man with a single-track stomach and no appetite for anything but personnel problems. And when he side-stepped and caught me off balance, I should have backed clear up and looked it over, instead of getting peeved and spilling Moore’s name to a vision of delight that couldn’t spell. I was too exuberant.

  On the other hand, I certainly didn’t intend to spend a week or so just getting myself established as a personnel expert. I sat there through two cigarettes, thinking it over, and then went and unlocked the filing cabinet and got out a couple of the folders I had stowed there. On one of them the tab said STOCK DEPARTMENT—STRUCTURAL METALS SECTION, and on the other STOCK DEPARTMENT—CORRESPONDENCE CHECKERS SECTION. With the folders under my arm, I emerged to the arena, crossed it by a main traffic aisle, and knocked at the door of an office on the other side. When a voice told me to come in I entered.