Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 43 - The Father Hunt Read online

  “I know I did.” I turned a hand over on the table. “You’ve got a tough one. I’m afraid you need more than a suggestion, even from the one man you can trust. Sure, I filed that. To get what you want—there’s one chance in a million that a week or so of poking around would crack it, but it would probably be a long and very expensive job. How much money have you got?”

  “Not much. Of course I would want to pay you.”

  “Not me. I explained that. But Nero Wolfe has inflated ideas about fees; that’s why I would have to know exactly how you are fixed. If you care to tell me.”

  “Certainly I’ll tell you. I have never earned any money, not enough to mention, and anyway I’ve spent it. I only have what my mother left, after paying the … for the cremation. She left instructions about that. There’s a little more than two thousand dollars in the bank, that’s all. There are no debts and I don’t owe anyone anything.”

  I had a brow up. “What did your mother do for—no, that’s immaterial. She made enough to send you to an expensive college. Unless someone helped?”

  “No. She did it all. You were going to ask what she did for a living. She was with a television producer, the same one from as far back as I can remember. I suppose she got fifteen thousand a year, maybe more. She never told me.” The quick brown eyes were straight at me. “If I paid Nero Wolfe the two thousand dollars he would have you work on it, wouldn’t he?”

  I shook my head. “He wouldn’t even discuss it. He would know it might take a year, and he thinks nothing of billing a client five grand for a one-week job. You said you know about him, but apparently you don’t. He’s pigheaded and high-nosed and toplofty, and he thinks he’s the best detective in the world, and so do I, or I would have moved out long ago. I think you deserve some help with your problem, and you certainly need it, and I like your dimples, but if I told him about you and suggested an appointment he would just glare at me. He would think I had a hinge loose. I do have one idea that you might want to consider. Miss Rowan likes to do things for people, and she has a stack, and if you—”

  “Don’t you dare tell her about me!”

  “Keep your seat. I wouldn’t dream of telling her, or anyone. I merely thought you might tell her yourself, and—”

  “I wouldn’t tell anybody!”

  “Okay, I won’t either. Your eyes have a fine flash.” I regarded her. “Look, Miss Denovo. I’m shutting the door only because I have to. Myself, I would like to tackle it because it would probably have some interesting angles and twists and it would be nice to have a client it is a pleasure to look at. Besides, there would be the possibility of having to deal with a murder. When you hear about—”

  “Murder?”

  “Certainly. It’s only a bare possibility, but it popped up because when you hear of a hit-and-run death and the driver hasn’t been tagged, it does pop up. I mention it only because it’s one of the reasons why I would like to tackle it. But there’s not a sliver of a chance with Mr. Wolfe, and there you are. I’m sorry, I really am.”

  She shook her head, with her eyes staying at me. “But Mr. Goodwin. This leaves me helpless.” Apparently the murder possibility hadn’t fazed her. “What can I do? I can’t tell somebody else.”

  That was that. I wasn’t feeling particularly cocky twenty minutes later, as I flagged a taxi headed downtown on Park Avenue and gave the hackie Saul Panzer’s address. Working for and with the best detective in the world—which you don’t have to swallow—is fine, but when you have been told by a pretty girl that you are the one man in the world she can trust, even if it was pure soap, and you have stiff-armed her, you are not on your high horse. I slouched in the taxi and tried to steer my mind back to baseball and the Mets.

  It was six minutes to eight when I got out at the corner of Thirty-eighth and Park. As for what happened to my friends’ welfare, not to mention mine, I’ll skip it. Sometimes the cards simply will not cooperate.

  Chapter 2

  For Friday’s program I merely had to follow the script. At a quarter to ten I let myself out of the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, went to the garage around the corner on Tenth Avenue for the Heron sedan, which Wolfe owns and I drive, and headed for Long Island, where he had been spending three days as the guest of Lewis Hewitt, who has ten thousand orchids in two 100-foot greenhouses. Driving back to Manhattan, with him in back keeping a hold on the installed-on-order strap as usual because, according to him, no automobile can be trusted for a second, I had to be careful about bumps and jerks. Not on account of Wolfe, since I had a theory that jostles were good for him, but because of the pots of orchid plants in the trunk, which were not crated, and two of them were new Laelia crosses of schroederi and ashworthiana. They were worth maybe a couple of grand, but the important point was that nobody in the world but Hewitt and now Wolfe had any. As I pulled to the curb in front of the old brownstone I blew the horn, and Theodore Horstmann came out and down, as arranged, and helped me take the pots in and up in the elevator to the plant rooms on the roof. Wolfe took his bag himself. On that I have not a theory but a rule. He needs the exercise. By the time I got down to the office he was behind his desk, in the only chair he considers satisfactory for his weight and spread, looking through the accumulated mail, and Fritz came right behind me to announce lunch.

  At table, in the dining room across the hall, business talk was out, as always, and anyway there was no business to discuss, and I had no intention of mentioning Amy Denovo’s problem, then or ever. The talk may be of anything and everything, usually of Wolfe’s choosing, but that time I started it by remarking, as I helped myself from the silver platter, that a man had told me that shish kebab was just as good or better if it was kid instead of lamb. Wolfe said that any dish was better with kid instead of lamb, but that fresh kid, properly butchered and handled, was unattainable in the metropolitan area. Then he switched from meat to words and said it was miscalled shish kebab. It should be seekh kebab. He spelled it. That was what it was called in India, where it originated. In Hindi or Urdu a seekh is a thin iron rod with a loop at one end and a point at the other, and a kebab is a meatball. Some occidental jackass, he said, had made it shish instead of seekh, and it would serve him right if the only seekh kebab he ever got was old tough donkey instead of lamb. He was still commenting on people who garble foreign words when we finished the raspberries, stirred into a mixture, made by Fritz in a double boiler, of cream and sugar and egg yolks and sherry and almond extract, and went across to the office, where he got at his desk with the mail, and I got at mine with the plant records to enter the items he had talked Lewis Hewitt out of.

  At four o’clock, when he took the elevator to the roof for his regular two-hour afternoon session with Theodore and the orchids, I took the stairs for the two flights to my room to do some little personal chores, like inspecting socks and changing the ribbon on my personal typewriter. Those operations always take longer than you expect, and when I heard the doorbell, which has a connection to my room, and glanced at my wrist, I was surprised to see that it was twenty to six. I left it to Fritz, who goes when I am not downstairs, but in a couple of minutes the house phone buzzed, and when I got it Fritz said that a young woman who said her name was Denovo wanted to see me, and I asked him to put her in the front room.

  When, after mounting the stoop of the old brownstone, you enter, the second door down the hall on your left is the office. The first is to what we call the front room, which isn’t used much, mostly for parking people who aren’t wanted in the office. Its furniture is nothing much, not like the office or the kitchen, because Wolfe is seldom in it and doesn’t give a damn. When I entered, Amy Denovo was on a chair by a window. She stood up and said, “Well, here I am.”

  “So I see.” I crossed to her. “It’s nice to see you and I don’t want to be rude, but I thought I made it clear yesterday.”

  “Oh, you made it clear enough.” She started a smile but it didn’t quite come. “But I decided I had to see you again, and see Nero Wolfe, I suppose, and so I … I did something.” She had her bag, brown leather with a big clasp, under her left arm. She sat down and opened it, and took out a parcel wrapped in newspaper with rubber bands around it. She held it out and I took it, not wanting to be rude. “That’s twenty thousand dollars,” she said, “in hundred-dollar bills.” Now the smile came. “You would call it twenty grand. Of course you’ll want to count it.”

  No suitable words seemed to be ready for the tongue, so I gave them time by removing the rubber bands, and unfolding the newspaper for a look. It was centuries, some new and some used, in batches fastened with paper clips, and they looked real when I flipped through some. There were ten in the batch I counted, and there were twenty batches. I rewrapped them in the newspaper and replaced the rubber bands.

  “At five grand a week,” she said, “that’s enough for four weeks anyway.”

  From the hall the sound came of the elevator rattling to a stop. Wolfe was down from the plant rooms.

  “The five grand was just the fee,” I said. “It didn’t include expenses. But that was a little special, it isn’t always five grand a week. Are you telling me that you want to hire Nero Wolfe and you offer this as a retainer?”

  “Yes. Certainly. Provided you’re in charge.”

  “He’s always in charge. I merely do the work.”

  “All right, if you do the work.”

  “I will. He only does the thinking. I’ll explain it to him and then call you in. If you’ll wait here?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it to anybody but you.”

  “Then it’s out. He wouldn’t take a client he hasn’t seen. He never has and he never will.”

  She pressed her lips tight and took a couple of breaths, and finally said, “I guess I can. All right.”

  “Good. You won’t cotton to him, but you can trust him as far as me.” I tapped the package. “Do you want to tell me anything about this?”

  “No, I don’t. There’s nothing to tell except there it is.”

  “I can assume it’s in your possession legally?”

  “Of course.” She was still frowning. “I didn’t rob a bank.”

  “It’s still in your possession until he takes the job.” I handed her the parcel. “It may take me five minutes or it could be half an hour. If you get tired waiting, there are magazines on the table.” I started for the connecting door to the office but decided to go around, and went to the door to the hall instead.

  Wolfe was at his desk with his current book, Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord. He probably hadn’t got much reading in at Hewitt’s and would have to catch up. I went to my desk, sat facing him, and waited for him to finish a paragraph. It must have been a long one. He looked up and growled, “Something?”

  “Somebody,” I said. “A girl in the front room named Amy Denovo. I believe I mentioned a while back that Miss Rowan was collecting material for a book about her father, and she hired this girl to help, and I met her there last week. As I was leaving there yesterday afternoon she—the girl—stopped me down in the lobby and we went to a place and had egg-and-anchovy sandwiches which I have told Fritz about but he wasn’t interested. She wanted me to do a job for her because I am the one man in the world she can trust, and I told her I couldn’t because I already had a job, and she said then she would hire you if I would do the work, and I explained that I always do the work. Of course the next question, my question, was about money, and I asked it. She said she had two thousand dollars in the bank, left to her by her mother, and that’s all. No other resources and no prospects. Since the job would be complicated and might take months and no telling what expenses, I told her nothing doing, I wouldn’t even mention it to you. I was sorry because—”

  “Pfui.” He grunted. “Why do you mention it now?”

  “I’ll finish the sentence. I was sorry because the job would probably be interesting, and tough, and it has none of the aspects that you won’t touch. I mention it now because she is in the front room with a package wrapped in newspaper containing two hundred hundred-dollar-bills, twenty thousand dollars, which she wants you to take as a retainer.”

  “Where did she get it?”

  “I don’t know. She says it’s in her possession legally.”

  He put his bookmark, a thin strip of gold that was a gift from a client, at his page and put the book down. “What was said yesterday. In full.”

  I had expected that. He hates to take on a job; anything to hold off a commitment. Also, there was the chance that there might be one or more details that he could find unacceptable. I reported. It had taken a lot of practice to get to where I could give a long conversation verbatim, but it was a cinch now, even with three or four talking. As usual, he leaned back and closed his eyes, and didn’t interrupt. There was no reaction even to the “pigheaded and high-nosed and toplofty.” I omitted nothing except the irrelevant chatter while we were eating. When I finished he stayed put for a minute and then opened his eyes and straightened up.

  He regarded me. “That’s not like you, Archie. It’s hardly even a sketch. Barely a start.”

  “Certainly. There was no point in going deeper with a poor little poor girl.”

  He looked up at the wall clock and back at me. “You could have—no matter. Very well. Bring her.”

  I went and opened the connecting door. She was still in the chair by the window, and hadn’t returned the parcel to her bag; it was in her lap. I told her to come.

  Wolfe seldom rises when someone enters the office, and never if it’s a woman. His expression is always the same if it’s a woman, no matter who or what she is; he is concentrating on not making a face. There is no telling what he notices or doesn’t; for instance, whether he noticed that the skirt of Amy Denovo’s brown-striped summer dress wasn’t really a mini; it was only about two inches above her knees. Certainly he didn’t notice that the knees were worthy of notice, though they were, since that had no bearing on her acceptability as a client. The seat of the red leather chair near the end of his desk was too deep for her to settle back, so she sat on the front half, straight, and put her bag on the stand at her elbow, with the parcel in her lap.

  Wolfe, his chair swiveled to face her, his fingers curled over the arm ends, spoke. “So Mr. Goodwin impressed you at first sight.”

  Her eyes, meeting his, widened a little. “Yes. He did.”

  “That may be a point for you and it may not. It is nothing new for him to impress a young woman. He has reported his conversation with you yesterday, to its conclusion. He says that you now have in your possession, you say legally, twenty thousand dollars in cash, and you offer it to me as retainer for the job you want me to do. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, if Mr. Goodwin does the work.”

  “He would do his share, directed by me except when urgency forbids. The money is in that parcel? May I see it?”

  She got up and handed it to him and returned to the chair. He removed the rubber bands and wrapping and took a look at each batch, all twenty of them, stacking them neatly on his desk. He turned to me. “I see no indication of source. Did you?”

  I said no.

  He turned to her. “Did Miss Lily Rowan supply it?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But of course someone did. In view of what you told Mr. Goodwin yesterday, I would have to know the source of this money. Where and how you did get it.”

  Her lips were tight. She opened them to say, “I don’t see why you have to know that. There’s nothing wrong with the way I got it. It’s mine. If I went to a store to buy something and gave them one of those bills they wouldn’t ask me where I got it.”

  He shook his head. “Not a parallel, Miss Denovo. Yesterday you told Mr. Goodwin that two thousand dollars in the bank was all you had, and you rejected his suggestion that you ask Miss Rowan to help you.” He tapped the desk. “This is ten times two thousand. If it was a loan or a gift I would have to know from whom. If you sold something I would have to know what you sold and to whom. You may not know, at your age, that that is merely reasonable prudence. To accept a substantial retainer for a difficult and complicated operation without assurance of its legitimacy would be asinine, and if you won’t tell me where you got this money I won’t take it. If you do tell me it will have to be verified, with proper discretion, but to my satisfaction.”

  She was frowning again, not at him, at me, but it wasn’t really for me; it was for the problem she had been handed. But when she spoke it was to me and for me, a question: “Is he right, Mr. Goodwin? Or is he just shutting the door, as you did?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m afraid he’s right. As he said, just reasonable prudence. And after all, if it’s yours legally, as you told me, and if there’s nothing wrong with the way you got it, as you told him, why not spill it? It can’t be a deeper secret than the one we already know.”

  She looked at Wolfe and back at me. “I could tell you,” she said.

  “Okay, tell me, and we’ll pretend he’s not here.”

  “I guess I was being silly.” Her eyes were meeting mine. “After what you already know, you might as well know this too. That money came from my father. That and a lot more.”

  Both of my brows went up. “That makes a liar of you yesterday. Yesterday you had never had your father and didn’t know who or what he was, and the two thousand—”

  “I know. That was true, I never had a father. This is what happened. When my mother died I came to New York, of course, but I had to go back for graduation, and anyway Mr. Thorne had her instructions, about cremation, and that there was to be no funeral, and he attended to all the … the details. Then when I came to New York after the graduation he came—”

  “Mr. Thorne?”

  “Yes. He came—”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s the television producer my mother worked for. He came to see me, to the apartment, and he brought things—papers and bills and letters and other things from my mother’s desk in her room at the office. And a box, a locked metal box with a label glued on it that said Property of Amy Denovo. And a key with a tag that said Key to Amy Denovo’s box. It had been—”