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

  “Excuse me,” I said, “you’re busy.”

  Mr. Rosenbaum, the head of the Structural Metals Section, was a middle-aged, bald-headed guy with black-rimmed glasses. He waved me on in.

  “So what,” he said without a question mark. “If I ever dictated a letter without being interrupted I’d lose my train of thought. No one ever knocks around here, you just bust in. Sit down. I’ll ring later, Miss Livsey. This is the Mr. Truett mentioned in that memo we sent around. Miss Hester Livsey, my secretary, Mr. Truett.”

  I was wondering how I had ever missed her, even in that colossal swarm outside, until it struck me that a section head’s secretary probably had her own room. She was not at all spectacular, not to be compared with my non-speller, but there were two things about her that hit you at a glance. You got the instant impression that there was something beautiful about her that no one but you would ever see, and along with it the feeling that she was in some kind of trouble, real trouble, that no one but you would understand and no one but you could help her out of. If that sounds too complicated for a two-second-take, okay, I was there and I remember it distinctly.

  She went out with her notebook and I sat down.

  “Thanks for letting me horn in,” I told Rosenbaum, taking papers from the folder. “It won’t take long. I just want to ask a few general questions and one or two specific ones about these reports. You people have certainly got this thing organized to a T, with your sections and subsections. It must simplify things.”

  He agreed that it did. “Of course,” he added, “it gets mixed up sometimes. I’m Structural Metals, but right now I’ve got thirty-seven elephants in stock, over in Africa, and I can’t get any other section to take them. My basic position is that elephants are nonmetallic. I may have to go up to Mr. Naylor to get rid of them.”

  “Hah.” I said triumphantly, “so that’s where your stock is, Africa! And elephants. I’ve been wondering. With that settled, let’s tackle personnel. Speaking of which, I noticed that your secretary, Miss Livsey, didn’t seem to be wading through bliss. I hope she’s not quitting too?”

  That proved she had had that effect on me as described, my going out of my way to mention her name, with no reason at all.

  “Bliss?” Rosenbaum shook his head. “No, I guess she isn’t. The man she was engaged to died a few months ago. Got killed in an accident.” He shook his head again. “If it’s a part of your job to make our employees happy, I’m afraid you won’t get to first base with Miss Livsey. She’s a damn good secretary too. If I had that hit-and-run driver here I’d—do something to him.”

  “I’d be glad to help,” I said sympathetically. I riffled the papers. “The man she was engaged to—is he among these? Did he work here?”

  “Yes, but not in my section. He was a correspondence checker. It was an awful blow for her, and she stayed away—but here I go again, you’re not here to listen to me gab. What are your questions, Mr. Truett?”

  Since I had quit being exuberant I decided not to press it, only it did seem that wherever I went I met Waldo Wilmot Moore. We got down to business. I had questions ready that I thought were good enough to keep me from being spotted as a phony, and I stayed with him a good twenty minutes, which seemed ample for the purpose.

  Then I went down the line to the office of the head of the Correspondence Checkers Section. The door was standing open and he was there alone.

  Grandpa Dickerson was by no means too old or too watery-eyed to know the time of day. As soon as the preliminary courtesies had been performed and I had sat down and got the folder opened, he inquired, perfectly friendly:

  “I’m wondering, Mr. Truett, why you start with me?”

  “Well—you’re not the first, Mr. Dickerson I’ve just had a session with Mr. Rosenbaum. Incidentally, there’s a special problem there: are elephants personnel?”

  But he wasn’t having light conversation. “Even so,” he said, “I have the smallest number of employees of any section in the department. Only six men, whereas other sections have up to a hundred. Also, I have had no turnover for nearly eight years, except one case, a man who got killed and was replaced. I’m quite willing to co-operate, but I really don’t see what you can do with me.”

  I nodded at him. “You’re perfectly right—from where you sit. From the standpoint of general personnel problems you’re out. But your section is something special. Everybody in the place regards your six men as dirty lowdown snoops, and you’re the Master Snoop.”

  It didn’t feeze him. He merely nodded back at me. “How do you propose to change that?”

  “Oh, I don’t. But it certainly ties it in with personnel difficulties. For instance, the man that got killed. Don’t you know there has been talk around that his death wasn’t an accident?”

  “Nonsense! Talk!” He tapped on his desk blotter. “Look here, young man, are you intimating that the functioning of this section has been the cause, directly or indirectly, of the commission of a crime?”

  “Yes.”

  His jaw trembled, and then came open and hung open. I was restraining myself from taking my handkerchief and wiping his eyes.

  “That’s not the way to put it,” I said with emphasis, “but it was you who put it that way. I would say it more like this, that the talk about that man’s death is certainly one of the personnel problems around here, and Mr. Naylor himself suggested that I might use it as one of my starting points. Do you mind my asking a few questions about him? About Moore?”

  “I resent any insinuation that the operation of this section has resulted in any injustice or has been the cause of any legitimate desire to retaliate.” His jaw was back under control.

  “Okay. Who said anything about legitimate? Desires to retaliate come in all flavors. But about this Moore, how did he rate with you? Was he a good worker?”

  “No.”

  “No?” I was matter-of-fact. “What was wrong with him?”

  The old man’s jaw trembled again, but it didn’t come open. When he had it in hand he spoke. “I have been in charge of this section ever since it started, over twenty years ago. Last April I had five men under me, and I regarded that as adequate. But a new man was hired and I was told to put him to work. He was incompetent, and I so reported, but my report was ignored. We had to put up with him. On several occasions his mistakes would have discredited the section if we had not been alert. It made it harder for all of us.”

  I thought to myself, my God, here we go again. I was trying to get started narrowing it down, and here were six more added to the list, Dickerson himself and five loyal checkers, who might have been irritated into killing Moore for the honor of the section. Now everybody was in except Kerr Naylor himself.

  “But,” I objected, “what about the hiring regulations? I understand there is no over-all personnel control and each department head rolls his own in theory, but in practice the section heads have the say. Who hired Moore and saddled you with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you help knowing?”

  Dickerson used his own handkerchief on his eyes, which relieved the tension a lot for me. I hoped he would keep the handkerchief in his hand, but he deliberately and neatly returned it to his pocket.

  “This,” he said, “is a very large concern, the largest in the world in its field, and beyond all comparison the best. Naturally the authority is tightly organized. No one on this floor is my superior except the head of the department, Mr. Kerr Naylor, the son of one of the founders. Therefore any exercise of authority can be brought to bear on me only through Mr. Naylor.”

  “Then it was Naylor who hired Moore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it was Naylor who said you needed another man and wished Moore on you?”

  “Certainly. The line of authority is as I have described it.”

  “What else can you tell me about Moore besides his incompetence?”

  “Why, nothing.” Dickerson’s look and tone indicated that he regarded my question as silly. Obviously, if a man was incompetent that settled it; nothing else about him mattered one way or another. But it appeared that he was willing to concede that even a competent man must eat. He pulled a watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and stated, “My lunch hour starts at twelve, Mr. Truett.”

  8.

  Outside Dickerson’s office I turned left, toward the far end of the arena, and then was struck by an idea and came to a halt. Turning the idea over, and seeing that it had no visible defects on either side, I faced around and headed in the other direction. When I got to Rosenbaum’s door I found it closed again, but since he had said no knocking I turned the knob and entered. My intention was to ask him where his secretary’s room was, but I didn’t carry it out because she was there in a chair at the end of his desk with her notebook.

  She didn’t turn her head at my entrance. Rosenbaum gave me a glance and said unemotionally, “Hello again.”

  “I just had a logical train of thought,” I told them, “and I wanted to find out what Miss Livsey thinks of it.”

  She looked at me. Nothing had changed in her in the hour that had passed. It was still obvious that no one on earth but me could understand her or help her.

  “It goes like this,” I explained to her. “My job here requires that I have talks with units of the personnel, as many as possible. I should do that with a minimum amount of interference with the work of the department. You are a unit. If we eat lunch together and do our talking then, there will be no interference with your work. I’ll pay for the lunch and put it on expense.”

  Rosenbaum chuckled. “That’s a good approach,” he said appreciatively. He spoke to his secretary. “Since he thought that all up just for you, Hester, the least you can do is let him buy you a sandwich.”

  She asked him, in a voice that could have been a pleasure to listen to if there had been any lift to it, “Do I owe it to anybody?”

  “Not to me,” he declared, “but maybe to yourself. Mr. Truett sounds as if he might be capable of making you smile. Even if only a wan and feeble smile, why not let him try?”

  She turned to me and said politely, “Thank you, I think not.”

  There was certainly something about her, and I frankly admit I was getting a good start at being jealous of Waldo Wilmot Moore, even dead. He had found some way of propagandizing this wren to the point of agreeing to marry him.

  Her eyes were back on her notebook. Rosenbaum, his lips bunched, was gazing at her and shaking his head philosophically. I might as well not have been there, so I removed myself. My hand was on the knob, with my back to them, when her voice came:

  “Why did you ask one of the girls if she had heard any gossip about Mr. Moore?”

  Talk about grapevine. Less than two hours had gone by! I turned.

  “There, see? Didn’t I say I didn’t want to interfere with your work? You could have asked me that over anything from roast duckling to a maple sundae.”

  “All right, I will. I go at one o’clock. We can meet in the lobby, William Street side, near the mailbox.”

  “That’s the girl. Save a smile for it.” I went.

  So I had it all glued on, a lunch date with Hester Livsey, but it peeled off—though it wasn’t her fault or mine either. I returned to my own little room, put the folders back in the cabinet and locked it, and stood at the window to look at the river and sort things out. All I got out of that was the realization that so far there was nothing to sort. Of course, I thought sarcastically, if I was Nero Wolfe I would have finished up here by noon and gone home to drink beer, but as it is, about all I’ve accomplished is to start the grapevine rustling. That really got me. In two short hours, and with no meal period for opportunity! Where it branches out from, I thought, is the restroom. If I could borrow a skirt and blouse and spend thirty minutes in the restroom I would have all I needed for a final report. Out on the river two tugboats nearly hit and one of them scooted off like a ripple skipper.

  When the buzz sounded I jerked around, startled, it was so loud in the little room. I wasn’t sure what it was, but the best guess was the phone, so I went to the desk and took it up and said hello, and came within an ace of adding, “Archie Goodwin speaking.” I bit it off, and a tenor voice asked my ear:

  “Hello, Mr. Truett?”

  “Right. Speaking.”

  “This is Kerr Naylor. I’d like you to lunch with me if that’s convenient. Could you step down to my office?”

  I told him I’d be glad to, and hung up. A glance at my wrist showed me ten to one. I lifted the phone again, and when I got a voice I asked to be connected with Miss Hester Livsey, Stock Department, Structural Metals Section. In a second the voice said, “Extension six-eight-eight please ask by extension number whenever possible,” and after a short wait another voice said, “Miss Livsey speaking.”

  “Peter Truett,” I told her. “This is the unluckiest day I’ve had since my rich uncle changed doctors. Mr. Kerr Naylor just phoned me to have lunch with him. I can meet you as arranged and come back after lunch and quit my job.”

  “I don’t want you to quit your job.” she declared. “I’ve been thinking about you. Go with Mr. Naylor, of course. My room is next to Mr. Rosenbaum’s, the one on the left.”

  But it didn’t set me up any, on account of the motive, which I was fully aware of. I got my hat and coat and went along to the corner office, where Naylor met me at the door. I took my hat and coat because, although the assistant vice-president had told me I would rate eating lunch in the executives’ section of the Naylor-Kerr cafeteria on the thirty-sixth floor, my hunch was that the son of the founder didn’t patronize it. The hunch was right. He had his hat on and his topcoat over his arm. We went to an elevator, and from the lobby on the ground floor he steered us out the back way, down a block and around a corner, and to a door which had painted on it in green lettering, FOUNTAIN OF HEALTH. That could mean only one thing, and I grimly told my stomach it was in the line of duty as we entered, made our way to a table against the wall, got seated, and accepted menus from a waitress. There it was, roots and leaves and coarse fodder, with such names as EPICURE’S BOWL and BRAN AND CARROT PUDDING. My reaction was so strong that I was barely aware that Naylor was talking. With the waitress there waiting for us to name it, he was saying something like:

  “… so I tried it once about five years ago, and I’ve been lunching here ever since. I find it makes an enormous difference, physically, mentally—and even spiritually. There’s a purity about it. It keeps a man light and clean. What will you select, Mr. Goodwin?”

  I heard that all right.

  9.

  It was like the tricky little squirt to choose that moment for it, with the waitress, who knew him, there by us, making it as awkward as possible for me. So he thought. But I merely elevated the menu so it came between his eyes and my face, to get a little privacy, and turned my brain loose on the problem. Manifestly there was no point in trying to make a grab for the cat. After an interval, not a long one, I handed the menu to the waitress and told her to bring me three apples and a glass of milk. Then I asked him politely:

  “Were you saying something? I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”

  He gave the waitress his order and let her go.

  “I was speaking of diet,” he snapped, “and you heard me. It isn’t to be expected, Mr. Truett, that you’ll like this food at first. No one does. But after a while you will wonder how you ever liked anything else.”

  “Yeah. When I like it I’ll whinny. You ought to make up your mind who you’re treating to lunch, though. Goodwin or Truett?”

  “I much prefer Goodwin.” He smiled at me. “That was my chief reason for inviting you to lunch, to tell you that the only way to deal with me is directly and forthrightly. Also to give you a message for Mr. Nero Wolfe. Tell him, please, that you have badly bungled this job. This morning when I mentioned the murder of a former employee of my department, you should have displayed no interest in the matter.”

  “I see. Much obliged. So that aroused your suspicion and you investigated.” I looked at him admiringly. “You certainly stepped on it. Where did you start from?”

  “Now, now,” he scolded me and shook his head. “You’re extraordinarily transparent, Mr. Goodwin, and I must say it’s a surprise to me—and a disappointment. It would have been gratifying to find a good man, a good mind, starting to work on that murder. I would have watched you with the keenest interest and expectation—Those aren’t the best apples.” He frowned at the waitress. “Haven’t you any Stayman Winesaps?”

  It seemed they hadn’t. When she had served us and was gone I started peeling an apple. It is not my custom to peel apples, but I figured it would outrage him. That was wasted effort, since he ignored it and waded in with a fork on a big bowl of a raw unholy mess, which he had ordered by name: TODAY’S VITANUTRITA SPECIAL. With his small mouth he had to feed it in dribs, chewing with a straight one-two beat and skipping two chews for each drib going in.

  “Here’s an idea,” I said amiably. “You can’t count on me to give that message to Mr. Wolfe. Why don’t you drop in on him this evening after dinner and give it to him yourself?”

  “I would be glad to.” He chewed. “But not this evening.” He chewed. “Three evenings a week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I play chess at the Midtown Chess Club.” He chewed. “Saturday I’m going to the country, to spend the week-end looking at birds.” He chewed. “I should be delighted to do that on Monday.”

  “Okay, I’ll fix it up.” I started on another apple, not bothering to peel it. “But by that time I may be all through here. In my opinion, and I hope Mr. Wolfe will agree, there’s only one thing to do: tell the police about it and let them start up the machinery. An accusation of murder is entirely too ticklish, especially for a bungler like me.”