Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (5 page)

“A woman like you should have a private room!”

“I have,” she said haughtily, and led me through a door in a partition to a cubbyhole. Since the partition
was only six feet high, the racket bounced down on us off the ceiling. Two minutes later the woman was telling me, “We don’t give out any information about clients. Our business is strictly confidential.”

I had given her my business card. “So is ours!” I shouted. “Look, it’s quite simple. Our client is a reputable firm of book publishers. They have a manuscript of a novel that was submitted to them, and they’re enthusiastic about it and want to publish it, but the page of the script that had the author’s name and address got lost somehow and can’t be found. They remember the author’s name, Baird Archer, but not the address, and they want to get in touch with him. They might not be so anxious if they didn’t want to publish the novel, but they do. His name is not in any phone book. The manuscript came in the mail, unsolicited. They’ve advertised and got no answer. All I want to know, did you type a manuscript of a novel for a man named Baird Archer, probably last September? Sometime around then? The title of the novel was ‘Put Not Your Trust.’”

She stayed haughty. “Last September? They’ve waited long enough to inquire.”

“They’ve been trying to find him.”

“If we typed it a page couldn’t have got lost. It would have been fastened into one of our folders.”

The boys had told me of running into that one. I nodded. “Yes, but editors don’t like to read fastened scripts. They take the folders off. If you typed it for him, you can bet he would want you to help us find him. Give the guy a break.”

She had remained standing. “All right,” she said, “I’ll look it up as soon as I get something straightened out.” She left me.

I waited for her twenty minutes, and then another
ten while she fussed through a card file. The answer was no. They had never done any work for a Baird Archer. I took an elevator up to the eighteenth floor, to the office of the Raphael Typing Service.

Those first two calls took me nearly an hour, and at that rate you can’t cover much ground in a day. They were all kinds and sizes, from a big outfit in the Paramount Building called Metropolitan Stenographers, Inc., down to two girls with their office in their room-bath-and-kitchenette in the upper Forties. For lunch I had cannelloni at Sardi’s, on John R. Wellman, and then resumed.

It was warm for February, but it was trying to make up its mind whether to go in for a steady drizzle, and around three o’clock, as I dodged through the sidewalk traffic to enter a building on Broadway in the Fifties, I was wishing I had worn my raincoat instead of my brown topcoat. My quarry in that building was apparently one of the small ones, since its name on my list was just the name of a woman, Rachel Abrams. The building was an old one, nothing fancy, with Caroline, women’s dresses, on the left of the entrance, and the Midtown Eatery on the right. After stopping in the lobby to remove my topcoat and give it a shake, and consulting the building directory, I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The elevator man told me to go left for 728.

I went left, rounded a corner to the right, continued, turned right again, and in ten paces was at Room 728. The door was wide open, and I stuck my head in to verify the number, 728, and to see the inscription:

I stepped into a room about ten by twelve, not more, with a typewriter desk, a little table, a couple of chairs, a clothes rack, and an old green metal filing cabinet. A woman’s hat and cloth coat hung on the rack, and an umbrella, and at the back of the typewriter desk was a vase of yellow daffodils. On the floor were some sheets of paper, scattered around. That was accounted for by the fact that the one window was raised, way up, and a strong draft was whirling through.

Something else was coming through too: voices from down in the street that were shouts. Three steps took me to the window, and I looked out and down. People had stopped in the drizzle and were gawking. Three men, from different directions, were running across the street toward the building, and on this side a group was forming on the sidewalk. In the center of the group two men were bending over a figure of a woman prostrate on the sidewalk, with her skirt up, showing her bare legs, and her head twisted sideways. I have good eyes, but from seven floors up, in the dim light of the drizzle blown by the wind, things were blurred. Most of the group were looking at the huddled figure, but some were gazing straight up at me. Off to the left a hundred feet, a cop was trotting toward the group.

I assert that it took me not more than three seconds to realize what had happened. I assert it not to get a credit mark, since I can’t prove it, but to account for what I did. Of course it was only a hunch, but I had never had one that felt like a better bet. Wolfe had told me to get him something, and I had missed getting it by three minutes or maybe only two. I was so sure of it that what I did was automatic. Pulling back from the window and straightening, I darted a glance at the desk and one at the filing cabinet. I started with the desk only because it was nearer.

That was probably the briefest search on record, or close to it. The shallow middle drawer was eliminated with one look. The top left drawer held paper and carbon and envelopes. The one below it had three compartments, with miscellaneous contents, and in the middle one was a notebook bound in brown imitation leather. At the top of the first page was written the word “Receipts,” and the first entry was dated Aug. 7, 1944. I flipped the pages to 1950, began with July, ran my eye over the items, and there it was: “Sept. 12, Baird Archer, $60.00 dep.” Six lines down another entry said: “Sept. 23, Baird Archer, $38.40 in full.”

“Of all the goddam lousy luck,” I said with feeling and, slipping the notebook in my pocket, made for the door. There was a bare chance that Rachel Abrams had enough life left in her to talk a little. As I rounded the second turn in the hall an elevator door opened and a flatfoot emerged. I was so engrossed that I didn’t even glance at him, which was a mistake because cops can’t bear not to be glanced at, especially when they’re on something hot. He stopped in my path and demanded, “Who are you?”

“Governor Dewey,” I told him. “How do you like me without the mustache?”

“Oh, a wag. Show me some identification.”

I raised the brows. “How did I get behind the Iron Curtain without knowing it?”

“I’m in a hurry. What’s your name?”

I shook my head. “Honest, officer, I don’t like this. Take me to the nearest Kremlin and I’ll tell the sergeant.” I stepped and pushed the down button.

“Aw, nuts.” He tramped down the hall.

An elevator stopped and I entered. The elevator man was telling his passengers about the excitement. The street lobby was deserted. Out on the sidewalk the
crowd was thick now, ignoring the drizzle, and I had to get authoritative to elbow my way through to the front. A cop was there, commanding them to stand back. I had a line ready to hand him to get me an approach, but when I got close enough for an unobstructed view I saw I wouldn’t need it. She was smashed good, and there would be no more talking from a head that had taken that angle to the shoulders. Nor did I have to ask her name, since I had heard everybody telling everybody else, Rachel Abrams, as I pushed my way through the mob. I pushed my way out again, went to the corner and grabbed a taxi, and gave the driver the number on West Thirty-fifth Street.

When I mounted the stoop and let myself in with my key it was five minutes past four, so Wolfe had gone up for his afternoon conference with the orchids. Hanging my hat and topcoat in the hall, I ascended the three flights to the plant rooms on the roof. For all the thousands of times I have seen that display of show-offs, they still take my eye and slow me down whenever I go through, but that day I didn’t even know they were there, not even in the warm room, though the Phalaenopsis were in top bloom and the Cattleyas were splashing color all around.

Wolfe was in the potting room with Theodore, transferring young Dendrobium chrysotoxums from fours to fives. As I approached he snapped at me, “Can’t it wait?”

“I suppose so,” I conceded. “She’s dead. I just want permission to phone Cramer. I might as well, since I was seen by the elevator man who let me off at her floor, and a cop, and my fingerprints are on her desk.”

“Who is dead?”

“The woman who typed that manuscript for Baird Archer.”

“When and how?”

“Just now. She died while I was in the elevator going up to her office on the seventh floor. She was going down faster, out of her window. What killed her was hitting the sidewalk.”

“How do you know she typed the manuscript?”

“I found this in her desk.” I took the notebook from my pocket and showed him the entries. His hands were too dirty to touch it, and I held it before his eyes. I asked him, “Do you want details now?”

“Confound it. Yes.”

As I reported in full he stood with the tips of his dirty fingers resting on the potting bench, his head turned to me, his lips tight, his brow creased with a frown. His yellow smock, some half an acre in area, was exactly the color of the daffodils on Rachel Abram’s desk.

When I had finished the story I inquired grimly, “Shall I expound?”

He grunted.

“I should have stuck around, but it wouldn’t have done any good because I was too goddam mad to function. If I had been three minutes earlier I would have had her alive. Also, if she was pushed out the window I would have had the pusher alive, and you told me to get you something, and it would have been a pleasure to get you that. The lucky bastard. He must have entered a down elevator, or passed down the hall on his way to the stairs, not more than thirty seconds before I stepped out on that floor. When I looked out of the window he was probably there on the sidewalk, walking away because he wasn’t morbid.”

Wolfe’s eyes opened and half shut again.

“If you’re thinking,” I said aggressively, “that she wasn’t pushed, one will get you ten. I do not believe that
the woman who typed that manuscript picked today to jump out of the window or to fall out by accident.”

“Nevertheless, it’s possible.”

“I deny it. It would be too goddam silly. Okay, you said to get you something, and at least I got you this.” I tapped the notebook with a finger.

“It doesn’t help much.” Wolfe was glum. “It establishes that Miss Wellman was killed because she had read that manuscript, but we were already going on that assumption. I doubt if it would gratify Miss Abrams to know that her death validated an assumption for us. Most people expect more than that of death. Mr. Cramer will want that notebook.”

“Yeah. I shouldn’t have copped it, but you said to get you something and I wanted to produce it. Shall I take it to him or phone him to send for it?”

“Neither. Put it here on the bench. I’ll wash my hands and phone him. You have work to do. It’s possible that Miss Abrams told someone something about the contents of that novel she typed. Try it. See her family and friends. Get a list of them. Saul and Fred and Orrie will phone in at five-thirty. You will phone at five-twenty-five, to tell me where I can tell them to join you. Divide the list among you.”

“My God,” I protested, “we’re stretching it thinner and thinner. Next you’ll be trying to get it by photo-offset from her typewriter platen.”

He ignored it and headed for the sink to wash his hands. I went to my room, one flight down, for my raincoat. Downstairs I stopped in the kitchen to tell Fritz I wouldn’t be home for dinner.

I
t was more than I had bargained for. Having got the home address of a Rachel Abrams from the Bronx phone book, having learned by dialing the number and speaking briefly with a female voice that that was it, and having hit the subway before the rush hour, I had congratulated myself on a neat fast start. I entered the old apartment building on 178th Street a block off the Grand Concourse less than an hour after Wolfe had told me to see her family and friends.

But now I realized that I had been too damn fast. The woman who opened the door of 4E to me was meeting my eyes straight and inquiring placidly, “You’re the one that phoned? What is with my Rachel?”

“Are you Rachel’s mother?” I asked.

She nodded and smiled. “Since some years I am. I have never been told the opposite. What is?”

I hadn’t bargained for this. I had taken it for granted that either a cop or a journalist would have relayed the news before I got there, and had been ready to cope with tears and wailing, but obviously I had beat them to it. Of course the thing to do was spill it to her, but her quiet self-satisfaction when she said “my Rachel” was too much for me. Nor could I say excuse it please,
wrong number, and fade, because I had a job to do, and if I muffed it merely because I didn’t like it I was in the wrong line of business. So I tried my damnedest to grin at her, but I admit that for a couple of seconds I was no help to the conversation.

Her big dark friendly eyes stared straight at mine.