Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 41 (11 page)

I forced my mind onto Frank Odell. The obvious thing was to ring the New York State Parole Division and ask if they had him listed. But of course not on our phone. If the FBI knew that we were spending time and money on Odell after what Quayle had said about him, they would know it wasn’t just prudence, that we thought there was actually a chance that he was involved, and that wouldn’t do. I decided to play it absolutely safe. If some G-man reads this and thinks I’m overrating his outfit, he isn’t inside far enough to know all the family secrets. I’m not inside at all, but I’ve been around a lot.

After going to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving and to the hall for my coat and hat, I let myself out, walked to Tenth Avenue and on to the garage, got permission from Tom Halloran to use the phone, dialed the
Gazette
number, and got Lon Cohen. He was discreet. He didn’t ask me how we were making out with Mrs. Bruner and the FBI. He did ask if I knew where he could get a bottle of brandy.

“I might send you one someday,” I said, “if you earn it. You can start now. About two years ago a man named Frank Odell was sent up for fraud. If he behaved himself and got a reduction he may be out and on the parole list. I’ve gone in for social work and I want to find him, quick, and rehabilitate him. You can get me, the sooner the better, at this number.” I gave it to him. “I’m
keeping my social work secret, so please don’t mention it.”

He said an hour should do it, and I went out to the floor to give motor vehicles a look. Wolfe buys a new one every year, thinking that reduces the risk of a collapse, which it doesn’t, and he leaves the choice to me. I have been tempted to get a Rolls, but it would be a shame to ditch it after only a year. That day there was nothing on the floor I would have traded the Heron for. Tom and I were discussing the dashboard of a 1965 Lincoln when the phone rang and I went. It was Lon, and he had it. Frank Odell had been released in August and would be on parole until the end of February. He lived at 2553 Lamont Avenue, Bronx, and he had a job at a branch of the Driscoll Renting Agency at 4618 Grand Concourse. Lon said that a good way to start rehabilitating him would be to get him in a poker game, and I said I thought craps would be better.

I decided to take the subway instead of a taxi, not to save the client money, but because I thought it was about time to do something about tails. There had been two days and nights since the FBI had presumably got interested in us, and twenty-five hours since they had asked Perazzo to take our licenses, and I still had seen no sign that I had company. Of course I had dodged or hadn’t looked. I now decided to look, but not while walking. I waited until I was at the Grand Central subway station and had boarded an uptown express.

If you think you have a tail on a subway train and want to spot him you keep moving while the train is under way, and at each station you stand close enough to a door so that you might get off. At a rush hour it’s difficult, but it was ten-thirty in the morning and we were going uptown. I had him by the time we made the third stop—or rather, them. There were two. One was
a chunky specimen, barely tall enough to meet the specifications, with big brown eyes that he didn’t know how to handle, and the other was the Gregory Peck type except for his curly little ears. The game, just for the hell of it, was to spot them without their knowing I had, and when I got off at the 170th Street station I was pretty sure I had won it. Out on the sidewalk again, I ignored them.

Tailing on New York streets, if you know you have it and want to shake it and aren’t a birdbrain, is a joke. There are a thousand dodges, and the tailee merely picks the one that fits the time and place. There on Tremont Avenue I moseyed along, glancing occasionally at my wristwatch and at the numbers on doors, until I saw an empty taxi coming. When it was thirty yards away I scooted between parked cars, flagged it, hopped in, told the hackie as I pulled the door shut, “Step on it,” and saw Gregory Peck stare at me as we went by. The other one was across the street. We did seven blocks before a red light stopped us, so that was that. I admit I had kept an eye on the rear. I gave the driver the Grand Concourse address, and the light changed, and we rolled.

Some realty agency branch offices are upstairs, but that one was the ground floor of an apartment building, of course one of the buildings it serviced. I entered. It was small, two desks and a table and a filing cabinet. A beautiful young lady with enough black hair for a Beatle was at the nearest desk, and when she smiled at me and asked if she could help me I had to take a breath to keep my head from swimming. They should stay home during business hours. I told her I would like to see Mr. Odell, and she turned her beautiful head and nodded to the rear.

He was at the other desk. I had waited to see him
before deciding on the approach, and one look was enough. Some men, after a hitch in the jug, even a short one, have got a permanent wilt, but not him. In size he was a peanut, but an elegant peanut. Fair-skinned and fair-headed, he was more than fair-dressed. His pinstripe gray suit had set him, or somebody, back at least two Cs.

He left his chair to come, said he was Frank Odell, and offered a hand. It would have been simpler if he had had a room to himself; possibly she didn’t know she was cooped up with a jailbird. I said I was Archie Goodwin, got out my case, and handed him a card. He gave it a good look, stuck it in his pocket, and said, “My goodness, I should have recognized you. From your picture in the paper.”

My picture hadn’t been in the paper for fourteen months, and he had been behind bars, but I didn’t make an issue of it. “I’m beginning to show my years,” I told him. “Can you give me a few minutes? Nero Wolfe has taken on a little job involving a man named Morris Althaus and he thinks you might be able to furnish some information.”

He didn’t bat an eye. No wilt. He merely said, “That’s the man that was murdered.”

“Right. Of course the police have been around about that. Routine. This is just a private investigation on a side issue.”

“If you mean the police have been
here
, they haven’t. We might as well sit down.” He moved to his desk, and I followed and took a chair at its end. “What’s the side issue?” he asked.

“It’s a little complicated. It’s about some research he was doing at the time he was killed. You may know something about it if you saw him during that period—
say the month of November, last November. Did you see him around then?”

“No, the last time I saw him was two years ago. In a courtroom. When some people that I thought were friends of mine were making me the goat. Why would the police be seeing
me
?”

“Oh, in a murder case they can’t crack they see everybody.” I waved it away. “What you say about being made the goat, that’s interesting. It might have some bearing on what we want to know, whether Althaus was in the habit of doctoring his stuff. Was he one of the friends who made you the goat?”

“My goodness, no. He wasn’t a friend. I only met him twice, while he was doing that piece, or getting ready to. He was looking for bigger fish. I was just a hustler, working for Bruner Realty.”

“Bruner Realty?” I wrinkled my brow. “I don’t remember that name in connection with the case. Of course I’m not any too familiar with it. Then it was your friends in Bruner Realty who made you the goat?”

He smiled. “You certainly are
not
familiar with it. It was some outside deals that I had a hand in. That all came out at the trial. The Bruner people were very nice about it,
very
nice. The vice-president even arranged for me to see Mrs. Bruner herself. That was the second time I saw Althaus, in her office at her house. She was nice too. She believed what I told her. She even paid my lawyer, part of it. You see, she realized that I had got mixed up in a shady deal, but I explained to her that I hadn’t known what I was getting into, and she didn’t want a man who was working for her company to get a bum deal. I call that
nice.
”

“So do I. I’m surprised you didn’t go back to Bruner Realty when you got—when you could.”

“They didn’t want me.”

“That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

“Well, it’s the philosophy of it. After all, I had been convicted. The president of the company is a pretty tough man. I could have gone to Mrs. Bruner, but I have a certain amount of pride, and I heard about this opening with Driscoll.” He smiled. “I’m not licked, far from it. There’s plenty of opportunity in this business, and I’m still young.” He opened a drawer. “You gave me a card, I’ll give you one.”

He gave me about a dozen, not one, and some information about the Driscoll Renting Agency. They had nine offices in three boroughs and handled over a hundred buildings, and they gave the finest service in the metropolitan area. I received a strong impression that Driscoll was
nice.
I listened to enough of it to be polite, and thanked him, and on the way out I took the liberty of exchanging glances with the beautiful young lady, and she smiled at me. That was certainly a nice place.

I strolled down the Grand Concourse in the winter sunshine, cooling off; I hadn’t been invited to remove my coat. I was listing the items of the coincidence:

1. Mrs. Bruner had distributed copies of that book.
   

2. Morris Althaus had been collecting material for a piece on the FBI.
   

3. G-men had killed Althaus, or at least had been in his apartment about the time he was killed.
   

4. Althaus had met Mrs. Bruner. He had been in her house.
   

5. A man who had worked for Mrs. Bruner’s firm had been jailed (made the goat?) as a result of a piece Althaus had written.
   

That was no coincidence; it was cause and effect in a hell of a mess. I started to sort it out but soon found that
there were so many combinations and possibilities that you could even come up with the notion that Mrs. Bruner had shot Althaus, which wouldn’t do, since she was the client. The one conclusion was that there
was
a needle in
this
haystack, and it had to be found. Wolfe had stolen another base. He had merely asked Yarmack if the articles Althaus had written for
Tick-Tock
were innocuous, and had merely told me to find Odell because he couldn’t think of anything sensible for me, and here was this.

I couldn’t have called Wolfe even if he had been at home, and I decided not to ring him at Hewitt’s. Not only does a place like that have a dozen or more extensions, but also G-men had probably followed him there, since Saul had been told to ignore tails, and tapping a line in the country was a cinch for them. I happen to know that they once—But I’ll skip it.

But I was not going to go home and sit on it until he got back. I found a phone booth, dialed Mrs. Bruner’s number and got her, and asked if she could meet me at Rusterman’s at twelve-thirty for lunch. She said she could. I rang Rusterman’s and got Felix and asked if I could have the soundproofed room upstairs, the small one. He said I could. I went out and got a taxi.

Rusterman’s has lost some of the standing it had when Marko Vukcic was alive. Wolfe is no longer the trustee, but he still goes there about once a month and Felix comes to the old brownstone now and then for advice. When Wolfe goes, taking Fritz and me, we eat in the small room upstairs, and we always start with the queen of soups, Germiny à l’Oseille. So I knew that room well. Felix was there with me, being sociable, when Mrs. Bruner came, only ten minutes late.

She wanted a double dry martini with onion. You never know; I would have guessed hers would be sherry
or Dubonnet, and certainly not the onion. When it came she took three healthy sips in a row, looked to see that the waiter had closed the door, and said, “Of course I didn’t ask you on the phone. Something has happened?”

I had a martini to keep her company, without the onion. I took a sip and said, “Nothing big. Mr. Wolfe has broken two rules today. He skipped his morning session in the plant rooms, and he left the house on business—your business. He is out on Long Island seeing a man. That could develop into something, but don’t hold your breath. As for me, I just made a trip to the Bronx to see a man named Frank Odell. He used to work for you—Bruner Reality. Didn’t he?”

“Odell?”

“Yes.”

She frowned. “I don’t—Oh, of course. Odell, that’s the little man who had all that trouble. But he—isn’t he in prison?”

“He was. He was paroled out a few months ago.”

She was still frowning. “But why on earth were you seeing him?”

“It’s a long story, Mrs. Bruner.” I took a sip. “Mr. Wolfe decided to try getting a start by checking a little on FBI activities in and around New York. Among other things, we learned that last fall a man named Morris Althaus had been gathering material for a piece on the FBI for a magazine, and seven weeks ago he was murdered. That was worth looking into, and we did some checking on him. We learned that he did a piece called ‘The Realty Racket’ a couple of years ago, and as a result a man named Frank Odell had got a jail sentence for fraud. Mr. Wolfe had me look him up, and I located him and went to see him and learned that he had worked for your firm. So I thought I ought to ask you about it.”

She had put the glass on the table. “But what is there to ask me?”

“Just questions. For instance, about Morris Althaus. How well did you know him?”

“I didn’t know him at all.”

“He came at least once to your house—your office. According to Odell.”

She nodded. “That’s right, he did. I remembered that when I read about him—the murder.” Her chin was up. “I don’t like your tone, Mr. Goodwin. Are you intimating that I have concealed something?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bruner, I am. That you
may
have. We might as well clear it up before lunch instead of after. You have hired Mr. Wolfe to do a job that’s as close to impossible as a job can get. The least you can do is tell us everything that could conceivably have a bearing on it. The fact that you had known Morris Althaus, at least you had met him, naturally suggests questions. Did you know he was working at a piece on the FBI? Let me finish. Did you know or suspect that the FBI was involved in his murder? Was that why you sent those books? Was that why you came to Nero Wolfe? Just stay in the buggy. We simply have to know everything you know, that’s all.”