Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 43 Page 5

  Thorne and his room went together fine. The room was big and modern and so was he. After giving me a man-to-man handshake and saying how much he would like to help Amy any way he could, and telling me to sit, he returned to his desk and said he didn’t know what it was I wanted because Amy had been rather vague on the phone.

  I nodded. “She thought I could tell it better, but it’s really very simple. She wants Nero Wolfe—you may have heard the name.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “She wants him to find out who killed her mother. I think she’s a little hipped on it, but that’s her privilege. She thinks the cops should have nailed him long ago, and also she thinks they went at it wrong. She thinks it was premeditated murder. In fact, she’s sure it was. Don’t ask me why she’s sure; I have asked her, and she says it’s intuition. How old were you when you learned not to argue with intuition?”

  “It’s so long ago I’ve forgotten.”

  “Me too. But intuition hasn’t told her who it was. She has made a list of names, twenty-eight of them, people who were friends of her mother, everybody who had personal contact that could be called close even by stretching it, and she has said no to all of them. She says none of them could possibly have had a reason, so it must have been someone she doesn’t know about—someone connected with her work here, or someone from many years ago when she was too young to remember. Therefore I come to you first, naturally. She worked here, and you knew her—how long?”

  “More than twenty years.” He had his head cocked. “Do you think it was premeditated murder?”

  “Mr. Wolfe would say it’s ‘cogitable.’ He likes words like that. It could have been; none of the facts say no. If we find someone with a healthy motive that will make it interesting. The first thing I would like from you is a photograph of Mrs. Denovo. You must have some.”

  His eyes left me for a quick glance down and to the right, then up again. “I don’t think …” He let that go. “Didn’t you get one from Amy?”

  “She hasn’t any. There aren’t any in the apartment. Surely you have some. At least one.”

  “Well …” He glanced down again. “I’m not surprised that there are none in the apartment. Mrs. Denovo had a thing about photographs—I mean of her. When we wanted pictures of the staff, for promotion, we had to leave her out. She couldn’t be persuaded. Once we got up a folder with separate pictures of seven of us, but not of her, though she should have been up front, after me. No picture of her at all, period.” He rubbed his chin with fingertips, eying me. “But I’ve got one.”

  “Yeah.” I gestured with a hand. “There in the bottom drawer.”

  His head jerked up. “How the hell do you know?”

  “Any detective just learning how would have known, and I’ve been at it for years. When I said ‘photograph’ you glanced down there; you did it twice.”

  His head went back to normal. “Well, you’re wrong. They’re in the next to the bottom drawer. Two of them. They were taken years ago by a camera man trying angles, and she didn’t know they existed. A week or so after her death I remembered about them and took a look in the old files and found them. But I don’t think I should … Well, if she had known they were there she would have destroyed them long ago. Wouldn’t she?”

  “Probably. But she’s dead. And if Amy’s intuition happens to be right and it was murder, and if the photos would help us get him, do you want to destroy them?”

  “No. Of course I don’t.”

  “I should hope not. May I see them, please?”

  He leaned over to reach down to the drawer, came up with a brown envelope, slipped two prints out, and gave them a look. They were about five by eight inches. “Until I saw these,” he said, “I had forgotten how attractive she was. It must have been nineteen forty-six or forty-seven, a year or so after she came here. My God, how people change.”

  I had got up and circled the end of the desk, and he handed them to me. One was about three-quarters face and the other was profile. There wasn’t much of her figure, not down to her waist, but they were good shots of a good face. There was some resemblance to Amy, but the forehead was a little wider and the chin a little more pointed. I looked at the back, but there was no date or other data.

  “I can’t let you take them,” Thorne said, “but I can have copies made. As many as you want.”

  I gave them another look. “They could be extremely useful. I can have copies made and return these to you.”

  He said no, they were the only pictures he had of a woman who had been a big help to him for many years, and he was going to hang on to them, and I handed them over. I told him I needed at least six copies, ten would be better, and returned to my chair and got out my notebook.

  “Now a leading question,” I said. “You’ll dodge it, naturally, but I’ll ask it anyway. Amy thought it might be someone connected with her work here. Could you suggest a candidate?”

  He shook his head. “You mentioned that before. I don’t have to dodge. Forget it. There are forty-six people in this organization, counting everybody. Over the years there have been, oh, I suppose around a hundred and fifty. They haven’t all thought Mrs. Denovo was perfect, we’ve had our share of scraps and grudges, but murder? Not a chance. Forget it.”

  Of course I was glad to, since Amy’s father couldn’t have been one of the hundred and fifty unless Elinor had lied in the letter, and I decided it wasn’t necessary to nag him just to keep up appearances. I opened the notebook. “Okay, we’ll pass that for now. Now some dates. When did Mrs. Denovo start with you?”

  “I looked that up the day I found the pictures. It was July second, nineteen forty-five.”

  “You had known her before that?”

  “No. She walked in that morning and said she had heard that I needed a stenographer. I was in radio then—we got into television later—and I had only four people in three little rooms on Thirty-ninth Street. It was vacation time and my secretary had gone on hers, so I handed Mrs. Denovo a notebook and gave her some letters. And she was so good I kept her.”

  “Had she been sent by an agency?”

  “No. I asked who had sent her, and she said nobody, she had heard someone say I needed a stenographer.”

  “But you checked on her references.”

  “I never asked her for any. Three days was enough to see how good she was, not only as a stenographer, and I didn’t bother. After a week I didn’t give a damn where she had worked before or how she happened to walk in that morning. It didn’t matter.”

  I closed the notebook and stuck it in my pocket. “But that makes it a blank. First you tell me to forget everybody connected with her work here, there’s not a chance it was one of them, and now are you saying you know nothing about her before the second of July, nineteen forty-five? What she had done or where she had been?”

  “Yes, I am.

  “After being closely associated with her for twenty-two years? I don’t believe it.”

  He nodded. “You’re not the first detective that can’t believe it. Two of them from the police, at different times, couldn’t either. But it’s—”

  “Were they here recently?”

  “No, that was back in May, just after her death. But it’s true. She never spoke of her family or background—anything you could call personal, and she wasn’t a woman you would … Well, she kept her distance. I’ll give you an example. Once a woman—an important woman, important to us; she represented one of our clients—she was saying something about her sister, and she asked Mrs. Denovo if she had a sister, and she just ignored it. Not even a yes or no. I’m pretty quick at getting on to people, and within a month after I met her, less than that, I knew she had lines I wasn’t to cross. And I never did. If you want to ask some of the others here go ahead, but you’ll be wasting your time. Do you want to try?”

  Ordinarily I would have said yes, and perhaps I should have, but I was only partly there. I had come only because Wolfe had said to. Where I wanted to be was with Avery Ballou
. So I said I didn’t want to interfere with their lunch hours but I might be back later, tomorrow if not today, and thanked him on behalf of Miss Denovo. He said if I come tomorrow he would have the copies of the photographs by four o’clock, and I thanked him again.

  As I went down the hall to the elevator I decided to head for Al’s diner and treat myself to bacon and eggs and home-fried potatoes. Eggs are never fried in Wolfe’s and Fritz’s kitchen, and neither are potatoes, but that wasn’t the main point. The idea of sitting through lunch with Wolfe and discussing something like the future of computers or the effect of organized sport on American culture, when we should be discussing how to handle Avery Ballou, didn’t appeal to me.

  But knowing that Wolfe had done his reflecting and was as keen to go at Ballou as I was, I reflected as I sipped coffee and decided it would do him good to be stalled off a little, say half an hour, to even up for my being stalled by his sappy rule about table talk. So I watched the time. I left the diner at two on the dot, walked the three blocks to the old brownstone, and entered the office at 2:05, got the retainer from the safe, went across the hall to the dining-room door, and said, “You said to deposit this at an early opportunity and this is it. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “No.” He put his coffee cup down. “That can wait. We have a decision to make.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I like to obey orders,” and went.

  I admit I didn’t loiter walking to Lexington Avenue and back, but even so I was gone thirty-six minutes. The television was on and he was standing in the middle of the room glaring at it. Presumably he had been so riled that he had picked on the one thing there that would rile him more. As I put the bankbook in the safe he turned the television off and went to his desk, and as I went to mine he demanded, “What the devil has someone done?”

  Not “What have you done?”

  I crossed my legs. “My lunch was greasy and I ate too fast. I wanted to get that twenty grand in the bank before it closed. I hurried back because I knew you wanted to tell me how to approach Ballou. But first, of course, you want a full report on Raymond Thorne.”

  “I do not. Unless you got something that makes it unnecessary to see Mr. Ballou.”

  “I didn’t. Except for two photographs of Elinor Denovo, I drew a blank. A complete blank. Have you phoned to find out if he’s there?”

  “No. You will.”

  “Sure. A corporation president might be anywhere in August. If I get him do I ask to see him today? I suppose you’ve decided how I play it.”

  “Not you.” He cleared his throat. “Archie. You have many aptitudes, some of them extraordinary, but it will be delicate and may be thorny. Besides, it was I who dealt with him before. You were present, but I did it. I must be sure of the facts. You said on the telephone that the checks cashed by Mrs. Denovo were drawn by the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company, payable to bearer. How sure is that?”

  “The only way to make it any surer would be to look at them. It came straight from the top man at the Eighty-sixth Street branch of the Continental, where she cashed a hundred of them. His name’s Atwood.”

  “And Mr. Ballou is now a director of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company?”

  “He is unless he quit or has been bounced very recently. It was this year’s edition of Rand McNally’s International Bank Directory.”

  “How difficult would it be to learn about the checks without Mr. Ballou’s help?”

  “Close to impossible. The Seaboard is a two-billion-dollar outfit. Their main office probably draws thousands of checks in a year, maybe tens of thousands, drawn by God knows how many clerks. And of course they have automation. I don’t see how we could even start. I suppose we could have Sue Corbett, or Miss Denovo herself, get to some assistant vice-president and seduce him, and if it didn’t work try another one, and in a year or so—”

  “Get Mr. Ballou.”

  “You’ll talk?”

  “No. It will be more exigent from you. Tell him that if it will suit his convenience I would like to see him, here, at six o’clock.”

  I wheeled my chair and reached for the book, got the number of the Federal Holding Corporation, and dialed. Once before, when I had tried for Ballou on the phone, it had taken three people to get me through, and this time it was the same—first the switchboard female, then another female who made me spell my name twice, and then a man. They were all so reserved that I didn’t even know if he was there until his voice came.

  “Goodwin? Archie Goodwin?”

  “Right.” Knowing the voice, I went on. “I’m glad I got you. I’m calling for Mr. Wolfe. If it will suit your convenience he would like to see you, here at his office, at six o’clock, or as soon after that as you can make it.”

  Silence; then: “Today?”

  “Yes. It’s a little urgent.”

  A longer silence, and of course I knew why. He couldn’t ask what was up. He couldn’t ask anything on a phone that someone else might be on. But he did. He asked, “Will it take long?”

  “Probably not. Half an hour ought to do it.”

  A shorter silence; then: “I’ll be there at six.” He hung up.

  I cradled it, turned to Wolfe, who had listened in, and said, “He’ll be expecting a holy mess,” and Wolfe said he should be relieved to find there wasn’t one. He looked at the clock, saw that he had an hour before leaving for the plant rooms, and told me to take my notebook. There was still unanswered mail from last week.

  At 5:30, having finished the dozen or so letters he had given me, I went up to my room to change my shirt, because the walk to the bank and back with the temperature twenty degrees above what it was in that air-conditioned house had worked up a sweat, but I was down again in twenty minutes, so I was there when Wolfe came down. As he reached his desk the doorbell rang.

  I believe I mentioned somewhere in my report of the death of a doxy that Avery Ballou’s face was seamy but had no sag. Now, I saw as I opened the door and let him in, it did have a sag. But he was trying to look grim and ready for anything, and that didn’t go very well with the sag. He didn’t walk, he strode, clown the hall and on in. As he sat in the red leather chair, not settled back, after acknowledging Wolfe’s greeting with a nod that wasn’t cordial at all, he rubbed his brow with a palm. I had seen him do that before, more than once, when he had been in a mess.

  His hand dropped to grip the chair arm. “I’m not accust—” he began, but it came out hoarse and he stopped. He started over. “I’m not in the habit of getting a peremptory summons from a—from anybody.”

  Wolfe nodded. “I suppose not. But I needed to see you. You may remember that I never leave my house on business errands, but there was also the consideration that you would probably prefer not to have Mr. Goodwin or me call at your office. First I’ll—”

  “Why do you need to see me?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. First I’ll relieve your mind. My need has no connection with what happened eighteen months ago, none whatever. No connection with you or your affairs. I am having—”

  “Then goddam it, why did—”

  “If you please. I am having a rare experience, almost without precedent. I am embarrassed. I need to say something and I am unsure about how to say it. I must ask your help on a problem, and how do I do it without risking misunderstanding?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw you at a loss for words. Is that straight? It has nothing to do with me?”

  “Yes. It’s my problem. And Mr. Goodwin’s.”

  Ballou took a deep breath, settled back in the chair, turned to me, and said, “I could use a drink.”

  “Gin on the rocks with lemon peel?” I asked. “There’s fresh mint if you want it.”

  “You remember? I’ll be damned. No mint.”

  I didn’t move; I didn’t intend to miss the next five minutes. Wolfe, seeing I wasn’t going, pushed a button, and when Fritz came gave him a triple order: gin for the guest, beer for him, and milk for me.

  He squi
nted at Ballou. “It’s difficult. I can’t pretend that you are under any obligation to me. You paid me a substantial sum for the ticklish and knotty job I did for you. You did say that you had to be rescued from that predicament no matter what it cost, but that was merely the desperate squawk of a man under intolerable pressure. The account was settled. You owe me nothing. But the fact remains that Mr. Goodwin and I remain in possession of a secret which you still wish to protect at any cost, and we could support our knowledge with evidence. Then no matter what I say, how I put it, how can I ask you to help me on a problem without risking an indictment for extortion? For blackmail? Not by a jury; by you.”

  He compressed his lips and shook his head. “Confound it. Words won’t do it. No words will erase or suspend your awareness that I could divulge that secret. There are no conceivable circumstances in which Mr. Goodwin or I would divulge it, but you know we could, and I can’t open your skull and select those cells and remove them.”

  He shook his head some more. “I’ll try another tack. I need your help. I presume to request it solely on the supposition that you may be willing to supply it not to meet any obligation, but to show your continued appreciation for the service I rendered you. If your appreciation has withered or vanished, I make no request.”

  “It hasn’t.” The sag was gone, and Ballou had even smiled a couple of times. “It’s too bad you didn’t know how to say it. I’m glad you’re not going to open my skull, I appreciate that, too. What’s your problem?”

  That had to wait because Fritz came with the drinks. He served Wolfe’s beer first, the bottle unopened because that’s a rule, and Wolfe got his opener from the drawer, a gold one Marko Vukcic had given him that didn’t work very well. By the time Fritz had served my milk and had gone, Ballou had downed a good half of his gin, but the bottle and ice were there on the stand.

  Wolfe licked foam from his lips and eyed Ballou. “Well,” he said, “I did my best. Making the request is much simpler. According to Mr. Goodwin, you are a director of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company.”