Archie Meets Nero Wolfe (11 page)

A second difference was that on this second trip into the Bronx, I lay on the floor of another of Burke Williamson’s autos, his slick red Pierce-Arrow phaeton. “Just like Wolfe’s men, I’m changing cars tonight,” Williamson said tightly. He was on edge, of course, but then so were the rest of us.

“Okay, Goodwin, I’m turning onto Southern Boulevard now, less than a mile from the zoo. Isn’t this something, though? Almost exactly a year ago, Lillian and I took Tommie here for his seventh birthday, and now ... Williamson could not finish the sentence, which made me begin to worry that he would not hold up under the strain for much longer.

“Wait a minute,” he snapped. “There’s construction here, dammit!”

I popped up from the floor and saw the barricade and the
ROAD CLOSED
sign. “The sawhorse doesn’t go all the way across the street,” I said to him. “Just swing on around it.”

“It’s like a washboard,” Williamson complained as we bounced north along the rough pavement at about ten miles an hour, passing cement mixers and trucks that awaited the arrival of paving crews in the morning. We also passed Panzer’s darkened Model A, which was parked at the curb and was pointed north.

“Could be that’s why they picked this stretch,” I said. “It’s one way to ensure privacy, assuming you don’t attract the cops’ attention by ignoring the sign.”

We had gone about a block, with the darkened zoo and its trees looming on our right behind an iron fence. “There’s the phone booth,” he whispered, “and it’s now 8:57. Here goes.”

He climbed out of the car, taking the suitcase with him, and slipped into the phone booth, closing its door. I watched from the lower edge of the backseat window, my hand gripping the Webley and my mouth as dry as a saltine cracker. I could hear the faint ring and watched Williamson pick up the receiver and speak a word or two, nodding grimly as if the voice on the other end could see him agreeing.

“Okay,” he said, getting back into the car. “I’m to kill the headlights and keep driving until I see another auto parked up ahead, next to another phone booth. He—the voice—said this would be about two blocks farther along, just around a slight curve. When I get there, I’m to get out with the suitcase and walk toward the booth. My God, I hope that I never see another phone booth for the rest of my life.”

“Before you start moving, hit your brake pedal three times fast, three times slowly, then three times fast again,” I told him.

“What! Why?”

“Your brake lights will flash the Morse code for S.O.S., which will bring our other auto up closer.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“Standard procedure,” I said without telling him that I got the idea from a story I read in one of the dime detective magazines.

“But I thought the plan was for them to stay in the background,” Williamson said. “We don’t want trouble, remember?”

“You don’t have to worry; Panzer will turn off his headlights, too. You won’t even know he’ll be easing along behind us, at a distance. It’s just a good idea to have a backup, in case something unexpected happens.”

“I don’t like it one bit,” Williamson huffed, but he pumped the brakes as I had instructed, then shut off his headlights and eased forward along the bumpy road, which seemed nothing like a boulevard in its current state.

“There’s the other car, Goodwin!” he rasped. Ahead of us, parked next to the phone booth where the call surely had come from, was a nondescript coupe that looked like a Chevrolet. It was difficult to tell if anyone was inside the car because of the dim glow thrown off by the streetlights.

Williamson exhaled loudly. “Well, here goes,” he said, climbing out of the car with his suitcase. Slipping the Webley from my pocket and making sure the safety was off, I poised to jump out of the Pierce-Arrow.

Williamson walked stiffly toward the booth and as he did, a yell of “Daddy, Daddy!” came from behind the bushes along the cast-iron fence that separated the zoo from the sidewalk and boulevard.

“Tommie!” his father screamed, moving in the direction of the voice. But he was intercepted by a tall man coming from the direction of the Chevrolet. He wore a fedora, and some sort of mask covered his face, maybe a woman’s silk stocking. “Stop right there, Mr. Williamson. You will see your son soon enough,” he said, gesturing with a nickel-plated automatic that glistened even in the faint light. “Now the satchel, please. Give it to me.”

The millionaire held out the suitcase and the tall man grabbed it, backing toward the Chevrolet and keeping his gun leveled. He then stopped and knelt down, snapped the latches on the suitcase, and opened it, peering inside. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he shut the case and rose, backing toward the car with his gun still drawn.

“Daddy!” the anguished cry came again, and Williamson moved in the direction of the panicked little voice. I slipped out of the auto, and as I did a gunshot cracked. The man with the suitcase staggered once, recovered his balance, and fired, apparently at his attacker. I went into a prone position on the pavement and saw Orrie Cather fire and shout, “You child-snatching bastard, let’s see how you like this!”

Cather and the tall man exchanged more shots, at least two or three each, and I heard a groan from somewhere behind me. It sounded like Fred Durkin’s voice. The tall man clutched his side and climbed into the front passenger seat of the Chevy as the car squealed off, bouncing along the rough pavement. I fired twice from a crouch, trying for one of its tires, but all I hit was the car’s trunk.

“Durkin’s down!” Del Bascom yelled as he and Saul Panzer came running up to join Cather, who stood in the roadway cursing and watching the kidnappers’ car disappear onto the night. “Geez, Orrie, you know you weren’t supposed to start shooting,” Panzer growled as he knelt next to Fred.

“I’m okay, Saul,” the big man said, struggling to get to his feet. “Just nicked me in the shoulder and spun me around. My pride got hurt the most.”

“We’re over here,” Williamson cried. “Give us a hand.”

We all went to a spot along the cast-iron zoo fence where Tommie Williamson was sobbing, and with good reason. The boy was handcuffed to the fence, although apparently otherwise unharmed. “Any way we can get these things off him?” his father pleaded as he knelt in the grass next to his son.

“You got a tool kit in your trunk?” Panzer asked him.

“Not with anything that would work here,” Williamson said as we began to hear the damnedest collection of noises from the darkness of the zoo—roaring and bleating and howling and cawing and other strange sounds coming from strange creatures. We had awakened the populace.

We also had drawn the attention of some of a particular two-legged species. A patrol car, siren wailing, had drawn up and played a spotlight on us. “What’s all this and what about the gunfire?” a beefy patrolman demanded as he climbed out, revolver drawn and playing his flashlight on the strange tableau of a crying boy handcuffed to a fence and six men gathered around him.

“It’s a long story,” I told him when no one else chose to respond.

“I’ll just bet it is, son,” he said, “but my partner and me, we got us all kinds of time to listen.”

F
irst things first. The patrolman and his partner pulled metal cutters from their trunk, which they used to free a tearful Tommie Williamson from the fence. All of us, the two cops included, were anxious to learn details of the boy’s ordeal, but his father refused to let anybody talk to him.

“I am Burke Williamson, you may have heard of me,” he said to the badges, “and my boy here was kidnapped the day before yesterday. Thanks to these men, I have him back, and I am now taking him home, whether you like it or not. I will be happy to discuss the matter with you or your superiors, but not tonight.”

It was clear from their expressions that the coppers indeed knew who Williamson was, and they made no attempt to stop him as he picked up his still-sobbing son and carried him to the Pierce-Arrow. “All right, boys,” the patrolman, named Finnegan, said as Williamson drove away, “just stay right where you are while I call the precinct. Then we are all going down there so you can have a little chat with the lieutenant. He’s going to want to know just how this peaceful piece of the Bronx got turned into a Wild West shootout.”

“Didn’t you hear Williamson!” Saul Panzer barked as Finnegan slid into the phone booth. “His kid got kidnapped, and while we’re standing here, they’re getting away, headed up Southern Boulevard in a black Chevy coupe.”

“And who might all of you be?” Finnegan said, sticking out a chin as if daring someone to take a swing at it.

“Like Williamson said, we found the boy,” Panzer said. “He hired us. We’re all private investigators.”

“Police not good enough for the job, huh?” his partner put in as Finnegan used the instrument in the booth.

Panzer wisely did not respond.

“All right, all of you into your car, and we’ll be right behind you. Do you know where Webster Avenue is?” Finnegan asked Panzer, who nodded.

“That’s where we’re headed, Fifty-Second Precinct. Not six blocks from here. We’ll be right behind you, and I wouldn’t try making a dash for it. This Black Maria of ours has a lot more horses under the hood than your rattletrap, and you fellas are in enough trouble as it is. When we get to the station, we’ll flash our headlights in case you don’t recognize it or maybe decide to drive right on by.”

We all jammed into the Ford and lurched along the torn-up pavement of Southern Boulevard with the patrol car right behind us. “What the hell is Wolfe going to say?” Orrie Cather whined.

“Let’s worry about that later,” Panzer snapped. “Fred, how are you? You need a doctor?”

“Nah,” Durkin said, holding his shoulder. “Bullet just grazed me. I checked and there’s hardly a drop of blood. A bandage should do it, when we’ve got time.”

“Have you all got your PI licenses with you?” Panzer asked. Each of us told him we did.

W
e pulled up in front of the old station house and got marched inside by the pair of uniforms. “Sarge, these here are the desperadoes who was shooting up Southern Boulevard,” Finnegan proudly announced to the desk sergeant, a stocky specimen whose bushy gray mustache at least partly offset the total lack of hair on his shiny dome.

“Don’t look much like desperadoes to me,” the sergeant observed with a smirk. “A pretty motley bunch, I’d say. The lieutenant’s wanting to see ’em.”

We got herded down a long, dark hall with paint peeling on both the ceiling and the pictureless walls and ended up in a bleak room filled with straight-backed wooden chairs, bare wooden tables, and a couple of desks pushed up against the walls. Before we could sit down, a tall, lean guy in shirtsleeves, a necktie, and suspenders burst in and looked at each of us with a tight grin.

“Cowboys right here in the Bronx, eh? What next? Sit down, all of you. I am Lieutenant R. L. Knapp, and that’s with a
K
, just in case anybody here wants to file a formal complaint about me. Now I want names, identification, and the whole story about what the hell was going on out there. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that you’ve got people in that part of town all riled up, to say nothing of the animals in the zoo.”

We all pulled out our licenses and handed them over. “I will be damned, all private dicks,” Knapp said as he riffled through the IDs. “Does one of you speak for the whole bunch?”

“I do,” Saul said, putting up his hand.

“And you are ...?”

“Panzer.”

“Well, Panzer,” Knapp said, sitting on one corner of a table, “how about you telling me what all this is about. Don’t leave anything out, or you will have to go through it all again.”

Saul did lay the whole thing out, and each time he mentioned Burke Williamson, the lieutenant tensed up.

“Interesting, Mr. Williamson hiring you and this bunch to find the boy,” Knapp said derisively. “Just what is it that makes you so special?”

“Most of us have been around awhile.”

The cop lit a cigarette and scowled. “Let me put it another way: Who’s your boss? There hasta be one.”

Saul shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s Nero Wolfe,” he murmured after a long pause.

“That fat eccentric who never leaves home? Well, I’ll be double damned. So somehow he found out about the kidnapping and went to Williamson looking to get himself an assignment?”

“Other way around. Williamson went to him.”

“Huh! Okay, I’m going to call Mr. Nero Wolfe right now and get his story. You got his number handy, or do I have to look it up?”

Saul gave him the number and the lieutenant dialed it from a phone on one of the desks. “Nero Wolfe? This is Lieutenant Knapp, that’s with a
K
, calling from the Fifty-Second Precinct in the Bronx. ... That’s right, the Bronx. I’ve got five private operatives here with me now who say they work for you. They are”—Knapp shuffled through our licenses—“Orville Cather, Archie Goodwin, Delbert Bascom, Saul Panzer, and Frederick Durkin. ... So, they are in your employ? Uh-huh ... yeah ... And Burke Williamson hired you to find his kid?”

Knapp’s face flushed as he listened to whatever Wolfe was saying. “Yeah, I hear that the kid is back home safe now, but cases like this are really for the police, not amateurs ... no, the kidnappers—I should say alleged kidnappers—got away. They exchanged fire with your boys, right out there on the public street.... Oh, you’ve heard from Williamson ... he said
what
? ... well, I hardly think that’s being fair to the Police Department. We have caught countless kidnappers over the years.”

The lieutenant ground out his cigarette on the table leg and passed a handkerchief over his forehead. “No, we don’t plan to hold them, although this town doesn’t need a bunch of vigilantes shooting up our neighborhoods ... We—What? He wants to speak to you,” Knapp snarled at Saul Panzer, handing him the telephone.

“Yes, Mr. Wolfe, all right. We’ll be there. Yes, sir.” Saul cradled the receiver.

“I wasn’t through talking to him!” Knapp bellowed.

“Sorry, he hung up.”

Knapp glowered at each of us in turn, exhaling loudly. “You’re a fine bunch, and a good reason why we need tougher standards for certifying private dicks in this burg and this state. Why don’t you all get the hell back to Manhattan where you belong and stay out of the Bronx? We don’t need the likes of you up here.” He tossed our licenses onto the table and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. For several seconds, we just looked at one another.