Archie Meets Nero Wolfe (3 page)

A
t 11:45, I stepped into the Devereaux shop, where the only customer was talking to the other salesman. “May I help you?” Clarence Chapman asked with an ingratiating smile as he rubbed his palms together.

“Yes, I think you can. I have something here that I would like you to look at.” I took a folded sheet of paper from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. He opened it, read it, then swallowed hard, looking at me wide-eyed. His expression lay somewhere between pain and panic.

He leaned across the counter and whispered, “Who are you?”

“I thought you would find this an interesting challenge,” I responded in a normal tone. “I’ve heard many good things about this store and felt sure you’d be able to help me. I have to run off on some other business now, but would it be possible to discuss this further during your lunch break?”

“Yes, yes, that would be at, er ... twelve.” Beads of perspiration had formed above his eyebrows and on his upper lip. All of a sudden, he didn’t look the least bit suave and debonair.

“Excellent; I will be back then, and we can go somewhere to talk,” I said in a voice meant to ooze conviviality and good humor.

E
xactly at noon by my watch and the chimes at St. Patrick’s over on Fifth Avenue, I popped back into the store, but got nudged right back out by Chapman, who had seen me coming. “Not in here,” he whispered as he steered me onto the sidewalk “Let’s ... let’s walk.”

When we got a few yards away from the store, he grabbed my arm. “What is this all about?”

“You read my note. I don’t see how it can be any clearer.”

“Who are you?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. We’re going to visit my boss,” I said, this time taking hold of his arm gently but firmly.

“Are you some sort of hoodlum?” he said in a choked voice, trying to look irate.

I laughed. “Not in the least. But you are in some sort of trouble, Mr. Chapman, and you need to have a few things explained to you. It won’t take long, and then you can be back in your store—if you will even want to go back.”

He didn’t say another word as we walked toward Bascom’s building, or even when we rode up in the open-cage elevator and stepped into the office. “We’re going in,” I told Wilda, who looked so surprised she didn’t even sniff.

“This is Clarence Chapman. You may recognize him from his photograph,” I told Bascom, whose eyebrows went halfway up his forehead. I steered our quarry to the chair and stood with my back against the wall.

“Well, well,” Bascom said, recovering his aplomb and folding thick arms across his chest. “We knew we’d find you for your wife. What the hell did you think you were doing?”

I almost felt sorry for the guy as he put his hands over his face and sniffled. “Muriel ... she came to you?”

“That’s right, pal. She thought something terrible must have happened to you. But you look like you haven’t exactly been suffering.”

With that, it all came out. A blubbering Chapman told us how Alicia Devereaux had gone into Macy’s, checking out their camera department to get ideas on how to better display her own store’s wares—or so she said. She and Chapman hit it off from the first—or so he said. He described it as “magic.” They went to lunch, and before they’d finished the meal, he said he realized this was the woman he had been waiting for his whole life.

Under Bascom’s questioning, Chapman told us he didn’t return to Macy’s after lunch but went straight back to the Winchester with the Devereaux woman. She bought him fine clothes, put him on the payroll at her store, and gave him a place to live that was far more luxurious than anything he had known or even imagined. And she seemed not to care anything about his past.

“So you lived a fantasy life for a while—now what?” Bascom barked.

“I ... I guess it’s over, isn’t it?” Chapman said between sobs. “What am I going to say to Muriel?”

“That is your problem, buddy,” Bascom said, clearly disgusted with the man sitting across the desk from him. “But if I was you, I’d cook up a story about amnesia, or maybe kidnapping, although I don’t know why anybody would kidnap you. You ain’t exactly rich.”

“Are you going to say anything about this to Muriel?”

“Of course I am! She hired me to find you, and I did ... with my associate’s help.” He dipped his head in my direction.

“Do you have to tell her ... where you found me?”

“Frankly, I don’t know why I should save your skin,” Bascom said, “but I don’t have to tell her anything other than that we’ve found you. That fulfills my commission from her.”

“What is she paying you?” Chapman asked as he dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief.

“That is strictly between me and my client,” Bascom snapped. “I’m going to call her now and tell her you’re coming home. And by God, if you don’t go straight home, one, we will find you again, and two, your wife will learn all about you and the exotic and exciting Mrs. Devereaux of Park Avenue.”

As we learned later, Chapman did go straight home, although what he told his wife remained between them. After he had left us, Bascom closed his office door and told me to sit down.

“Okay, Goodwin, you did one helluva job; I take my hat off to you. Now fill me in on just how you did it.”

“Well, as you know, I started checking out camera stores, and—”

“Yeah, and I admit up front that I thought it was a lousy idea at the time. If the guy was trying to lose himself, why would he go right back to the same kind of job he had before? To say nothing of the risk he was taking by being recognized by somebody who remembered him from Macy’s.”

“People aren’t always logical, particularly when it comes to love. I figured something made him disappear, and there was a good chance a woman was involved in the story. I felt he was susceptible to feminine—what do you call them?—wiles, from the way his wife said he never, ever looked at another woman. Sounds like a guy who’s trying too hard not to seem interested.”

“So you found him at this camera shop the Devereaux dame owned?”

“Yeah, I did get lucky there. He could have been off that day, or in the back room and out of sight when I walked by.” I went on to tell Bascom how I learned about Alicia Devereaux’s man-eating tendencies from Kevin the café counterman.

“I’d read something about her before all right, but I’ve never paid much attention to that social world,” Bascom said. “One thing seems sure: we did that poor sap Chapman a favor by smoking him out. That woman would have chewed him up and spit him out within six months, a year at most.”

I nodded. “And he never even thanked us, the ingrate.”

“Here’s another question for you,” Bascom said, leaning back and clasping his hands behind his head. “How did you get Chapman to come over here with you?”

“Showed him this,” I said, handing across the note that had shaken the guy up so much in the camera shop.

Your wife misses you, Clarence, and she is worried sick. Do you want me to tell her where you are working and where you are living, or would you prefer discussing this with me on your lunch hour? The choice is yours.

Bascom looked at the hand-printed note and shook his head, grinning. “For a kid, you act like you know what you’re doing.”

“Put it down that I’m old beyond my years. And as I said when I first walked in here, I can use a job.”

“I got still another question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“I noticed that you recited all your conversations to me without looking at any notes and they sounded like they were word for word.”

“They were word for word,” I told him. “I didn’t take any notes, none at all.”

“No baloney?”

“No baloney whatever. Back when I was in high school, I got a perfect score on this history test. The teacher—Mr. Mason, it was—asked me how I did so well when I never seemed to write down any notes when he was talking. I told him that I never took any notes in any classes or when I read my textbooks, either, and I only went through the books once.

“That’s when he told me I must have something they were starting to call ‘total recall.’ I felt like some kind of freak.”

“Freak, hell, that’s one great asset you got, especially in our game. Tell you what, Goodwin,” he said, lighting a cigar. “I’ll give you fifty bucks for the work you did on the Chapman business. That is a one-half of what the guy’s wife paid me to find him. And I’ll show you the woman’s check so that you can see I’m not stiffing you. I haven’t cashed it yet, but I called a friend at her bank. That money and more is in their joint account.”

“Good, but what about—”

“I’m not done yet,” Bascom said, holding up a hand like a traffic cop. “I can’t afford much, as I told you before, but I’ll put you on at a sawbuck a week to start with, and you can have the vacant office, which has a telephone in it. Also, if you crack a case the way you did today, you’ll get twenty-five percent of the fee.”

“Not fifty?”

“Not fifty,” Bascom snapped. “That was a one-shot. Call me a softy. Remember, I’m supplying you with office space.”

“Of course, I would like more than that, but, okay,” I told him. “You just got yourself a deal.”

“You’re learning your way around town fast, Goodwin,” the grizzled detective said, standing and pumping my hand. “I like that. And by the way, we’re going to get you licensed in the State of New York as a private investigator. I’ll help you get the paperwork going.”

“I think that I’m liking this burg,” I responded with a grin. “I might just stay around here awhile.”

S
o I became a detective. I even had an office, albeit small and shabby. And Wilda started treating me like I wasn’t some lower form of life. She even stopped sniffing when I walked in off the elevator.

My payment from the Chapman case and my regular check, small as it was, allowed me to get out of the dump I was living in and move into a modest but clean apartment hotel on the West Side in the Sixties. I still ate at places like the Automat and hole-in-the-wall coffee shops, although I wasn’t complaining.

I liked Bascom. He seemed honest. He wouldn’t touch divorce cases and all the spying on one spouse or the other that usually went with them, even when he was hard up for business, which was much of the time.

“A lot of people look down on our so-called profession, Goodwin,” he told me, “and Lord knows there’s plenty of joes around who give it a bad name. I try not to be one of ’em.”

On slow days, of which there were too many, he’d regale me with cases he’d had, some of them sounding like they came right off the pages of pulps like
Black Mask
or
Dime Detective.

“This Chapman business you did such a good job on, in a weird way it reminds me of something I worked on a few years back,” he said one rainy morning as we sat in his office drinking coffee brewed by Wilda. “This natty swell named Fletcher—he was some sort of middle-level bank officer—shows up at my door one day and says his wife has disappeared. My first thought is that she’s run off with some other guy, but I don’t say so, of course. I listen.

“He tells me she’s a perfect wife, that they been married eight years, no kids, have a nice apartment on the Upper East Side. He makes it sound like an ideal marriage, of which there is no such thing. He goes on about how wonderful and beautiful she is, blah, blah.

“I ask about her family, and he tells me she was an only child, came up from North Carolina, both parents dead. He’s willing to pay big dough for me to try finding her, so I figure, what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. I ask a bunch of questions about her habits, her friends, and he says she’s pretty much a loner, reads a lot at home. Sounds fishy to me, especially when he gives me a snapshot of her. She’s a real doll, and he tells me that she has flaming red hair, which you can’t tell from a black-and-white shot.

“This looks to me like a skirt who should be out and around town, having good friends, enjoying life,” Bascom says, then adds apologetically, “I guess I’m making this too long, huh?”

“Not at all, take your time,” I said. “I like a good story.”

“Anyway, I start by doing the usual, checking around the neighborhood where they live. I go into groceries, drugstores, dry cleaners, that sort of stuff. ‘Oh yeah, that’s Lucille,’ they say when I show the picture. ‘Nice lady, quiet, haven’t seen her around lately. Has something happened to her?’”

“How do you answer that question?” I asked.

Bascom took a puff of his cigar. “I get vague and say I don’t know her exact address and that I’m trying to locate her because a distant relative left her some money. Usually, somebody will give me her address then, which, of course, I already know, but at least it’s a cover for why I’m asking about her.

“I get this hunch, don’t ask me why, that she’s left Manhattan. So I hang around the Staten Island Ferry docks, showing her picture to crewmen. No luck at all. Then I try the Hoboken Ferry, and one of the crew recognizes her, but only after I mention her red hair. ‘Yeah, I think she was on a westbound run a few weeks back. I remember the hair, and one other thing. It was a rainy day, but she was wearing dark glasses.’”

“Now I think I might have a hunch,” I put in.

“You just might at that,” Bascom said. “I start hanging around the business area of Hoboken close to the ferry terminal, asking questions in shops and restaurants. I show her picture to everybody and tell the same story that I had on the Upper East Side. Turns out several people know of her, and a waitress in a coffee shop says ‘Oh, that’s Lucille Jones, she comes in here often—a lovely woman, so refined, a real lady.’ Before I can even ask, the waitress gives me the address where she lives, a small apartment building about three blocks away.

“Sure enough, there’s an ‘L. Jones’ listed on a mailbox in the foyer. She’s on the third floor, and I press the button. When she answers, I say into the speaker that I’m from the gas company investigating a leak, and she buzzes me in.

“She’s waiting for me at the door to her place, and she looks great. Her husband hadn’t exaggerated the red hair. It’s spectacular. Once inside the apartment, I tell her who I really am and why I’m there.