Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (17 page)

“But if you can sell it—” She was wide-eyed. It didn’t alter my opinion of her. A prospect of fifty thousand unexpected bucks is enough to open eyes, no matter how honest they are. She added, “If it’s my property I can just tell you to sell it, can’t I?”

“You see,” I reproached her, “you didn’t listen.”

“I did—too! I lis—”

“No. You did not. I warned you that that was only what I
intended
to tell you. There was some truth in it, but darned little. I do think that your brother wrote a novel of that title under the name of Baird Archer, and I would like to go through his letters to see if he mentioned it, but I have no copy of the manuscript, there is no prospect of selling it to the movies, I am not a literary agent, and my name is not George Thompson. Now, having—”

“Then it was all lies!”

“No. It would have—”

She was out of her chair. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Have my ears changed any?” I demanded.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to listen. It wasn’t a lie if I didn’t say it, even if I intended to. Now here’s what I do say, and it’s the truth. You might as well sit down, because this is even longer.”

She sat, but on about a third of the chair seat.

“My name,” I said, “is Archie Goodwin. I’m a private detective, and I work for Nero Wolfe, also a private detec—”

“Nero Wolfe!”

“Right. It will please him to know that you had heard of him, and I’ll be sure to tell him. He has been hired by a man named Wellman to find out who murdered his daughter. And another girl has been murdered, one named Rachel Abrams. Also, before that, your brother was murdered. We have reason to believe that the same person committed all three murders. It’s a long and complicated reason, and I’ll skip it. If you want the details later you can have them. I’ll just say that our theory is that your brother was killed because he wrote that novel, Joan Wellman was killed because she had read it, and Rachel Abrams was killed because she had typed it.”

“The novel—Len wrote?”

“Yes. Don’t ask me what was in it, because we don’t know. If we did, I wouldn’t have had to come out here to see you. I came to get you to help us catch a man that murdered three people, and one of them was your brother.”

“But I can’t—” She gulped. “How can I help?”

“I’m telling you. I could have tricked you into helping. I’ve just proved it. You would have come along for a chance at fifty thousand dollars, you know darned well you would. You’d have let me go through your brother’s letters for evidence, and whether we found it or not you’d have written the letter to the law firm. That’s all I’m asking you to do, only now I’m giving it to you straight and asking you to do it not for a pile of dough but to help catch the man that killed your brother. If you would have done it for money, and you would,
don’t you think you ought to do it to bring a murderer to justice?”

She was frowning, concentrating. “But I don’t see—You only want me to write a letter?”

“That’s right. It’s like this. We think your brother wrote that novel, and it was a vital element in the murders. We think that someone in that law office is involved and either committed the murders or knows who did. We think that someone is desperately determined that the contents of that manuscript shall not be known to any living person. If we’re right, and you send the kind of letter I described, he’ll have to move and move quick, and that’s all we need, to start him moving. If we’re wrong, your sending the letter will do nobody any harm.”

She was keeping the frown. “What did you say you wanted me to say in the letter?”

I repeated it, with fuller detail. Toward the end she began slowly shaking her head. When I stopped she spoke.

“But that would be a lie—saying you have a copy of the manuscript when you haven’t. I couldn’t tell them a deliberate lie!”

“Maybe not,” I said regretfully. “If you’re the kind of person who has never told a lie in all your life, I can’t expect you to tell one just to help find the man who killed your brother—and who also killed two young women, ran a car over one of them and pushed the other one out of a window. Even if it couldn’t possibly hurt any innocent person, I wouldn’t want to urge you to tell your very first lie.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic.” Her face had turned a mild pink. “I didn’t say I never told a lie. I’m no angel. You’re perfectly right, I would have done it for the money, only then I wouldn’t have known it was a lie.”
Suddenly her eyes twinkled. “Why don’t we start over and do it the other way?”

I would have liked to give her a good hug. “Listen,” I suggested, “let’s take things in order. We’ve got to go through his letters first anyhow, there’s no objection to that, then we can decide on the next step. You get the letters, huh?”

“I guess so.” She arose. “They’re in a box in the garage.”

“Can I help?”

She said no, thanks, and left me. I got up and crossed to a window to look out at the California climate. I would have thought it was beautiful if I had been a seal. It would be beautiful anyway if one of Dykes’s letters had what I was after. I wasn’t asking for anything elaborate like an outline of the plot; just one little sentence would do.

When she came back, sooner than I expected, she had two bundles of white envelopes in her hands, tied with string. She put them down on the glass-topped table, sat, and pulled the end of a bowknot.

I approached. “Start about a year ago. Say March of last year.” I pulled a chair up. “Here, give me some.”

She shook her head. “I’ll do it.”

“You might miss it. It might be just a vague reference.”

“I won’t miss it. I couldn’t let you read my brother’s letters, Mr. Thompson.”

“Goodwin. Archie Goodwin.”

“Excuse me. Mr. Goodwin.” She was looking at postmarks.

Evidently she meant it, and I decided to table my motion, at least temporarily. Meanwhile I could do a job. I got out my notebook and pen and started writing at the top of a sheet:

I stopped to consider. Mrs. Potter was reading a letter, with her teeth clamped on her lower lip. Well, I thought, I can put it in, and it will be easy enough to take it out if we have to. I resumed with my pen:

It didn’t come out that way all at once. I did a lot of crossing out and changing, and the preceding was the final result, of which I made a clear copy. I read it over and passed it. There was the one sentence that might have to come out, but I hoped to God it wouldn’t.

My accomplice was reading steadily, and I had kept an eye on her progress. There were four envelopes in a little stack at her right, finished, and if she had started with March and he had written one a month, she was up to July. My fingers itched to reach for the next one. I sat and controlled them until she finished another one and began folding it for return to the envelope, and then got up to take a walk. She was reading so damn slow. I crossed to the glass doors at the far end of the room and looked out. In the rain a newly planted tree about twice my height was slanting to one side, and I decided to worry about that but couldn’t get my mind on it. I got stubborn and determined that I damn well was going to worry about that tree, and was fighting it out when suddenly her voice came.

“I knew there was something! Here it is. Listen!”

I wheeled and strode. She read it out.

Mrs. Potter looked up at me, at her elbow. “There! I had forgotten that he mentioned the title, but I knew—no! What are you—”

She made a quick grab, but not quick enough. I had finally pounced. With my left hand I had snatched the letter from her fingers, and with my right the envelope from the table, and then backed off out of reach.

“Take it easy,” I told her. “I’d go through fire for you and I’ve already gone through water, but this letter goes home with me. It’s the only evidence on earth that your brother wrote that novel. I’d rather have this letter than one from Elizabeth Taylor begging me to let her hold my hand. If there’s anything in it that you don’t want read in a courtroom that part won’t be read, but I need it all, including the envelope. If I had to I would knock you down and walk on you to get out of here with it. You’d better take another look at my ears.”

She was indignant. “You didn’t have to grab it like that.”

“Okay, I was impulsive and I apologize. I’ll give it back, and you can hand it to me, with the understanding that if you refuse I’ll take it by force.”

Her eyes twinkled, and she knew it, and flushed a little. She extended a hand. I folded the letter, put it in the envelope, and handed it to her. She looked at it, glanced at me, held it out, and I took it.

“I’m doing this,” she said gravely, “because I think
my brother would want me to. Poor Len. You think he was killed because he wrote that novel?”

“Yes. Now I know it. It’s up to you whether we get the guy that killed him.” I got out my notebook, tore out a sheet, and handed it to her. “All you have to do is write that letter on your own paper. Maybe not quite all. I’ll tell you the rest.”

She started to read it. I sat down. She looked beautiful. The phony logs in the phony fireplace looked beautiful. Even the pouring rain—but no, I won’t overdo it.

I
phoned Wolfe at 3:23 from a booth in a drugstore somewhere in Glendale. It is always a pleasure to hear him say “Satisfactory” when I have reported on an errand. This time he did better. When I had given him all of it that he needed, including the letter written by Dykes that I had in my pocket and the one written by Mrs. Potter that I had just put an air-mail stamp on and dropped in the slot at the Glendale Post Office, there was a five-second silence and then an emphatic “Very satisfactory.” After another five bucks’ worth of discussion of plans for the future, covering contingencies as well as possible, I dove through the rain to my waiting taxi and gave the driver an address in downtown Los Angeles. It rained all the way. At an intersection we missed colliding with a truck by an eighth of an inch, and the driver apologized, saying he wasn’t used to driving in the rain. I said he soon would be, and he resented it.

The office of the Southwest Agency was on the ninth floor of a dingy old building with elevators that groaned and creaked. It occupied half the floor. I had been there once before, years back, and, having phoned that morning from the hotel that I would probably be
dropping in, I was more or less expected. In a corner room a guy named Ferdinand Dolman, with two chins, and fourteen long brown hairs deployed across a bald top, arose to shake hands and exclaim heartily, “Well, well! Nice to see you again! How’s the old fatty?”

Few people know Nero Wolfe well enough to call him the old fatty, and this Dolman was not one of them, but it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to teach him manners, so I skipped it. I exchanged words with him enough to make it sociable and then told him what I wanted.

“I’ve got just the man for you,” he declared. “He happens to be here right now, just finished a very difficult job. This is a break for you, it really is.” He picked up a phone and told it, “Send Gibson in.”