Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 24
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Authors: Three Men Out
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Political, #Wolfe; Nero (Fictitious Character), #Detective and Mystery Stories, #Private Investigators, #Westerns, #New York, #Private Investigators - New York (State) - New York - Fiction, #New York (State), #Wolfe; Nero (Fictitious Character) - Fiction
Generally I don’t take my gun to ball games, but that afternoon the Giants were so far behind, I wanted to shoot myself.
Luckily, I found some action in the stands where the curves in the box next to us were more interesting than those on the mound …
But just as I was getting to first base, a substitution was made in the line-up, and Wolfe and I were called to the locker room. It seems someone had taken a foul swing at the club’s star rookie and smashed his head in with a baseball bat.
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Rex Stout
The Black Mountain
Broken Vase
Death of a Dude
Death Times Three
Fer-de-Lance
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Plot It Yourself
The Rubber Band
Some Buried Caesar
Three for the Chair
Too Many Cooks
And Be a Villain
Max Allan Collins
The Dark City
Bullet Proof
Butcher’s Dozen
Loren Estleman
Peeper
Whiskey River
Dick Lupoff
The Comic Book Killer
Virginia Anderson
Blood Lies
King of the Roses
William Murray
When the Fat Man Sings
The King of the Nightcap
The Getaway Blues
Eugene Izzi
King of the Hustlers
The Prime Roll
Invasions
Jeffery Deaver
Manhattan Is My Beat
Death of a Blue Movie Star
David Lindsey
In the Lake of the Moon
Rob Kantner
Dirty Work
The Back-Door Man
Hell’s Only Half Full
Made in Detroit
Robert Crais
The Monkey’s Raincoat
Stalking the Angel
Keith Peterson
The Trapdoor
There Fell a Shadow
The Rain
Rough Justice
The Scarred Man
David Handler
The Man Who Died Laughing
The Man Who Lived by Night
The Man Who Would Be
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jerry Oster
Club Dead
Internal Affairs
Final Cut
Benjamin M. Schutz
A Tax in Blood
Embrace the Wolf
The Things We Do for Love
Monroe Thompson
The Blue Room
Paul Levine
To Speak for the Dead
Randall Wallace
Blood of the Lamb
Stephen Greenleaf
Impact
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition
.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED
.
THREE MEN OUT
A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement with Viking Penguin
PRINTING HISTORY
Viking edition published March 1954
Dollar Mystery Guild edition published June 1954
Bantam edition / November 1955
Bantam Crime Line edition / July 1991
CRIME LINE
and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc
.
Acknowledgment is made to
AMERICAN MAGAZINE
,
in which these short novels originally appeared
.
The magazine title for “The Zero Clue” was “Scared to Death”; “Invitation to Murder” was titled “Will to Murder
.”
All rights reserved
.
Copyright 1952, 1953 by Rex Stout
.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher
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For information address: Viking Penguin 40 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10010
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eISBN: 978-0-307-76816-2
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103
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v3.1
CONTENTS
1The neat little man resented it. He was hurt. “No, sir,” he protested, “you are wrong. It is not what you called it, sordid familial flimflam. It is perfectly legitimate for me to inquire into anything affecting the disposal of the fortune my father made, is it not?”
Weighing rather less than half as much as Nero Wolfe, he was lost in the red leather chair three steps from the end of Wolfe’s desk. Comfortably filling his own outsized chair behind the desk, Wolfe was scowling at the would-be client, Mr. Herman Lewent of New York and Paris. I, at my desk with notebook and pen, was neutral, because it was Friday and I had a weekend date, and if Lewent’s job was urgent and we took it, good-by weekend.
Wolfe, as usual when solicited, was torn. He hated to work, but he loved to eat and drink, and his domestic and professional establishment in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, including the orchids in the plant rooms on the roof, had an awful appetite for dollars. The only source of dollars was his income as a private detective, and at that moment, there on his desk near the edge, was a little stack of lettuce with a rubber band around it. Herman Lewent, who had put it there, had stated that it was a thousand dollars.
Nevertheless Wolfe, who hated to work and was torn, demanded, “Why is it legitimate?”
Lewent was small all over. He was slim and short, his hands and feet were tiny, and his features were in scale, with a pinched little mouth that had no room at all for lips. Also he was old enough to have started to shrink some and show creases. Still I would not have called him a squirt. When his quick little gray eyes met yours straight, as they did, you had the feeling that he knew a lot of the answers and could supply good guesses on the ones he hadn’t worked out.
He was still resenting Wolfe but holding it in. “I came to you,” he said, “because this is a very delicate matter, and the combination you have here, you and Mr. Goodwin, may be able to handle it. So I’m prepared to suffer your rudeness. The inquiry is legitimate because it was my father who made the fortune—in mining, mostly copper mining. My mother died when I was a child, and I never learned how to behave myself. I have never learned, and I am now too old to. A few months ago I had three mistresses, one in Paris, one in Toulouse, and one in Rome, and one of them tried to poison me.”