Too Many Women
Chapter One
It was the same old rigmarole. Sometimes I
found it amusing; sometimes it only bored
me; sometimes it gave me a pronounced pain,
especially when I had had more of Wolfe than
was good for either of us.
This time it was fairly funny at first, but it
developed along regrettable lines. Mr.
Jasper Pine, president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc.,
914 William Street, down where a thirty-story
building is a shanty, wanted Nero
Wolfe to come to see him about something.
I explained patiently, all about Wolfe being
too lazy, too big and fat, and too much of a
genius, to let himself be evoked. When Mr.
Pine phoned again, in the afternoon, he
insisted on speaking to Wolfe himself, and
Wolfe made it short, sour, and final. An
hour later, after Wolfe had gone up to the
plant rooms, just to pass the time I dialed
the number of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., managed
to get through to Mr. Pine, and asked him
why he didn’t come to see us. He snapped
that he was too busy, and then he wanted to
know, “Who are you?”
I told him I was Archie Goodwin, the
heart, liver, lungs, and gizzard of the private
detective business of Nero Wolfe, Wolfe
being merely the brains. He asked sarcastically
if I was a genius too, and I told him no
indeed, I was comparatively human.
“I could run down now,” I said.
“No.” He was curt but not discourteous.
“I’m filled up for today. Come tomorrow
morning at ten o’clock. Better make it
ten-fifteen.”
Chapter Two
Those pyramids of profit down in the Wall
Street section, sticking straight up nine
hundred feet and more, are tenanted by everything
from one-room midgets to ten-floor
super-giants. Though the name of Naylor-Kerr,
Inc., was vaguely familiar to me, it was
not a household word, and I lifted the brows
when I learned from the lobby directory that
it paid the rent for three whole floors. The
executive offices were on the thirty-sixth, so up
I went. The atmosphere up there was of thick
carpets, wood panels, and plenty of space,
but as for the receptionist, though she was
not really miscast she was way past the deadline,
having reached the age when it is more
blessed to receive than to give.
She received me at ten-fourteen, and at
ten-nineteen I was escorted down a corridor
to the office of the president. Naturally he
had a corner room with batteries of big windows,
but I had to admit that in spite of
more panels and carpets and the kind of office
furniture you see in Sloane’s window, it
gave me the impression of a place where
somebody got some work done.
Mr. Jasper Pine was about the same age as
the receptionist, a little short of fifty maybe,
but on him it looked good. Except for his
clothes, with the coat obviously cut for the
stoop of his shoulders, he had more the
appearance of a foreman or a job boss than a
top executive of a big corporation. In the
middle of the room he shook hands as if he
were comparatively human too, and, instead
of fencing himself off behind his desk,
assigned us to a couple of comfortable
chairs between two windows.
“My morning’s a little crowded,” he told
me in a deep voice that sounded as if all it
needed was more breath to reach to Central
Park, and he could furnish the breath when
necessary. I was sizing him up, not knowing
then whether the job was a lead pencil leak
in the supply room, which would have been
beneath our notice, or wife-tailing, which
was out of bounds for Nero Wolfe. On the
phone he had refused to specify.
“So,” he was going on, “I’ll sketch it
briefly. Looking over some reports recently,
I noticed that our employee turnover here in
the home office, exclusive of the technical
staff, was over twenty-eight per cent for the
year nineteen forty-six. That was excessive.
I decided to look into it. As a first step I had
a form drawn up and two thousand copies
of it multigraphed, and sent a supply of it to
all heads of departments, with instructions
that one be filled out for each person who
had left our employ during nineteen forty-six.
The forms were to be returned direct to
me. Here’s one that came from the head of
the stock department.” He extended a hand
with a paper in it. “Take a look at it. Read it
through.”
It was a single sheet, letter size, with a neat
job of multigraphing on one side. At the top
it said:
RETURN TO THE OFFICE
OF THE PRESIDENT
BY MARCH TENTH
The blank spaces had been filled in with a
typewriter. First came the name of the ex-employee,
which in this case was Waldo
Wilmot Moore. Age: 30. Unmarried. Home
address: Hotel Churchill. Employment
began: April 8,1946. Hired through: Applied
personally. Job: Correspondence checker.
Salary: $100 weekly. Rises: To $150 weekly
September 30, 1946. Employment ended:
December 5, 1946.
Other spaces had been filled in, about
how well he had done his job, and his
relations with other employees and his
immediate superiors, and so forth, and then at the
bottom came what was of course the key
question: Reason for ending of employment
(give details). There was three inches of
space after it, plenty of room for details, but
for Waldo Wilmot Moore only one word
had been thought necessary and there it
was:
Murdered.
Chapter Three
So apparently it wasn’t a lead pencil leak.
I looked at Jasper Pine. “An excellent
idea,” I said enthusiastically. “These reports
will show you where the weak spots are, and
you can take steps. Though Moore’s case
was probably an exception. I don’t suppose
many of the twenty-eight per cent got murdered.
Incidentally, I keep track of murders
for business reasons, and I don’t remember
this one. Was it local?”
Pine was shaking his head. “Moore was
run over by a car, a hit-and-run driver—here
in New York somewhere uptown. I believe
that is called manslaughter, not
murder, which requires malice aforethought.
I’m not a lawyer, but I looked it up
when this report—when I saw this.” He
made a gesture of impatience. “The hit-and-run
driver was not found. I want Nero
Wolfe to find out if there is any basis for the
supposition that it was murder.”
“Just curiosity?”
“No. I took it up with the head of the
stock department, who made that report,
because I didn’t think it desirable to have it
in our files, stating that one of our employees
had been murdered, unless that was
actually the case. Also I wanted to know
what reason he had, if any, to make that
statement. He refused to give any reason.
He agreed with my definition of murder and
manslaughter, but he refused to change the
report or to make another report using a
different word or phrase. He insisted that the
report is correct as it stands. He refused to
elaborate. He refused to discuss it.”
“Goodness.” I was impressed. “That
ought to be a record. Four refuses to a corporation
president from a mere head of a department!
Who is he? Mr. Naylor? Or Mr. Kerr?”
“His name is Kerr Naylor.”
I thought for a second he was injecting
comic relief, but the look on his face showed
me quite the contrary. He was talking time
out to light a cigarette, and it was easy to see
that the purpose of the maneuver was to
hide embarrassment. The president was unquestionably
embarrassed.
After a good puff he coughed explosively
and explained, “Kerr Naylor is the son of
one of the founders of this business. He was
named Kerr after the other founder. He has
had a—uh, varied career. Also he is my
wife’s brother. He actually controls a large
block of the corporation’s stock, but he no
longer owns it because he gave it away. He
refuses to be an officer of the company, and
he refuses to serve on the Board of Directors.”
“I see. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool refuser.”
Pine made the gesture of impatience
again. He did it with a little fling of a hand,
and it was abrupt but not domineering. “As
you see,” he said, “the situation is not
simple. After Mr. Naylor’s refusal either to
justify the report or to change it, I was inclined
just to let the matter drop and merely
destroy the report, but I mentioned it to two
of my brother executives and to a member of
the Board, and they were all of the opinion
that it should be followed up. Besides that,
news of the report, with that word on it, has
got around among the employees of the department,
presumably through the stenographer
who typed it, and there is a lot of
unhealthy gossip. This man Moore was the
type—I’ll put it this way—he was the type
that stirs up gossip in the circle he lives in,
and now, nearly four months after his death,
here he is stirring it up again. We don’t like it
and we want it stopped.”
“Oh. You said you wanted Mr. Wolfe to
find out if there was any basis for using the
word murdered. Now you want the gossip
stopped. You’d better pick which.”
“It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t
it?”
“Not necessarily. If we find out he was
murdered and the finding percolates, the
gossip gauge will go right through the
ceiling, not to mention other possible results.”
Pine glanced at his wristwatch, reached to
an ash tray to ditch his cigarette, and stood
up. “Damn it,” he said, with more breath
but not more noise, “do I have to explain
that the situation is made more complicated
by the fact that it was Mr. Kerr Naylor who
signed that report? This is a damn nuisance
and it’s taking my time that ought to be
spent working! His father, old George
Naylor, is still living and is Chairman of the
Board, though he turned over his stock to
his children long ago. This is the oldest and
largest company in its field, the largest in the
world, and it has built up a reputation and a
tradition. It has also built up—oh, complexities.
The directors and executives now
managing its affairs—of whom I am one—
want this thing looked into, and I want to
hire Nero Wolfe to do the looking.”
“You mean the corporation? Wants to hire
him?”
“Certainly!”
“To do what? Wait a minute, can I put it
this way? We’re either to make that word on
that report good, or we’re to make this Mr.
Kerr Naylor eat it. Is that the job?”
“Roughly, yes.”
“Do we get credentials for around here?”
“You get all reasonable co-operation. The
details will have to be arranged with me.
More time gone. It will have to be handled
with discretion—and delicately. I had an
idea that a way to do it would be for Nero
Wolfe to get a job in the stock department,
under another name of course, and he could
— what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Excuse me.” I stood up. The
notion of Wolfe fighting his way down to
William Street every morning, or even with
me driving him, and punching a time clock,
and working all day in the stock department,
had been too much for my facial control.
“Okay,” I said, “I guess I know enough to
put it up to Mr. Wolfe. Except about money.
I ought to warn you that his charges have
not joined in the postwar inflation because
they were already so high that a boost would
have been vulgar.”
“This company never expects good work
for low pay.”
I told him that was fine and got my hat
and coat.
Chapter Four
A coolness had sprung up between Wolfe and
me. These coolnesses averaged about four a
week, say, a couple of hundred a year. This
particular one had two separate aspects: first,
my natural desire for him to buy a new car
opposed to his pigheaded determination to
wait another year; and second, his notion of
buying a noiseless typewriter opposed to my
liking for the one we had.
It happened that at that moment there
were other coolnesses swirling around in the
old brownstone house, on West Thirty-fifth
Street not far from the Hudson River, which
he owned and used both for a residence and
an office. Four of us lived there, counting
him, and we were all temporarily cool. Wolfe
had somewhere picked up the idea of putting
leaves of sweet basil in clam chowder,
and Fritz Brenner, the cook and house manager,
strongly disapproved. A guy in New
Hampshire who was grateful to Wolfe for
something had sent him an extra offering,
three plants of a new begonia named
Thimbleberry, and Wolfe had given them
good bench space up in the cool room, and
Theodore Horstmann, the plant nurse, who
thought that everything that grew except
orchids was a weed, was fit to be tied.
So the atmosphere around the place was
somewhat arctic, and on my way down in
the elevator the thought struck me that this
Naylor-Kerr or Kerr Naylor or Pine-Kerr
Naylor business might be used as an excuse
to go somewhere out of the cold for a few
days. Why couldn’t it be me who got a job in
the stock department? Grabbing a taxi from
under the chins of two other prospective
customers, I considered it. Just any job, one
that happened to be loose, didn’t seem practical.
A little friendly conversation with the
elevator starter had informed me that the
line of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., was Engineers’
Equipment and Supplies, and I knew all of
nothing about them except maybe overalls.
Anyway, the job would have to be one that
would let me roam around and rub elbows,
or it might take months, and I didn’t want
months. It would be hard enough to maneuver
Wolfe into letting me try it for a
week, since he needed me every hour and
might need me any minute, for anything and
everything from opening the mail to
bouncing unwanted customers or even
shooting one, which had been known to
happen.
Liking the idea, and being afraid of the
dark when it comes to anything resembling
murder, I told the taxi driver I had had a
vision and asked him to go to the address of
the Homicide Squad on West Twentieth
Street. There by good luck I found that
Purley Stebbins, my favorite sergeant, was
on hand, and he obligingly got what I
wanted with only three or four growls. A
phone call to a brother sergeant downtown
brought the information that the death of
Waldo Wilmot Moore had occurred around
midnight on December 4. The body had
been discovered by a man and wife on
Thirty-ninth Street a hundred and twenty
feet east of Eleventh Avenue. The wife had
phoned in while the man stood by, and a
radio car had arrived on the scene at one-nineteen
A.M. on December 5. It was a
DOA, dead on arrival, with Moore’s head
crushed and his legs broken. The car that
hit him had been found the next morning,
parked on West Ninety-fifth Street near
Broadway. It was hot, having been stolen
the evening of the fourth from where it was
parked on West Fifty-fourth Street. Its
owner had been checked up and down and
backwards and forwards, and was out of it.
No witnesses to the accident had been
found, but the post-mortem report, plus
laboratory examination of various particles
clinging to the tires and fender of the stolen
car, had satisfied everybody as to what had
happened. It was filed as a routine hit-and-run
and was still open. After the phone call
Purley went through a door, and came back
in a couple of minutes and told me that
Homicide still had it and was working on it.
“Yeah,” I grinned at him, “I can imagine it—conferences,
minute clues subjected to
severe scrutiny, ten of your best men
turning over stones all the way—”
Purley pronounced a word. Having
granted my slightest wish, he sneered,
“Come and take my desk and do it. Now
give. Who’s your client?”
I shook my head. “About that noise you
use for a voice, I know how you got it. Your
mother had a longing for nutmeg graters
when she was carrying you. It might be, say,
an insurance company.”
“Nuts. No insurance company pays Nero
Wolfe prices. Who invited you in?”
“Nothing for now.” I got erect. “Somebody
had a dream, that’s all. If and when
anything for the teeth is brought on, we’ll
see that you get a bite. Much obliged, and
give my love to your boss.”
But I had a chance to do my own love-giving.
On my way out there he was, striding
in from the entrance, Inspector Cramer
himself, concentrated and in a hurry.
He saw me, stopped short, and demanded,
“What do you want?”
“Well, sir,” I said pleadingly, “I thought
with my experience if you had a vacancy
anywhere, I’d be willing to start as a patrolman
and work my way—”
“Natural-born clown,” he said personally.
“Is it the Meredith case? Has Wolfe crashed
the gate—”
“No, sir, Mr. Wolfe would regard that as
impertinent. As he was saying only yesterday,
if ever Mr. Cramer—”
He was on his way. I looked reproachfully
at his broad manly back and then headed for
the street.
Chapter Five
Seated at my desk in the office, I put the
phone back in the cradle and told Nero
Wolfe, “The bank says that Naylor-Kerr is
good for anything up to twenty million.”
Wolfe, seated behind his own desk,
heaved a sigh and then was silent. I had
given him the story complete, in a dry
factual manner with no flavor or coloring on
account of the coolness previously mentioned.
His inclination, naturally, was to
turn it down, since he was always annoyed at
any hint of a prospect that he might have to
use his brain, but I doubted if I would have
to ride him hard on this because it looked
like easy money and we could always use it.
He sighed again.
I spoke, still dry. “I suppose the best bet is
that Pine killed Waldo Wilmot Moore himself
and is keeping up appearances. What for
being unknown to us, but surely not to
everybody. Anyway, we would be paid by the
corporation, not him. His suggestion that
you get a job in the stock department under
another name shows that he has given the
problem a great deal of thought. You could
call yourself Clarence Camembert, for
instance, or Percy Pickerel. If they gave you
too much to do you could bring things
home and I’d be glad to help. They could
pay you by weight—say, a dollar a pound a
week. As you stand now, or at least sit, close
to three hundred and forty pounds, it would
come to an annual salary—”
“Archie. Your notebook.”
“Yes, sir.” I got it and flipped to a new
page.
“A letter to Mr. Pine, president and so on.
Mr. Goodwin has reported his conversation
this morning with you. I accept the job of
investigating, on behalf of your company, the
death of your former employee, Waldo
Wilmot Moore. It is understood that the
purpose of the investigation is to establish,
with satisfactory evidence, the manner of
his death—whether by accident or by the
deliberate action, with intent, of some
person or persons. The job does not, as I
understand it, extend to the disclosure of the
identity of the murderer—if there was a
murder—nor to procurement of proof of
guilt. Should such extension be desired, you
may notify me. Paragraph.
“The procedure promising quickest results,
I think, will be for you to put Mr.
Goodwin on the company payroll as a personnel
expert. You can plausibly explain his
presence as a part of your campaign to reduce
your employee turnover. Thus he can
spend his days there, moving freely about
and conversing with anyone whomever,
without causing comment or increasing the
gossip you deplore. I suggest that you make
his salary two hundred dollars weekly. Paragraph.
“My fee will of course be determined by
the amount of time spent on the case and
the amount and kind of work required. No
guarantee is given. No retainer is necessary
unless you prefer it that way, in which case
the check should be for two thousand dollars.
Sincerely.”
Wolfe, who always straightened up to
some extent to dictate, leaned back again.
“After lunch you can go down and give that
to him.”
If I had been cool before I was a glacier
now. “Why lunch?” I demanded. “Why
should I eat?”
“Why not?” His eyes went open. “What’s
the matter?”
“Nothing. Not a thing. But what I start I
like to finish, and this may take weeks.
There are one or two other little matters
that need attention around here, and there’s
a bare possibility that you may find it
slightly inconvenient when you buzz me or
call me or grunt at me, as you do on an average
of ten times an hour, and I’m not
here. Or, perhaps, that hadn’t occurred to
me, perhaps you’re figuring on a replacement?”
“Archie,” he murmured. His murmur is
Wolfe at his worst. “I agree with someone, I
forget who, that no man is indispensable. By
the way, you may have noticed that I suggested
the same salary as you receive from
me. You can either endorse their checks
over to me for deposit in my bank, and take
my checks weekly as usual, or just keep their
checks as your pay, whichever is simpler for
your bookkeeping.”
“Thank you very much.” I made no attempt
to speak further. His deliberate use of
the plural, checks, instead of check, three
times, therefore got exactly the effect he
intended it to. I got out paper and carbon and
inserted them, and started on the typewriter
in a way that left no possible doubt whether
it was noiseless or not.
Coolness.
Chapter Six
I started work as a personnel expert for
Naylor-Kerr, Inc., the next day, Wednesday
morning, March 19, the next to last day of
winter.
I knew just what I had known after my
first call on Pine, and no more. Tuesday
afternoon, when I took him Wolfe’s letter, he
was co-operative about letting me ask questions,
but he couldn’t supply many answers.
He liked Wolfe’s idea on procedure, and
proved he was a good executive by starting
immediately to execute. That was simple.
All he had to do was call in an assistant
vice-president, introduce me, tell him about me,
and instruct him to put me on the payroll
and present me personally to all heads of
departments. That was accomplished Tuesday
afternoon, the presentations being made in
the office of the assistant vice-president, to
which the department heads were summoned.
I found an opportunity to drop the
remark that after looking over the reports
and records I thought I would start in the
stock department.
Wednesday morning I was on the job in
the stock department on the thirty-fourth
floor. It handed me a surprise. I had vaguely
supposed it to be something on the order of
an overgrown hardware store, with rows of
shelves to the ceiling containing samples of
things that hold bridges together and related
objects, but not at all. Primarily, as far
as space went, it was a room about the size
of the Yankee Stadium, with hundreds of
desks and girls at them. Along each side of
that arena, the entire length, was a series of
partitioned offices, with some of the doors
closed and some open. No stock of anything
was in sight anywhere.
One good glance and I liked the job. The
girls. All right there, all being paid to stay
right there, and me being paid to move
freely about and converse with anyone
whomever, which was down in black and
white. Probably after I had been there a
couple of years I would find that close-ups
revealed inferior individual specimens,
Grade B or lower in age, contours, skin
quality, voice, or level of intellect, but from
where I stood at nine-fifty-two Wednesday
morning it was enough to take your breath
away. At least half a thousand of them, and
the general and overwhelming impression
was of—clean, young, healthy, friendly,
spirited, beautiful, and ready. I stood and
filled my eyes, trying to look detached. It
was an ocean of opportunity.
A voice at my elbow said, “I doubt very
much if there’s a virgin in the room. Now if
you’ll come to my office...”
It was Kerr Naylor, the head of the stock
department. I had reported to him on arrival,
as arranged, and he had introduced me to a
dozen or so of his assistants, heads of
sections. All but two of them were men. One of
them I had regarded with special interest was
the head of the Correspondence Checking
Section, since Waldo Wilmot Moore had
been a correspondence checker, but I was
careful not to give him any extra time or
attention there at the start. His name was
Dickerson, he could easily have been my
grandfather, and his eyes watered. I gathered
from our brief talk that the function of a
correspondence checker was to mosey around,
pounce and grab a letter when the whim
seized him, take it to the checkers’ office, and
give it the works on content, tone, policy,
style, and mechanical execution. So it could
safely be assumed that his popularity quotient
around the place would be about the
same as that of an MP in the army, and that
was bad. It presented the possibility that any
letter-dictator or stenographer in the department
might have felt like murdering Moore,
including those who had lost their jobs—and
the turnover had been twenty-eight per
cent. For one man to sort out the whole haystack,
a straw at a time, was not my idea of
the pursuit of happiness, but it did have its
good points as suggested above.
Kerr Naylor’s office was also a corner
room, but was considerably more modest in
every respect than the president’s, two
floors up. One whole wall was behind ceiling
high filing cabinets, and there were piles of
papers around on tables and even two of the
chairs. After we were seated, him at his desk
and me at one end of it, I asked him:
“Why, do you refuse to hire virgins?”
“What?” Then he tittered. “Oh, that was
just a remark. No, Mr. Truett, this office has
no prejudice against virgins. I merely doubt
if there are any. Now how do you want to
begin?”
His voice matched his appearance. The
voice was a thin tenor, and while he was not
a pygmy they had been all out of large sizes
the day he was outfitted. Also they had been
low on pigments. His skin had no color at
all, and the only thing that made it reasonable
to suppose there was anybody at home
inside it was the eyes. They too were without
color, but they had a sharp dancing glint
that wasn’t just on the surface but came
from behind, deep.
“This first day,” I said, “I guess I’ll just
poke around and get my directions straight.
No virgins at all? Who has picked all the
flowers? You might as well call me Pete.
Everybody does.”
The name I had chosen to be introduced
by was Peter Truett, liking the implication
of the first syllable of the Truett. Pine had
thought my own, Archie Goodwin, might be
familiar to someone. I went back to virgins
again because I wanted to keep the talk
going to get acquainted with this bird. But
apparently it had really been just a remark
and the virgin question had not come to a
boil in him, as it often does with men over
fifty, for he ignored it and said:
“As I understand it you are going to study
the whole employee problem, past, present,
and future. If you want to start with a specific
case and spread out from there, I suggest
the name of Waldo Wilmot Moore. He
was with us last year, from April eighth to
December fourth—a correspondence
checker. He was murdered.”
The glint in his eyes danced out at me and
went back in again. I kept my own face
under control, in spite of his splashing it out
like that, but it is only natural and proper for
anyone to betray a gleam of interest in
murder, so I let one show.
My brows went up. “Gosh,” I said, “no
one told me it had gone that far. Murdered?
Right here?”
“No no, not on the premises, up on
Thirty-ninth Street at night. He was run
over by a car. His head was smashed flat.”
Mr. Naylor tittered, or maybe it wasn’t a
titter but only a nerve untwisting somewhere
in the network. “I was one of those requested
to come and identify him, at the
morgue, and I can tell you it was a strange
experience—like trying to identify something
you have known only as a round object,
for instance an orange, after it has been
compressed to make two plane surfaces. It
was extremely interesting, but I wouldn’t
care to try it again.”
“Could you identify him?”
“Oh, certainly. There was no question
about that.”
“Why do you say murdered? Did they
catch the guy and hang it on him?”
“No. I understand that the police regard it
as an accident—what they call a hit-and-run.”
“Then it wasn’t murder. Technically.”
Naylor smiled at me. His neat little mouth
wasn’t designed for anything expansive, but
it was certainly meant for a smile, though it
went as quick as it came. “Mr. Truett,” he
said, “if we are to work together we should
understand each other. I am rather perceptive,
and it would probably surprise you to
know how much I understand of you already.
One little fact about me, I have always
been a student of languages, and I am
extraordinarily meticulous in my choice of
words. I detest euphemisms and circumlocutions,
and I am acquainted with all the
verbs, including those of the argots, which
mean to cause the death of. What did I say
happened to this man Moore?”
“You said he was murdered.”
“Very well. That’s what I meant.”
“Okay, Mr. Naylor, but I like words too.” I
had a strong feeling that no matter what his
reason had been for tossing this at me right
off the bat, if I fielded it right I might at least
end the inning, and possibly the game, that
first morning. I tried. I grinned at him. “I
have always been fond of words,” I declared.
“I never got worse than B in grammar, clear
to the eighth grade. Not that it’s any hide off
of me, but since we’re speaking of words,
when you say Moore was murdered I take it
to mean that the driver of the car knew it
was Moore, wanted him dead or at least
hurt, and aimed the car at him. Doesn’t it
come down to that?”
Naylor was looking up at the wall behind
me. His eyes stayed that way, with no glint
showing because they were upraised, until I
twisted my neck to see what he was looking
at. All that was there was a clock. I untwisted
back to him, and his gaze came
down to my level.
He smiled again. “Twenty minutes past
ten,” he said resentfully. “I understand, Mr.
Truett, that Mr. Pine has hired you to
survey our personnel problems. What do
you think he would say if he knew you were
sitting here at your ease, prolonging a
discussion of a murder which has no possible
connection with your job?”
The damn little squirt. The only satisfactory
way to field that one would have been
to pick him up and use him for a dust rag.
Under the circumstances that satisfaction
would have to be postponed. I swallowed it,
stood up, and grinned down at him.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m a great talker. It was
nice of you to listen. Why don’t you put
through a voucher in triplicate, or however
you do it, docking me for an hour? I deserve
it, I really do.”
I left. If the “uh, complexities” that Pine
had mentioned included a desire on the part
of his brother executives and him to tie a can
to Kerr Naylor’s tail, I was all for it. He sure
was tricky and mean. He had me so sore that
I went from his office straight to the main
arena, took a random course through the
labyrinth of desks, glancing in all directions
at faces, shoulders, and arms, and took my
time picking one who had probably been a
Powers model and got fired because she
made all her colleagues look below standard.
I sat on the corner of her desk and she
looked up at me with the clear blue eyes of
an angel and a virgin.
I leaned to her. “My name is Peter
Truett,” I told her, “and I’ve been hired as a
personnel expert. If your section head
hasn’t told you about me...”
“He has,” she said, in a sweet musical
voice, a contralto, which is my favorite.
“Then please tell me, have you heard any
gossip recently about a man named Moore?
Waldo Wilmot Moore? Did you know him
when he worked here?”
She shook her head. “I’m awfully sorry,”
she said, sweeter than before if anything,
“but I only started here day before yesterday,
and I’m leaving on Friday. Just because
I can’t spell! I never could spell.” Her
lovely fingers were resting on my knee and
her eyes were going straight to my heart.
“Mr. Truman, do you know of any job
where you don’t have to spell?”
I forget exactly how I got away.
Chapter Seven
I had been assigned a room of my own, about
the right size for an Irish setter but not big
enough for a Great Dane, about midway of
the row of offices that ran along the uptown
side of the arena. It contained a cute little
desk, three chairs, and a filing cabinet with a
lock to which I had been given the key.
Apparently there were nothing but shanties
across the street, since the window had space
outside, and if you took it at a slant there was
a good view of the East River.
I went there and sat.
It seemed I had breezed into something
with insufficient consideration of strategy
and tactics. As a result I had already pulled
two boners. When Kerr Naylor had unexpectedly
jumped the gun by shoving Moore
and murder at me, I should have shrugged it
off as a man with a single-track stomach and
no appetite for anything but personnel
problems. And when he side-stepped and
caught me off balance, I should have backed
clear up and looked it over, instead of getting
peeved and spilling Moore’s name to a
vision of delight that couldn’t spell. I was
too exuberant.
On the other hand, I certainly didn’t intend
to spend a week or so just getting myself
established as a personnel expert. I sat
there through two cigarettes, thinking it
over, and then went and unlocked the filing
cabinet and got out a couple of the folders I
had stowed there. On one of them the tab
said STOCK DEPARTMENT—STRUCTURAL
METALS SECTION/font>, and on the other
STOCK DEPARTMENT—CORRESPONDENCE
CHECKERS SECTION. With the
folders under my arm, I emerged to the
arena, crossed it by a main traffic aisle, and
knocked at the door of an office on the other
side. When a voice told me to come in I entered.
“Excuse me,” I said, “you’re busy.”
Mr. Rosenbaum, the head of the Structural
Metals Section, was a middle-aged,
bald-headed guy with black-rimmed glasses.
He waved me on in.
“So what,” he said without a question
mark. “If I ever dictated a letter without
being interrupted I’d lose my train of
thought. No one ever knocks around here,
you just bust in. Sit down. I’ll ring later,
Miss Livsey. This is the Mr. Truett mentioned
in that memo we sent around. Miss
Hester Livsey, my secretary, Mr. Truett.”
I was wondering how I had ever missed
her, even in that colossal swarm outside,
until it struck me that a section head’s
secretary probably had her own room. She was
not at all spectacular, not to be compared
with my non-speller, but there were two
things about her that hit you at a glance.
You got the instant impression that there
was something beautiful about her that no
one but you would ever see, and along with
it the feeling that she was in some kind of
trouble, real trouble, that no one but you
would understand and no one but you could
help her out of. If that sounds too complicated
for a two-second-take, okay, I was
there and I remember it distinctly.
She went out with her notebook and I sat
down.
“Thanks for letting me horn in,” I told
Rosenbaum, taking papers from the folder.
“It won’t take long. I just want to ask a few
general questions and one or two specific
ones about these reports. You people have
certainly got this thing organized to a T,
with your sections and sub-sections. It must
simplify things.”
He agreed that it did. “Of course,” he
added, “it gets mixed up sometimes. I’m
Structural Metals, but right now I’ve got
thirty-seven elephants in stock, over in Africa,
and I can’t get any other section to take
them. My basic position is that elephants
are nonmetallic. I may have to go up to Mr.
Naylor to get rid of them.”
“Hah,” I said triumphantly, “so that’s
where your stock is, Africa! And elephants.
I’ve been wondering. With that settled, let’s
tackle personnel. Speaking of which, I noticed
that your secretary, Miss Livsey, didn’t
seem to be wading through bliss. I hope
she’s not quitting too?”
That proved she had had that effect on me
as described, my going out of my way to
mention her name, with no reason at all.
“Bliss?” Rosenbaum shook his head. “No,
I guess she isn’t. The man she was engaged
to died a few months ago. Got killed in an
accident.” He shook his head again. “If it’s a
part of your job to make our employees
happy, I’m afraid you won’t get to first base
with Miss Livsey. She’s a damn good secretary
too. If I had that hit-and-run driver
here I’d—do something to him.”
“I’d be glad to help,” I said sympathetically.
I riffled the papers. “The man she was
engaged to—is he among these? Did he
work here?”
“Yes, but not in my section. He was a correspondence
checker. It was an awful blow
for her, and she stayed away—but here I go
again, you’re not here to listen to me gab.
What are your questions, Mr. Truett?”
Since I had quit being exuberant I decided
not to press it, only it did seem that wherever
I went I met Waldo Wilmot Moore. We got
down to business. I had questions ready that
I thought were good enough to keep me from
being spotted as a phony, and I stayed with
him a good twenty minutes, which seemed
ample for the purpose.
Then I went down the line to the office of
the head of the Correspondence Checkers
Section. The door was standing open and he
was there alone.
Grandpa Dickerson was by no means too
old or too watery-eyed to know the time of
day. As soon as the preliminary courtesies
had been performed and I had sat down and
got the folder opened, he inquired, perfectly
friendly:
“I’m wondering, Mr. Truett, why you
start with me?”
“Well—you’re not the first, Mr.
Dickerson. I’ve just had a session with Mr.
Rosenbaum. Incidentally, there’s a special
problem there: are elephants personnel?”
But he wasn’t having light conversation.
“Even so,” he said, “I have the smallest
number of employees of any section in the
department. Only six men, whereas other
sections have up to a hundred. Also, I have
had no turnover; for nearly eight years,
except one case, a man who got killed and was
replaced. I’m quite willing to co-operate,
but I really don’t see what you can do with
me.”
I nodded at him. “You’re perfectly right—from
where you sit. From the standpoint
of general personnel problems you’re out.
But your section is something special. Everybody
in the place regards your six men as
dirty lowdown snoops, and you’re the
Master Snoop.”
It didn’t feeze him. He merely nodded
back at me. “How do you propose to change
that?”
“Oh, I don’t. But it certainly ties it in with
personnel difficulties. For instance, the man
that got killed. Don’t you know there has
been talk around that his death wasn’t an
accident?”
“Nonsense! Talk!” He tapped on his desk
blotter. “Look here, young man, are you
intimating that the functioning of this section
has been the cause, directly or indirectly, of
the commission of a crime?”
“Yes.”
His jaw trembled, and then came open
and hung open. I was restraining myself
from taking my handkerchief and wiping his
eyes.
“That’s not the way to put it,” I said with
emphasis, “but it was you who put it that
way. I would say it more like this, that the
talk about that man’s death is certainly one
of the personnel problems around here, and
Mr. Naylor himself suggested that I might
use it as one of my starting points. Do you
mind my asking a few questions about him?
About Moore?”
“I resent any insinuation that the operation
of this section has resulted in any injustice
or has been the cause of any legitimate
desire to retaliate.” His jaw was back under
control.
“Okay. Who said anything about legitimate?
Desires to retaliate come in all flavors.
But about this Moore, how did he rate
with you? Was he a good worker?”
“No.”
“No?” I was matter-of-fact. “What was
wrong with him?”
The old man’s jaw trembled again, but it
didn’t come open. When he had it in hand
he spoke. “I have been in charge of this
section ever since it started, over twenty years
ago. Last April I had five men under me, and
I regarded that as adequate. But a new man
was hired and I was told to put him to work.
He was incompetent, and I so reported, but
my report was ignored. We had to put up
with him. On several occasions his mistakes
would have discredited the section if we had
not been alert. It made it harder for all of
us.”
I thought to myself, my God, here we go
again. I was trying to get started narrowing
it down, and here were six more added to
the list, Dickerson himself and five loyal
checkers, who might have been irritated
into killing Moore for the honor of the section.
Now everybody was in except Kerr
Naylor himself.
“But,” I objected, “what about the hiring
regulations? I understand there is no overall
personnel control and each department
head rolls his own in theory, but in practice
the section heads have the say. Who hired
Moore and saddled you with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you help knowing?”
Dickerson used his own handkerchief on
his eyes, which relieved the tension a lot for
me. I hoped he would keep the handkerchief
in his hand, but he deliberately and neatly
returned it to his pocket.
“This,” he said, “is a very large concern,
the largest in the world in its field, and
beyond all comparison the best. Naturally the
authority is tightly organized. No one on
this floor is my superior except the head of
the department, Mr. Kerr Naylor, the son of
one of the founders. Therefore any exercise
of authority can be brought to bear on me
only through Mr. Naylor.”
“Then it was Naylor who hired Moore?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it was Naylor who said you needed
another man and wished Moore on you?”
“Certainly. The line of authority is as I
have described it.”
“What else can you tell me about Moore
besides his incompetence?”
“Why, nothing.” Dickerson’s look and
tone indicated that he regarded my question
as silly. Obviously, if a man was incompetent
that settled it; nothing else about him mattered
one way or another. But it appeared
that he was willing to concede that even a
competent man must eat. He pulled a watch
from his vest pocket, looked at it, and stated,
“My lunch hour starts at twelve, Mr.
Truett.”
Chapter Eight
Outside Dickerson’s office I turned left,
toward the far end of the arena, and then was
struck by an idea and came to a halt. Turning
the idea over, and seeing that it had no visible
defects on either side, I faced around and
headed in the other direction. When I got to
Rosenbaum’s door I found it closed again,
but since he had said no knocking I turned
the knob and entered. My intention was to
ask him where his secretary’s room was, but I
didn’t carry it out because she was there in a
chair at the end of his desk with her notebook.
She didn’t turn her head at my entrance.
Rosenbaum gave me a glance and said unemotionally,
“Hello again.”
“I just had a logical train of thought,” I
told them, “and I wanted to find out what
Miss Livsey thinks of it.”
She looked at me. Nothing had changed
in her in the hour that had passed. It was still
obvious that no one on earth but me could
understand her or help her.
“It goes like this,” I explained to her. “My
job here requires that I have talks with units
of the personnel, as many as possible. I
should do that with a minimum amount of
interference with the work of the department.
You are a unit. If we eat lunch together
and do our talking then,, there will be
no interference with your work. I’ll pay for
the lunch and put it on expense.”
Rosenbaum chuckled. “That’s a good approach,”
he said appreciatively. He spoke to
his secretary. “Since he thought that all up
just for you, Hester, the least you can do is
let him buy you a sandwich.”
She asked him, in a voice that could have
been a pleasure to listen to if there had been
any lift to it, “Do I owe it to anybody?”
“Not to me,” he declared, “but maybe to
yourself. Mr. Truett sounds as if he might
be capable of making you smile. Even if only
a wan and feeble smile, why not let him try?”
She turned to me and said politely,
“Thank you, I think not.”
There was certainly something about her,
and I frankly admit I was getting a good
start at being jealous of Waldo Wilmot
Moore, even dead. He had found some way
of propagandizing this wren to the point of
agreeing to marry him.
Her eyes were back on her notebook.
Rosenbaum, his lips bunched, was gazing at
her and shaking his head philosophically. I
might as well not have been there, so I removed
myself. My hand was on the knob,
with my back to them, when her voice came:
“Why did you ask one of the girls if she
had heard any gossip about Mr. Moore?”
Talk about grapevine. Less than two
hours had gone by! I turned.
“There, see? Didn’t I say I didn’t want to
interfere with your work? You could have
asked me that over anything from roast
duckling to a maple sundae.”
“All right, I will. I go at one o’clock. We
can meet in the lobby, William Street side,
near the mailbox.”
“That’s the girl. Save a smile for it.” I
went.
So I had it all glued on, a lunch date with
Hester Livsey, but it peeled off—though it
wasn’t her fault or mine either. I returned to
my own little room, put the folders back in
the cabinet and locked it, and stood at the
window to look at the river and sort things
out. All I got out of that was the realization
that so far there was nothing to sort. Of
course, I thought sarcastically, if I was Nero
Wolfe I would have finished up here by noon
and gone home to drink beer, but as it is,
about all I’ve accomplished is to start the
grapevine rustling. That really got me. In
short hours, and with no meal period
for opportunity! Where it branches out
from, I thought, is the restroom. If I could
borrow a skirt and blouse and spend thirty
minutes in the restroom I would have all I
needed for a final report. Out on the river
two tugboats nearly hit and one of them
scooted off like a ripple skipper.
When the buzz sounded I jerked around,
startled, it was so loud in the little room. I
wasn’t sure what it was, but the best guess
was the phone, so I went to the desk and
took it up and said hello, and came within
an ace of adding, “Archie Goodwin speaking.”
I bit it off, and a tenor voice asked my ear:
“Hello, Mr. Truett?”
“Right. Speaking.”
“This is Kerr Naylor. I’d like you to lunch
with me if that’s convenient. Could you step
down to my office?”
I told him I’d be glad to, and hung up. A
glance at my wrist showed me ten to one. I
lifted the phone again, and when I got a
voice I asked to be connected with Miss
Hester Livsey, Stock Department, Structural
Metals Section. In a second the voice
said, “Extension six-eight-eight please ask
by extension number whenever possible,”
and after a short wait another voice said,
“Miss Livsey speaking.”
“Peter Truett,” I told her. “This is the
unluckiest day I’ve had since my rich uncle
changed doctors. Mr. Kerr Naylor just
phoned me to have lunch with him. I can
meet you as arranged and come back after
lunch and quit my job.”
“I don’t want you to quit your job,” she
declared. “I’ve been thinking about you. Go
with Mr. Naylor, of course. My room is next
to Mr. Rosenbaum’s, the one on the left.”
But it didn’t set me up any, on account of
the motive, which I was fully aware of. I got
my hat and coat and went along to the
corner office, where Naylor met me at the
door. I took my hat and coat because, although
the assistant vice-president had told
me I would rate eating lunch in the executives’
section of the Naylor-Kerr cafeteria
on the thirty-sixth floor, my hunch was that
the son of the founder didn’t patronize it.
The hunch was right. He had his hat on and
his topcoat over his arm. We went to an
elevator, and from the lobby on the ground
floor he steered us out the back way, down a
block and around a corner, and to a door
which had painted on it in green lettering,
FOUNTAIN OF HEALTH. That could mean
only one thing, and I grimly told my
stomach it was in the line of duty as we
entered, made our way to a table against the
wall, got seated, and accepted menus from a
waitress. There it was, roots and leaves and
coarse fodder, with such names as EPICURE’S
BOWL and BRAN AND CARROT PUDDING.
My reaction was so strong that I
was barely aware that Naylor was talking.
With the waitress there waiting for us to
name it, he was saying something like:
“...so I tried it once about five years ago,
and I’ve been lunching here ever since. I
find it makes an enormous difference, physically,
mentally—and even spiritually.
There’s a purity about it. It keeps a man
light and clean. What will you select, Mr,
Goodwin?”
I heard that all right.
Chapter Nine
It was like the tricky little squirt to choose
that moment for it, with the waitress, who
knew him, there by us, making it as awkward
as possible for me. So he thought. But I
merely elevated the menu so it came between
his eyes and my face, to get a little privacy,
and turned my brain loose on the problem.
Manifestly there was no point in trying to
make a grab for the cat. After an interval, not
a long one, I handed the menu to the waitress
and told her to bring me three apples and a
glass of milk. Then I asked him politely:
“Were you saying something? I’m afraid I
wasn’t listening.”
He gave the waitress his order and let her
go.
“I was speaking of diet,” he snapped, “and
you heard me. It isn’t to be expected, Mr.
Truett, that you’ll like this food at first. No
one does. But after a while you will wonder
how you ever liked anything else.”
“Yeah. When I like it I’ll whinny. You
ought to make up your mind who you’re
Seating to lunch, though. Goodwin or
Truett?”
“I much prefer Goodwin.” He smiled at
me. “That was my chief reason for inviting
you to lunch, to tell you that the only way to
deal with me is directly and forthrightly.
Also to give you a message for Mr. Nero
Wolfe. Tell him, please, that you have badly
bungled this job. This morning, when I
mentioned the murder of a former employee
of my department, you should have
displayed no interest in the matter.”
“I see. Much obliged. So that aroused
your suspicion and you investigated.” I
looked at him admiringly. “You certainly
stepped on it. Where did you start from?”
“Now, now,” he scolded me and shook his
head. “You’re extraordinarily transparent,
Mr. Goodwin, and I must say it’s a surprise
to me—and a disappointment. It would
have been gratifying to find a good man, a
good mind, starting to work on that murder.
I would have watched you with the keenest
interest and expectation—Those aren’t the
best apples.” He frowned at the waitress.
“Haven’t you any Stayman Winesaps?”
It seemed they hadn’t. When she had
served us and was gone I started peeling an
apple. It is not my custom to peel apples,
but I figured it would outrage him. That was
wasted effort, since he ignored it and waded
in with a fork on a big bowl of a raw unholy
mess which he had ordered by name:
TODAY’S VITANUTRITA SPECIAL. With his
small mouth he had to feed it in dribs,
chewing with a straight one-two beat and
skipping two chews for each drib going in.
“Here’s an idea,” I said amiably. “You
can’t count on me to give that message to
Mr. Wolfe. Why don’t you drop in on him
this evening after dinner and give it to him
yourself?”
“I would be glad to.” He chewed. “But not
this evening.” He chewed. “Three evenings a
week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I
play chess at the Midtown Chess Club.” He
chewed. “Saturday I’m going to the country,
to spend the week-end looking at birds.” He
chewed. “I should be delighted to do that on
Monday.”
“Okay, I’ll fix it up.” I started on another
apple, not bothering to peel it. “But by that
time I may be all through here. In my
opinion, and I hope Mr. Wolfe will agree,
there’s only one thing to do: tell the police
about it and let them start up the machinery.
An accusation of murder is entirely too
ticklish, especially for a bungler like me.”
He stopped chewing to ask, “Who has
made such an accusation?”
“You have.”
“I have not. I have merely stated that
Moore was murdered. The police? Pooh.
They started their machinery the moment
the body was discovered, but they have let it
stop. Your intention, of course, was to force
me into making disclosures by threatening
to get the police after me. My dear Mr,
Goodwin, I’m afraid this affair is far beyond
the range of your abilities. A week ago I
called upon Deputy Commissioner O’Hara,
whom I have known for years, and stated to
him that Moore was murdered. Naturally
he wished me to elaborate, and naturally I
refused. I told him that all I could furnish
was the bare fact, that the procurement of
evidence and apprehension of the criminal
were functions of his department.”
Naylor tittered. “I really believe that for
some moments the Deputy Commissioner
was tempted to have the third degree tried
on me. At the end he merely regarded me as
a babbler.” He resumed on the Vitanutrita.
My impulse was to finish the milk, shove
the third apple in my pocket, beat it to
Thirty-fifth Street, and tell Wolfe that Kerr
Naylor was a malicious chattering hay-eating
beetle and that was all there was to it.
Various considerations restrained me, two
of which were that Naylor-Kerr, Inc., was
good for any amount up to twenty million,
and that I now knew where Miss Livsey’s
room was.
“Okay,” I said, completely friendly,
“threats are out, disclosures are out, and
chess and bird-looking will keep you from
calling on Mr. Wolfe before Monday. Meanwhile,
I noticed that on that report to Mr.
Pine, the one about Moore, where it asked
how he got hired, you put, ‘Applied personally’.
Who did he apply to, the head of that
section, Mr. Dickerson?”
That was the first dent I made in the beetle’s
shell. It didn’t make him drop his fork,
or even start the glint in his eyes dancing,
but he went on conveying and chewing far
beyond the limit of politeness. It was plain
that he was finding it necessary to decide
what to say.
He swallowed and spoke. “He applied to
my sister.”
“Oh. Which sister?”
“I have only one.” The glint became perceptible.
“My sister, Mr. Truett, is a remarkable
and interesting woman, but she is
far more conventional than I am. Each of us
was given one-quarter of the stock of the
corporation by our father, who wished to get
rid of his burdens and responsibilities. I
turned mine over, without compensation, to
certain old employees of the business,
because they had earned it and I hadn’t. I
don’t like to own things to which other
people might conceivably assert a claim,
especially a moral claim. Legal claims don’t
interest me. But my sister, being more
conventional, kept her stock. That was lucky for
her husband. Jasper Pine, whom I believe
you have met, as otherwise it is unlikely that
he would have become president of the corporation.”
“And Moore got his job through your sister?”
The glint did a jig. “You have a talent, Mr.
Goodwin, for making statements in the
most distasteful manner possible. My sister
likes to do things for people. She sent
Moore to me, and I spoke with him and had
him interviewed by Dickerson, and he was
given a job in that section. Now how about
some pudding? And some Pink Steamer?
Hot water with tangerine juice.”
He was through as an information bureau.
From there on the only thing that appealed
to him as a topic of conversation was
the food, and questions about Moore or
murder or sister were simply ignored. He
irritated me most when he was ignoring. I
gave up and sat and watched him sip Pink
Steamer.
When we got back to the building on William
Street I parted from him in the lobby,
went to a phone booth and dialed the
number of the Gazette, and asked for Lon
Cohen. He knew more facts than the Police
Department and the Public Library combined.
When he was on I told him, “It’s your turn
on the favors. What about a Mrs. Jasper
pine? When born she was called Naylor.
Her husband is president of a big engineers’
supply firm with offices downtown. Ever
hear of her?”
“Sure, she’s meat.”
“What kind of meat?”
“Oh, that means anyone who might make
a meal for a journalist some day, strictly as
news. So far she has kept herself off the
menu, except for paragraphs on the right
inside pages, but not a sheet in town has lost
hope.”
“What keeps the hope going?”
“Where are you phoning from? Wolfe’s
office?”
I tutted at him. “Didn’t I tell you my
name? That’s all right, I’m in a booth.”
“Okay. The subject of your inquiry is a
befriender of young men. Not promiscuous.
Discriminating, but chronic. She has plenty
of dough, is well preserved, and presumably
not a fool or she would have lost her balance
long ago. I would advise you to try for it—now
old are you, thirty? Just about right for
her! You have the looks, and you could
brush up on manners—”
“Yeah. You’ll get ten per cent. I don’t suppose
you could get hold of a list of my predecessors
she has befriended?”
“Well, we wouldn’t have one, we’re not
that thorough. Do you think this paper
would nose into people’s private af— Say!
Wait a minute! You and Nero Wolfe and
your homicides. I’ll try word association on
you—damn it, what was that name?
Murray. No. Moore?”
“Mr. Cohen,” I said in awe, “you have
nailed the head on the hit as usual.
Compared to you John Kieran is a blank
page. Moore was killed by a hit-and-run on
Thirty-ninth Street the night of December
fourth. Do tell me he was being or had been
befriended.”
“I do.”
“By Mrs. Pine?”
“Restate the question. Even from a booth
I don’t like names on anything as fragile as
this.”
“By the subject of my inquiry?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind spreading it out?”
“Sure, it looked as if the meat might be on
its way to the table, that was all. With him
mowed down like that in the dead of night,
and with that connection he had, we felt we
owed it to the community to cover all angles
in an effort to prevent any breath of
scandal—”
“My God. Go on.”
“So we did, and I suppose the cops did
too, but it was a washout. The details are
hazy by now, but it was definitely nothing
doing for the presses. I remember this, the
most obvious line only got us to a starve-out.
The husband had certainly not done a
desperate deed to retrieve his honor, or for
vengeance. Moore was nothing but number
—I don’t know—seven or eight—and
besides, he had been ditched months before
and the current befriendee was—I forget
his name, it doesn’t matter. And the husband
had known all about it for years. That
was absolutely established by our research
department. You must be smothering in
that booth. I’ve got to go to work. I do so by
demanding that you come clean, for the record
if possible. Who has hired Wolfe?”
“Not yet,” I told him. “You’ll get it as
soon as it’s ripe if it hasn’t got worms. You
know us, we return favors with interest. If I
Pay you a visit could I talk with whoever
forked on it?”
“You’d better phone ahead.”
“I will. Thanks and love from all of us.”
I ducked out through the lobby to the
street, down the block to a place I had
spotted, bought three ham sandwiches and
a quart of milk, and transported them to the
building and up to my place of employment
on the thirty-fourth floor. There in my room
I ate my lunch without being disturbed. By
the time it was all down I had arrived at a
couple of decisions, the first one being that
it was just as well I hadn’t obeyed my impulse
to walk out of the Fountain of Health
with nothing to show for my trouble but an
apple.
Chapter Ten
Having two things to do, it would have been in
character for me to save the best till the last,
and I had it programmed that way, but it
didn’t work. The idea was to phone Jasper
Pine to arrange to run up to see him at three
o’clock, but when I tried it all I got was the
word from a Mr. Stapleton that Mr. Pine
would not be available until four-fifteen. That
compelled me to shift. But before making a
call on Miss Livsey I thought it would be well
to get in a piece of equipment I needed, so I
did what I had been told to do when the occasion
arose, called Extension 637 and said I
needed a stenographer. In two minutes, not
more, one entered with a notebook. She was
nothing like my non-speller, but neither was
she any evidence against my theory that there
was a strong preference at Naylor-Kerr for
females who were easy to look at.
After I had got her name I told her, “I
have nothing against you, quite the contrary.
The trouble is I don’t want you, just
your typewriter. Could you bring it in here
and let me use it?”
From the look on her face it might have
been thought I had asked her to bring Mr.
Kerr Naylor in handcuffs and set him on my
lap. She tried to be nice about it, but what I
had asked for was not done and could not be
done. I let her go and went to work on the
phone, and it wasn’t too long before I had a
typewriter, with paper and other accessories.
Then I emerged to the arena, crossed
to the other side, found the door next to
Rosenbaum’s on the left standing open, and
entered.
I pushed the door shut, crossed to a chair
near the end of her desk, and sat down. Her
room was twice as big as mine, but there was
just as little free space in it on account of the
rows of files. The light from the window filtering
through the top layer of her fine
brown hair made it look as if someone had
crowned her with a wreath of shiny silk
mesh. She gave the typewriter a rest and let
me have her full face.
“It was simply stinking,” I said. “Mr.
Naylor eats oats and shredded bark.”
No smile for that, but she nodded. “Yes,
he’s famous for that. Someone should have
warned you.”
“But they didn’t, including you. Are you
crowded for time?”
“No, I only have eight or nine more letters.”
She glanced at her wrist. “It’s only
three o’clock.”
“Good.” I tipped my chair back, with my
hands in my pockets, to show how informal
I was. “I guess the best way to start is just to
follow the routine. How long have you been
working here?”
“Three years. Well—two years and eight
months. I’m twenty-four years old, nearly
twenty-five, I get fifty dollars a week, and I
can do over a hundred words a minute.”
“That’s wonderful. What are the three
things you dislike most, or like least, about
your job?”
“Oh, now, really.” Still no smile, but there
was a little curving twist to her lips. “May I
ask one?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did you invite me to lunch?”
“Well—what do you want, candor?”
“I like it.”
“I do too. One look at you, and I seemed
to be paralyzed all over, as in a dream. The
two sides of my nature there fighting for
control. One, the base and evil side, wanted
to be alone with you on an island. The other
side wanted to write a poem. The lunch
thing was a compromise.”
“That’s pretty good,” she said, with some
sign of appreciation but not enthusiastically.
“If that’s candor, let’s have some double
talk. Why? You wanted to ask me about
Waldo Moore, didn’t you?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Why, my lord. You practically broadcast
it! Asking that girl about him—it was all
over the place in no time.”
“Okay, say I did. What did I want to ask
you about him?”
“I don’t know, but here I am, ask me.”