Rex Stout
Murder By The Book
1
SOMETHING remarkable happened that cold Tuesday in January. Inspector Cramer, with no appointment, showed up a little before noon at Nero Wolfe's old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and, after I had ushered him into the office and he had exchanged greetings with Wolfe and lowered himself into the red leather chair, he said right out, "I dropped in to ask a little favor."
What was remarkable was his admitting it. From my chair at my desk I made an appropriate noise. He sent me a sharp glance and asked if I had something.
"No, sir," I told him courteously, "I'm right on top. You just jolted that out of me. So many times I've seen you come here for a favor and try to bull it or twist it, it was quite a shock." I waved it away tolerantly. "Skip it."
His face, chronically red, deepened a shade. His broad shoulders stiffened, and the creases spreading from the corners of his gray-blue eyes showed more as the eyelids tightened. Then, deciding I was playing for a blurt, he controlled it. "Do you know," he asked, "whose opinion of you I would like to have? Darwin 's. Where were you while evolution was going on?"
"Stop brawling," Wolfe muttered at us from behind his desk. He was testy, not because he would have minded seeing either Cramer or me draw blood, but because he always resented being interrupted in the middle of a London Times crossword puzzle. He frowned at Cramer. "What favor, sir?"
"Nothing strenuous." Cramer relaxed. "A little point about a homicide. A man's body fished out of the East River a week ago yesterday, off Ninetieth Street. He had been -"
"Named Leonard Dykes," Wolfe said brusquely, wanting to make it brief so he could finish the puzzle before lunch. "Confidential clerk in a law office, around forty, had been in the water perhaps two days. Evidence of a severe blow on the head, but had died of drowning. No one charged by last evening. I read all the homicide news."
"I bet you do." That having slipped out by force of habit, Cramer decided it wasn't tactful and smiled it off. He could smile when he wanted to. "Not only is no one charged, we haven't got a smell. We've done everything, you know what we've done, and we're stopped. He lived alone in a room-and-bath walk-up" on Sullivan Street. By the time we got there it had been combed - not torn apart, but someone had been through it good. We didn't find anything that's been any help, but we found one thing that might possibly help if we could figure it out."
He got papers from his breast pocket, from them selected an envelope, and from the envelope took a folded sheet of paper. "This was inside a book, a novel. I can give you the name of the book and the numbers of the pages it was found between, but I don't think that has a bearing." He got up to hand the paper to Wolfe. "Take a look at it."
Wolfe ran his eyes over it, and, since I was supposed to be up on everything that went on in that office so as to be eligible for blame if and when required, I arose and extended a hand. He passed it over.
"It's in Dykes's handwriting," Cramer said. "The paper is a sheet from a scratch pad there on a table in his room. There were more pads like it in a drawer of the table."
I was giving it a look. The paper was white, ordinary, six by nine, and at the top was the word "Tentative," under-scored, written with pencil in a neat almost perpendicular hand. Below it was a list of names:
Sinclair Meade
Sinclair Sampson
Barry Bowen
David Yerkes
Ernest Vinson
Dorian Vick
Baird Archer
Oscar Sniff
Oscar Cody
Lawrence McCue
Mark McCue
Mark Flick
Mack Flick
Louis Gill
Lewis Gill
I handed it back to Cramer and returned to my chair.
"Well?" Wolfe asked impatiently.
"I was on my way uptown and dropped in to show it to you." Cramer folded the sheet and put it in the envelope. "Not so much to get help, it probably has nothing to do with the homicide, but it's got me irritated and I wondered what you'd say, so I dropped in. A list of fifteen names written by Dykes on a piece of his scratch paper, and not one of them can be found in any phone directory in the metropolitan area! Or anywhere else. We can find no record anywhere of a man with any of those names. None of Dykes's friends or associates ever heard of a man with one of those names, so they say. I mean, taking the first and last names together, as they are on that list. Of course we haven't checked the whole damn country, but Dykes was a born and bred New Yorker, with no particular connections elsewhere that we know of. What the hell kind of a list of names is that?"
Wolfe grunted. "He made them up. He was considering an alias, for himself or someone else."
"We thought of that, naturally. If so, no one ever used it that we can find."
"Keep trying if you think it's worth it."
"Yeah. But we're only human. I just thought I'd show it to a genius and see what happened. With a genius you never know."
Wolfe shrugged. "I'm sorry. Nothing has happened."
"Well, by God, I hope you'll excuse me"- Cramer got up. He was sore, and you couldn't blame him - "for taking up your time and no fee. Don't bother, Goodwin."
He turned and marched out. Wolfe bent over his crossword puzzle, frowned at it, and picked up his pencil.
2
CRAMER'S crack about no fee had of course been deserved. Wolfe hated to start his brain going on what he called work, and during the years I had been on his payroll the occasions had been rare when anything but a substantial retainer had jarred him into it. But he is not a loafer. He can't be, since his income as a private detective is what keeps that old house going, with the rooms on the roof full of orchid plants, with Theodore Horstmann as tender, and Fritz Breriner serving up the best meals in New York, and me, Archie Goodwin, asking for a raise every time I buy a new suit, and sometimes getting it. It takes a gross of at least ten thousand a month to get by. That January and the first half of February business was slow, except for the routine jobs, where all Wolfe and I had to do was supervise Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, and for a little mix-up with a gang of fur hijackers during which Fred and I got shot at. Then, nearly six weeks after the day Cramer dropped in to see what would happen if he showed a piece of paper to a genius, and got a brush-off, a man named John R. Wellman phoned on Monday morning for an appointment, and I told him to come at six that afternoon. When he arrived, a few minutes early, I escorted him to the office and sat him in the red leather chair to wait until Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, sliding the little table near his right elbow, for his convenience if he needed to do any writing, for instance in a checkbook. He was a plump short guy, going bald, without much of a nose to hold up his rimless glasses. His plain gray suit and haberdashery didn't indicate opulence, but he had told me on the phone that he was a wholesale grocer from Peoria, Illinois, and there had been time to get a report from the bank. We would take his check if that was on the program.
When Wolfe entered, Wellman stood up to shake hands. Sometimes Wolfe makes an effort to conceal his dislike of shaking hands with strangers, and sometimes he doesn't. This time he did fairly well, then rounded the corner of his desk and got his seventh of a ton deposited in the only chair on earth that really suits him. He rested his forearms on the arms of the chair and leaned back.
"Yes, Mr. Wellman?"
"I want to hire you," Wellman said.
"For what?"
"I want you to find -" He stopped short, and his jaw muscles began to work. He shook his head violently, took off his glasses, dug at his eyes with his fingertips, put the glasses back on, and had trouble getting them adjusted. "I'm not under very good control," he apologized. "I haven't had enough sleep lately and I'm tired. I want you to find the person who killed my daughter."