"I won't." I gazed at him admiringly. "It's uncanny, these flashes of inspiration you get. Absolutely brilliant!"
He exploded. "Confound it, what have I got? Get me something! Will you get me something?"
"Certainly." I was composed. "Drink your beer."
So the next day, Monday, after finishing the morning office chores, I took a geographical section of the list Saul and I had compiled, and went at it. The other three had covered downtown Manhattan up to Fourteenth Street, the Grand Central section, and the West Side from Fourteenth to Forty-second. That day Fred was in Brooklyn, Orrie in the Bronx, and Saul on the East Side. I took the West Side from Forty-second Street up.
At ten-thirty I was in bedlam, having entered through a door inscribed broadway stenographic service. In a room big enough to accommodate comfortably five typewriter desks and typists, double that number were squeezed in, hitting the keys at about twice my normal speed. I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf. "A woman like you should have a private room!"
"I have," she said haughtily, and led me through a door in a partition to a cubbyhole. Since the partition was only six feet high, the racket bounced down on us off the ceiling. Two minutes later the woman was telling me, "We don't give out any information about clients. Our business is strictly confidential."
I had given her my business card. "So is ours!" I shouted. "Look, it's quite simple. Our client is a reputable firm of book publishers. They have a manuscript of a novel that was submitted to them, and they're enthusiastic about it and want to publish it, but the page of the script that had the author's name and address got lost somehow and can't be found. They remember the author's name, Baird Archer, but not the address, and they want to get in touch with him. They might not be so anxious if they didn't want to publish the novel, but they do. His name is not in any phone book. The manuscript came in the mail, unsolicited. They've advertised and got no answer. All I want to know, did you type a manuscript of a novel for a man named Baird Archer, probably last September? Sometime around then? The title of the novel was 'Put Not Your Trust.'"
She stayed haughty. "Last September? They've waited long enough to inquire."
"They've been trying to find him."
"If we typed it a page couldn't have got lost. It would have been fastened into one of our folders."
The boys had told me of running into that one. I nodded. "Yes, but editors don't like to read fastened scripts. They take the folders off. If you typed it for him, you can bet he would want you to help us find him. Give the guy a break."
She had remained standing. "All right," she said, "I'll look it up as soon as I get something straightened out." She left me.
I waited for her twenty minutes, and then another ten while she fussed through a card file. The answer was no. They had never done any work for a Baird Archer. I took an elevator up to the eighteenth floor, to the office of the Raphael Typing Service.
Those first two calls took me nearly an hour, and at that rate you can't cover much ground in a day. They were all kinds and sizes, from a big outfit in the Paramount Building called Metropolitan Stenographers, Inc., down to two girls with their office in their room-bath-and-kitchenette in the upper Forties. For lunch I had canneloni at Sardi's, on John R. Wellman, and then resumed.
It was warm for February, but it was trying to make up its mind whether to go in for a steady drizzle, and around three o'clock, as I dodged through the sidewalk traffic to enter a building on Broadway in the Fifties, I was wishing I had worn my raincoat instead of my brown topcoat. My quarry in that building was apparently one of the small ones, since its name on my list was just the name of a woman, Rachel Abrams. The building was an old one, nothing fancy, with Caroline, women's dresses, on the left of the entrance, and the Midtown Eatery on the right. After stopping in the lobby to remove my topcoat and give it a shake, and consulting the building directory, I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The elevator man told me to go left for 728.
I went left, rounded a corner to the right, continued, turned right again, andin ten paces was at Room 728. The door was wide open, and I stuck my head in to verify the number, 728, and to see the inscription:
RACHEL ABRAMS
Stenography and Typing
I stepped into a room about ten by twelve, not more, with a typewriter desk, a little table, a couple of chairs, a clothes rack, and an old green metal filing cabinet. A woman's hat and cloth coat hung on the rack, and an umbrella, and at the back of the typewriter desk was a vase of yellow daffodils. On the floor were some sheets of paper, scattered around. That was accounted for by the fact that the one window was raised, way up, and a strong draft was whirling through.
Something else was coming through too: voices from down in the street that were shouts. Three steps took me to the window, and I looked out and down. People had stopped in the drizzle and were gawking. Three men, from different directions, were running across the street toward the building, and on this side a group was forming on the sidewalk. In the center of the group two men were bending over a figure of a woman prostrate on the sidewalk, with her skirt up, showing her bare legs, and her head twisted sideways. I have good eyes, but from seven floors up, in the dim light of the drizzle blown by the wind, things were blurred. Most of the group were looking at the huddled figure, but some were gazing straight up at me. Off to the left a hundred feet, a cop was trotting toward the group.
I assert that it took me not more than three seconds to realize what had happened. I assert it not to get a credit mark, since I can't prove it, but to account for what I did. Of course it was only a hunch, but I had never had one that felt like a better bet. Wolfe had told me to get him something, and I had missed getting it by three minutes or maybe only two. I was so sure of it that what I did was automatic. Pulling back from the window and straightening, I darted a glance at the desk and one at the filing cabinet. I started with the desk only because it was nearer.
That was probably the briefest search on record, or close to it. The shallow middle drawer was eliminated with one look. The top left drawer held paper and carbons and envelopes. The one below it had three compartments, with miscellaneous contents, and in the middle one was a notebook bound in brown imitation leather. At the top of the first page was writen the word "Receipts," and the first entry was dated Aug. 7, 1944.1 flipped the pages to 1950, began with July, ran my eye over the items, and there it was: "Sept. 12, Baird Archer, $60.00 dep." Six lines down another entry said: "Sept. 23, Baird Archer, $38.40 in full."
"Of all the goddam lousy luck," I said with feeling and, slipping the notebook in my pocket, made for the door. There was a bare chance that Rachel Abrams had enough life left in her to talk a little. As I rounded the second turn in the hall an elevator door opened and a flatfoot emerged. I was so engrossed that I didn't even glance at him, which was a mistake because cops can't bear not to be glanced at, especially when they're on something hot. He stopped in my path and demanded, "Who are you?"
"Governor Dewey," I told him. "How do you like me without the mustache?"
"Oh, a wag. Show me some identification."
I raised the brows. "How did I get behind the Iron Curtain without knowing it?"
"I'm' in a hurry. What's your name?"
I shook my head. "Honest, officer, I don't like this. Take me to the nearest Kremlin and I'll tell the sergeant." I stepped and pushed the down button.
"Aw, nuts." He tramped down the hall.
An elevator stopped and I entered. The elevator man was telling his passengers about the excitement. The street lobby was deserted. Out on the sidewalk the crowd was thick now, ignoring the drizzle, and I had to get authoritative to elbow my way through to the front. A cop was there, commanding them to stand back. I had a line ready to hand him to get me an approach, but when I got close enough for an unobstructed view I saw I wouldn't need it. She was smashed good, and there would be no more talking from a head that had taken that angle to the shoulders. Nor did I have to ask her name, since I had heard everybody telling everybody else, Rachel Abrams, as I pushed my way through the mob. I pushed my way out again, went to the corner and grabbed a taxi, and gave the driver the number on West Thirty-fifth Street.