Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 (2 page)

“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,” underscored, written with pencil in a neat almost perpendicular hand. Below it was a list of names:

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.

C
ramer’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 Brenner 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.”

Wolfe shot a glance at me, and I got my notebook and pen. Wellman, concentrating on Wolfe, wasn’t interested in me. Wolfe asked him, “When and where and how did she die?”

“She was run over by a car in Van Cortlandt Park
seventeen days ago. Friday evening, February second.” Wellman had himself in hand now. “I ought to tell you about her.”

“Go ahead.”

“My wife and I live in Peoria, Illinois. I’ve been in business there over twenty years. We had one child, one daughter, Joan. We were very—” He stopped. He sat completely still, not even his eyes moving, for a long moment, and then went on. “We were very proud of her. She graduated from Smith with honors four years ago and took a job in the editorial department of Scholl and Hanna, the book publishers. She did well there—I have been told that by Scholl himself. She was twenty-six last November.” He made a little gesture. “Looking at me, you wouldn’t think I’d have a beautiful daughter, but she was. Everybody agreed she was beautiful, and she was extremely intelligent.”

He got a large envelope from his side pocket. “I might as well give you these now.” He left his chair to hand Wolfe the envelope. “A dozen prints of the best likeness we have of her. I got them for the police to use, but they weren’t using them, so you can. You can see for yourself.”

Wolfe extended a hand with one of the prints, and I arose to take it. Beautiful is a big word, but there’s no point in quibbling, and if that was a good likeness Joan Wellman had been a good-looking girl. There was slightly too much chin for my taste, but the forehead and eyes were all any father had a right to expect.

“She was beautiful,” Wellman said, and stopped and was still again.

Wolfe couldn’t stand to see people overcome. “I suggest,” he muttered, “that you avoid words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘proud.’ The colder facts will serve. You want to hire me to learn who drove the car that hit her?”

“I’m a damn fool,” Wellman stated.

“Then don’t hire me.”

“I don’t mean I’m a damn fool to hire you. I mean I intend to handle this efficiently and I ought to do it.” His jaw muscles moved, but not through loss of control. “It’s like this. We got a wire two weeks ago Saturday that Joan was dead. We drove to Chicago and took a plane to New York. We saw her body. The car wheels had run over the middle of her, and there was a big lump on her head over her right ear. I talked to the police and the medical examiner.”

Wellman was being efficient now. “I do not believe Joan was walking in that secluded spot in that park, not a main road, on a cold evening in the middle of winter, and neither does my wife. How did she get the lump on her head? The car didn’t hit her head. The medical examiner says it’s possible she fell on her head, but he’s careful how he says it, and I don’t believe it. The police claim they’re working on it, doing all they can, but I don’t believe that either. I think they think it was just a hit-and-run driver, and all they’re doing is to try to find the car. I think my daughter was murdered, and I think I know the name of the man that killed her.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a little. “Have you told them so?”

“I certainly have, and they just nod and say they’re working on it. They haven’t got anywhere and they’re not going to. So I decided to come to you—”

“Have you any evidence?”

“I call it evidence, but I guess they don’t.” He took an envelope from his breast pocket. “Joan wrote home every week, hardly ever missed.” He removed a sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it. “This is a copy I had typed, I let the police have the original. It’s
dated February first, which was a Thursday. I’ll read only part of it.

Wellman waggled the paper. “Now she wrote that on—”

“May I see it, please?” Wolfe was leaning forward with a gleam in his eye. Apparently something about Joan Wellman’s letter home had given him a kick, but when Wellman handed it to him he gave it only a brief glance before passing it to me. I read it clear through with my eyes while my ears recorded their talk for the notebook.

“She wrote that,” Wellman said, “on Thursday, February
first. Her appointment with that man was the next day, Friday, right after office hours. Early Saturday morning her body was found on that out-of-the-way road in Van Cortlandt Park. What’s wrong with thinking that that man killed her?”

Wolfe was leaning back again. “Was there any evidence of assault? Assault as a euphemism for rape?”

“No.” Wellman’s eyes went shut, and his hands closed into fists. After a moment the eyes opened again. “Nothing like that. No sign at all of that.”

“What do the police say?”

“They say they’re still trying to find that man Archer and can’t. No trace of him. I think—”

“Nonsense. Of course there’s a trace. Publishers must keep records. He submitted a manuscript of a novel last fall, and it was returned to him with a note from your daughter. Returned how and where?”

“It was returned by mail to the only address he gave, General Delivery, Clinton Station. That’s on West Tenth Street.” Wellman’s fists became hands again, and he turned a palm up. “I’m not saying the police have just laid down on the job. Maybe they’ve even done the best they can, but the fact remains that it’s been seventeen days now and they haven’t got anywhere, and I don’t like the way they talked yesterday and this morning. It looks to me like they don’t want it to be an unsolved murder, and they want to call it manslaughter, and that’s all it would be if it was a hit-and-run accident. I don’t know about these New York police, but you tell me, they might do a thing like that, mightn’t they?”

Wolfe grunted. “It is conceivable. And you want me to prove it was murder and find the murderer, with evidence?”