Rex Stout - Plot It Yourself

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “If you’re Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe sent you clear out here, it’s not hard to guess what for. Or I should say who for. I might as well come right out with it. The Victory Press has hired him, or Amy Wynn has, to try to find something wrong about my claim for damages. If that’s what it is you’ve wasted a lot of gas. I’m not going to talk about it, not a word. I may not be very bright, but I’m not exactly a fool. Unless you came to make an offer. I’ll listen to that.”

I shook my head. “That’s not a very good guess, Miss Porter, It’s about your claim against Amy Wynn, that much is okay, but she hasn’t hired Mr. Wolfe and neither has the Victory Press. I’m here on behalf of a New York newspaper that’s looking for a scoop. Nothing has been published about your claim, so I don’t know how the paper got onto it, but you know how that is, word gets around. What the paper is after, it wants to publish your story, ‘Opportunity Knocks,’ on which you base your claim, with an introductory statement by you. It wants to know how much you will take for what it calls first serial rights, and it’s not breaking any confidence to tell you that you can go pretty high. The reason they got Nero Wolfe to handle it instead of coming to you direct is that they want him to check on certain details. You understand that; it’s sort of tricky.”

“There’s nothing tricky about my claim.”

“I didn’t say there is. But there would be a risk of a libel suit against the paper, whether there is ground for it or not. Of course before the paper makes a definite commitment it would want to see the story. Mr. Wolfe thought you might have a carbon copy and would let me take it. Have you got one?”

Her eyes met mine. They had been slanting off, first in one direction and then another, but now they came to me straight. “You’re pretty good,” she said.

“Thanks.” I grinned at her. “I like to think so, but of course I’m biased. Good how?”

“Good with your tongue. I’ll have to think it over. I’ll do that. I’ll think it over. Right now, as I said, I’m not going to talk about it. Not a word.” She arose.

“But that was when you thought Mr. Wolfe had been hired by the Victory Press or Amy Wynn.”

“I don’t care who hired him, I’m not talking. You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got things to do.” She headed for the door of the house. The mutt glanced at me and then at her, decided she was the best bet, and trotted after her. I went and got in the car and started the engine. On the stretch of blacktop a man with a bunch of wild columbine in his hand was following a herd of forty-seven cows (actual count; a detective is supposed to observe) who all had the same idea, that they would rather get hit by a Heron sedan than get milked, and it took me five minutes to get through.

Saturday afternoon at Lily Rowan’s place, or it may have been Sunday afternoon, when half a dozen of us were loafing in the sun by the swimming pool, I told them about the incident on the terrace at Riverdale, leaving out the name and address and why I was there, and asked if they thought she was batty. The three women voted no and the two men yes, and of course that proved something but I still haven’t decided what.

At midnight Sunday, full of air and with a sunburned nose, I dropped my bag in the hall of the old brownstone, went to the office, and found a note on my desk:

AG :

Mr. Harvey phoned Saturday morning. He will come with his committee Monday at 11:15.

This time there were seven instead of six. In addition to the three from the BPA — Gerald Knapp, Thomas Dexter, and Reuben Imhof — and the three from NAAD — Amy Wynn, Mortimer Oshin, and Philip Harvey — there was a middle-aged woman named Cora Ballard whose spine stayed as stiff as a poker both standing and sitting. Harvey had explained that she was not a committee member but was there ex officio. She was the executive secretary of the NAAD. Harvey had seen to it that she was seated next to him, at his left. I had noted glances directed at her by Dexter and Knapp which led me to suspect that in a national poll to choose the Secretary of the Year the book publishers’ vote would not go to Cora Ballard, and her return glances indicated that she most certainly wouldn’t want it to. She had a stenographer’s notebook on her lap and a pencil in her hand.

Philip Harvey, in the red leather chair, was yawning, probably because he had had to get up and out before noon for the second time in a week. Gerald Knapp was explaining that he had been willing to cancel two appointments in order to be present because he agreed with Mr. Imhof that the charge now made by Alice Porter against Amy Wynn and the Victory Press made it imperative that immediate and vigorous action be taken, and he agreed with Mr. Harvey that they should see Mr. Wolfe in a body to learn what progress had been made. Wolfe, his lips pressed tight, sat and scowled at him.

“That is,” Knapp finished, “if there has been any progress. Has there?”

“No,” Wolfe said. “To the contrary. There has been regress.”

They all stared. Cora Ballard said, “Really.” Mortimer Oshin demanded, “How the hell could there be?”

Wolfe took a breath. “I’ll explain briefly, and if you would like me to return the five thousand dollars you have advanced you have only to say so. I told you last Tuesday that this may be a laborious and costly operation; it now appears that it may take more labor than I am prepared to give, and cost more than you are prepared to pay. You were assuming that Alice Porter’s success in hoodwinking Ellen Sturdevant had led others to imitate her, but you were wrong. Alice Porter was merely a tool, and so were Simon Jacobs, Jane Ogilvy, and Kenneth Rennert.”

Cora Ballard looked up from her notebook. “Did you say ‘tool’?”

“I did. Two steps brought me to that conclusion. The first resulted from my examination of the stories used by the three first-named as the bases of their claims. They were all written by the same person. The internal evidence — diction, syntax, paragraphing — is ineluctable. You are professional word-and-language people; study those stories and you’ll all agree with me.”

“I’m not a writer,” Cora Ballard said. “I just work for writers.”

“Not for ,” Harvey corrected her. “You work with writers and on writers.” To Wolfe: “This is important, if true. I want to compare those stories.”

“It’s not only important,” Knapp declared, “it’s remarkable. It seems to me you have made progress.”

“So it seemed to me,” Wolfe said, “until I took the next step. All that remained, it seemed, was to learn which of the three had written the stories; then it would be simple. I procured a book written by Alice Porter, and one written by Simon Jacobs, and studied them, and I reread the testimony Jane Ogilvy had given on the witness stand, including the three poems she had recited. I shall not expound; I merely state that I am convinced that none of them wrote the stories.”

“But damn it,” Imhof objected, “somebody did! And now Alice Porter is repeating.”

“By God,” Oshin exclaimed, squashing a cigarette, “Rennert! Kenneth Rennert!”

Wolfe shook his head. “I doubt it. The reasons for my doubt are not conclusive, but they are cogent.” He upturned a palm. “So. When you left here six days ago I thought I had four culprits to expose. When I had read the stories I thought I had just one and he could be easily identified; the others were only tools. That was progress. Now there is still just one, but who and where is he? The only approach to him, the only hope of finding him, is through the contacts he must have made with his tools. That kind of investigation does not fit my talents, and it will probably be prolonged and expensive. It will demand an exhaustive and meticulous inquiry into the movements and associations of those three people — four, with Kenneth Rennert included. That is regress.”