Rex Stout - Help Wanted, Male

I snorted. “With me right there to tell her when to cease firing.”

“I admit it is unlikely. Also, it will convince her that Mr. Hackett is me.”

“Which still will not shorten his life or lengthen yours.”

“Possibly not. Also, it will give me an opportunity to see her and hear her. I shall be at the hole.”

So that was really the idea. He would be in the passage, a sort of an alcove, at the kitchen end of the downstairs hall, looking through into the office by means of the square hole in the wall. The hole was camouflaged on the office side by a picture that was transparent one way. He loved to have an excuse to use it, and it actually had been a help now and then.

“That’s different,” I told him. “If you see her and hear her you’ll know she has a heart of platinum.”

Major Jensen had phoned once and been told that Wolfe was engaged; apparently he wasn’t as persistent as Jane. He had told Cramer that he had come to see Wolfe on Wednesday because on Tuesday morning his father had shown him the threat he had received in the mail and had announced that he was going to consult Nero Wolfe about it; and the major, wishing his father’s murderer to be caught and punished, had wanted to talk with Wolfe. It was Wolfe’s veto of my suggestion that Major Jensen be invited to call, not on Hackett but on Wolfe himself, that showed me the state he was in. Ordinarily it would have needed no suggestion from me, since the major, in his present situation, was a natural for a fat fee.

When I got down to the office Hackett was there in Wolfe’s chair, eating cookies and getting crumbs on the desk. I had told him good morning previously, and having nothing else to tell him, ignored him. From the phone on my desk I got Jane Geer at her office.

“Archie,” I told her.

She snapped, “Archie who?”

“Oh, come, come. We haven’t sicked the police onto you, have we? Let’s gossip a while.”

“I am ringing off.”

“Then I am too. In a moment. Nero Wolfe wants to see you.”

“He does? Ha, ha. He doesn’t act like it.”

“He has reformed. I showed him a lock of your hair. I showed him a picture of Elsa Maxwell and told him it was you. This time he won’t let me come after you.”

“Neither will I.”

“Okay. Be here at six o’clock and you will be received. Six o’clock today, P.M. Will you?”

She admitted that she would. I made a couple of other calls and did some miscellaneous chores. But I found that my jaw was getting clamped tighter and tighter on account of an irritating noise. Finally I spoke to the occupant of Wolfe’s chair. “What kind of cookies are those?”

“Ginger snaps.” Evidently the husky croak was his normal voice.

“I didn’t know we had any.”

“We didn’t. I asked Fritz. He doesn’t seem to know about ginger snaps, so I walked over to Ninth Avenue and got some.”

“When? This morning?”

“Just a little while ago.”

I turned to my phone, buzzed the plant rooms, got Wolfe, and told him, “Mr. Hackett is sitting in your chair eating ginger snaps. Just a little while ago he walked to Ninth Avenue and bought them. If he pops in and out of the house whenever he sees fit, what are we getting for our hundred bucks?”

Wolfe spoke to the point. I hung up and turned to Hackett and spoke to the point. He was not to leave the house except as instructed by Wolfe or me. He seemed unimpressed and unconcerned, but nodded good-naturedly.

“All right,” he said, “if that’s the bargain I’ll keep it. But there’s two sides to a bargain. I was to be paid daily in advance, and I haven’t been paid for today. A hundred dollars net.”

Wolfe had told me the same, so I took five twenties from the expense wallet and forked it over.

“I must say,” he commented, folding the bills neatly and stuffing them in his waistband pocket, “this is a large return for a small effort. I am aware that I may earn it— ah, suddenly and unexpectedly.” He leaned toward me. “Though I may tell you confidentially, Archie, that I expect nothing to happen. I am sanguine by nature.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “me too.” I opened the drawer of my desk, the middle one on the right, where I kept armament, got out the shoulder holster and put it on, and selected the gun that was my property — the other two belonged to Wolfe. There were only three cartridges in it, so I pulled the drawer open farther to get to the ammunition compartment and filled the cylinder.

As I shoved the gun into the holster I happened to glance at Hackett and saw that he had a new face. The line of his lips was tight, and his eyes looked startled, wary, and concentrated.

“It hadn’t occurred to me before,” he said, and his voice had changed too. “This Mr. Wolfe is quite an article, and you’re his man. I am doing this with the understanding that someone may mistake me for Mr. Wolfe and try to kill me, but I have only his word for it that that is actually the situation. If it’s more complicated than that, and the intention is for you to shoot me yourself, I want to say emphatically that that would not be fair.”

I grinned at him sympathetically, trying to make up for my blunder, realizing that I should not have dressed for the occasion in his presence. The sight of the gun, a real gun and real cartridges, had scared him stiff. If he ran out on us now and we had to advertise again to find a new one — my God, I had just handed him a hundred bucks!

“Listen,” I told him earnestly, “you said a minute ago that you expect nothing to happen. You may be right. I’m inclined to agree with you. But in case somebody does undertake to perform, I am wearing this little number” — I patted under my arm where the gun was — “for two purposes: first, to keep you from getting hurt; and second, if you do get hurt, to hurt him worse.”

It seemed to satisfy him, for his eyes got less concentrated, but he didn’t resume with the ginger snaps. At least I had accomplished that much. Using a matter-of-fact tone, which I thought would reassure him, I explained that he was to go to Wolfe’s room at eleven-thirty for instructions, which would include our afternoon outing.

To tell the truth, by the time the afternoon was over and I had him back in the house again, a little after five-thirty, I had to maintain a firm hold on such details as ginger snaps and his calling me Archie to keep from admiring him. During that extended expedition we made stops at Brooks Brothers, Rusterman’s, the Churchill, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and three or four others. He occupied the rear seat, of course, because Wolfe always did, and the mirror showed me that he sat back comfortably, taking in the sights, a lot more imperturbable than Wolfe himself would have been, since Wolfe disliked motion, detested bumps, and had a settled notion that all the other cars had turned out for the express purpose of colliding with his.

When we made one of our stops and Hackett got out to cross the sidewalk, he was okay. He didn’t hurry or dodge or jerk or weave, but just walked. In Wolfe’s hat and coat and stick, he might even have fooled me. I had to hand it to him, in spite of the fact that the whole show struck me as the biggest bust Wolfe had ever concocted. At night it might be different, but here in broad daylight, and with no discernible evidence that anyone was on our trail, I felt foolish, futile, and fatuous, and still I had to keep alert, covering all directions, with the gun in my hand resting on the seat.

Nothing happened. Not a damn thing.

Back at the house, I left Hackett in the office and went to the kitchen, where Wolfe was sitting at the big table drinking beer and watching Fritz make tomato juice. His daily routine was of course all shot.