Rex Stout: The Golden Spiders

“Twelve.”

“Then I should make allowances, and do. To continue: with a robust ego, your feeling about earning your fees can safely be left to your intelligence and common sense. Never collect or accept a fee that you feel you haven’t earned; if you do, your integrity crumbles and your ego will have worms. With that one reservation, get all you can. As you must not take what you feel you haven’t earned, so must you get what you feel you have earned. Don’t even discuss a case with a prospective client until you know about his ability to pay. So much—”

“Then why—” Pete blurted, and stopped.

“Why what?”

“Nothing. Only you’re discussing with me, just a kid.”

“This is a special case. Mr. Goodwin brought you in to me, and he is my trusted and highly valuable assistant, and he would be disappointed if I didn’t explore your affair thoroughly and let him take it down and type it.” Wolfe favored me with a hypocritical glance and returned to Pete. “So much for your ego and your fees. As for your methods, they must of course be suited to your field. I pass over such fields as industrial espionage and divorce evidence and similar repugnant snooperies, since the ego of any man who engages in them is already infested with worms, and so you are not concerned. But take robbery. Say, for instance, a woman’s jewel box has been looted, and she doesn’t want to go to the police because she suspects—”

“Let’s take murder. I’d rather start with murder.”

“As you will.” Wolfe was gracious. “You’re getting this, are you, Archie?”

“You bet. With my tongue out.”

“Good. But robbery or murder, no matter what, speaking generally, you must thoroughly understand that primarily you are practicing an art, not a science. The role of science in crime detection is worthy, honorable, and effective, but it has little part in the activities of a private detective who aspires to eminence. Anyone of moderate capacity can become adept with a vernier caliper, a camera, a microscope, a spectrograph, or a centrifuge, but they are merely the servants of detection. Science in detection can be distinguished, even brilliant, but it can never replace either the inexorable march of a fine intellect through a jungle of lies and fears to the clearing of truth, or the flash of perception along a sensitive nerve touched off by a tone of a voice or a flicker of an eye.”

“Excuse me,” I interposed. “Was that ‘a tone of voice’ or ‘a tone of a voice’?”

“Neither,” Wolfe lied. “It was ‘a tone of some voice.’” He resumed to Pete, “The art of detection has many levels and many faces. Take one. Shadowing a man around New York without losing him is an extremely difficult task. When the police undertake it seriously they use three men, and even so they are often hoodwinked. There is a man who often works for me, Saul Panzer, who is a genius at it, working alone. I have discussed it with him and have concluded that he himself does not know the secret of his superlative knack. It is not a conscious and controlled operation of his brain, though he has a good one; it is something hidden somewhere in his nervous system — possibly, of course, in his skull. He says that he seems somehow to know, barely in the nick of time, what the man he is following is about to do — not what he has done or is doing, but what he intends. That’s why Mr. Panzer might teach you everything he knows, and still you would never be his equal. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn all you can. Learning will never hurt you. Only the man who knows too little knows too much. It is only when you undertake to use what you have learned that you discover whether you can transform knowledge into performance.”

Wolfe aimed a thumb at me. “Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him — possibly in his brain, though I doubt it — a powerful and subtle governor. For instance, the sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster, doubtless occasionally on the very brink. It works similarly with the majority of his impulses and whims, but now and then it fails to intervene in time, and he suffers mishap, as this evening when he was impelled to badger me when a certain opportunity offered. It has already cost him — what time is it, Archie?”

I looked. “Eighteen minutes to nine.”

“Hey!” Pete leaped from his chair. “I gotta run! My mother — I gotta be home by a quarter to! See you tomorrow!”

He was on his way. By the time I was up and in the hall he had reached the front door and pulled it open, and was gone. I stepped to the threshold of the dining room and told Wolfe, “Damn it, I was hoping he would stay till midnight so you could finish. After that a billiard match will be pretty dull, but I might as well go.”

I went.

Next day, Wednesday, I was fairly busy. A hardware manufacturer from Youngstown, Ohio, had come to New York to try to locate a son who had cut his lines of communication, and had wired Wolfe to help, and we had Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather out scouting around. That kept me close to my desk and the phone, getting reports and relaying instructions.

A little after four in the afternoon Pete Drossos showed up and wanted to see Wolfe. His attitude indicated that while he was aware that I too had a license as a private detective and he had nothing serious against me, he preferred to deal with the boss. I explained that Nero Wolfe spent four hours every day — from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon — up in the plant rooms on the roof, with his ten thousand orchids, bossing Theodore Horstmann instead of me, and that during those hours he was unavailable. Pete let me know that he thought that was a hell of a way for a private eye to spend his time, and I didn’t argue the point. By the time I finally got him eased out to the stoop and the door closed, I was ready to concede that maybe my governor needed oiling. Pete was going to be a damn nuisance, no doubt of it. I should have choked my impulse to invite him in as a playmate for Wolfe. Whenever I catch myself talking me into chalking one up against me, it helps to take a drink, so I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. As I returned to the office the phone was ringing — Orrie Cather making a report.

At the dinner table that evening neither Wolfe nor Fritz gave the slightest indication that starlings had ever come between them. As Wolfe took his second helping of the main dish, which was Danish pork pancake, he said distinctly, “Most satisfactory.” Since for him that was positively lavish, Fritz took it as offered, nodded with dignity, and murmured, “Certainly, sir.” So there were no sparks flying when we finished our coffee, and Wolfe was so agreeable that he said he would like to see me demonstrate Mosconi’s spectacular break shot I had told him about, if I cared to descend to the basement with him.

But I didn’t get to demonstrate. When the doorbell rang as we were leaving the dining room, I supposed of course it was Pete, but it wasn’t. The figure visible through the glass panel was fully twice as big as Pete, and much more familiar — Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Manhattan Homicide West. Wolfe went into the office, and I went to the front and opened the door.