Rex Stout: Prisoner's Base

At five o’clock Saturday morning I sat in a room at Leonard Street, reading papers from a folder. Pitkin had been sent home an hour previously, from another room. This was the room where all reports and documents bearing on the three stranglings, either originals or copies, were being collected and held, and the report I was reading was about the movements of Jay Brucker during the rest of Thursday night after he left the meeting at Wolfe’s office. The correctness of some of his statements seemed to be in question, and I was trying to find a basis of an opinion on whether, instead of going home to Brooklyn as he claimed, he had actually gone to Sarah Jaffee’s apartment on Eightieth Street or to Daphne O’Neil’s apartment on Fourth Street.

A voice said, “Hey, Goodwin, better knock off.”

An assistant DA and two clerks were in the room, sorting and arranging the papers and folders, and the voice was the assistant DA’s. I yanked myself up. I had been two-thirds asleep. It was silly to pretend I could sit there and read.

“There’s a room down the hall with a couch,” one of them said, “and no one will be in it today. It’s Saturday.”

I would have given a million dollars to be on a couch, so I decided against it. I arose, announced that I was going for a walk and would be back before long, and beat it. Emerging from the building to the sidewalk, I got a shock — it was daylight. Dawn had come, and that helped to wake me and changed my outlook. I stood at the curb, and when a taxi loomed before long, headed uptown, I flagged it and gave the driver the address I knew best.

At that time of day we had Manhattan all to ourselves. West Thirty-fifth was empty too as I paid the hackie and climbed out. Since the chain bolt would of course be on the front door, instead of mounting the stoop I went down the four steps to the area door and pushed the button. It buzzed in the kitchen and Fritz’s room. There were sounds from within, a door opening and footsteps, and Fritz gave me a look through the peep-glass and then opened up.

“Good God,” he said, “you look awful.”

I told him that was precisely why I had dropped in, to remedy that condition, apologized for disturbing him, and proceeded upstairs. Without even a glance in at the office as I passed by, I went on up to my room and started in on a shower, a shave, and a complete change. When I had finished I may or may not have looked better, but I sure felt better. Descending to the ground floor, I heard sounds in the kitchen and went in. Fritz was there, putting on his apron.

“What now?” I demanded. “It’s only half-past six.”

“Orange juice in two minutes. Breakfast in ten — enough to start.”

“I’m on my way out.”

“You’ll eat first.”

So I did, though I felt that it was bad manners to eat Wolfe’s grub under the circumstances. Fritz kept me company, sitting on a stool and yawning while he wasn’t serving the meal. At one point he observed, “This is getting to be a habit.”

“What is?”

“This early breakfast. Yesterday about this time — a little later — I was poaching eggs for Mr. Wolfe and Saul.”

I stopped a bite of pancake in midair. “You were what?”

“Poaching eggs for Mr. Wolfe and Saul.”

I put the bite where it belonged and chewed slowly. Saul Panzer looked less, and acted more, like the best all-round operative in New York than any other candidate I had ever seen or heard of. He was so good that he could free-lance without an office and make more than anyone on a payroll. He was always Wolfe’s first choice when we had to have help, and we had used him hundreds of times.

I asked casually, “Saul’s taking over my job, I suppose?”

“I don’t know,” Fritz said firmly, “anything about what Saul is doing.”

That was plain enough. Obviously Fritz had been told that if I came around it was okay for me to know that Saul had come to an early breakfast, but no more. I made no effort to snake it out of him, having tried it once or twice before with no success at all.

On my way out I stopped in the office. Friday’s mail, under a paperweight on Wolfe’s desk, contained nothing that couldn’t wait. There was nothing on the desk, or on the memo pad or calendar, that gave any hint of what he wanted with Saul, but in the safe I found something that indicated that it was no trivial chore. I opened the safe because I wanted to hit petty cash for a loan. One of the drawers of the safe is partitioned in the middle, with petty cash on the right and emergency reserve on the left. Getting five twenties from petty, I noticed a slip of paper in emergency that hadn’t been there before, and I picked it up for a look. Scribbled on it in pencil in Wolfe’s neat hand was the notation, “6/27/52 $2000 NW.” It was the long-standing rule to keep five grand in emergency, in used hundreds, twenties, and tens. A quick count showed that the slip was a record of a real transaction; two grand had been taken. That was interesting — so darned interesting that I might have forgotten to tell Fritz so long if he hadn’t heard me leaving the office and come out to put the bolt back on the door. I told him it was okay to let Wolfe know I had been in for an early breakfast, but no more.

Returning to Leonard Street in a taxi, naturally I tried to decide what Saul Panzer was supposed to be doing with two thousand bucks, granting that it was in connection with Eads-Fomos-Jaffee. I concocted quite a list of guesses, beginning with a trip to Venezuela to check on Eric Hagh, and ending with a bribe to Andy Fomos to spill something his wife had told him. I bought none of them.

The five hours’ sleep that I mentioned getting between early Friday morning and Monday morning came Sunday from 4 A.M. to 9 A.M., on a bumpy old couch at the headquarters of Manhattan Homicide West on Twentieth Street. I might be able, by digging hard, to give a complete report and timetable of a hundred other activities I had a share in during that stretch, but I don’t know what good it would do you, and if you don’t mind I would rather skip it. I sat in a couple of dozen quiz sessions, at Twentieth Street, Leonard Street, and Centre Street. I read tens of thousands of words of reports and summaries. Most of Sunday I spent in a PD car with a uniformed driver, with credentials signed by a deputy commissioner, calling on a long list of people who were connected in one way or another with something that had been said by one of the suspects. Returning to Twentieth Street Sunday around midnight, I admit I had in mind the possibility of another date with the couch, but I didn’t get it. Brackets alibi had been cracked. Feeling hot breath just behind him, he was now claiming that he had gone from Wolfe’s house to Daphne O’Neil’s apartment and spent the night there, and she was concurring. When I got in from my Sunday drive, Captain Olmstead was just starting to take Daphne over the bumps, and I was invited to join the party, and accepted. It ended around six A.M. Monday, and my thoughts again dived for the couch, but I didn’t. I had to either get a clean shirt or go off and hide, so I went to Thirty-fifth Street and repeated Saturday’s performance, including a breakfast by Fritz.

Of course I didn’t see Wolfe. I had phoned him once each day, but no mention had been made of murder or Saul Panzer. He was testy, and I was touchy. I looked in the safe again; no more dough had been taken from emergency.

Returning to Twentieth Street, superficially clean and fresh, but pretty well fagged, and no bargain even at half price, I was going along the upper hall when one of my colleagues — for I might as well face it and admit it, during that period Homicide dicks were my colleagues — coming out of a room, caught sight of me, and yelled, “Hey, where the hell have you been?”