Rex Stout: Prisoner's Base

“I don’t need that much,” Wolfe said impatiently.

“Then I’ll curtail it. I found on her writing desk an envelope addressed to me. Inside was a handwritten note.” He reached for his briefcase and opened it. “Here it is.” He took out a folded sheet of blue-tinted paper, but put it down to get a spectacle case from a pocket and put on black-rimmed glasses. He retrieved the paper, “It reads, ‘Dear Perry—’”

He stopped, lifting his chin to glance at me and then at Wolfe. “She has called me by my first name,” he stated, “ever since she was twelve years old and I was forty-nine. Her father suggested it.”

Apparently he invited comment, and Wolfe obliged. “It is not actionable,” he muttered.

Helmar nodded. “I only mention it. It reads:

“Dear Perry:

I hope you won’t be too mad at me for standing you up. I’m not going to do anything loony. I just want to be sure where I stand. I doubt if you will hear from me before June 30th, but you will then all right. Please, and I mean this, please don’t try to find me.

Helmar folded the note and returned it to the briefcase. “Perhaps I should explain the significance of June thirtieth. That will be my ward’s twenty-fifth birthday, and on that day, under the terms of her father’s will, the trust terminates and she takes complete possession of the property. That is the basic position, but there are complications, as there always are. One is that the largest single item of the property is ninety per cent of the stock of a large and successful corporation, and there is some feeling among part of the managing and directing personnel about my ward’s taking control. Another is my ward’s former husband.”

Wolfe frowned. “Alive?” he demanded. He refuses to touch marital messes.

“Yes.” Helmar was frowning too. “That was my ward’s one disastrous blunder. She ran away with him when she was nineteen, to South America, and left him three months later, and divorced him in nineteen forty-eight. There was no further communication between them, but two weeks ago I received a letter from him, sent to me as the trustee of the property, claiming that, under the provisions of a document she had signed shortly after their marriage, half of the property legally belonged to him. I doubt—”

I horned in. I had stood the suspense long enough. “You say,” I blurted, “her name is Priscilla Eads?”

“Yes, she took her maiden name. The husband’s name is Eric Hagh. I doubt—”

“I think I’ve met her. I suppose you’ve got a picture for us?” I got up and crossed to him. “I’d like to see.”

“Certainly.” He didn’t care much for an underling butting in, but condescended to reach for his briefcase and finger in it. “I have three good pictures of her I brought from her apartment. Here they are.” I took them and stood looking them over.

He went on. “I doubt if his claim has any legal validity, but morally — that may be a question. It is indubitably a question with my ward. His letter came from Venezuela and I think she may have gone there to see him. She fully intended — she intends — to be here on June thirtieth, but how long does it take to get from New York to Caracas by plane? Not more than twenty hours, I think. She has a wild streak in her. The first thing to do will be to check all plane passengers to Venezuela, and if it’s humanly possible I want to reach her before she sees that man Hagh.”

I handed the photographs to Wolfe. “She’s worth looking at,” I told him. “Not only the pictures, but, as I thought, I’ve seen her. Just recently. I forget exactly where and when, but I remember from something somebody said, it was the day we had bacalhau for dinner. I don’t—”

“What the devil are you gibbering about?” Wolfe demanded.

I looked him in the eye. “You heard me,” I said, and sat down.

One of Wolfe’s better performances was his handling of Perry Helmar after my disclosure that Priscilla Eads was upstairs in the south room. The problem was to get Helmar out of there reasonably soon with his conviction of his need for Wolfe’s services intact, without any commitment from us to take his job. Wolfe broke it by telling Helmar that he would sleep on it, and that if he decided to tackle it I would call at Helmar’s office at ten in the morning for further details. Of course Helmar blew up. He wanted action then and there.

“What would you think of me,” Wolfe asked him, “if, solely on information furnished by you here and now, I accepted this case and started to work on it?”

“What would I think? That’s what I want!”

“Surely not,” Wolfe objected. “Surely you would be employing a jackass, I have never seen you before. Your name may be Perry Helmar, or it may be Eric Hagh; I have only your word for it. All that you have told me may be true, or none of it. I would like Mr. Goodwin to call on you at your office, and I would like him to visit your ward’s apartment and talk with her maid. I am capable of boldness, but not of temerity. If you want the kind of detective who will dive in heedlessly on request from a stranger, Mr. Goodwin will give you some names and addresses.”

Helmar was fairly stubborn and had objections and suggestions. For his identity and bona fides we could phone Richard A. Williamson. For visiting his ward’s apartment and talking with her maid, tonight would do as well as tomorrow. But according to Wolfe I couldn’t possibly be spared until morning because we were jointly considering an important problem, and the sooner Helmar left and let us do our considering, the better. Finally he went. He returned the photographs to the briefcase before tucking it under his arm, and in the hall he let me get his hat from the rack and open the door for him.

I went back to the office but didn’t get inside. As I was stepping over the sill Wolfe barked at me, “Bring her down here!”

I stopped. “Okay. But do I brief her?”

“No. Bring her here.”

I hesitated, deciding how to put it. “She’s mine, you know. My taking her up and locking her in was a gag, strictly mine. You would have tossed her out if I had consulted you. You have told me to refund her dough and get rid of her. She is mine. With the dope that Helmar has kindly furnished, you will probably be much too tough for her. I reserve the right, if and when I see fit, to go up and get her luggage and take her to the door and let her out.”

He chuckled audibly. He doesn’t do that often, and after all the years I’ve been with him I haven’t got the chuckle tagged. It could have been anything from a gloat to an admission that I had the handle. I stood eying him for three seconds, giving him a chance to translate if he wanted it, but apparently he didn’t, so I turned and strode to the stairs, mounted the two flights, inserted the key in the hole, turned it, and knocked, calling my name. Her voice told me to come in, and I opened the door and entered.

She was right at home. One of the beds had been turned down, and its coverlet, neatly folded, was on the other bed. Seated at a table near a window, under a reading lamp, doing something to her nails, she was in the blue negligee and barefooted. She looked smaller than she had in the peach-colored dress, and younger.

“I had given you up,” she said, not complaining. “In another ten minutes I’ll be in bed.”

“I doubt it. You’ll have to get dressed. Mr. Wolfe wants you down in the office.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Why can’t he come up here?”

I looked at her. In that getup, to me she was a treat; to Wolfe, in his own house, she would have been an impudence. “Because there’s no chair on this floor big enough for him. I’ll wait outside.”