Rex Stout - Where There's a Will

“Andy and Celia do. I can’t phone her, because the cops—”

“I didn’t say phone her! I said get her! Bring her here!”

On the way uptown in the roadster I devised two or three nifty ruses for getting the professional fiend off the premises without annoying either cops or family, but by the time I arrived at 67th Street I had decided that direct action was the quickest and most feasible. A flatfoot out front who was keeping sightseers on the move seemed to think I wasn’t needed there, but I talked my way through him, pushed the button, and was admitted by the butler. I asked for Mr. Dunn.

In a few minutes Dunn joined me in the living room. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week and never expected to again. I told him Nero Wolfe had beat it the day before in order to pursue certain activities without restriction from the police, that he was at home and was on the job. The poor guy was so punch drunk that he couldn’t even ask an intelligent question. He sort of sputtered that he didn’t see what Wolfe could do, he hoped he could do something but what, it was beyond remedy, did Wolfe have any idea...

I had never expected to find myself patting John Charles Dunn on the shoulder to buck him up. But I did, and spent twenty minutes with him trying to persuade him that Nero Wolfe would roll the clouds away and the sun would shine. That was partly in preparation for telling him his daughter Sara was wanted in Wolfe’s office, but when I finally did so he wasn’t even curious as to why we wanted her. He had been under a strain for months, and now this had about finished him. He sent the butler for her, and in no time I had her out of the house and in the roadster.

But when I got to Wolfe’s house I drove on past without slowing down, eighty yards or so, and then rolled to the curb and stopped. Sara Dunn looked at me.

“What’s the matter? That’s it back there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but that car in front is Inspector Cramer’s, and what he don’t know won’t hurt him. We’ll wait here till he goes.”

“Oh. Darn it anyway. It would be simply marvelous, doings like this, if it wasn’t so — if it wasn’t my own f-family—”

“All right, sister. I’ll teach you to be a detective some day.” I patted her hand because her lip was trembling and I didn’t want her crying, but it only made it tremble more, so I quit. I twisted around on the seat to get a good view of the rear through the window, and after a while, ten minutes or so, saw Cramer emerge and start down the stoop. I started the car, went around the block and into 35th again, and parked in front of the house.

I was about half-bored as I sat and listened to Wolfe starting in on her. Not that I was too dumb to be able to figure that if her camera and films had been stolen it might have been done by somebody to conceal something connected either with the will or with the murder. Of course that was a possibility. But I was cold on it for two reasons. First, on account of Sara’s intimate disclosures when she confessed she had betrayed her father and slaughtered her uncle. I wanted proof that anything had been stolen at all. Second, although she was loony she wasn’t stupid, and she must have realized that if anybody was going to be exposed by investigating the theft of the camera it could only be someone in her family or close to it. I never knew until the following winter, when I took her to a show one evening, that she thought all the time she knew who had killed Hawthorne and Naomi Karn both, and it was someone she didn’t like.

Apparently Wolfe was taking the larceny seriously. He went into all the details, making sure she had actually left the camera in the bedroom, and the films in the suitcase; also, he wanted to know exactly how and when she had informed each of the others of her loss, and what they had said and how they had acted. She gave him all that without any visible reluctance or hesitation, except when he asked about Osric Stauffer. At that she balked for a moment, and then said she hadn’t mentioned it to Stauffer. Wolfe asked her why, and she said because she wouldn’t have believed anything Stauffer told her, so there was no use asking him.

Why, did she know Stauffer to be a liar?

No, but she didn’t like his mouth, or his eyes either, and she wouldn’t trust him.

Wolfe’s brows went up a little. “Am I to assume, Miss Dunn, that you think Mr. Stauffer stole your camera?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t expect you to assume anything. I thought detectives didn’t assume, I thought they deduced.”

Wolfe grunted. “They do if they can. They try. Anyhow, I doubt if your dislike for Mr. Stauffer’s mouth and eyes will convict him of anything.” He glanced up at the clock, which said a quarter past one. “Let’s try another path briefly before we have lunch. You say the two rolls of film in the suitcase had not been exposed. Then if what the thief was after was exposed film, he presumably took those two cartons on a chance, being in too much of a hurry to investigate there in your bedroom. And the only exposed film he got was the one that was still in the camera.”

Sara shook her head again. “He didn’t get any at all. There was none in the camera.”

Wolfe frowned. “You said that the picture you took in this office Friday afternoon finished a roll, and that that roll was in the camera when you put it in the bedroom.”

“I know I did. But you didn’t let me go on. I removed the film from the camera Friday evening and took it to a drugstore to be developed. That was when I bought the two rolls—”

“Confound it,” Wolfe snapped, “where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“The pictures!”

“I suppose at the drugstore.” She fished in her handbag and got out a piece of cardboard. “Here’s the check. He said they’d be ready the next evening — that was yesterday—”

“May I have that, please?” Wolfe extended a hand. “Thank you. Archie, call Fred and Orrie.”

I went to the kitchen, where they were picking their teeth after a repast, and brought them in. Wolfe handed the check to Orrie and told him:

“That’s for some snapshots. The address is on it. Miss Dunn left the film Friday evening. Take the roadster; I want the pictures and the film as soon as possible. I think I do. I’ll know when I look at them.”

“Yes, sir.” They went.

Wolfe got up and stood scowling at Sara. “Would you mind removing your hat, Miss Dunn? I deduce the thing is a hat, because it’s on your head. Thank you. I don’t like restaurant conventions in my dining room.”

The occasions have been rare when I have known the pressure of business to cause Wolfe to accelerate the tempo of a meal, but it did that Sunday. For the first half hour, while the melon and cutlets and broccoli were being disposed of, he maintained the usual easy balance of consumption and conversation; but during the service of the salad Fred and Orrie returned, were admitted by Fritz, and left to wait in the office. I got two grins in a row, the first when Wolfe broke his rule excluding any reference to business from the dining room by asking Fritz to ask Orrie if he had got what he went for, and the second when the salad dressing was ready in six minutes instead of the usual eight. The peeling and slicing of peaches would have hung up a record, too, if I had clocked it; and while I couldn’t have called his step nimble as he led the way back into the office, it certainly didn’t drag any.

He took the envelope from Orrie and told him and Fred to wait in front, sat down and shook the pictures out onto the desk, and spoke to Sara:

“You’ll have to tell me what these are, Miss Dunn.”

I started to move a chair up for her, but she waved me away and sat on the arm of his, balancing herself with her hand on his shoulder. He grimaced but took it. I completed the group by moving to his other side, for the pictures were so small — the usual miniatures of a Leitax — that I had to get close to make them out.