Рекс Стаут - Murder Is Corny

“Do you want to hear it crack?” I asked him, which was bad manners, since he couldn’t answer. I loosened my arm a little. “I admit I was lucky. If Jay had been sideways you would have had me.” I looked at Jay, who was on a chair, rubbing his neck. “If you want to play games you ought to take lessons. Maslow would be a good teacher.” I unwound my arm and got erect “Don’t bother to see me out,” I said and headed for the front.

I was still breathing a little fast when I emerged to the sidewalk, having straightened my tie and run my comb through my hair in the elevator. My watch said twenty past ten. Also in the elevator I had decided to make a phone call, so I walked to Madison Avenue, found a booth, and dialed one of the numbers I knew best. Miss Lily Rowan was in and would be pleased to have me come and tell her things, and I walked the twelve blocks to the number on 63rd Street where her penthouse occupies the roof.

Since it wasn’t one of Wolfe’s cases with a client involved, but a joint affair, and since it was Lily who had started Sue on her way at my request, I gave her the whole picture. Her chief reactions were a) that she didn’t blame Sue and I had no right to, I should feel flattered; b) that I had to somehow get Sue out of it without involving whoever had removed such a louse as Kenneth Faber from circulation; and c) that if I did have to involve him she hoped to heaven it wasn’t Carl Heydt because there was no one else around who could make clothes that were fit to wear, especially suits. She had sent a lawyer to Sue, Bernard Ross, and he had seen her and had phoned an hour before I came to report that she was being held without bail and he would decide in the morning whether to apply for a writ.

It was after one o’clock when I climbed out of a cab in front of the old brownstone on West 35th Street, mounted the stoop, used my key, went down the hall to the office and switched the light on, and got a surprise. Under a paperweight on my desk was a note in Wolfe’s handwriting. It said:

AG: Saul will take the car in the morning, probably for most of the day. His car is not presently available.

I went to the safe, manipulated the knob, opened the door, got the petty-cash book from the drawer, flipped to the current page, and saw an entry:

10/14 SP exp AG 100

I put it back, shut the door, twirled the knob, and considered Wolfe had summoned Saul, and he had come and had been given an errand for which he needed a car. What errand, for God’s sake? Not to drive to Putnam County to get the corn that had been ordered for Friday; for that he wouldn’t need to start in the morning, he wouldn’t need a hundred bucks for possible expenses, and the entry wouldn’t say “exp AG.” It shouldn’t say that anyway since I wasn’t a paying client; it should say “exp JA” for joint affair. And if we were going to split the outlay I should damn well have been consulted beforehand. But up in my room, as I took off and put on, what was biting me was the errand. In the name of the Almighty Lord or J. Edgar Hoover, whichever you prefer, what and where was the errand?

Wolfe eats breakfast in his room from a tray taken up by Fritz, and ordinarily I don’t see him until he comes down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock. If he has something important or complicated for me he sends word by Fritz for me to go up to his room; for something trivial he gets me on the house phone. That Friday morning there was neither word by Fritz nor the buzzer, and after a late and leisurely breakfast in the kitchen, having learned nothing new from the report of developments in the morning papers on the Sweet Corn Murder, as the Gazette called it, I went to the office and opened the mail. If Wolfe saw fit to keep Saul’s errand strictly private, he could eat wormy old corn boiled in water before I’d ask him. I decided to go out for a walk and was starting for the kitchen to tell Fritz when the phone rang. I got it, and a woman said she was the secretary of Mr. Bernard Ross, counsel for Miss Susan McLeod, and Mr. Ross would like very much to talk with Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Goodwin at their earliest convenience. He would greatly appreciate it if they would call at his office today, this morning if possible.

I would have enjoyed telling Wolfe that Bernard Ross, the celebrated attorney, didn’t know that Nero Wolfe, the celebrated detective, never left his house to call on anyone whoever, but since I wasn’t on speaking terms with him I had to skip it I told the secretary that Wolfe couldn’t but I could and would, went and told Fritz I would probably be back for lunch, put a carbon copy of the twelve-page conversation with affidavits in my pocket, and departed.

I did get back for lunch, just barely. Including the time he took to study the document I had brought, Ross kept me a solid two hours and a half. When I left he knew nearly everything I did, but not quite; I omitted a few items that were immaterial as far as he was concerned — for instance, that Wolfe had sent Saul Panzer somewhere to do something. Since I couldn’t tell him where, to do what, there was no point in mentioning it.

I would have preferred to buy my lunch somewhere, say at Rusterman’s, rather than sit through a meal with Wolfe, but he would be the one to gripe, not me, if he didn’t know where I was. Entering his house, and hearing him in the dining room speaking to Fritz, I went first to the office, and there on my desk under a paperweight were four sawbucks. Leaving them there, I went to the dining room and said good morning, though it wasn’t.

He nodded and went on dishing shrimps from a steaming casserole. “Good afternoon. That forty dollars on your desk can be returned to the safe. Saul had no expenses and I gave him sixty dollars for his six hours.”

“His daily minimum is eighty.”

“He wouldn’t take eighty. He didn’t want to take anything, since this is our personal affair, but I insisted. This shrimp Bordelaise is without onions but has some garlic. I think an improvement, but Fritz and I invite your opinion.”

“I’ll be glad to give it. It smells good.” I sat That was by no means the first time the question had arisen whether he was more pigheaded than I was strong-minded. I was supposed to explode. I was supposed to demand to know where and how Saul had spent the six hours, and he would then be good enough to explain that he had got an idea last night in my absence, and, not knowing where I was, he had had to call Saul. So I wouldn’t explode. I would eat shrimp Bordelaise without onions but with garlic and like it. Obviously, whatever Saul’s errand had been, it had been a washout, since he had returned and reported and been paid off. So it was Wolfe’s move, since he had refused to see the three candidates when they came and rang the bell, and I would not explode. Nor would I report on last night or this morning unless and until he asked for it. Back in the office after lunch, he got settled in his favorite chair with My Life in Court, and I brought a file of cards from the cabinet and got busy with the germination records. At one minute to four he put his book down and went to keep his date with the orchids. It would have been a pleasure to take the Marley .32 from the drawer and plug him in the back.

I was at my desk, looking through the evening edition of the Gazette that had just been delivered, when I heard a noise I couldn’t believe. The elevator. I looked at my watch: half past five. That was unprecedented. He never did that. Once in the plant rooms he stuck there for the two hours, no matter what. If he had a notion that couldn’t wait he buzzed me on the house phone, or Fritz if I wasn’t there. I dropped the paper and got up and stepped to the hall. The elevator jolted to a stop at the bottom, the door opened, and he emerged.