Rex Stout - Bad for Business

“But you — you’re not going there—”

“Somebody has to. Don’t hold me up. Is the door locked?”

“No — I think I didn’t even close it... it’s open—”

“Good.”

Fox picked up his coat and hat. Amy stammered:

“I don’t know what to say — I mean, I had a nerve yesterday to ask you to help me, and now—”

“Forget it. I love to shine my light. Also, this is my chance to make the P. & B. vice-president no better than a dim and trivial memory. By the way, though you’re minus your purse, apparently you’re not broke. There’s nine dollars and thirty cents on the table.”

“I had some money here.”

“Good for you. Remember, no talking until you hear from me. See you tomorrow.”

He left her. Downstairs he found the janitor, to hand him a dollar and ask him to admit Dr. Vail. It was still raining, but his car was right in front. He had to make three turns to get to Seventh Avenue, where he headed north. If any of his friends or associates had been in the car, they would have felt a tingle of expectation at hearing him strike up the tune of the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” “Lah-de-dah, dumdum, lah-de-dah, dum-dum,” as the Wethersill rolled uptown, with the windshield wiper for a metronome.

In the neighborhood of the Tingley building the street was completely deserted, desolate in the driving rain. He parked squarely in front of the pedestrian entrance, unlocked the dash compartment and took out a pistol and a flashlight, slipping the former into his pocket and keeping the latter in his hand, and got out and darted across the sidewalk. But what he headed for was the dark tunnel of the cobbled driveway for trucks a little to the right of the entrance. The beam of the flashlight showed him that it was empty throughout its length, past the loading platform to the other end of the premises. He darted out again and up the two stone steps, found the door open as Amy had said, entered the building, and mounted the stairs, not needing the torch because the lights were on. In the anteroom he stood motionless for ten seconds, heard nothing whatever, and proceeded, with no effort to conceal his own noise. The doors were all standing open.

Two spaces inside Arthur Tingley’s office, just beyond the edge of the burlap screen at his right, he stopped again. Taking Amy’s story as she told it, it must have been just there that she had been struck. Considering the screen, that was all right. He circled the screen and directed his eyes downward.

A tightening of the muscles around his mouth and a breath intake through his nostrils somewhat quicker and deeper than common were his only visible reactions to what he saw. Though a glance was enough to make it more than probable that Amy had not, in her stunned daze, left her uncle to bleed slowly to death, he stepped around the area of the congealed liquid on the floor to bend over for a brief but conclusive examination. That done, he straightened up for a survey. For three minutes he stood, moving only his head and eyes, filing away a hundred details in the cabinet in his skull. The outstanding items were:

1. A bloody towel on the floor by the wash basin, sixteen inches from the wall.

2. Another bloody towel on the rim of the basin, to the right.

3. A long thin knife with a black composition handle on the floor between the body and the screen. In the factory that morning he had seen girls with similar knives, sharp as razors, slicing meat loaves.

4. Also on the floor, between the two front legs of the wash basin, a metal object nearly as big as his fist, in the form of a truncated cone, with a figure 2 in high relief on its side. That too, or its fellow, he had seen in the factory: a two-pound weight of an old-fashioned scale in the sauce room.

5. Farther away, out beyond the edge of the screen, a snakeskin bag — a woman’s handbag.

When he moved, it was to kneel for a close inspection of the knife, without touching it; and the same for the metal weight. It was unnecessary to repeat the performance for the handbag: from his height he could see the chromium monogram, AD, at a corner of it. It, too, he left untouched; in fact, he touched nothing, as he toured the room, but he saw that someone else had touched a great many things, during what had apparently been a thorough search. Two drawers of the rolltop desk were standing open. Objects which, when he was there in the morning, had been neatly and compactly stacked on rows of shelves, were now disarranged and anything but neat. A pile of the trade journal, The National Grocer , had tumbled to chaos on the floor. The door of the enormous old safe was standing wide open. Arthur Tingley’s hat was still on the little shelf above and to the left of the desk, but his coat, instead of being on the hanger which dangled from a hook beneath the shelf, as it should have been, was in a heap on the floor.

Fox noted these and many other evidences of a search, stood scowling in the middle of the room and muttered, “It’s too damn bad I can’t make a job of it,” and departed.

It was still raining. Five minutes later, at 11:21 by his watch, he was in a phone booth in a drugstore at 28th and Broadway, speaking in the transmitter:

“All right, if the inspector isn’t there I’ll tell you about it. May I have your name, please? Sergeant Tepper? Thanks. You’d better write this down. Name: Arthur Tingley. Place: His office on the second floor of his place of business at Twenty-sixth Street and Tenth Avenue. He’s there dead, murdered, throat cut. Let me finish, please. My name is Fox, Tecumseh Fox. That’s right. Tell Inspector Damon I’ll see him tomorrow — hold on and get this, will you? — I’ll see him tomorrow and tell him where Amy Duncan is. Amy Duncan!”

He cut off loud remonstrances by hanging up, went out to his car and drove to the Hotel Vandermeer and asked the doorman, who greeted him as an old acquaintance, to have the car garaged. Inside the clerk greeted him similarly, but exhibited no surprise when he wrote “William Sherman” on the registration sheet.

He smiled at the clerk and said, “The police are after me, and they may even canvass the hotels, but I intend to sleep.” He put a fingertip on the “William Sherman.” “You can always trust the written word.”

“Certainly, Mr. Fox.” The clerk smiled back.

In a clean and comfortable room on the twelfth floor, Fox got his notebook from his pocket and flipped to a page, and arranged himself at ease in an upholstered chair next to the telephone. He stayed there half an hour, making a series of seven calls. The sixth was to his home in the country, to tell Mrs. Trimble that there would probably be an inquiry for him, and that he wasn’t telling her where he was so she wouldn’t know. The seventh was to the East End hospital, to tell Dr. Vail where he was, and to learn, as he did, that Miss Duncan had no serious injury, had been safely transported, and was fairly comfortable.

He undressed and went to bed a nudist.

Though the detective bureaus of the New York City police force are by no means staffed exclusively by university graduates — a questionable fate which Scotland Yard in London seems to be headed for — neither does their personnel consist entirely of heavy-handed big-jawed low-brows. Inspector Damon of the Homicide Squad, for instance, while he is rather big-jawed, possesses fine sensitive hands, a wide well-sculptured brow, and eyes which might easily belong to a morose and pessimistic poet. His educated voice is rarely raised but has an extended repertory, as is desirable for a man who deals daily with all kinds from disintegrating dips to bereaved dowagers.

As he sat behind his desk at headquarters at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning, speaking to a man seated opposite — a gray-haired man with the four buttons on his coat all buttoned and his hands folded in his lap in the manner traditional to parsons — his voice was merely businesslike: