Rex Stout: Bad for Business

Amy Duncan said to herself, aloud, in a tone of withering sarcasm, “Heaven protect the poor working girl! I’ll go get me a job at the five and ten, something decent and domestic like the kitchenware counter. Wah!”

She squeezed the rinse water from the stockings she had been washing, hung them in a neat row along the shower-curtain rail, dried her hands, and left the bathroom to enter the modest little living room of the apartment on Grove Street which she shared with a friend. Facing south, it was often a cheerful little room with the sun slanting in through the two windows, but now the dim November gloom of an overcast day was no more cheerful than she was. As she picked up her watch from the table at one end of the sofa and fastened it to her wrist, she frowned at it. It said twelve o’clock, and since her lunch engagement at the Churchill with the man who either was or wasn’t trying to blackmail Mrs. V. A. Grimsby was for one o’clock, and it would take only twenty minutes to get there, and she intended to be fifteen minutes late, there was nearly an hour ahead of her and nothing to do with it that she felt like doing.

She wandered into the bedroom and got her gray fur coat from the closet and made another start at the urgent problem of whether to spend eighty-three dollars having it remodeled. She certainly couldn’t afford the eighty-three dollars, but just look at it, and anyway she should never have bought the thing, with her light brown hair and the faint coloring of her skin and her outlandish chartreuse eyes. Eighty-three dollars! She shrugged and said something, not complimentary, to the coat.

She returned to the living room and sat on the sofa with a magazine which she didn’t open. As far as the lunch engagement with the blackmailer was concerned, it was not at all certain that she was going to keep it. She was faced with a problem even more urgent than the remodeling of the fur coat. She had taken the job, about a year ago, because (a) it had been offered to her, (b) it had sounded exciting, (c) the lawyer whose secretary she was had just proposed to her for the fifth time and it was getting scrummy, and (d) she was tired of writing “... this agreement, entered into this day of January, 1939, by the Corrigan Construction Company, hereinafter called...” And now what? Well, it had certain aspects. There was something sneaky — but no, she would be honest, that wasn’t it. The reason she felt the way she did about it was quite specific.

She wanted to quit. But she couldn’t just quit, because there were things like rent and food and clothes to be considered. How did people save money, anyhow? There must be some kind of a trick to it. She got up to a hundred dollars in a savings bank once, but then that girl in the office had got into trouble, and poof it went, and how were you going to avoid things like that? Of course if you were a skunk—

The bell rang. With her mind still on her problem, she went to the kitchenette and pushed the button to release the latch of the vestibule door downstairs, and then came back to open the door from the living room to the outer hall. She stood on the threshold, hearing footsteps ascending the flight of stairs and supposing in an inactive corner of her mind that it would be laundry or something; but saw that it wasn’t when a man in well-tailored brown reached her level and came at her along the poorly lit hall. Her fingers tightened around the doorknob they were grasping, but that could not be seen.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, and felt that she should have cleared her throat before trying to speak.

“Good afternoon.” The man took his hat off and faced her with a grin which might have been called sheepish but for the fact that all other evidence was against any such assumption. Though saved from being offensively handsome by a rather wide mouth and a nose too broad to be called noble, he was thoroughly presentable, and there was a comfortable, even faintly aggressive, assurance in the set of his shoulders and the action of all his muscles, walking and standing. Nevertheless, the grin could undeniably have been called sheepish.

She had cleared her throat and still had a tight grasp on the doorknob. “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “I mean it’s after noon. But I thought you were a big executive. Don’t tell me you’re peddling provisions and beverages from door to door.”

“That’s a nice dress,” he said. “I could see it better in there where there’s more light. I just want to — I won’t keep you long.”

“You certainly won’t.” She made room for him to pass within, shut the door, turned to him, and glanced at her watch. “I haven’t time to show you any etchings, because I have to leave in about a minute to keep an engagement. And I’m sorry, but I don’t need any beans or flour or canned peaches—”

“If I only have a minute,” he cut her off, “I want to use it. What has happened?”

“Happened?” She smiled at him. “Well, Norway has taken the Germans off of the City of Flint and interned them, and President Roosevelt—”

“Please!” he begged. He wasn’t grinning. “What are you trying to do, have some fun with me?”

“Good heavens, no.” His eyes required to be met, and she met them, keeping, she hoped, an easy dancing smile in hers. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to have fun with one of the ablest and shrewdest—”

“Oh, you wouldn’t.” He took a step toward her. “I don’t know about my being able and shrewd, but I’m pretty well occupied during business hours. Do you think I’m in the habit of running off in the middle of the day to beg a girl to go to a football game?”

“Certainly not,” she laughed. “You don’t have to. You just snap your fingers, and scads of girls—”

“Excuse me. I came because it’s — well, it’s important to me. I mean you are. You phone and tell me casually that you can’t have dinner with me tomorrow and you can’t go to the game with me Saturday. You say things interfere but you won’t say what things. You only stammer—”

“I didn’t stammer!”

“Well, I don’t mean stammer. I mean you didn’t even bother to make up a plausible excuse. You just more or less give me to understand that all dates are off. And that doesn’t make sense unless something has happened, because you certainly gave me the impression that you liked me and enjoyed being with me. Of course we’ve only been together five times in the three weeks since we met, and I don’t mean necessarily that you liked me in the way I was beginning to like — I don’t mean beginning either — I mean you know very well the kind of impression — for instance, I have never missed a Yale-Harvard game since I graduated twelve years ago, and I don’t like to go to a football game with a girl, I like to go with men and always have until now—”

“I appreciated it deeply, Mr. Cliff, really I did—”

“You see? ‘Mr. Cliff!’ You were calling me Leonard. And now ‘Mr. Cliff with sarcasm, and you won’t see me tomorrow and you won’t go to the game Saturday and you won’t say what has happened, and I have a right to expect—”

“Right?” Her brows went up. “Oh? Have you got rights?”

“Yes, I... but I don’t... yes, I have!” His color was rising. “Now look — didn’t you give me a reason to suppose — weren’t we friends? Weren’t we friends enough so that if you decide to go to a football game with me and then suddenly decide not to go, I have a right to ask you why? Tell me that!”