Rex Stout - Bitter End

“Where did you get that?” Amy Duncan said.

I looked at her in astonishment. “Get it? This jar?”

“Yes. Where did you get it?”

“Bought it. Sixty-five cents.”

“And you’re taking it to a laboratory? Why? Does it taste funny? Oh, I’ll bet it does! Bitter?”

I gawked at her in amazement. Wolfe, upright, his eyes narrowed at her, snapped, “Why do you ask that?”

“Because,” she said, “I recognized the label. And taking it to a laboratory — that’s what I came to see you about! Isn’t that odd? A jar of it right here—”

On any other man Wolfe’s expression would have indicated a state of speechlessness, but I have never yet seen him flabbergasted to a point where he was unable to articulate. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you were actually aware of this infamous plot? That you knew of this unspeakable insult to my palate and my digestion?”

“Oh, no! But I know it has quinine in it.”

“Quinine!” he roared.

She nodded. “I suppose so.” She stretched a hand toward me. “May I look at it?” I handed her the jar. She removed the lid, took a tiny dab of the contents on the tip of her little finger, licked it off with her tongue, and waited for the effect. It didn’t take long. “Br-r-uh!” she said, and swallowed twice. “It sure is bitter. That’s it, all right.” She put the jar on the desk. “How very odd—”

“Not odd,” Wolfe said grimly. “ Odd is not the word. You say it has quinine in it. You knew that as soon as you saw it. Who put it in?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I came to see you for, to ask you to find out. You see, it’s my uncle— May I tell you about it?”

“You may.”

She started to wriggle out of her coat, and I helped her with it and got it out of her way so she could settle back in her chair. She thanked me with a friendly little smile containing no trace of quinine, and I returned to my desk and got out a notebook and flipped to a blank page.

“Arthur Tingley,” she said, “is my uncle. My mother’s brother. He owns Tingley’s Tidbits. And he’s such a pigheaded—” She flushed. “Well, he is pigheaded. He actually suspects me of having something to do with that quinine, just because — for no reason at all!”

“Are you saying,” Wolfe demanded incredulously, “that the scoundrel, knowing that his confounded tidbits contain quinine, continues to distribute them?”

“No,” she shook her head, “he’s not a scoundrel. That’s not it. It was only a few weeks ago that they learned about the quinine. Complaints began to come in, and thousands of jars were returned from all over the country. He had them analyzed, and lots of them contained quinine. Of course, it was only a small proportion of the whole output — it’s a pretty big business. He tried to investigate it, and Miss Yates — she’s in charge of production — took all possible precautions, but it’s happened again in recent shipments.”

“Where’s the factory?”

“Not far from here. On West Twenty-sixth Street near the river.”

“Do you work there?”

“No, I did once, when I first came to New York, but I... I quit.”

“Do you know what the investigation has disclosed?”

“Nothing. Not really. My uncle suspects — I guess he suspects everybody, even his son Philip, his adopted son. And me! It’s simply ridiculous! But chiefly he suspects a man — a vice-president of P. & B., the Provisions & Beverages Corporation. Tingley’s Tidbits is an old-established business — my great-grandfather founded it seventy years ago — and P. & B. has been trying to buy it, but my uncle wouldn’t sell. He thinks they bribed someone in the factory to put in the quinine to scare him into letting go. He thinks that Mr. — the vice-president I spoke of — did it.”

“Mr. — ?”

“Mr. Cliff. Leonard Cliff.”

I glanced up from my notebook on account of a slight change in the key of her voice.

Wolfe inquired, “Do you know Mr. Cliff?”

“Oh, yes.” She shifted in her chair. “That is, I... I’m his secretary.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe’s eyes went shut and then opened again halfway. “When you left your uncle’s employ you came to terms with the enemy?”

She flared up. “Of course not!” she said indignantly. “You sound like my uncle! I had to have a job, didn’t I? I was born and brought up in Nebraska. Three years ago my mother died, and I came to New York and started to work in my uncle’s office. I stuck it out for two years, but it got — unpleasant, and either I quit or he fired me, it would be hard to say which. I got a job as a stenographer with P. & B., and six weeks ago I was promoted and I’m now Mr. Cliff’s secretary. If you want to know why it got so unpleasant in my uncle’s office—”

“I don’t. Unless it has a bearing on this quinine business.”

“It hasn’t. None whatever.”

“But you are sufficiently concerned about the quinine to come to me about it. Why?”

“Because my uncle is such a—” She stopped, biting her lip. “You don’t know him. He writes to my father, things about me that aren’t so, and my father writes and threatens to come to New York — it’s such a mess! I certainly didn’t put quinine in his darned Tidbits! I suppose I’m prejudiced, but I don’t believe any investigating he does will ever get anywhere, and the only way to stop it is for someone to investigate who knows how.” She flashed a smile at him. “Which brings me to the embarrassing part of it. I haven’t got much money—”

“You have something better,” Wolfe grunted.

“Better?”

“Yes. Luck. The thing you want to know is the thing I had determined to find out before I knew you existed. I had already told Mr. Goodwin that the blackguard who poisoned that pâté is going to regret it.” He grimaced. “I can still taste it. Can you go now with Mr. Goodwin to your uncle’s factory and introduce him?”

“I—” She glanced at her watch and hesitated. “I’ll be awfully late getting back to the office. I only asked for an hour—”

“Very well. Archie, show Miss Duncan out and return for instructions.”...

It was barely three o’clock when I reached the base of operations, and the jar in my pocket was only half full, for I had first gone downtown to the laboratory and left a sample for analysis.

The three-story brick building on West 26th Street was old and grimy-looking, with a cobbled driveway for trucks tunneled through its middle. Next to the driveway were three stone steps leading up to a door with an inscription in cracked and faded paint:

As I parked the roadster and got out, I cocked an admiring eye at a Crosby town car, battleship gray, with license GJ88, standing at the curb. “Comes the revolution,” I thought, “I’ll take that first.” I had my foot on the first stone step leading up to the office when the door opened and a man emerged. I had the way blocked. At a glance, it was hard to imagine anyone calling him Uncle Arthur, with his hard, clamped jaw and his thin, hard mouth, but, not wanting to miss my quarry, I held the path and addressed him: “Mr. Arthur Tingley?”

“No,” he said in a totalitarian tone, shooting a haughty glance at me as he brushed by, with cold, keen eyes of the same battleship gray as his car. I remembered, just in time, that I had in my pocket a piece of yellow chalk which I had been marking orchid pots with that morning. Circling around him, I beat him to the car door which the liveried chauffeur was holding open and with two swift swipes chalked a big X on the elegant enamel.

“Don’t monkey with that,” I said sternly, and, before either of them could produce words or actions, beat it up the stone steps and entered the building.