Рекс Стаут - Please Pass the Guilt

“Of course! He would say that!”

“Please hold it, I’ve just started. So I drew the check and he signed it, and I phoned you. But I think I can prove that he didn’t sell out, and I want to try. I think I can get him to tear the check up and go on with the job, with your help. May I use your typewriter?”

“What for? I don’t believe it.”

“You will. You’ll have to.” I got up and crossed to a desk, the one with a typewriter on an extension. As I pulled the chair out and sat, I asked where I would find paper and she said, “The top drawer, but you’re not fooling me,” and I said, “Wait and see,” and got out paper and a sheet of carbon.

She preferred not to wait. As I got the third draft from my pocket and spread it out on the desk, she kicked the sections of the Times aside, left the couch, and came and stood at my elbow, and I hit the keys. I didn’t hurry because I wanted it clean. No exing. As I pulled it out, I said, “I had to type it here because he might recognize it from my machine, and this is going to be your idea.” I handed her the original and gave the carbon a look:

NERO WOLFE HAS $50,000

in cash, given to him by me. He will pay it, on my behalf, to any person or persons who supply information to him that leads to the conclusive identification of the man or woman who placed a bomb in a drawer of the desk of Amory Browning on Tuesday, May 20th, resulting in the death of my husband.The information is to be given directly to Nero Wolfe, who will use it on my behalf, and the person or persons supplying it will do so under these conditions:1. All decisions regarding the significance and value of any item of information will be made solely by Nero Wolfe and will be final. 2. The total amount paid will be $50,000. If more than one person supplies useful information, the determination of their relative value and of the distribution of the $50,000 will be made solely by Nero Wolfe and will be final. 3. Any person who communicates with Nero Wolfe or his agent as a result of this advertisement thereby agrees to the above conditions .

“With your name at the bottom,” I said. “A reproduction of your signature, Madeline Odell, like on your check, and below it ‘Mrs. Peter J. Odell’ in parenthesis, as usual, printed. Now hear this. Of course he’ll know I wrote it, but if he thinks I wrote it at home and brought it, he’ll balk. No go. As I said, that’s why I didn’t type it there. It has to be your idea, suggested by you after I told you about his reaction to Saul Panzer’s suggestion. He may phone you. If he does, you’ll have to do it right. Then of course the question will be, what will happen? I think it will work, and certainly it may work. It’s ten to one that someone knows something that would crack it open, and fifty grand is a lot of bait.”

I was on my feet. “So if you’ll sign it, the original, and keep the carbon, and I’ll need two samples of your signature on plain paper, one for the Times and one for the Gazette , to make cuts.”

“You’re pretty good,” she said.

“I try hard. Whence all but me have fled.”

“What?”

“The burning deck.”

“What burning deck?”

“You don’t read the right poems.” I swiveled the chair. “Sit here? That pen is stingy, I tried it. Mine’s better.”

“So is the one on my desk.” She moved, went to the other desk, which was bigger, and sat. “I’m not convinced, you know. This could be an act. You can phone to say it didn’t work.”

“If I do, it won’t be an act, it will be because he is pigheaded. I mean strong-minded. It will depend on you if he phones.”

“Well.” She reached for the pen in an elegant jade stand. “ I have a suggestion. It shouldn’t be fifty thousand. Figures like that, fifty thousand or a hundred thousand, they don’t hit. In-between figures are better, like sixty-five thousand or eighty-five.”

“Right. Absolutely. Change it. Make it sixty-five. Just draw a line through the fifty thousand.”

She tried the pen on a scratch pad. I always do.

It worked.

Driving downtown and across to the garage on Tenth Avenue, I considered the approach. Over the years I suppose I have told Wolfe 10,000 barefaced lies, or, if you prefer in-between figures, make it 8,392, either on personal matters that were none of his business or on business details that couldn’t hurt and might help, but I have no desire to break a world record, and anyway the point was to make it stick if possible. I decided on a flank attack and then to play it by ear.

When I entered the office at 6:22, he was at his desk working on the Double-Crostic in the Times , and of course I didn’t interrupt. I took my jacket off and draped it on the back of my chair, loosened my tie, went to the safe and got the checkbook and took it to my desk, and got interested in the stubs for the month of June. That was a flank attack all right. In a few minutes, maybe eight, he looked up and frowned at me and asked, “What’s the balance now?”

“It depends,” I said. I twisted around to get Exhibit A from my jacket pocket and rose and handed it across. He read it, taking his time, dropped it on the desk, narrowed his eyes at me, and said, “Grrr.”

“She changed the fifty to sixty-five herself,” I said. “That heading could have been Archie Goodwin has sixty-five thousand instead of Nero Wolfe. She didn’t actually suggest it, but she thinks I’m pretty good. She said so. When I told her you were quitting and handed her the check, she said. ‘How much did Browning pay him?’ I told her that if I talked for five hours I might be able to convince her that you wouldn’t double-cross a client, but actually I doubt it. You may not give a damn what she thinks of my employer, but I do. I brought her to you. She said things and I said things, and when it became evident that nothing else would convince her, I went to a typewriter and wrote that. I don’t claim the wording is perfect. I am not Norman Mailer.”

“Bah. That peacock? That blowhard?”

“All right, make it Hemingway.”

“There was a typewriter there?”

“Sure. It was the big room on the fourth floor where apparently she does everything but eat and sleep. As you see, the paper is a twenty-pound bond at least half rag. Yours is only twenty percent rag.”

He gave it a look, a good look, and I made a note to pat myself on the back for not doing it on my typewriter. “I admit,” I said, “that I didn’t try to talk her out of it. I certainly did not. In discussing it I told her that I thought it would work, that it’s ten to one that someone knows something that would crack it open, and that fifty grand is a lot of bait. That was before she changed it to sixty-five. This is a long answer to your question, What’s the balance? As I said, it depends. I brought the check back, but it would only cost eight cents to mail it. If we do, the balance will be a little under six thousand dollars. There was the June fifteenth income tax payment. I’m not badgering you, I’m just answering your question. But I’ll permit myself to mention that this way it would not be a frantic squawk for someone to pull you out of a mudhole. I will also mention that if I phone her that the ad — correction, advertisement — has been placed, she will mail another check. For sixty-five thousand. She would make it a million if it would help. As of now nothing else on earth matters to her.”

What he did was typical, absolutely him. He didn’t say “Very well” or “Tear the check up” or even “Confound it.” He picked the thing up, read it slowly, scowling at it, put it to one side under a paper weight, said “I’m doing some smoked sturgeon Muscovite. Please bring a bottle of Madeira from the cellar,” and picked up the Double-Crostic.