Рекс Стаут: In the Best Families

She had my sympathy up to a point, but what stuck out was her basic assumption that rich people can always get anything they want just by putting up the dough. That’s enough to give an honest workingman, like a private detective for instance, a pain in three places. The assumption is of course sound in some cases, but what rich people are apt not to understand is that there are important exceptions.

This, however, was not one of them, and I hoped Wolfe would see that it wasn’t. He did. He didn’t want to, but the bank account had by no means fully recovered from the awful blow of March fifteenth, only three weeks back, and he knew it. He came forward in his chair for a glance at the check, caught my eye and saw how I felt about it, heaved a sigh, and spoke.

“Your notebook, Archie. Confound it.”

The following morning, Saturday, I was in the office typing the final report on a case which I will not identify by name because it was never allowed to get within a mile of a newspaper or a microphone. We were committed on Mrs. Rackham’s job, since I had deposited her check Friday afternoon, but no move had been made yet, not even a phone call to any of the names she had given us, because it was Wolfe’s idea that first of all we must have a look at him. With Wolfe’s settled policy of never leaving his house on business, and with no plausible excuse for getting Barry Rackham to the office, I would have to do the looking, and that had been arranged for.

Mrs. Rackham had insisted that her husband must positively not know or even suspect that he was being investigated, and neither must anyone else, so the arrangements for the look were a little complicated. She vetoed my suggestion that I should be invited to join a small week-end gathering at her country home in Westchester, on the ground that someone would probably recognize the Archie Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe. It was Calvin Leeds who offered an amendment that was adopted. He had a little place of his own at the edge of her estate, where he raised dogs, called Hillside Kennels. A month ago one of his valuable dogs had been poisoned, and I was to go there Saturday afternoon as myself, a detective named Archie Goodwin, to investigate the poisoning. His cousin would invite him to her place, Birchvale, for dinner, and I would go along.

It was a quiet Saturday morning in the office, with Wolfe up in the plant rooms as usual from nine to eleven, and I finished typing the report of a certain case with no interruptions except a couple of phone calls which I handled myself, and one for which I had to give Wolfe a buzz — from somebody at Mummiani’s on Fulton Street to say that they had just got eight pounds of fresh sausage from Bill Darst at Hackettstown, and Wolfe could have half of it. Since Wolfe regards Darst as the best sausage maker west of Cherbourg, he asked that it be sent immediately by messenger, and for heaven’s sake not with dry ice.

When, at 11:01, the sound of Wolfe’s elevator came, I got the big dictionary in front of me on my desk, opened to H, and was bent over it as he entered the office, crossed to his oversized custom-built chair, and sat. He didn’t bite at once because his mind was elsewhere. Even before he rang for beer he asked, “Has the sausage come?”

Without looking up I told him no.

He pressed the button twice — the beer signal — leaned back, and frowned at me. I didn’t see the frown, absorbed as I was in the dictionary, but it was in his tone of voice.

“What are you looking up?” he demanded.

“Oh, just a word,” I said casually. “Checking up on our client. I thought she was illiterate, her calling you handsome — remember? But, by gum, it was merely an understatement. Here it is, absolutely kosher: ‘Handsome: moderately large.’ For example it gives ‘a handsome sum of money.’ So she was dead right, you’re a handsome detective, meaning a moderately large detective.” I closed the dictionary and returned it to its place, remarking cheerfully, “Live and learn!”

It was a dud. Ordinarily that would have started him tossing phrases and adjectives, but he was occupied. Maybe he didn’t even hear me. When Fritz came from the kitchen with the beer, Wolfe, taking from a drawer the gold bottle opener that a pleased client had given him, spoke.

“Fritz, good news. We’re getting some of Mr. Darst’s sausage — four pounds.”

Fritz let his eyes gleam. “Ha! Today?”

“Any moment.” Wolfe poured beer. “That raises the question of cloves again. What do you think?”

“I’m against it,” Fritz said firmly.

Wolfe nodded. “I think I agree. I think I do. You may remember what Marko Vukcic said last year — and by the way, he must be invited for a taste of this. For Monday luncheon?”

“That would be possible,” Fritz conceded, “but we have arranged for shad with roe—”

“Of course.” Wolfe lifted his glass and drank, put it down empty, and used his handkerchief on his lips. That, he thought, was the only way for a man to scent a handkerchief. “We’ll have Marko for the sausage at Monday dinner, followed by duck Mondor.” He leaned forward and wiggled a finger. “Now about the shallots and fresh thyme: there’s no use depending on Mr. Colson. We might get diddled again. Archie will have to go—”

At that point Archie had to go answer the doorbell, which I was glad to do. I fully appreciate, mostly anyhow, the results of Wolfe’s and Fritz’s powwows on grub when it arrives at the table, but the gab often strikes me as overdone. So I didn’t mind the call to the hall and the front door. There I found a young man with a pug nose and a package, wearing a cap that said, “Fleet Messenger Service.” I signed the slip, shut the door, started back down the hall, and was met not only by Fritz but by Wolfe too, who can move well enough when there’s something he thinks is worth moving for. He took the package from me and headed for the kitchen, followed by Fritz and me.

The small carton was sealed with tape. In the kitchen Wolfe put it on the long table, reached to the rack for a knife, cut the tape, and pulled the flaps up. My reflexes are quick, and the instant the hissing noise started I grabbed Wolfe’s arm to haul him back, yelling at Fritz, “Watch out! Drop!”

Wolfe can move all right, considering what he has to move. He and I were through the open door into the hall before the explosion came, and Fritz came bounding after, pulling the door with him. We all kept going, along the short stretch of hall to the office door, and into the office. There we stopped dead. No explosion yet.

“Come back here!” Wolfe commanded.

“Be quiet,” I commanded back, and dropped to my hands and knees and made it into the hall. There I stopped to sniff, crawled to within a yard of the crack under the kitchen door, and sniffed again.

I arose, returned to the office on my feet, and told them, “Gas. Tear gas, I think. The hissing has stopped.”

Wolfe snorted.

“No sausage,” Fritz said grimly.

“If it had been a trigger job on a grenade,” I told him, “there would have been plenty of sausage. Not for us, of us. Now it’s merely a damn nuisance. You’d better sit here and chat a while.”

I marched to the hall and shut the door behind me, went and opened the front door wide, came back and stood at the kitchen door and took a full breath, opened the door, raced through and opened the back door into the courtyard, ran back again to the front. Even there the air current was too gassy for comfort, so I moved out to the stoop. I had been there only a moment when I heard my name called.

“Archie!”

I turned. Wolfe’s head with its big oblong face was protruding from a window of the front room.