Rex Stout: Murder Is No Joke

I was a little disappointed in Flora Gallant when she arrived that Tuesday morning for her eleven-o’clock appointment with Nero Wolfe. Her getup was a letdown. One of my functions as Wolfe’s factotum is checking on people who phone for an appointment with him, and when I learned that Flora Gallant was one of the staff of her brother Alec’s establishment on East Fifty-fourth Street, and remembered remarks a friend of mine named Lily Rowan had made about Alex Gallant, I had phoned Lily for particulars.

And got them. Gallant was crowding two others for top ranking in the world of high fashion. He thumbed his nose at Paris and sneered at Rome, and was getting away with it. He had refused to finish three dresses for the Duchess of Harwynd because she postponed flying over from London for fittings. He declined to make anything whatever for a certain famous movie actress because he didn’t like the way she handled her hips when she walked. He had been known to charge as little as eight hundred dollars for an afternoon frock, but it had been for a favorite customer so he practically gave it away.

And so forth. Therefore when I opened the door to admit his sister Flora that Tuesday morning it was a letdown to see a dumpy middle-aged female in a dark gray suit that was anything but spectacular. It needed pressing, and the shoulders were too tight, and her waist wasn’t where it thought it was. As I ushered her down the hall to the office and introduced her to Wolfe, I was thinking that if the shoemaker’s son went barefoot I supposed his sister could too, but all the same I felt cheated.

Her conversation was no more impressive than her costume, at least at the beginning. Seated on the edge of the red leather chair beyond the end of Wolfe’s desk, the fingers of both hands gripping the rim of the gray leather bag on her lap, she apologized, in a low meek mumble with just a trace of a foreign accent, for asking such an important man as Nero Wolfe to give any of his valuable time to her and her troubles. That didn’t sound promising, indicating as it did that she was looking for a bargain. As she went on with it Wolfe started a frown going, and soon he cut her off by saying that it would take less of his time if she would tell him what her troubles were.

She nodded. “I know. I just wanted you to understand that I don’t expect anything for myself. I’m not anybody myself, but you know who my brother is? My brother Alec?”

“Yes. Mr. Goodwin has informed me. An illustrious dressmaker.”

“He is not merely a dressmaker. He is an artist, a great artist.” She wasn’t arguing, just stating a fact. “This trouble is about him, and that’s why I must be careful with it. That’s why I come to you, and also” — she sent me a glance and then back to Wolfe — “also Mr. Archie Goodwin, because I know that although you are private detectives, you are gentlemen. I know you are worthy of confidence.”

She stopped, apparently for acknowledgment. Wolfe obliged her. “Umph.”

“Then it is understood I am trusting you?”

“Yes. You may.”

She looked at me. “Mr. Goodwin?”

“Right. Whatever Mr. Wolfe says. I only work here.”

She hesitated, seeming to consider if that was satisfactory, decided it was, and returned to Wolfe. “So I’ll tell you. I must explain that in France, where my brother and I were born and brought up, our name was not ‘Gallant.’ What it was doesn’t matter. I came to this country in nineteen-thirty-seven, when I was twenty-five years old, and Alex only came in nineteen-forty-five, after the war was over. He had changed his name to Gallant and entered legally under that name. Within seven years he had made a reputation as a designer, and then — Perhaps you remember his fall collection in nineteen-fifty-three?”

Wolfe grunted no.

Her right hand abandoned its grip on the bag to gesture. “But of course you are not married, and you have no mistress, feeling as you do about women. That collection showed what my brother was — an artist, a true creator. He got financial backing, more than he needed, and opened his place on Fifty-fourth Street. I had quit my job four years earlier — my job as a governess — in order to work with him and help him, and had changed my name to have it the same as his. From nineteen-fifty-three on it has been all a triumph, many triumphs. I will not say I had a hand in them, but I have been trying to help in my little way. The glory of great success has been my brother’s, but I have been with him, and so have others. But now trouble has come.”

Both hands were gripping the bag again. “The trouble,” she said, “is a woman. A woman named Bianca Voss.”

Wolfe made a face. She saw it and responded to it. “No, not an affaire d’amour, I’m sure it’s not that. Though my brother has never married, he is by no means insensible to women, he is very healthy about women, but since you are worthy of confidence I may tell you that he has an amie intime, a young woman who is of importance in his establishment. It is impossible that Bianca Voss has attracted him that way. She first came there a little more than a year ago. My brother had told us to expect her, so he had met her somewhere. He designed a dress and a suit for her, and they were made there in the shop, but no bill was ever sent her. Then he gave her one of the rooms, the offices, on the third floor, and she started to come every day, and then the trouble began. My brother never told us she had any authority, but she took it and he allowed her to. Sometimes she interferes directly, and sometimes through him. She pokes her nose into everything. She got my brother to discharge a fitter, a very capable woman, who had been with him for years. She has a private telephone line in her office upstairs, but no one else has. About two months ago some of the others persuaded me to try to find out about her, what her standing is, and I asked my brother, but he wouldn’t tell me. I begged him to, but he wouldn’t.”

“It sounds,” Wolfe said, “as if she owns the business. Perhaps she bought it.”

Flora Gallant shook her head. “No, she hasn’t. I’m sure she hasn’t. She wasn’t one of the financial backers in nineteen-fifty-three, and since then there have been good profits, and anyway my brother has control. But now she’s going to ruin it and he’s going to let her, we don’t know why. She wants him to design a factory line to be promoted by a chain of department stores using his name. She wants him to sponsor a line of Alec Gallant cosmetics on a royalty basis. And other things. We’re against all of them, and my brother is too, really, but we think he’s going to give in to her, and that will ruin it.”

Her fingers tightened on the bag. “Mr. Wolfe, I want you to ruin her .”

Wolfe grunted. “By wiggling a finger?”

“No, but you can. I’m sure you can. I’m sure she has some hold on him, but I don’t know what. I don’t know who she is or where she came from. I don’t know what her real name is. She speaks with an accent, but not French; I’m not sure what it is. I don’t know when she came to America; she may be here illegally. She may have known my brother in France, during the war. You can find out. If she has a hold on my brother you can find out what it is. If she is blackmailing him, isn’t that against the law? Wouldn’t that ruin her?”

“It might. It might ruin him too.”

“Not unless you betrayed him.” She swallowed that and added hastily, “I don’t mean that, I only mean I am trusting you, you said I could, and you could make her stop and that’s all you would have to do. Couldn’t you just do that?”