Rex Stout: Might as Well Be Dead

“You mean quit looking for him?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. My wife and my daughters — Anyway, I won’t. Right is right. I’ve got to find him.”

“And you want to hire me?”

“Yes. You and Goodwin and Panzer.”

“Then I must inform you that it may take months, the expenses will be considerable, the amount of my bill will not be contingent on success, and I charge big fees.”

“I know you do. Lieutenant Murphy told me.” Herold looked more like a man in trouble than when he came in. “But I can call you off at any time.”

“Certainly.”

“All right.” He took a breath. “You want a retainer.”

“As an advance for expenses. More important, I want all the information you can give me.” Wolfe’s head turned. “Archie, your notebook.”

I already had it out.

An hour later, after the client had left and Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms for his afternoon session with Theodore and the orchids, I put the check for three thousand dollars in the safe and then got at the typewriter to transcribe my notes. When I was done I had five pages of assorted facts, one or two of which might possibly be useful. Paul Herold had a three-inch scar on his left leg, on the inside of the knee, from a boyhood accident. That might help if we found him with his pants down. It had made him 4F and kept him out of war. His mother had called him Poosie. He had liked girls, and had for a time concentrated on one at college named Arline Macy, but had not been hooked, and so far as was known had communicated with none after heading east. He had majored in Social Science, but on that his father had been a little vague. He had taken violin lessons for two years and then sold the violin for twenty bucks, and got hell for it. He had tried for football in spite of his bum knee, but didn’t make the team, and in baseball had played left field for two innings against Kansas in 1944. No other sports to speak of. Smoke and drink, not to excess. Gambling, not to the client’s knowledge. He had always pushed some on his allowance, but there had been nothing involving dishonesty or other moral turpitude before the blow-up.

And so on and so forth. It didn’t look very promising. Evidence of some sort of dedication, such as a love for animals that hop or a determination to be President of the United States, might have helped a little, but it wasn’t there. If his father had really known him, which I doubted, he had been just an ordinary kid who had had a rotten piece of luck, and now it was anybody’s guess what he had turned into. I decided that I didn’t appreciate the plug Lieutenant Murphy of the Missing Persons Bureau had given me, along with Saul Panzer. Any member of the NYPD, from Commissioner Skinner on down, would have given a day’s pay, after taxes, to see Nero Wolfe stub his toe, and it seemed likely that Murphy, after spending a month on it, had figured that this was a fine prospect. I went to the kitchen and told Fritz we had taken on a job that would last two years and would be a washout.

Fritz smiled and shook his head. “No washouts in this house,” he said positively. “Not with Mr. Wolfe and you both here.” He got a plastic container from the refrigerator, took it to the table, and removed the lid.

“Hey,” I protested, “we had shad roe for lunch! Again for dinner?”

“My dear Archie.” He was superior, to me, only about food. “They were merely sauté, with a simple little sauce, only chives and chervil. These will be en casserole , with anchovy butter made by me. The sheets of larding will be rubbed with five herbs. With the cream to cover will be an onion and three other herbs, to be removed before serving. The roe season is short, and Mr. Wolfe could enjoy it three times a day. You can go to Al’s place on Tenth Avenue and enjoy a ham on rye with coleslaw.” He shuddered.

It developed into an argument, but I avoided getting out on a limb, not wanting to have to drop off into Al’s place. We were still at it when, at six o’clock, I heard the elevator bringing Wolfe down from the plant rooms, and after winding it up with no hard feelings I left Fritz to his sheets of larding and went back to the office.

Wolfe was standing over by the bookshelves, looking at the globe, which was even bigger around than he was, checking to make sure that Omaha, Nebraska, was where it always had been. That done, he crossed over to his desk, and around it, and lowered his colossal corpus into his custom-made chair.

He cocked his head to survey the Feraghan, which covered all the central expanse, 14 x 26. “It’s April,” he said, “and that rug’s dirty. I must remind Fritz to send it to be cleaned and put the others down.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, looking down at him. “But for a topic for discussion that won’t last long. If you want to avoid discussing Paul Herold start something with some body to it, like the Middle East.”

He grunted. “I don’t have to avoid it. According to Lieutenant Murphy, that’s for you and Saul. Have you reached Saul?”

“Yes. We’re going to disguise ourselves as recruiting officers for the Salvation Army. He starts at the Battery and works north, and I start at Van Cortlandt Park and work south. We’ll meet at Grant’s Tomb on Christmas Eve and compare notes, and then start in on Brooklyn. Have you anything better to suggest?”

“I’m afraid not.” He sighed, deep. “It may be hopeless. Has that Lieutenant Murphy any special reason to bear me a grudge?”

“It doesn’t have to be special. He’s a cop, that’s enough.”

“I suppose so.” He shut his eyes, and in a moment opened them again. “I should have declined the job. Almost certainly he has never been known in New York as Paul Herold. That picture is eleven years old. What does he look like now? It’s highly probable that he doesn’t want to be found and, if so, he has been put on the alert by the advertisements. The police are well qualified for the task of locating a missing person, and if after a full month they — Get Lieutenant Murphy on the phone.”

I went to my desk and dialed CA 6-2000, finally persuaded a sergeant that only Murphy would do, and, when I had him, signaled to Wolfe. I stayed on.

“Lieutenant Murphy? This is Nero Wolfe. A man named James R. Herold, of Omaha, Nebraska, called on me this afternoon to engage me to find his son Paul. He said you had given him my name. He also said your bureau has been conducting a search for his son for about a month. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct. Did you take the job?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Good luck, Mr. Wolfe.”

“Thank you. May I ask, did you make any progress?”

“None whatever. All we got was dead ends.”

“Did your search go beyond your set routine?”

“That depends on what you call routine. It was a clear-cut case and the boy had had a rough deal, and you could say we made a special effort. I’ve still got a good man on it. If you want to send Goodwin down with a letter from Herold we’ll be glad to show him the reports.”

“Thank you. You have no suggestions?”

“I’m afraid not. Good luck.”

Wolfe didn’t thank him again. We hung up.

“Swell,” I said. “He thinks he’s handed you a gazookis. The hell of it is, he’s probably right. So where do we start?”

“Not at the Battery,” Wolfe growled.

“Okay, but where? It may even be worse than we think. What if Paul framed himself for the theft of the twenty-six grand so as to have an excuse to get away from father? Having met father, I would buy that. And seeing the ad asking him to communicate with father — not mentioning mother or sisters, just father — and saying a mistake was made, what does he do? He either beats it to Peru or the Middle East — there’s the Middle East again — or he goes and buys himself a set of whiskers. That’s an idea; we can check on all sales of whiskers in the last month, and if we find—”