Rex Stout - Before Midnight

“Need any help?” I asked brightly.

“No,” Susan said. “We’re conferring.”

I re-entered the office, closed the door, and told Wolfe, “They’re in conference. If I go in the front room and put my ear to the keyhole of the door to the hall I can catch it. After all, it’s your house.”

“Pfui,” he said, and shut his eyes. I treated myself to a good yawn and stretch, and looked at my wrist. Twenty to seven.

For the second time that day we had a king-size wait. At six-forty-five I turned on the radio to see how the Giants had made out with the Phillies, and got no glow out of that. I would have gone to the kitchen for a glass of milk, since dinner would be late, but the only route was through the rear of the hall, and I didn’t want to disturb the conference. At six-fifty-five I reminded Wolfe that Harold Rollins was due in five minutes, and he only nodded without opening his eyes. At seven-two the doorbell rang, and I went.

Still in a huddle at the rack, they broke off as I appeared and gave me their faces. Out on the stoop was a lone male. I went on by the huddle, opened the door, and said, “Mr. Rollins? Come in.”

My own idea would have been to put him in the front room until the conference was over and we had got the score, but if Wolfe had wanted that he would have said so, and I’m perfectly willing to let him have things his way unless his ego is jostling mine. So I took Rollins’ hat and coat and ushered him along to the office. I was inside too and was shutting the door when Susan’s voice came. “Mr. Goodwin!”

I pulled the door to with me on the hall side. As I approached she asked, “Wasn’t that one of them? The one named Rollins?”

“Right. Harold Rollins, Burlington, Iowa, professor of history at Bemis College.”

She looked at her pals. Their heads all moved, an inch to the left and back again. She looked at me. “Mr. Wolfe asked me if I had any comment about what he told me about Miss Frazee. He asked me if I thought it was worth discussing. I have no comment now, but I will have. It’s absolutely outrageous to expect—”

A quick tug at her sleeve by Knudsen stopped her. She shot him a glance and then pushed her head forward at me. “No comment!” she shrilled, and turned to reach to the rack for her coat. The men simultaneously reached for theirs.

“If you gentlemen don’t mind,” I said, perfectly friendly, “my grandmother out in Ohio used to ask me if the cat had my tongue. I’ve always wondered about it. Was it a cat in your case?”

No soap. Not a peep. I gave up and opened the door to let them out.

Back in the office, I attended to the lights before going to my desk. There are eight different lights — one in the ceiling above a big bowl of banded Oriental alabaster, which is on the wall switch, one on the wall behind Wolfe’s chair, one on his desk, one on my desk, one flooding the big globe, and three for the book shelves. The one on Wolfe’s desk is strictly for business, like crossword puzzles. The one on the wall behind him is for reading. He likes all the others turned on, and after making the rounds I sat, picked up my notebook, and gave Harold Rollins a look.

“They have gone?” Wolfe asked.

“Yes, sir. No comment.”

Rollins was comfortable in the red leather chair, right at home, though one about half the size would have been better for him. He hadn’t shrunk from underfeeding like Carol Wheelock; he looked healthy enough, what there was of him. Nor was there much to his face except a wide flexible mouth and glasses in thick black frames. You didn’t see his nose and chin at all unless you concentrated.

It’s hard to tell with glasses like those, but apparently he was returning my regard. “Your name’s Goodwin, isn’t it?” he asked.

I admitted it.

“Then it was you who sicked that man Younger on me. You don’t expect me to be grateful, do you? I’m not.” He switched to Wolfe. “We might as well start right. I made this appointment, and kept it, only to pass the time. I’m in this grotesque imbroglio, with no discoverable chance of emerging with honor and dignity, so why miss an opportunity of meeting an eminent bloodhound?” He smiled and shook his head. “No offense intended. I am hardly in a position to offend anybody. What are we going to talk about?”

Wolfe was contemplating him. “I suggest, Mr. Rollins, that your despair is excessive. My client is the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, but in many respects your interest runs with theirs, and their honor and dignity are involved with yours. Both may be salvaged; and in addition, you may get a substantial amount of money. You didn’t like what Mr. Younger proposed?”

He was still smiling. “Of course I know I should make allowances.”

“For Mr. Younger?”

“For all of you. Your frame of reference is utterly different from mine, in fact to me it seems quite contemptible, but it was my own thoughtlessness that got me entangled in it. I dug my own grave, that’s true; but, realizing and confessing it, I may still resent the slime and the worms. Can you get me back my job?”

“Job?”

“Yes. I am a professor of history at Bemis College, but I won’t be very long. It will amuse you to hear — no, that’s not the right way to look at it. It will amuse me to tell you; that’s better. One day last September a colleague showed me an advertisement of this contest, and said facetiously that as a student and teacher of history I should be interested. As a puzzle the thing was so obvious it was inane, and so was the second one, which my colleague also showed me. I was curious as to how long the inanity would be maintained, and got others as they appeared, and before long I found I was being challenged. I made a point of getting them without referring to any book, but the twelfth one so distracted me that I broke that ban just to get rid of it.”

He screwed up his lips. “Have I said that I hadn’t entered the contest?”

“No.”

“Well, I hadn’t. I regarded it as a diversion, an amusing toy. But after I had solved the twentieth and last, which I must confess was rather ingenious, I sent in an entry blank with my answers. If you were to ask me why I did so I would be at a loss. I suppose in the lower strata of my psyche the primitive lusts are slopping around in the mire, and somehow they managed it; they are not in direct communication with me. The next day I was appalled at what I had done. I had a professorship at the age of thirty-six; I was a serious and able scholar with two books to my credit; and I had well-defined ambitions which I was determined to realize. If I won a prize in a perfume contest — a perfume called Pour Amour — it would be a blemish on my career, and if I won a sensational one, a half or a quarter of a million, I would never live it down.”

He smiled and shook his head. “But you won’t believe I was appalled, because when I was notified that I was in a tie with seventy-one others, and was sent five new verses to solve in a week, I had the answers in four days and sent them in. I can only plead that schizophrenia must have many forms and manifestations, or I could resort to demonology. I was once much impressed by Roskoff’s Geschichte des Teufels . Anyhow, I sent the answers, and was asked to come to New York, and arrived just twenty-four hours ago; and now I’m involved not only in a perfume contest — Pour Amour Rollins they’ll call me — but in a murder, a nationwide cause célèbre . I am done for. If I don’t resign I’ll be fired. Can you get me a job?”

I was wishing he would take his glasses off so I could see his eyes. From his easy posture and his voice and his superior smile he was taking it well, a manly and gallant bozo refusing to squirt blood under the wheels of calamity. But without more sales pressure I wasn’t buying the notion that one definition of “calamity” was half a million bucks, even for a man as highly educated as him, and I wanted to see his eyes. All I could see was the reflection of the ceiling light from the lenses.