Rex Stout - Before Midnight

I asked him what Spanish wool was, and had him. He didn’t know, and because he can’t stand not knowing the meaning of any word or phrase he sees or hears, I asked why he hadn’t looked in the dictionary, and he said he had but it wasn’t there. Another item was that Mary Queen of Scots bathed in wine regularly, and so did the elder ladies of the court, but the younger ones couldn’t afford it and had to use milk. Another was that when they found unguent vases in old Egyptian tombs they had dug into, the aromatics in them were still fragrant, after thirty-five hundred years. Another, that Roman fashion leaders at the time of Caesar’s wife bleached their hair with a kind of soap that came from Gaul. Another, that Napoleon liked Josephine to use cosmetics and got them for her from Martinique. Another, that Cleopatra and other Egyptian babes painted the under side of their eyes green, and the lid, lashes, and eyebrows black. For the black they used kohl, and put it on with an ivory stick.

I admitted it was very interesting, and made no remark about how helpful it would be in finding out who swiped Dahlmann’s wallet, since that would have touched on business. Even after we finished with cheese and coffee and left the dining room to cross the hall to the office, I let him digest in peace, and went to my desk and dialed Lily Rowan’s number. When I told her I wouldn’t be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words. While we were talking the doorbell rang, but Fritz had been told about Heery, so I went ahead and finished the conversation properly. When I hung up and swiveled, Heery was in the red leather chair.

He measured up to it, both vertically and horizontally, much better than either Rollins or Mrs. Wheelock. In a dinner jacket, with the expanse of white shirt front, he looked broader even than before. Apparently he had been glancing around, for he was saying, “This is a very nice room. Very personal. You like yellow, don’t you?”

“Evidently,” Wolf muttered. Such remarks irritate him. Since the drapes and couch cover and cushions and five visible chairs were yellow, it did seem a little obvious.

“Yellow is a problem,” Heery declared. “It has great advantages, but also it has a lot of drawbacks. Yellow streak. Yellow journalism. Yellow fever. It’s very popular for packaging, but Louis Dahlmann wouldn’t let me use it. Formerly I used it a great deal. Seeing all your yellow made me think of him.”

“I doubt,” Wolfe said drily, “if you needed my décor to remind you of Mr. Dahlmann at this juncture.”

“That’s funny,” Heery said, perfectly serious.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Anyway, it is, because it’s wrong. That’s the first time I’ve thought of him today. Ten seconds after I heard he was dead, and how he had died, I was in a stew about the effect on the contest and my business, and I’m still in it. I haven’t had any room for thinking about Louis Dahlmann. Have you seen all the contestants?”

“Four of them. Mr. Goodwin saw Mr. Younger.”

“Have you got anywhere?”

Wolfe hated to work right after dinner. He said testily, “I report only to my client, Mr. Heery.”

“That’s funny too. Your client is Lippert, Buff and Assa. I’m one of their biggest accounts — their commission on my business last year was over half a million. I’m paying all the expenses of the contest, and of course the prizes. And you won’t even tell me if you’ve got anywhere?”

“Certainly not.” Wolfe frowned at him. “Are you really as silly as you sound? You know quite well what my obligation to my client is. You have a simple recourse: get one of them on the phone and have me instructed — preferably Mr. Buff or Mr. Assa.”

It seemed a good spot for Heery to offer to knock his block off, but instead he got to his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets, and looked around, apparently for something to look at, for he marched across to the globe and stood there staring at it. His back looked even broader than his front. Pretty soon he turned and came back and sat down.

“Have they paid you a retainer?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

He took a thin black leather case from his breast pocket, opened it and tore off a strip of blue paper, produced a midget fountain pen, put the paper on the table at his elbow, and wrote. After putting the pen and case away he reached to send the paper fluttering onto Wolfe’s desk and said, “There’s ten thousand dollars. I’m your client now, or my firm is. If you want more say so.”

Wolfe reached for the check, tore it across, again, again, and leaned to the right to drop it in the wastebasket. He straightened up. “Mr. Heery. I am never too complaisant when my digestion is interrupted, and you are trying me. You might as well go.”

I’ll be damned if Heery didn’t look at me. Wanting to save him the embarrassment of offering me a twenty, possibly even a C, to put him back on the track, and getting another turndown, and also thinking that if Wolfe wanted his nose pushed in I might as well help, I met his eyes and told him, “When you do go, if you’re still looking for a better time and place there’s a little yard out back.”

He burst out laughing — a real good hearty laugh. He stopped long enough to say, “You’re a team, you two,” and then laughed some more. We sat and looked at him. He took out a folded handkerchief and coughed into it a couple of times, and was sober.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you how it is.”

“I know how it is.” Wolfe was good and sore.

“No, you don’t. I went about it the wrong way, so I’ll start over. LBA has a good deal at stake in this mess, I know that, but I have more. If this contest explodes in my face it could ruin me. Will you listen?”

Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed. “I’m listening,” he muttered.

“You have to know the background. I started my business twenty years ago on a shoestring. I worked hard, but I had some luck, and my biggest piece of luck was that a man named Lippert, an advertising man, got interested. The firm’s name then was McDade and Lippert. My product was good, but Lippert was better than good, he was great, and in ten years my company was leading the field in dollar volume. It was sensational. Then Lippert died. Momentum kept us on the rise for a couple of years, and then we started to sag. Not badly, we had some ups too, but it was mostly downs. I still had a good organization and a good product, but Lippert was gone, and that was the answer.”

He looked at his folded handkerchief as if he wondered what it was for, and stuck it back in his pocket. “In nineteen-fifty the LBA people submitted some names for a new line we were getting ready to start, and from the list I picked Pour Amour. I didn’t learn until later that that name had been suggested by a young man named Louis Dahlmann who hadn’t been with them long. Do you know anything about the agency game?”

“No.”

“It’s very tough, especially with the big ones. The men who have made it, who have got up around the top, most of them spend a lot of their time kicking the faces of the ones who are trying to climb. Of course that’s more or less true in any game because it’s how people are made, but advertising agencies are about the worst, I mean the big ones. It took me two years to find out who thought of that name Pour Amour, and it was another year before Dahlmann was allowed to confer with me on my account. By that time he had shown so much stuff there was no holding him. There was a lot of talk — you may have heard of him?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t very likable. He was too cocky, and if he thought you were a goddam fool he said so, but he had real brains and there’s no substitute for brains, and his were a special kind. I don’t say that Oliver Buff and Pat O’Garro and Vern Assa haven’t got brains. Buff has some real ability. He’s a good front man. Lippert trained him and knew what he was good for. Now he’s the senior member of the firm. For presenting an outline for an institutional campaign to the heads of a big national corporation, he’s as good as anybody and better than most, but that kind of approach never has sold cosmetics and never will. I’ve been one of the firm’s big accounts for years, and he has never personally come up with an idea that was worth a dime.”