Rex Stout - Before Midnight

“What is that firm?”

“You must have heard of it. The advertising agency.”

Wolfe’s lips were going left to right and back again. It was his kind of smile. “Very ingenious. I congratulate you. But as you say, you will be at my mercy. I may end the relationship at any moment, with no commitment whatever.”

“Just a minute,” O’Garro put in, his clever bright brown eyes darting from Wolfe to Hansen. “Must it be like that?”

“It’s the only way, Pat,” the lawyer told him. “If you hire him, you either trust him or you don’t.”

“I don’t like it... but if it’s the only way...”

“It is. Oliver?”

Buff said yes.

“Vern?”

Assa nodded.

“Then you retain me, Mr. Wolfe? As specified?”

“Yes. — Archie, give Mr. Hansen a dollar.”

I got one from my wallet, suppressing a pointed comment which the transaction certainly deserved, crossed to the attorney-at-law, and handed it over.

“I give you this,” I told him formally, “as the agent for Mr. Nero Wolfe.”

It’s a long story,” Hansen told Wolfe, “but we’ll have to make it as short as possible. These gentlemen have appointments at the District Attorney’s office. I speak as your counsel of matters pertinent to the case to be offered you about which you seek my advice. Have you heard of the murder of Louis Dahlmann?”

“No.”

“It was on the radio.”

“I don’t listen to the radio in the morning. Neither does Mr. Goodwin.”

“To hell with the radio,” Assa snapped. “Get on, Rudolph.”

“I am. One of LBA’s big accounts — we call Lippert, Buff and Assa LBA — is Heery Products, Incorporated. One of the Heery products is the line of cosmetics that they call Pour Amour. They introduced it some years ago and it was doing fairly well. Last spring a young man on the LBA staff named Louis Dahlmann conceived an idea for promoting it, and he finally succeeded in getting enough approval of the idea to have it submitted to the Heery people, and they decided they liked it, and it was scheduled to start the twenty-seventh of September. It was a prize contest, the biggest in history, with a first prize of five hundred thousand dollars in cash, second prize two hundred and fifty thousand, third prize one hundred thousand, and fifty-seven smaller prizes. I have to explain it to you. Each week for twenty weeks there appeared in newspapers and magazines a four-line verse, from which—”

“I can save you that,” Wolfe told him. “I know about it.”

“Did you enter?” O’Garro demanded.

“Enter the contest? Good heavens, no.”

“Get on,” Assa snapped.

Hansen did so. “The deadline was February fourteenth. The answers had to be postmarked before midnight February fourteenth. There were over two million contestants, and Dahlmann had trained three hundred men and women to handle the checking and recording. When they finished they had seventy-two contestants who had identified all twenty of the women correctly. Dahlmann had more verses ready, and on March twenty-eighth he sent five of them to each of the seventy-two contestants, by airmail to those at a distance, and the answers had to be postmarked before midnight April fourth. It came out a quintuple tie. Five of them correctly identified the five new ones, and Dahlmann telephoned them and arranged for them to come to New York. They would land the first three prizes, the big three, and also two of the ten-thousand-dollar prizes. They came, and last evening he had them to dinner in a private room at the Churchill. Talbott Heery of Heery Products was there, and so were Vernon Assa and Patrick O’Garro. Dahlmann was going to give them five more verses, with a week to solve them, but a woman who lives in Los Angeles objected that she wanted to work at home and would have to take part of the week getting there, so it was arranged to stagger the deadlines for the postmarks according to how long it would take each one to get home. The meeting ended shortly before eleven o’clock, and they left and separated. Four of them, from out of town, had rooms at the Churchill. One who lives in New York, a young woman named Susan Tescher, presumably went home.”

“Get on, damn it,” Assa snapped.

“I’m making it as brief as possible, Vern. — Dahlmann also presumably went home. He was a bachelor and lived alone in an apartment on Perry Street. A woman came at seven in the morning to get his breakfast, and when she got there this morning he was on the floor of the living room, dead. He was shot through the heart, from the back, and a cushion from a divan was used to muffle the sound. She ran and got the building superintendent, and the police were notified, and they came and went to work. You may need more facts about the murder when they’re available — he was found only four hours ago — but you may not, because that’s not what you’re needed for. You’re needed for something more urgent than murder.”

I uncrossed my legs. Something more urgent than murder called for muscles set to go.

Hansen was leaning forward, his palms on his knees. “Here’s the crux of it. No one knew the answers in that contest but Louis Dahlmann. He had written all the verses himself — the original twenty, the five to break the first tie, with seventy-two contestants, and the five to break the second tie, with five contestants. Of course the answers for the first twenty had to be known to the crew of checkers and recorders, after the deadline had passed and they started to work, but he himself checked the answers of the seventy-two who were in the first tie. With the third group, the five in the second tie, he guarded the verses themselves almost as strictly as the answers. He typed the verses personally and made only seven copies. One copy was placed in a safe deposit vault, one he kept — I’m not sure where — and the other five were given by him last evening to the five contestants at the meeting.”

“He kept it in his wallet,” O’Garro said.

Hansen ignored it. “Anyway, the point is not the verses but the answers. I speak of the answers to the last group of five verses — the others don’t matter now. Of course it was merely the names of five women, with an explanation of the fitness of the verses for them. There was supposed to be only one copy in existence. It had been typed by Dahlmann on an LBA letterhead, signed by him and initialed by Buff, O’Garro, and Assa, with the answers covered so they couldn’t see them, and then put in the safe deposit vault, in a sealed envelope, with five men present. So as I said, no one knew the answers but Dahlmann.”

“As far as we know,” Oliver Buff put in.

“Certainly,” the lawyer agreed. “To our knowledge.”

“My God, reach the point,” Assa rapped out.

“I am. But at the meeting last evening Dahlmann did an extremely reckless thing. When he—”

“Worse than reckless,” Buff declared. “Irresponsible! Criminal!”

“That may be a little strong. But it was certainly ill-advised. When he was ready to hand out the new group of verses he took some envelopes from his inside breast pocket, and other things came with them — other papers and his wallet. He passed the envelopes around, and then — you tell it, Pat, you were there.”

O’Garro obliged. “After he gave them the envelopes he started to return the other stuff to his pocket, then he hesitated a moment, smiled around at them, opened the wallet, took a piece of folded paper from it and held it up, and told them he wanted to make—”

“No. Exactly what he said.”

“He said, ‘I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving this here on the table. It’s the names of the women who fit the verses I just gave you.’ Then he slipped the paper back in the wallet and put it in his pocket.”