Rex Stout - Door to Death

I asked if he was going in to phone and he said no, I was. I turned in the seat to get a look at him.

“I don’t know, Archie,” he said, “whether you have ever seen me when my mind was completely dominated by a single purpose.”

“Sure I have. I’ve rarely seen you any other way. The purpose has always been to keep comfortable.”

“It isn’t now. It is — never mind. A purpose is something to achieve, not talk about. Get Saul if possible. Fred or Orrie would do, but I’d rather have Saul. Tell him to come at once and meet us — where can we meet?”

“Around here?”

“Yes. Between here and White Plains.”

“He’s to have a car?”

“Yes.”

“The Covered Porch near Scarsdale would do.”

“Tell him that. Phone Fritz that we are still delayed and ask him how things are. That’s all.”

I got out, but even at a risk I wanted to have it understood, so I poked my head in and asked, “What about dinner? Fritz will want to know.”

“Tell him we won’t be there. I’ve already faced that. My purpose is enough to keep me from going home, but I wouldn’t trust it to get me out again if I once got in.”

Evidently he knew himself nearly as well as I knew him. I entered the drugstore and found the booth.

I got Fritz first. He thought I was kidding him, and then, when I made it plain that I was serious, he suspected me of concealing a calamity. He simply couldn’t believe that Wolfe was a free man and sound of mind and body, and yet wasn’t coming home to dinner. It looked for a while as if I would have to go and bring Wolfe to the phone, but I finally convinced him, and then went after Saul.

As Wolfe had said, Fred or Orrie would do, but Saul Panzer was worth ten of them or nearly anyone else, and I had a feeling that we were going to need the best we could get for whatever act Wolfe was preparing to put on to achieve his dominant purpose. So when I learned that Saul wasn’t home but was expected sometime, I gave his wife the number and told her I would wait for a call. It was so long before it came that when I went back out to the car I expected Wolfe to make some pointed remarks, but all he did was grunt. The purpose sure was dominant. I told him that from Saul’s home in Brooklyn it would take him a good hour and a quarter to drive to the rendezvous, whereas we could make it easy in thirty minutes. Did he have any use for the extra time? No, he said, we would go and wait, so I got the car moving and headed for the parkway.

When, a little before nine o’clock, Saul Panzer joined us at the Covered Porch, we were at a table in a rear corner, as far as we could get from the band. Wolfe had cleaned up two dozen large oysters, tried a plate of clam chowder and swallowed five spoonfuls of it, disposed of a slice of rare roast beef with no vegetables, and was starting to work on a pile of zwieback and a dish of grape jelly. He hadn’t made a single crack about the grub.

By the time Wolfe had finished the zwieback and jelly and had coffee Saul had made a good start on a veal cutlet. Wolfe said he would wait until Saul was through, but Saul said no, go ahead, he liked to hear things while he ate. Wolfe proceeded. First he described the past, enough of it to give Saul the picture, and then gave us a detailed outline of the future as he saw it. It took quite a while, for he had to brief us on all foreseeable contingencies. One of them was the possibility that the key tagged “Dup Grnhs” which was in my pocket wouldn’t fit. Another prop was the sketch made by Gus Treble of the ground plans of the mansion. Still another prop was a sheet of plain white paper, donated on request by the management of the Covered Porch, on which Wolfe wrote a couple of paragraphs with my fountain pen. That too was for Saul, and he put it in his pocket.

It sounded to me as if the whole conception was absolutely full of fleas, but I let it pass. If Wolfe was man enough to stay away from dinner at his own table, damned if I was going to heckle just because it looked as if we stood a very fine chance of joining Andy in jail before midnight. The only item I pressed him on was the gun play.

“On that,” I told him, “I want it A, B, C. When you’re in the cell next to mine, on a five-year ticket, I won’t have you keep booming at me that I bollixed it up with the gun. Do I shoot at all and if so when?”

“I don’t know,” he said patiently. “There are too many eventualities. Use your judgment.”

“What if someone makes a dash for a phone?”

“Head him off. Stop him. Hit him.”

“What if someone starts to scream?”

“Make her stop.”

I gave up. I like to have him depend on me, but I only have two hands and I can’t be two places at once.

The arrangement was that Saul was to follow us in his car because it would be useful for a preliminary approach. It was after ten when we rolled out of the parking lot of the Covered Porch and turned north. When I pulled off the road at a wide place, in the enemy country, the dashboard clock said twelve minutes to eleven, and it had started to snow a little. Saul’s car had stopped behind us.

I turned off the lights, got out and went back, and told him, “Half a mile on, maybe a little more, at the left. You can’t miss the big stone pillars.”

He swung his car back into the road and was off. I returned to our car and climbed in, and turned to face the rear because I thought a little cheerful conversation was called for, but Wolfe wouldn’t cooperate, and I well knew why. He was holding his breath until he learned whether Saul would bring good news or bad. Would we be able to drive right in and make ourselves at home? Or...?

The news wasn’t long in coming, and it was bad. Saul’s car came back, turned around, and parked close behind us, and Saul came to us with snowflakes whirling around him and announced, “He’s still there.”

“What happened?” Wolfe demanded peevishly.

“I turned in at the entrance, snappy, and he flashed a light at me and yelled. I told him I was a newspaperman from New York, and he said then I’d better get back where I belonged quick because it was snowing. I tried a little persuasion to stay in character, but he was in a bad humor. So I backed out.”

“Confound it.” Wolfe was grim. “I have no rubbers.”

Before we got to the Pitcairn greenhouse Wolfe fell down twice, I fell four times, and Saul once. My better score, a clear majority, was because I was in the lead.

Naturally we couldn’t show a light, and while the snow was a help in one way, in another it made it harder, since enough of it had fallen to cover the ground and therefore you couldn’t see ups and downs. For walking in the dark without making much noise levelness is a big advantage, and there was none of it around there at all, at least not on the route we took.

It had to be all by guess. We left the road and took to the jungle a good three hundred yards short of the entrance, to give the guy in bad humor a wide miss. Almost right away we were mountain climbing, and I slipped on a stone someone had waxed and went down, grabbing for a tree and missing.

“Look out, a stone,” I whispered.

“Shut up,” Wolfe hissed.

Just when I had got used to the slope up, the terrain suddenly went haywire and began to wiggle, bobbing up and down. After a stretch of that it went level, but just as it did so the big trees quit and I was stopped by a thicket which I might possibly have pushed through but Wolfe never could, so I had to detour. The thicket forced me around to the rim of a steep decline, though I didn’t know it until my feet told me three times. It was at the foot of that decline that we struck the brook. I realized what the dark streak was only when I was on its sloping edge, sliding in, and I leaped like a tiger, barely reaching the far bank and going to my knees as I landed, which I didn’t count as a fall. As I got upright I was wondering how in God’s name we would get Wolfe across, but then I saw he was already coming, wading it, trying to hold the skirt of his coat up with one hand and poking his cane ahead of him with the other.