Rex Stout - Trouble in Triplicate

“Eleven will do,” Wolfe said. “Did you try that Lincoln number? Mr. Perrit said between seven and ten.”

“No,” I said and hung up.

For the next hour and three-quarters my main job would have been to stay awake if it hadn’t been for the phone. Stalling journalists had got to be routine with me over the years, but it took time to handle it so they wouldn’t get down on us. One of the calls was a sample of what might be expected from life from then on as long as it lasted. A guy with a hoarse voice, so hoarse I wished he would take time out to clear his throat, said he was a friend of Dazy Perrit’s and he would like to ask me a couple of questions, and would I meet him at the Seven-Eleven Club some time that afternoon? I told him I was tied up at the office but if he would give me his name and number I would ring him if I found I could make it. He said he didn’t know where he would be, so skip it and he would try again. Then he said, “It was too bad you wasn’t tied up at the office last night,” and hung up.

Another call came from Saul Panzer just before eleven. I put it through to Wolfe and was instructed to stay off the line, an instruction I didn’t need since I was out of it. Before they were through talking the doorbell rang again, for about the tenth time since the cops had left, and this time it was not a gate-crasher to be shooed off but a customer with a reserved seat. I allowed L. A. Schwartz to enter, told him Wolfe would soon appear, and herded him to the office and to a chair. I wouldn’t have picked him for Dazy Perrit’s lawyer. For one thing, he wore old-fashioned nose-pinchers for glasses, which didn’t seem to be the thing. He was sixty, skinny, and silent. I thought I might keep myself awake another five minutes by striking up a conversation, but I got a total of not more than ten words out of him. He sat with his briefcase on his lap and every thirty seconds pulled at the lobe of his right ear. I had abandoned him by the time the sound of Wolfe’s elevator came.

On his way across to his desk Wolfe halted to acknowledge the introduction, made by me in spite of being out of it, purely for the sake of appearances. Then he went to his chair, sat and got himself adjusted, leaned back, and took in the visitor with half-closed eyes.

“Well, sir?” he asked.

Schwartz blinked against the light from the window. “I must apologize,” he said, “for being urgent about this appointment, but I felt there should be no delay.”

He sounded formal. “I gathered from Mr. Perrit last evening that you had not explicitly given your assent, and therefore-”

“May I ask, assent to what?”

“To your appointment, in his will, as executor of his estate and in effect the guardian of his daughter. Did you?”

“Utterly”-Wolfe wiggled a finger at him-“preposterous.”

“I was afraid of that,” Schwartz said regretfully. “It will complicate matters. I’m afraid it’s partly my fault, drafting the documents in such haste. There is a question whether the fifty thousand dollars provided for that purpose will go to the executor if the executor is not you but someone appointed by a court.”

Wolfe grunted. His eyes opened and then half closed again. “Tell me about it,” he said.

X

Schwartz opened the flap of his briefcase, then let it drop back again, and kept it on his lap.

“In the past,” he said, “I have attended to a few little matters for Mr. Perrit of a purely legal nature. I know law, but on account of my temperament I am not a successful lawyer. Last evening he came to my home-a modest little apartment on Perry Street-he has never been to my office-and asked me to draw up some papers at once, in his presence. Luckily I have a typewriter at home but it isn’t very good and you’ll have to overlook typographical deficiencies. It took a long while because I am not fast on a typewriter, and also because of the special conditions to be covered. It’s a difficult business, extremely difficult, to convey property by testament to a daughter without naming her and indeed without identifying her in any way.” The lawyer blinked. “I should tell you right off that there will be no problems of administration. The property consists exclusively of government bonds and cash in banks, a little over a million dollars. In that respect there are no intricacies. All other property owned by Mr. Perrit, including his interest in various enterprises, goes to others-his associates-in another document. Your functions are limited strictly to the legacy to his daughter. There are only two other provisions in the document under consideration: fifty thousand dollars to you as executor, and the same amount to me. The witnesses to it were a man who owns a delicatessen and a young woman who runs a rental library, both of whom are known to me. I have the original in my possession. Mr. Perrit took a copy.”

Wolfe lifted a hand. “Let me see it.”

Schwartz blinked again. “In a moment, yes, sir. I should explain that the large sum left to me was not to compensate me for drawing up some papers. It was Mr. Perrit’s way of insuring my performance of an act mentioned nowhere in writing, but only orally. I drafted another document of which no copy was made. It was put into an envelope along with other sheets of paper on which Mr. Perrit had written something, I don’t know what, and the envelope was sealed with wax. I was given the function and the responsibility, in the event of Mr. Perrit’s death, of delivering the envelope to you personally at the earliest possible moment, together with the information, already delivered, regarding the will. I would put it this way: of the fifty thousand dollars left to me, one hundred dollars was for drafting the documents, another hundred was for making the delivery to you-reasonable sums-and the remainder was to pay me for not opening the envelope and examining the contents. He misjudged me entirely. One-tenth that amount, even one-fiftieth, would have been enough.”

He opened his briefcase, took out folded papers, and put them on Wolfe’s desk.

“That’s the will, which I must take with me for probate.” He produced a bulky envelope with red blotches of wax and put it beside the papers. “That’s the envelope.”

He sat back and pulled at his ear.

Wolfe reached for the envelope and papers. First he went through the will, thoroughly-he is never a fast reader-then handed it to me and slit the envelope with his paper knife. As he finished with a page of the contents of the envelope he slid it across to my reach; apparently I was back in again. I read faster than he does, so I was only a couple of minutes behind him at the end.

The will was certainly involved. It was hard for me to tell whether the cash and bonds were left to Nero Wolfe or to the unnamed and unidentified “my daughter,” but I’m not a lawyer and I suppose it was legally hers, though it seemed to me to leave room for a lot of antics by him if his mind worked that way. The other document drawn up by Schwartz, the one in the envelope, was very technical. It contained a long list of bonds and balances in banks, and its chief purpose seemed to be to make them available to Wolfe if, as, and when he felt like taking them over. In places it sounded like a power of attorney, and in other places like blessings and absolution for Wolfe no matter what he did. If Dazy Perrit had sat around while Schwartz composed all that and typed it out, one of the problems the police were working on-how and where Perrit had spent the hours preceding his death-was certainly solved. But he hadn’t merely sat. He had done some composing too, namely, the papers he had written on himself and put in the envelope. I read that last and slowest. It began: