Rex Stout - The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

“Indeed,” Wolfe said loud enough for me to hear. I saw that he was reading it too, and spoke:

“If the cops hadn’t already been there and got it, and if Miss Gunther didn’t have me on a string, I’d run up to see Mrs. Boone and get that envelope.”

“Three or four men in a laboratory,” Wolfe said, “will do everything to that envelope but split its atoms. Before long they’ll be doing that too. But this is the first finger that has pointed in any direction at all.”

“Sure,” I agreed, “now it’s a cinch. All we have to do is find out which of those one thousand four hundred and ninety-two people is both a sentimentalist and a realist, and we’ve got him.”

We went back to our papers.

Nothing more before dinner. After the meal, which for me consisted chiefly of thin toast and liver pate on account of the way Fritz makes the pate, we had just got back to the office again, a little before nine when a telegram came. I took it from the envelope and handed it to Wolfe, and after he had read it he passed it over to me. It ran:

NERO WOLFE 922 WEST 35 NYC

CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTINUE SURVEILLANCE OF ONEILL BUT BELIEVE IT ESSENTIAL THIS BE DONE ALTHOUGH CAN GUARANTEE NOTHING

BRESLOW

I put my brows up at Wolfe. He was looking at me with his eyes half open, which meant he was really looking.

“Perhaps,” he said witheringly, “you will be good enough to tell me what other arrangements you have made for handling this case without my knowledge?”

I grinned at him. “No, sir. Not me. I was about to ask if you have put Breslow on the payroll and if so at how much, so I can enter it.”

“You know nothing of this?”

“No. Don’t you?”

“Get Mr. Breslow on the phone.”

That wasn’t so simple. We knew only that Breslow was a manufacturer of paper products from Denver, and that, having come to New York for the NIA meeting, he was staying on, as a member of the Executive Committee, to help hold the fort in the crisis. I knew Frank Thomas Erskine was at the Churchill and tried that, but he was out. Hattie Harding’s number, which was in the phone book, gave me a don’t answer signal. So I tried Lon Cohen again at the Gazette , which I should have done in the first place, and learned that Breslow was at the Strider-Weir. In another three minutes I had him and switched him to Wolfe, but kept myself connected.

He sounded on the phone just the way he looked, red-faced with anger.

“Yes, Wolfe? Have you got something? Well? Well?”

“I have a question to ask-”

“Yes? What is it?”

“I am about to ask it. That was why I had Mr. Goodwin learn your number, and call it and ask for you, so you could be on one end of the telephone and me on the other end, and then I could ask you this question. Tell me when you are ready, sir.”

“I’m ready! Damn it, what is it?”

“Good. Here it is. About that telegram you sent me-”

“Telegram? What telegram? I haven’t sent you any telegram!”

“You know nothing about a telegram to me?”

“No! Nothing whatever! What-”

“Then it’s a mistake. They must have got the name wrong. I suspected as much. I was expecting one from a man named Bristow. I apologize, sir, for disturbing you. Good-by.”

Breslow tried to prolong the agony, but between us we got him off.

“So,” I remarked, “he didn’t send it. If he did, and didn’t want us to know it, why would he sign his name? Do we have it traced? Or do we save energy by assuming that whoever sent it knows about phone booths?”

“Confound it,” Wolfe said bitterly. “Probably someone peddling herrings. But we can’t afford to ignore it.” He glanced at the wall clock, which said three minutes past nine. “Find out if Mr. O’Neill is at home. Just ask him-no. Let me have him.”

The number of O’Neill’s residence, an apartment on Park Avenue was listed, and I got both it and him. Wolfe took it, and told him about the request from Adamson, the NIA lawyer, and fed him a long rigmarole about the inadvisability of written reports. O’Neill said he didn’t care a hang about reports, written or otherwise, and they parted friends.

Wolfe considered a moment. “No. We’ll let him go for tonight. You had better get him in the morning as he leaves. If we decide to keep it up we can get Orrie Cather.”

Chapter 13

TAILING AS A SOLO job in New York can be almost anything, depending on the circumstances. You can wear out your brain and muscles in a strenuous ten-hour stretch, keeping contact only by using all the dodges on the list and inventing some more as you go along, and then lose him by some lousy little break that nothing and no one could have prevented. Or you can lose him the first five minutes, especially if he knows you’re there. Or, also in the first five minutes, he can take to a chair somewhere, an office or a hotel room, and stay there all day, not giving a damn how bored you get.

So you never know, but what I fully expected was a long day of nothing since it was Sunday. A little after eight in the morning I sat in a taxi which, headed downtown, was parked on Park Avenue in the Seventies, fifty paces north of the entrance to the apartment house where O’Neill lived. I would have given even money that I would still be there six hours later, or even twelve, though I admitted there was a fair chance of our going to church at eleven, or to a restaurant for two o’clock dinner. I couldn’t even read the Sunday paper with any satisfaction because I had to keep my eye on the entrance. The taxi driver was my old stand-by Herb Aronson, but he had never seen O’Neill. As the time went by we discussed various kinds of matters, and he read aloud to me from the Times.

At ten o’clock we decided to get a bet down. Each of us would write on a slip of paper the time that we thought my man would stick his nose out, and the one that was furthest off would pay the other one a cent a minute for the time he missed it by. Herb was just handing me a scrap he tore from the Times for me to write my guess on when I saw Don O’Neill emerging to the sidewalk.

I told Herb, “Save it for next time. That’s him.”

Whatever O’Neill did, it would be awkward, because his doorman knew us by heart by that time. He had previously signaled to Herb for a customer, and Herb had turned him down. What O’Neill did was look toward us, with me keeping my face in a corner so he couldn’t see it if his vision was good for that distance, and speak to the doorman, who shook his head. That was about as awkward as it could get, unless O’Neill had walked to us for a conference.

Herb told me out of the corner of his mouth, “Our strategy stinks. He takes a taxi and we ride his tail, and when he comes home the doorman tells him he’s being followed.”

“So what was I to do?” I demanded. “Disguise myself as a flower girl and stand at the corner selling daffodils? Next time you plan it. This whole tailing idea has got to be a joke. Start your engine. Anyhow, he’ll never get home. We’ll pinch him for murder before the day’s out. Start your engine! He’s getting transportation.”