Rex Stout - Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

He muttered under his breath, probably a prayer of thanks, as we stopped in front of the house, and then, as I opened my door and started to wriggle from behind the wheel, he spoke. “Don’t get out. You’re going somewhere.”

“Oh. I am.”

“Yes. Back downtown. General Fife said that place will be cleaned up tonight. They may start at any moment, and I want that suitcase. Get it and bring it here. Just the case. I don’t want the contents. Exactly as it is; don’t bend it or do any tampering with it.”

I had twisted around to glare at him. He had opened his door and was climbing out. “You mean,” I demanded, “Ryder’s suitcase?”

“I do.” He was on the sidewalk. “It’s important. Also it is doubly important that no one should see you taking it. Especially Lieutenant Lawson, Colonel Tinkham, General Fife, or Miss Bruce, but preferably no one.”

I seldom sputter, but I sputtered. “That suitcase-from under their noses-listen. Will you settle for the moon? Glad to get the moon for you. Do you realize-”

“Certainly I realize. It’s a difficult errand. I doubt if there is another man anywhere, in the Army or out, who could safely be entrusted with it.”

He sure wanted that suitcase, to be ladling it out like that.

“Bushwah,” I said, and opened my door and crawled out, and headed for the stoop.

He snapped after me. “Where are you going?”

“To get a receptacle!” I called over my shoulder. “Do you think I’m going to hang it around my neck?”

Three minutes later I was on my way back to Duncan Street, the rear seat occupied not by Wolfe but by a man-size suitcase that I had got from the closet in his room. I had one of my own just as big, but I wasn’t going to risk my personal property in addition to my career as a warrior. I was sorry I hadn’t read up more fully on the regulations about courts-martial. Not that I wasted the minutes en route being sorry. I used them to consider ways and means. My watch said 6:30, and at that hour of the day I couldn’t tell what I would be up against until I had executed a patrol. You never knew around there; anyone might be out or in; anyone might leave for the day any time between four and midnight. I had my mind started on about three and a half different plans, but by the time I got to Duncan Street I had decided that I couldn’t lay out a campaign until I had looked the ground over and done a reconnaissance on the enemy.

On the tenth floor I returned the corporal’s salute, indicating by my posture that the receptacle, in my left hand, was a little hefty, assumed an urgent expression, and asked him if he had seen Lieutenant Lawson go out.

“Yes, sir. He left about twenty minutes ago.”

“Damn it. Colonel Tinkham too?”

“No, sir. I think he’s in his office.”

“Have you seen General Fife around?”

“Not for an hour or more, sir. He may be upstairs.”

I breezed through to the inner corridor. No one in sight. The door to my room was about twenty paces down normally, and it took me not more than fourteen. Inside I took a breath, and deposited the big suitcase on my desk. It began to seem more possible. Like this. I go to the scene and tell the corporal Nero Wolfe sent me back to do a close-up on something. I enter and examine the top of Ryder’s desk with my little glass. I make noises of dissatisfaction and tell the corporal to go ask Major Goodman if I may borrow his big magnifying glass, Goodman’s office being on the eleventh floor. The corporal goes, I grab the suitcase, dive down the hall to my room, and cache it in Wolfe’s case. That would be the only risk, the five seconds negotiating the hall. The rest would be pie. I turned it over and around, looking for a way to reduce the risk still more, but decided that was the minimum.

I got the little glass from a drawer of my desk and stuck it in my pocket, went out and down the corridor, turned the corner, saw that the same corporal was on guard and no one else around, said my little piece to him, was passed in without any question, crossed to Ryder’s desk, and began inspecting it with the glass. But my heart wasn’t in my work because I had had plenty of time, approaching the desk, to perceive that the suitcase wasn’t there.

Chapter 4

I continued to inspect the desk, remarking to myself meanwhile, “Of all the blank blink blonk blunk luck.”

Since nothing more helpful than that occurred to me, I finally straightened up for a comprehensive survey. As far as I could see, everything was as before with the single exception of the suitcase. I went over to the corporal.

“Anyone been in here since Colonel Tinkham and Wolfe and I left?”

“No, sir. Oh yes, Colonel Tinkham came back shortly afterward. General Fife was with him.”

“Oh,” I said casually, “then I guess they took that chair.”

“Chair?”

“Yeah, one of the chairs Wolfe wanted me to examine-it seems to be gone-I’ll go and see-”

“There can’t be a chair gone, sir. Nobody took any chair or anything else.”

“You’re sure of that? Not even General Fife or Colonel Tinkham?”

“No, sir. Nobody.”

I grinned at him. “If I was Nero Wolfe, corporal, which I’m not, I would advise you to confine your assurances to the boundaries of your knowledge. That’s his way of putting it. You say positively that nobody took anything. But I notice you stand here in the doorway facing the hall, your back to the room. There’s no glass left in the windows. How do you know a paratrooper didn’t come in that way and take anything he wanted?”

For half a second he looked slightly startled, and for the next half a second the look in his eyes plainly indicated what he would have said, and probably done, if we had been just people instead of a corporal and a major. All he did say was “Yes, sir.”

“Okay,” I told him as man to man. “Probably I counted wrong. Skip it. I always get mixed up when I go above six.”

I went down the corridor to my room, sat on the edge of my desk, and applied logic. Of course it was obvious, if the corporal wasn’t either blind or a liar. Mental operations like figuring the cube root of minus two I leave to Nero Wolfe, but I can do simple addition and subtraction. So I pulled the phone over and got Captain Foster, in charge of personnel, and asked him for the home address of Sergeant Dorothy Bruce.

He was inclined to be flippant, but I told him the request was official and he loosened up. The Bronx or Brooklyn would have been a blow, since I was taking the trip not on information or a hunch, but only on logic, and I was relieved when he gave me a number on West Eleventh Street. That was right on the way home. Toting the receptacle which apparently I had brought along just for the ride, I evacuated via the elevator, went to the car, and started back uptown.

The Eleventh Street number was the only modern structure in a block of old brownstones. Leaving the receptacle in the car, I entered and brushed past the hallman in a military stride, columned left on a guess, spied the elevator, and said brusquely to the girl loitering outside, “Bruce.” Manifestly I was not a man to be questioned. She followed me in and started us up, stopped and opened the door at the seventh, and said musically, “Seven C.” I found it, the second on the right down the hall, pushed the button, and after a little wait the door opened. But it swung only to a gap of a few inches, so as a precaution I unobtrusively planted a foot beyond the line of the sill.