Rex Stout: Murder by the Book

I lifted a brow. "Do you think Dykes was Baird Archer?" "I don't know. He wrote that list of names, obviously inventions. He certainly wasn't Baird Archer on February second, since he had been dead five weeks. You will also go to Scholl and Hanna. In spite of what Miss Wellman wrote her parents, it's possible that someone else read that manuscript, or at least glanced through it. Or Miss Wellman may have said something about it to one of her associates. Or, less likely, Baird Archer may have delivered the manuscript in person and be remembered-of course that was last fall, months ago." Wolfe heaved a sigh and reached for his glass. "I suggest that you extend the deadline beyond sundown tomorrow." "What the hell," I said generously, "I'll give you till Friday." It was just as well I didn't say what Friday.

4

WHAT with getting Saul and Fred and Orrie sicked onto the typing services, and dealing with the morning mail, and going to the bank to deposit Wellman's check, it was well after ten o'clock Tuesday when I got to Cramer's office on Twentieth Street. He wasn't there but had left instructions with Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I am one of the few people Purley knows that he has not completely made up his mind about. Since I'm a private detective, the sooner I die, or at least get lost outside the city limits, the better-of course that's basic, but he can't quite get rid of the suspicion that I might have made a good cop if I had been caught in time.

I not only got a look at the files, I even got to talk with two of the help who had worked on Dykes and one from the Bronx who had worked on Joan Wellman. By the time I left, a little before three, I had a lot in my notebook and more in my head.

For here I'll trim it down. Leonard Dykes, forty-one, found banging up against a pile in the East River on New Year's Day, had for eight years been a clerk, not a member of the bar, in the office of the law firm of Corrigan, Phelps, Kustin and Briggs. Up to a year ago the firm's name had been O'Malley, Corrigan and Phelps, but O'Malley had been disbarred and there had been a reorganization. Dykes had been unmarried, sober, trustworthy, and competent. He had played cards every Tuesday evening with friends, for small stakes. He had twelve thousand dollars in government bonds and a savings account, and thirty shares of United States Steel, which had been inherited by a married sister who lived in California, his only close relative. No one discoverable had hated or feared him or wished him ill. One sentence in one report said, "No women at all." There was a photograph of him after he had been hauled out of the river, not attractive, and one of him alive that had been taken from his apartment. To be objective, I'll put it that he had been less unattractive before drowning than after. He had had popeyes, and his chin had started backing up about a quarter of an inch below his mouth.

The other thousand or so facts in the file on Dykes had as little discernible bearing on his murder as those I have given for samples.

On Joan Wellman, the Bronx had not been as much in love with the hit-and-run theory as Wellman suspected, but it was just as well that her father did not have access to the police file. They didn't care much for Joan's version of her Friday date in her letter home, especially since they could find no one among her office associates to whom she had mentioned it. I gave them a low mark on that, knowing how full offices are Of petty jealousies and being willing to give our client's daughter credit for enough sense to keep her mouth shut about her private affairs. Aside from the search for the car that had run over her, the Bronx had mostly concentrated on her boy friends. If you want to give the average dick a job he really likes, sit him down with a man who has been seen fairly recently in the company of a pretty girl who has just died a sudden and violent death. Think of the questions he can ask. Look at the ground he can cover, no matter who the man is, with no risk of a comeback that will cost him anything.

So the Bronx had done the boy friends up brown, especially an advertising copywriter named Atchison, apparently because his name began with "A" and had a "c" and an "h" in it, and it had dawned upon some eagle eye that Archer did too, and what more do you want?" Luckily for Atchison, he had taken a four-thirty train Friday afternoon, February second, to spend the weekend with friends at Westport. Two dicks had worked like dogs trying to pry that alibi loose, with no success.

As far as I could tell from the file, it looked as if Joan had had not only beauty and intelligence but also good old-fashioned virtue. The three boy friends who had been flushed were unanimous on that They had admired and respected her. One of them had been after her for a year to marry him and had had hopes. If any of them had had reason to prefer her dead, the Bronx had failed to dig up a hint of it.

I went back home and typed it all up for Wolfe, and got reports on the phone from Saul and Fred and Orrie.

I spent most of Wednesday at the office of Scholl and Hanna on Forty-fifth Street. What I got out of it was a respectful appreciation of the book-publishing business as a means of corralling jack. The office took up two whole floors, with nothing spared anywhere in the way of rugs and furniMURDER BY THE BOOK 17

tare. Scholl was in Florida, I was told, and Hanna never got in until ten-thirty. I was escorted down a hall to the room of a junior executive who needed a haircut and was chewing gum, and when I showed him the note I had from our client he said they would be glad to cooperate with the bereaved father of their late employee, and I could ask questions of any of the staff I cared to see, starting with him if I wanted to. But would I please tell him, had something new turned up? City detectives, three of them, had been there again yesterday, for hours, and now here was Nero Wolfe's Archie Goodwin. What was stirring? I told him something harmless and began on him.

The fact that Wolfe never leaves the office on business, unless there is an incentive more urgent than the prospect of a fee, such as saving his own skin, has a lot to do with the way I work. When I'm out on a case and get something helpful I like to recognize it before I deliver it to Wolfe, but as I left Scholl and Hanna's I couldn't see a crumb. It was hard to believe that I had spent nearly five hours in the office where Joan Wellman had worked, questioning everybody from the office boy to Hanna himself, without getting a single useful item, but that was how it looked. The one thing that tied in at all was an entry in the columns of a big book I had been shown. I give it with the column headings:

number: 16237

date: Oct. 2

name and address: Baird Archer, General Delivery,

Clinton Station, N. Y. City title: Put Not Your Trust detail: Novel 246 pp. postage enclosed: 630 read by: Joan Wellman disposition: Rejected ret'd. mail Oct. 27

That was my haul. The manuscript had been received by mail. No one had ever heard of Baird Archer, except for that entry. No one else had looked at the manuscript or remembered anything about it. If Joan had made any comment on it to anyone they had forgotten it. She had not mentioned the phone call from Baird Archer or her appointment with him. I could go on with negatives for a page.

When I reported to Wolfe that evening I told him, "It looks

to me as if we're all set. Two hundred and forty-six sheets of typewriter paper weigh a lot more than twenty-one ounces. Either he wrote on both sides, or he used thin light paper, or he didn't enclose enough postage. All we have to do is find out which and we've got him,"