Rex Stout - Murder by the Book

"Harlequin," he growled.

"Have you a better suggestion? From what I've brought in?"

"No."

"Did I get anything at all?"

"No."

"Okay. That's what I mean. Two days of me, nothing. Two days of the boys calling on typing services, nothing. At two hundred bucks a day, four C's of Wellman's money already gone. This would be all right for an agency or the cops, that's how they work, but it's not your way. I'll bet you a week's pay you haven't turned your brain on it once during the forty-eight hours!"

"On what?" he demanded. "I can't grapple, with a shadow. Get me something of him-a gesture, an odor, a word, a sound he made. Bring me something."

I had to admit, though of course not to him, that he had a point. You could say that Cramer had a trained army looking for Baird Archer, but it wouldn't mean much. They had no idea what he looked like. They had no evidence that anyone had ever known him, or even met him, by that name. There was no proof that Baird Archer had ever been anything but a name. It would be about the same if you just made up a name for a man, say Freetham Choade, and then tried to find him. After you look in the phone book, what do you do next?

I spent the rest of that week collecting some very interesting data about the quality and tone of publishers' offices. I learned that Simon and Schuster, in Rockefeller Center, had fallen hard for modern and didn't give a damn what it cost; that Harper and Brothers liked old desks and didn't care for ashtrays; that the Viking Press had a good eye for contours and comeliness when hiring female help; that The Macmillan Company had got itself confused with a Pullman car; and so on. L covered the whole trade, big and little, and the only concrete "result was a dinner date with a young woman at Scribner's who struck me as worth following up on the chance that she might have something I would like to know about. No one anywhere knew anything about a Baird Archer. If he had submitted the manuscript of "Put Not Your Trust" to any

other firm than Scholl and Hanna, there was no record or memory of it.

Over the weekend I had a couple of talks with Purley Steb-bins. If we were getting nowhere fast, so were the cops. They had uncovered a Baird Archer somewhere down in Virginia, but he was over eighty and couldn't read or write. Their big idea was to find some link between Leonard Dykes and Joan Wellman, and three of Cramer's best men were clawing away at it. When I reported that to Wolfe Sunday evening he snorted.

"Jackassery. I gave them the link."

"Yes, sir," I said sympathetically. "That was what tired you out."

"I am not tired out. 1 am not even tired."

"Then I lied to our client. The second time he called today I told him that you were exhausted with overwork on his case. I had to tell him something drastic because he's getting impatient. What's wrong with the beer? Too cold?"

"No. I am considering you. Most of these typing services are run by women, aren't they?"

"Not most. All."

"Then you will start on that tomorrow morning. You may be luckier than Saul and Fred and Orrie, but they will continue at it too. We'll finish that job before we try something else. Some of the women are surely young and personable. Don't overwork."

"I won't." I gazed at him admiringly. "It's uncanny, these flashes of inspiration you get. Absolutely brilliant!"

He exploded. "Confound it, what have I got? Get me something! Will you get me something?"

"Certainly." I was composed. "Drink your beer."

So the next day, Monday, after finishing the morning office chores, I took a geographical section of the list Saul and I had compiled, and went at it. The other three had covered downtown Manhattan up to Fourteenth Street, the Grand Central section, and the West Side from Fourteenth to Forty-second. That day Fred was in Brooklyn, Orrie in the Bronx, and Saul on the East Side. I took the West Side from Forty-second Street up. '¦"¦*

At ten-thirty I was in bedlam, having entered through a door inscribed broadway stenographic service. In a room big enough to accommodate comfortably five typewriter desks and typists, double that number were squeezed in, hitting the

keys at about twice my normal speed. I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf. "A woman like you should have a private room!" "I have," she said haughtily, and led me through a door in a partition to a cubbyhole. Since the partition was only six feet high, the racket bounced down on us off the ceiling. Two minutes later the woman was telling me, "We don't give out any information about clients. Our business is strictly confidential."

I had given her my business card. "So is ours!" I shouted. "Look, it's quite simple. Our client is a reputable firm of book publishers. They have a manuscript of a novel that was submitted to them, and they're enthusiastic about it and want to publish it, but the page of the script that had the author's name and address got lost somehow and can't be found. They remember the author's name, Baird Archer, but not the address, and they want to get in touch with him. They might not be so anxious if they didn't want to publish the novel, but they do. His name is not in any phone book. The manuscript came in the mail, unsolicited. They've advertised and got no answer. All I want to know, did you type a manuscript of a novel for a man named Baird Archer, probably last September? Sometime around then? The title of the novel was 'Put Not Your Trust.'"

She stayed haughty. "Last September? They've waited long enough to inquire."

"They've been trying to find him."

"If we typed it a page couldn't have got lost. It would have been fastened into one of our folders."

The boys had told me of running into that one. I nodded. "Yes, but editors don't like to read fastened scripts. They take the folders off. If you typed it for him, you can bet he would want you to help us find him. Give the guy a break."

She had remained standing. "All right," she said, "I'll look it up as soon as I get something straightened out." She left me.

I waited for her twenty minutes, and then another ten while she fussed through a card file. The answer was no. They had never done any work for a Baird Archer. I took an elevator up to the eighteenth floor, to the office of the Raphael Typing Service.

Those first two calls took me nearly an hour, and at that rate you can't cover much ground in a day. They were all kinds and sizes, from a big outfit in the Paramount Building

called Metropolitan Stenographers, Inc., down to two girls with their office in their room-bath-and-kitchenette in the upper Forties. For lunch I had canneloni at Sardi's, on John R. Wellman, and then resumed.

It was warm for February, but it was trying to make up its mind whether to go in for a steady drizzle, and around three o'clock, as I dodged through the sidewalk traffic to enter a building on Broadway in the Fifties, I was wishing I had worn my raincoat instead of my brown topcoat. My quarry in that building was apparently one of the small ones, since its name on my list was just the name of a woman, Rachel Abrams. The building was an old one, nothing fancy, with Caroline, women's dresses, on the left of the entrance, and the Midtown Eatery on the right. After stopping in the lobby to remove my topcoat and give it a shake, and consulting the building directory, I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The elevator man told me to go left for 728.