Rex Stout: The Final Deduction

“Mr Goodwin?”

“I thought I said so.”

“This is Althea Vail. I want to speak to Mr Wolfe.”

“Impossible, Mrs Vail. Not before breakfast. If it’s urgent, tell me. Have you-”

“My husband is back! Safe and sound!”

“Good. Wonderful. Is he there with you?”

“No, he’s at our country place. He just phoned, ten minutes ago. He’s going to bathe and change and eat and then come to town. He’s all right, perfectly all right. Why I’m phoning, he promised them he would say nothing, absolutely nothing, for forty-eight hours, and I’m not to say anything either. I didn’t tell him I had gone to Nero Wolfe; I’ll wait till he gets here. Of course I don’t want Mr Wolfe to say anything. Or you. That’s why I’m phoning. You’d tell him?”

“Yes. With pleasure. You’re sure it was your husband on the phone?”

“Certainly I’m sure!”

“Fine. Whether the notice helped or not. Will you give us a ring when your husband arrives?”

She said she would, and we hung up. The radio clicked on, and a voice came: “… has five convenient offices in New York, one at the-” I reached and turned it off. When I get to bed after midnight I set it for eight o’clock, the news bulletins on WQXR, but I didn’t need any more news at the moment. I had a satisfactory stretch and yawn, said aloud, “What the hell, no matter what Jimmy Vail says we can say Mr Knapp must have seen it,” yawned again, and faced the fact that it takes will power to get on your feet.

With nothing pending I took my time, and it was after eight-thirty when I descended the two flights to the ground floor, entered the kitchen, told Fritz good morning, picked up my glass of orange juice, took a healthy sip, and felt my stomach saying thanks. I had considered stopping at Wolfe’s room on the way down but had vetoed it. He would have been in the middle of breakfast, since Fritz takes his tray up at eight-fifteen.

“No allspice in the sausage,” Fritz said. “It would be an insult. The best Mr Howie has ever sent us.”

“Then double my order.” I swallowed juice. “You give me good news, so I’ll give you some. The woman that came yesterday gave us a job, and it’s already done. All over. Enough to pay your salary and mine for months.”

“ Fort bien .” He spooned batter on the griddle. “You did it last night?”

“No. He did it sitting down.”

“Yes? But he would do nothing without you to piquer .”

“How do you spell that?”

He spelled it. I said, “I’ll look it up,” put my empty glass down, went to the table against the wall where my copy of the Times was on the rack, and sat. I kept an eye on my watch, and at 8:57, when I had downed the last bite of my first griddle cake and my second sausage, I reached for the house phone and buzzed Wolfe’s room.

His growl came. “Yes?”

“Good morning. Mrs Vail called an hour ago. Her husband had just phoned from their house in the country. He’s at large and intact and will come to town as soon as he cleans up and feeds. He promised someone, presumably Mr Knapp, that neither he nor his wife will make a peep for forty-eight hours, and she wants us to keep the lid on.”

“Satisfactory.”

“Yeah. Nice and neat. But I’ll be taking a walk, to the bank to deposit her checks, and it’s only five more blocks to the Gazette . It’s bound to break soon, and I could give it to Lon Cohen to hold until we give the word. He’d hold it, you know that, and he would deeply appreciate it.”

“No.”

“You mean he wouldn’t hold it?”

“No. He has shown that he can be trusted. But I haven’t seen Mr Vail, nor have you. It’s useful to have Mr Cohen in our debt, but no. Perhaps later in the day.” He hung up. He would be two minutes late getting to the plant rooms on the roof. As Fritz brought my second cake and pair of sausages I said, “For a bent nickel I’d go up and peekay him.”

He patted my shoulder and said, “Now, Archie. If you should, you will. If you shouldn’t, you won’t.”

I buttered the cake. “I think that’s a compliment. It’s tricky. I’ll study it.”

For the next couple of hours, finishing breakfast and the Times (the notice was on page twenty-six), opening the mail, dusting our desks, removing yesterday’s orchids and putting fresh water in the vase, walking to the bank and back, and doing little miscellaneous office chores, I considered the situation off and on. It seemed pretty damn silly, being hired in connection with something as gaudy as the kidnaping of Jimmy Vail, merely to put an ad in the paper and collect a fee and then call it a day. But what else? I’m more than willing to peekay Wolfe when there’s any point or profit to it, but with Jimmy Vail back in one piece the job Wolfe had been hired for was done, so what? As soon as it broke, an army of cops and FBI scientists would be after Mr Knapp, and they’d probably get him sooner or later. We were done, except for one little detail, to see Jimmy Vail whole. Mrs Vail had said she would give us a ring when he arrived, and I would go up and ask him if Mr Knapp had shown him the Gazette with the notice in it.

I didn’t have to. At 11:25 the doorbell rang. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and gone to his desk, put a spray of Oncidium marshallianum in the vase, torn yesterday from his desk calendar, and gone through the mail, and was dictating a long letter to an orchid collector in Guatemala. He hates to be interrupted when he’s doing something really important, but Fritz was upstairs, so I went, and there he was on the stoop. I told Wolfe, “Jimmy Vail in person,” and went and opened the door, and he said, “Maybe you know me? I know you.” He stepped in. “You’re a hell of a good dancer.”

I told him he was too, which was true, took his coat and hat and put them on the rack, and took him to the office, and he crossed to Wolfe’s desk, stood, and said, “I know you don’t shake hands. I once offered to fight a man because he called you a panjandrum; of course I knew he was yellow. I’m Jimmy Vail. May I sit down? Preferably in the red leather chair. There it is.” He went and sat, rested his elbows on the chair arms, crossed his legs, and said, “If I belch you’ll have to pardon me. I had nothing but cold canned beans for two days and three nights, and I overdid it on the bacon and eggs. My wife has told me about hiring you. Never has so much been spent on so little. Naturally I don’t like being called my wife’s property-who would?-but I realize you had to. I only saw it when my wife showed it to me, and I don’t know whether they saw it or not. Is that important?”

You wouldn’t have thought, looking at him and listening to him, that he had just spent sixty hours in the clutches of kidnapers, living on cold beans, and maybe not long to live even on beans, but of course he had cleaned up and had a meal, and the talk I had heard had never included any suggestion that he was a softy. His face was dead white, but it always was, and smooth and neat as it always was, and his dark eyes were bright and clear.

“It would be helpful to know,” Wolfe said, “but it isn’t vital. You came to tell me that? That you don’t know?”