Rex Stout: The Doorbell Rang (The Rex Stout Library)

He was at a desk between two windows, taking a bite from a sandwich. Two steps in I stopped and said, "But I don't want to butt in on your lunch."

He chewed the bite, sizing me up through his rimless cheaters. His neat little face was the kind that doesn't register unless you make a point of it. When the bite was down he took a sip of coffee from a paper cup and said, "Someone always butts in. What's this about Nero Wolfe and information? What kind of information?" He took a bite of the sandwich, lox on white toast.

I went to a chair near the end of his desk and sat. "You may already have it," I said. "It's in connection with a government contract."

He chewed and swallowed and asked, "Is Nero Wolfe working for the government?"

"No. He's working for a private client. The client is interested in the fact that after a security check of an officer of your company the government has canceled a contract, or is about to. That's a matter of public interest, and-"

"Who is the client?"

"I can't name him. It's confidential, and-"

"Is it anyone connected with this company?"

"No. Not in any way. As I was saying, Mr Evers, the public interest is involved, you realize that. If the right to make security checks is being abused so that the personal or property rights of citizens are being violated, that isn't just a private matter. Mr Wolfe's client is concerned with that aspect of it. Anything you tell me will be strictly confidential and will be used only with your permission. Naturally you don't want to lose your contract, we understand it's a big one, but also as a citizen you don't want to see any injustice done. From the standpoint of Mr Wolfe's client, that's the issue.

He had put the sandwich down, what was left of it, and was eying me. "You said you had information. What?"

"Well, we thought it possible that you didn't know that the contract is going to be canceled."

"A hundred people know that. What else?"

"Apparently the reason for the cancelation is that the security check on your senior vice-president uncovered certain facts about his personal life. That raises two questions: how accurate are the so-called facts, and do they actually make him or your company a security risk? Is he, and are you, getting a raw deal?"

"What else?"

"That's it. I should think that's enough, Mr Evers. If you don't want to discuss it with me, discuss it with Mr Wolfe himself. If you don't know about his standing and reputation, check on it. He told me to make it clear that if you get any benefit from anything he does he would expect no payment of any kind. He isn't looking for a client; he has one."

He was frowning at me. "I don't get it. The client-is it a newspaper?"

"No."

"A magazine? Time?"

"No." I decided to stretch my instructions a little. "I can only tell you it's a private citizen who thinks the FBI is getting too big for its britches."

"I don't believe it. And I damn well don't like it." He pushed a button on a slab. "Are you FBI?"

I said no and was going on, but the door opened and a woman was there, the one who had led me in, and Evers snapped at her, "See this man out, Miss Bailey. Into the elevator."

I objected. I said that if he discussed it with Nero Wolfe the worst that could happen would be losing his contract, and evidently it was lost anyway, and if there was any chance of saving it- But the look on his face showed me it was no good, as he reached for the slab to push another button. No sale and no hope for one. I got up and walked out, with the woman tagging, and found, out in the ante-room, that it just wasn't my day. As I entered, the elevator door opened and a man came out, and it wasn't a stranger. Working on a case about a year ago I had had dealings with a G-man named Morrison, and there he was. Our eyes met, and then we met. As he offered a hand he spoke. "Well, well. Is Nero Wolfe using electronics now?"

I gave him a friendly grip and a grin. "Oh," I said, "we try to keep up. We're going to bug a certain building on Sixty-ninth Street." I stepped to the elevator and pushed the button. "I'm getting the latest angles."

He laughed to be polite and said he guessed they'd have to do all their talking in code. The elevator door opened, and I entered and the door slid shut. It certainly wasn't my day. Not that it mattered much, since I had got nowhere with Evers, but it's always bad to have the breaks going wrong, and God knows if we ever needed the breaks we did then. I was walking on hard pavement, not air, as I emerged to the sidewalk and turned uptown.

It had been more than twenty minutes, and Al had gone. There are plenty of taxis on First Avenue at that hour, and I flagged one and gave the backie an address.

4

At a quarter to eleven that Wednesday night, pessimistic and pooped, I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and pushed the button. With the chain bolt on I had to be let in. When Fritz came he asked if I wanted some warmed-up curried duck, and I growled the no. I shed my hat and coat and went to the office, and there was the oversized genius at his desk, in the chair made to order for his seventh of a ton, with a bottle of beer and a glass on the tray, comfortably reading his current book, The Treasure of Our Tongue, by Lincoln Barnett. I went to my desk and whirled my chair and sat. He would look up when he finished a paragraph.

He did. He even inserted his bookmark, a thin strip of gold given him years before by a client who couldn't afford it, and put the book down. "You have dined, of course," he said.

"Dined, no." I crossed my legs. "Excuse me for waving my legs around. I ate something greasy, I forget what, in a dump in the Bronx. It has been-"

"Fritz will warm the duck, and-"

"No he won't. I told him not to. It has been by far the lousiest day I have ever had and I'll finish it up right. I'll report in full and go to bed tasting grease. First, the-"

"Confound it, you must eat!"

"I say no. First, the client."

I gave it to him verbatim, and the action, including the two men in the parked car of which I had the license number. At the end I added some opinions: that [a] it would be wasting a dime to bother to check the license number, [b] Sarah Dacos could probably be crossed off, or at least filed for future reference, and [c] whatever dirt there might be under cover in the Bruner family, the lid was still on as far as the client knew. When I got up to hand him the paper Mrs Bruner had signed he merely glanced at it and said to put it in the safe.

I also gave him the Evers thing verbatim, of course including Morrison. My only opinion on that was that I hadn't handled it right, that I should have told him we had secret information he didn't have and couldn't get, and we might be able to put on pressure that would save his contract, and if we did we would expect to be paid. Of course it would have been risky, but it might have opened him up. Wolfe shook his head and said it would have made us too vulnerable. I rose and circled around his desk to the stand that held the dictionary, opened it and found what I wanted, and returned to my chair.

"Capable of being wounded," I said. "Liable to attack or injury. That's what 'vulnerable' means. It would be quite a trick to get any more vulnerable than we are now. But to finish the day. It took me all afternoon to run down Ernst Muller, who is charged with conspiring to transport stolen property across state lines and is out on bail, and he was even worse than Evers. He had the idea of slugging me, and he wasn't alone, so I had to react, and I may have broken his arm. Then-"