Rex Stout - And be a Villian

Also the matter of arranging for Nancylee Shepherd to come and be processed, but on that we were temporarily stymied. We knew all about her: she was sixteen, she lived with her parents at 829 Wixley Avenue in the Bronx, she had light yellow hair and grey eyes, and her father worked in a storage warehouse. They had no phone, so at four Wednesday, when Miss Fraser had left and Wolfe had gone up to the plants, I got the car from the garage and drove to the Bronx. 829 Wixley Avenue was the kind of apartment house where people live not because they want to, but because they have to. It should have been ashamed of itself and probably was. There was no click when I pushed the button marked Shepherd, so I went to the basement and dug up the janitor. He harmonized well with the building. He said I was way behind time if I expected to get any effective results-that's what he said-pushing the Shepherd button. They had been gone three days now. No, not the whole family, Mrs Shepherd and the girl. He didn't know where they had gone, and neither did anyone else around there. Some thought they had skipped, and some thought the cops had 'em. He personally thought they might be dead. No, not Mr Shepherd too. He came home from work every afternoon a little after five, and left every morning at half-past six.

A glance at my wrist showing me ten to five, I offered the animal a buck to stick around the front and give me a sign when Shepherd showed up, and the look in his eye told me that I had wasted at least four bits of the clients' money.

It wasn't a long wait. When Shepherd appeared I saw that it wouldn't have been necessary to keep the janitor away from his work, for from the line of the eyebrows it was about as far up to the beginning of his hair as it was down to the point of his chin, and a sketchy description would have been enough. Whoever designs the faces had lost all sense of proportion. As he was about to enter the vestibule I got in front of him and asked without the faintest touch of condescension: “Mr Shepherd?”

“Get out,” he snarled.

“My name's Goodwin and I'm working for Miss Madeline Fraser. I understand your wife and daughter-”

“Get out!”

“But I only want-”

“Get out!”

He didn't put a hand on me or shoulder me, and I can't understand yet how he got past me to the vestibule without friction, but he did, and got his key in the door. There were of course a dozen possible courses for me, anything from grabbing his coat and holding on to plugging him in the jaw, but while that would have given me emotional release it wouldn't have got what I wanted. It was plain that as long as he was conscious he wasn't going to tell me where Nancylee was, and unconscious he couldn't. I passed.

I drove back down to Thirty-fifth Street, left the car at the kerb, went in to the office, and dialled Madeline Fraser's number. Deborah Koppel answered, and I asked her: “Did you folks know that Nancylee has left home? With her mother?”

Yes, she said, they knew that “You didn't mention it when you were here this morning. Neither did Miss Fraser this afternoon.”

“There was no reason to mention it, was there? We weren't asked.”

“You were asked about Nancylee, both of you.”

“But not if she had left home or where she is.”

“Then may I ask you now? Where is she?”

“I don't know.”

“Does Miss Fraser?”

“No. None of us knows.”

“How did you know she was gone?”

“She phoned Miss Fraser and told her she was going.”

“When was that?”

“That was…that was Sunday.”

“She didn't say where she was going?”

“No.”

That was the best I could get. When I was through trying and had hung up, I sat and considered. There was a chance that Purley Stebbins of Homicide would be in the mood for tossing me a bone, since Cramer had been spending nickels on us, but if I asked him for it he would want to make it a trade, and I had nothing to offer. So when I reached for the phone again it wasn't that number, but the Gazette's, that I dialled.

Lon Cohen immediately got personal. Where, he wanted to know, had I got the idea that an open Press release made an entry in my credit column?

I poohed him. “Some day, chum, you'll get a lulu. Say in six months, the way we're going. A newspaper is supposed to render public service, and I want some.

Did you know that Nancylee Shepherd and her mother have blown?”

“Certainly. The father got sore because she was mixed up in a murder case. He damn' near killed two photographers. Father has character.”

“Yeah, I've met Father. What did he do with his wife and daughter, bury them?”

“Shipped 'em out of town. With Cramer's permission, as we got it here, and of course Cramer knew where but wasn't giving out. Naturally we thought it an outrage. Is the great public, are American people, to be deceived and kept in ignorance? No. You must have had a hunch, because we just got it here-it came in less than an hour ago. Nancylee and her mother are at the Ambassador in Atlantic City, sitting-room, bedroom, and bath.”

“You don't say. Paid for by?”

He didn't know. He agreed that it was intolerable that the American people, of whom I was one, should be uninformed of so vital a point, and before he hung up he said he would certainly do something about it.

When Wolfe came down to the office I reported developments. At the same time we still had three more to overhaul, but it was already apparent that we were going to need all we could get, so Wolfe told me to get Saul Panzer on the phone. Saul wasn't in, but an hour later he called back.

Saul Panzer free-lances. He has no office and doesn't need one. He is so good that he demands, and gets, double the market, and any day of the week he gets so many offers that he can pick as he pleases. I have never known him to turn Wolfe down except when he was so tied up he couldn't shake loose.

He took this on. He would take a train to Atlantic City that evening, sleep there, and in the morning persuade Mrs Shepherd to let Nancylee come to New York for a talk with Wolfe. He would bring her, with Mother if necessary.

As Wolfe was finishing with Saul, Fritz entered with a tray. I looked at him with surprise, since Wolfe seldom takes on beer during the hour preceding dinner, but then, as he put the tray on the desk, I saw it wasn't beer. It was a bottle of Starlite, with three glasses. Instead of turning to leave, Fritz stood by.

“It may be too cold,” Fritz suggested.

With a glance of supercilious distaste at the bottle, Wolfe got the opener from his top drawer, removed the cap, and started pouring.

“It seems to me,” I remarked, “like a useless sacrifice. Why suffer? If Orchard had never drunk Starlite before he wouldn't know whether it tasted right or not, and even if he didn't like it they were on the air and just for politeness he would have gulped some down.” I took the glass that Fritz handed me, a third full. “Anyway he drank enough to kill him, so what does it matter what we think?”

“He may have drunk it before.” Wolfe held the glass to his nose, sniffed, and made a face. “At any rate, the murderer had to assume that he might have. Would the difference in taste be too great a hazard?”

“I see.” I sipped. “Not so bad.” I sipped again. “The only way we can really tell is to drink this and then drink some cyanide. Have you got some?”

“Don't bubble, Archie.” Wolfe put his glass down after two little tastes. “Good heavens. What the devil is in it, Fritz?”

Fritz shook his head. “Ipecac?” he guessed. “Horehound? Would you like some sherry?”

“No. Water. I'll get it.” Wolfe got up, marched to the hall, and turned toward the kitchen. He believes in some good healthy exercise before dinner.

That evening, Wednesday, our victims were first Elinor Vance and then Nathan Traub. It was more than three hours after midnight when Wolfe finally let Traub go, which made two nights in a row.

Thursday morning at eleven we started on Tully Strong. In the middle of it, right at noon, there was a phone call from Saul Panzer. Wolfe took it, giving me the sign to stay on. I knew from the tone of Saul's voice, just pronouncing my name, that he had no bacon.

“I'm at the Atlantic City railroad station,” Saul said, “and I can either catch a train to New York in twenty minutes or go jump in the ocean, whichever you advise. I couldn't get to Mrs Shepherd just by asking, so I tried a trick but it didn't work. Finally she and the daughter came down to the hotel lobby, but I thought it would be better to wait until they came outside, if they came, and they did. My approach was one that has worked a thousand times, but it didn't with her. She called a cop and wanted him to arrest me for annoying her. I made another try later; on the phone again, but four words was as far as I got. Now it's no use. This is the third time I've flopped on you in ten years, and that's too often. I don't want you to pay me, not even expenses.”

“Nonsense.” Wolfe never gets riled with Saul. “You can give me the details later, if there are any I should have. Will you reach New York in time to come to the office at six o'clock?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Do that.”

Wolfe resumed with Traub. As I have already mentioned, the climax of that two hours' hard work was when Traub confessed that he frequently bet on horse races.

As soon as he had gone Wolfe and I went to the dining-room for the lunch previously described, corn fritters with autumn honey, sausages, and a bowl of salad. Of course what added to his misery was the fact that Savarese was expected at two o'clock, because he likes to have the duration of a meal determined solely by the inclination of him and the meal, not by some extraneous phenomenon like the sound of a doorbell.

But the bell rang right on the dot.

You have heard of the exception that proves the rule. Professor F. O. Savarese was it.

The accepted rule is that an Italian is dark and, if not actually a runt, at least not tall; that a professor is dry and pedantic, with eye trouble; and that a mathematician really lives in the strato- sphere and is here just visiting relatives. Well, Savarese was an Italian-American professor of mathematics, but he was big and blond and buoyant, two inches taller than me, and he came breezing in like a March morning wind.

He spent the first twenty minutes telling Wolfe and me how fascinating and practical it would be to work out a set of mathematical formulas that could be used in the detective business. His favourite branch of mathematics, he said, was the one that dealt with the objective numerical measurement of probability.

Very well. What was any detective work, any kind at all, but, the objective measurement of probability? All he proposed to do was to add the word numerical, not as a substitute or replacement, but as an ally and reinforcement.

“I'll show you what I mean,” he offered. “May I have a paper and pencil?”

He had bounded over to me before I could even uncross my legs, took the pad and pencil I handed him, and bounded back to the red leather chair. When the pencil had jitterbugged on the pad for half a minute he tore off the top sheet and slid it across the desk to Wolfe, then went to work on the next sheet and in a moment tore that off and leaped to me with it.

“You should each have one,” he said, “so you can follow me.”

I wouldn't try to pretend I could put it down from memory, but I still have both those sheets, in the folder marked ORCHARD, and this is what is on them:

I м ж X XІ ц ь u = - н I - Ѕ k з - - ј - ч э e - Ѕ XІ¤DІ V2pD о и D DІ ш ю “That,” Savarese said, his whole face smiling with eager interest and friendliness and desire to help, “is the second approximation of the normal law of error, sometimes called the generalized law of error. Let's apply it to the simplest kind of detective problem, say the question which one of three servants in a house stole a diamond ring from a locked drawer. I should explain that X is the deviation from the mean, D is the standard deviation, kis-”