Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families (3 page)

It was a quiet Saturday morning in the office, with Wolfe up in the plant rooms as usual from nine to eleven, and I finished typing the report of a certain case with no interruptions except a couple of phone calls which I handled myself, and one for which I had to give Wolfe a buzz—from somebody at Mummiani’s on Fulton Street to say that they had just got eight pounds of fresh sausage from Bill Darst at Hackettstown, and Wolfe could have half of it. Since Wolfe regards Darst as the best sausage maker west of Cherbourg, he asked that it be sent immediately by messenger, and for heaven’s sake not with dry ice.

When, at 11:01, the sound of Wolfe’s elevator came, I got the big dictionary in front of me on my desk, opened to H, and was bent over it as he entered the office, crossed to his oversized custom-built chair, and sat. He didn’t bite at once because his mind was elsewhere. Even before he rang for beer he asked, “Has the sausage come?”

Without looking up I told him no.

He pressed the button twice—the beer signal—leaned back, and frowned at me. I didn’t see the frown, absorbed as I was in the dictionary, but it was in his tone of voice.

“What are you looking up?” he demanded.

“Oh, just a word,” I said casually. “Checking up on our client. I thought she was illiterate, her calling you handsome—remember? But, by gum, it was merely an understatement. Here it is, absolutely kosher: ‘Handsome: moderately large.’ For example it gives ‘a handsome sum of money.’ So she was dead right, you’re a handsome detective, meaning a moderately large detective.” I closed the dictionary and returned it to its place, remarking cheerfully, “Live and learn!”

It was a dud. Ordinarily that would have started him tossing phrases and adjectives, but he was occupied. Maybe he didn’t even hear me. When Fritz came from the kitchen with the beer, Wolfe, taking from a drawer the gold bottle opener that a pleased client had given him, spoke.

“Fritz, good news. We’re getting some of Mr. Darst’s sausage—four pounds.”

Fritz let his eyes gleam. “Ha! Today?”

“Any moment.” Wolfe poured beer. “That raises the question of cloves again. What do you think?”

“I’m against it,” Fritz said firmly.

Wolfe nodded. “I think I agree. I
think
I do. You may remember what Marko Vukcic said last year—and by the way, he must be invited for a taste of this. For Monday luncheon?”

“That would be possible,” Fritz conceded, “but we have arranged for shad with roe—”

“Of course.” Wolfe lifted his glass and drank, put it down empty, and used his handkerchief on his lips. That, he thought, was the only way for a man to scent a handkerchief. “We’ll have Marko for the sausage at Monday dinner, followed by duck Mondor.” He leaned forward and wiggled a finger. “Now about the shallots and fresh thyme: there’s no use depending
on Mr. Colson. We might get diddled again. Archie will have to go—”

At that point Archie had to go answer the doorbell, which I was glad to do. I fully appreciate, mostly anyhow, the results of Wolfe’s and Fritz’s powwows on grub when it arrives at the table, but the gab often strikes me as overdone. So I didn’t mind the call to the hall and the front door. There I found a young man with a pug nose and a package, wearing a cap that said, “Fleet Messenger Service.” I signed the slip, shut the door, started back down the hall, and was met not only by Fritz but by Wolfe too, who can move well enough when there’s something he thinks is worth moving for. He took the package from me and headed for the kitchen, followed by Fritz and me.

The small carton was sealed with tape. In the kitchen Wolfe put it on the long table, reached to the rack for a knife, cut the tape, and pulled the flaps up. My reflexes are quick, and the instant the hissing noise started I grabbed Wolfe’s arm to haul him back, yelling at Fritz, “Watch out! Drop!”

Wolfe can move all right, considering what he has to move. He and I were through the open door into the hall before the explosion came, and Fritz came bounding after, pulling the door with him. We all kept going, along the short stretch of hall to the office door, and into the office. There we stopped dead. No explosion yet.

“Come back here!” Wolfe commanded.

“Be quiet,” I commanded back, and dropped to my hands and knees and made it into the hall. There I stopped to sniff, crawled to within a yard of the crack under the kitchen door, and sniffed again.

I arose, returned to the office on my feet, and told
them, “Gas. Tear gas, I think. The hissing has stopped.”

Wolfe snorted.

“No sausage,” Fritz said grimly.

“If it had been a trigger job on a grenade,” I told him, “there would have been plenty of sausage. Not for us, of us. Now it’s merely a damn nuisance. You’d better sit here and chat a while.”

I marched to the hall and shut the door behind me, went and opened the front door wide, came back and stood at the kitchen door and took a full breath, opened the door, raced through and opened the back door into the courtyard, ran back again to the front. Even there the air current was too gassy for comfort, so I moved out to the stoop. I had been there only a moment when I heard my name called.

“Archie!”

I turned. Wolfe’s head with its big oblong face was protruding from a window of the front room.

“Yes, sir,” I said brightly.

“Who brought that package?”

I told him Fleet Messenger Service.

When the breeze through the hall had cleared the air I returned to the kitchen and Fritz joined me. We gave the package a look and found it was quite simple: a metal cylinder with a valve, with a brass rod that had been adjusted so that when the package was opened so was the valve. There was still a strong smell, close up, and Fritz took it to the basement. I went to the office and found Wolfe behind his desk, busy at the phone.

I dropped into my chair and dabbed at my runny eyes with my handkerchief. When he hung up I asked, “Any luck?”

“I didn’t expect any,” he growled.

“Right. Shall I call a cop?”

“No.”

I nodded. “The question was rhetorical.” I dabbed at my eyes some more, and blew my nose. “Nero Wolfe does not call cops. Nero Wolfe opens his own packages of sausage and makes his own enemies bite the dust.” I blew my nose again. “Nero Wolfe is a man who will go far if he opens one package too many. Nero Wolfe has never—”

“The question was not rhetorical,” Wolfe said rudely. “That is not what rhetorical means.”

“No? I asked it. I meant it to be rhetorical. Can you prove that I don’t know what rhetorical means?” I blew my nose. “When you ask me a question, which God knows is often, do I assume—”

The phone rang. One of the million things I do to earn my salary is to answer it, so I did. And then a funny thing happened. There is absolutely no question that it was a shock to me to hear that voice, I know that, because I felt it in my stomach. But partly what makes a shock a shock is that it is unexpected, and I do not think the sound of that voice in my ear was unexpected. I think that Wolfe and I had been sitting there talking just to hear ourselves because we both expected, after what had happened, to hear that voice sooner or later—and probably sooner.

What it said was only, “May I speak to Mr. Wolfe, please?”

I felt it in my stomach, sharp and strong, but damned if I was going to let him know it. I said, but not cordially, “Oh, hello there, if I get you. Was your name Duncan once?”

“Yes. Mr. Wolfe, please.”

“Hold the wire.” I covered the transmitter and told Wolfe, “Whosis.”

“Who?” he demanded.

“You know who from my face. Mr. X. Mr. Z. Him.”

With his lips pressed tight, Wolfe reached for his phone. “This is Nero Wolfe.”

“How do you do, Mr. Wolfe.” I was staying on, and the hard, cold, precise voice sounded exactly as it had the four previous times I had heard it, over a period of three years. It pronounced all its syllables clearly and smoothly. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.” Wolfe was curt. “What do you want?”

“I want to call your attention to my forbearance. That little package could have been something really destructive, but I preferred only to give you notice. As I told you about a year ago, it’s a more interesting world with you in it.”

“I find it so,” Wolfe said dryly.

“No doubt. Besides, I haven’t forgotten your brilliant exposure of the murderer of Louis Rony. It happened then that your interest ran with mine. But it doesn’t now, with Mrs. Barry Rackham, and that won’t do. Because of my regard for you, I don’t want you to lose a fee. Return her money and withdraw, and two months from today I shall send you ten thousand dollars in cash. Twice previously you have disregarded similar requests from me, and circumstances saved you. I advise strongly against a repetition. You will have to understand—”

Wolfe took the phone from his ear and placed it on the cradle. Since the effect of that would be lost if my line stayed open, I did likewise, practically simultaneously.

“By God, we’re off again,” I began. “Of all the rotten—”

“Shut up,” Wolfe growled.

I obeyed. He rested his elbows on his chair arms, interlaced his fingers in front of where he was roundest, and gazed at a corner of his desk blotter. I did not, as a matter of fact, have anything to say except that it was a lousy break, and that didn’t need saying. Wolfe had once ordered me to forget that I had ever heard the name Arnold Zeck, but whether I called him Zeck or Whosis or X, he was still the man who, some ten months ago, had arranged for two guys with an SM and a tommy gun to open up on Wolfe’s plant rooms from a roof across the street, thereby ruining ten thousand dollars’ worth of glass and equipment and turning eight thousand valuable orchid plants into a good start on a compost heap. That had been intended just for a warning.

Now he was telling us to lay off of Barry Rackham. That probably meant that without turning a finger we had found the answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question—where was her husband getting his pocket money? He had got inside the circle of Arnold Zeck’s operations, about which Wolfe had once remarked that all of them were illegal and some of them were morally repulsive. And Zeck didn’t want any snooping around one of his men. That was almost certainly the sketch, but whether it was or not, the fact remained that we had run smack into Zeck again, which was fully as bad as having a gob of Darst sausage turn into a cylinder of tear gas.

“He likes to time things right, damn him,” I complained. “He likes to make things dramatic. He had someone within range of this house to see the package being delivered, and when I left the front door
open and then went and stood on the stoop that showed that the package had been opened, and as soon as he got the word he phoned. Hell, he might even—”

I stopped because I saw that I was talking to myself. Wolfe wasn’t hearing me. He still sat gazing at the corner of the blotter. I shut my trap and sat and gazed at him. It was a good five minutes before he spoke.

“Archie,” he said, looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“How many cases have we handled since last July?”

“All kinds? Everything? Oh, forty.”

“I would have thought more. Very well, say forty. We crossed this man’s path inadvertently two years ago, and again last year. He and I both deal with crime, and his net is spread wide, so that may be taken as a reasonable expectation for the future: once a year, or in one out of forty cases that come to us, we will run into him. This episode will be repeated.” He aimed a thumb at the phone. “That thing will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both of us will probably get killed. Well?”

I shook my head. “It couldn’t be made plainer. I don’t care much for either one.”

“Neither do I.”

“If you got killed I’d be out of a job, and if I got killed you might as well retire.” I glanced at my wristwatch. “The hell of it is we haven’t got a week to decide. It’s twelve-twenty, and I’m expected at
the Hillside Kennels at three o’clock, and I have to eat lunch and shave and change my clothes. That is, if I go. If I go?”

“Precisely,” Wolfe sighed. “That’s point two. Two years ago, in the Orchard case, I took to myself the responsibility of ignoring this man’s threat. Last year, in the Kane case, I did the same. This time I don’t want to and I won’t. Basic policy is my affair, I know that, but I am not going to tell you that in order to earn your pay you must go up there today and look at Mr. Rackham. If you prefer, you may phone and postpone it, and we’ll consider the matter at greater length.”

I had my brows raised at him. “I’ll be damned. Put it on me, huh?”

“Yes. My nerve is gone. If public servants and other respected citizens take orders from this man, why shouldn’t I?”

“You damn faker,” I said indulgently. “You know perfectly well that I would rather eat soap than have you think I would knuckle under to that son of a bitch, and I know that you would rather put horseradish on oysters than have me think you would. I might if you didn’t know about it, and you might if I didn’t know about it, but as it is we’re stuck.”

Wolfe sighed again, deeper. “I take it that you’re going?”

“I am. But under one condition, that the trepidant vigilance begins as of now. That you call Fritz in, and Theodore down from the plant rooms, and tell them what we’re up against, and the chain bolts are to be kept constantly on both doors, and you keep away from windows, and nothing and no one is to be allowed to enter when I’m not here.”

“Good heavens,” he objected sourly, “that’s no way to live.”

“You can’t tell till you try it. In ten years you may like it fine.” I buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to get Theodore.

Wolfe sat scowling at me.

W
hen, swinging the car off the Taconic State Parkway to hit Route 100, my dash clock said only 2:40, I decided to make a little detour. It would be only a couple of miles out of my way. So at Pines Bridge I turned right, instead of left across the bridge. It wouldn’t serve my purpose to make for the entrance to the estate where
EASTCREST
was carved on the great stone pillar, since all I would see there was a driveway curving up through the woods, and I turned off a mile short of that to climb a bumpy road up a hill. At the top the road went straight for a stretch between meadows, and I eased the car off onto the grass, stopped, and took the binoculars and aimed them at the summit of the next hill, somewhat higher than the one I was on, where the roof and upper walls of a stone mansion showed above the trees. Now, in early April, with no leaves yet, and with binoculars, I could see most of the mansion and even something of the surrounding grounds, and a couple of men moving about.