Rex Stout (2 page)

She was staring at him. She said, incredulous, “My goodness. I didn’t know you ever got upset like that.”

“I don’t.” He was crisp again. “But this … forget it. Until tonight, anyhow. You’ll be at Birchhaven?”

She nodded. “Later. We’re going to play tennis at Martin’s, and dinner, and I’ll come over with Janet. Is it money? I mean the murder you’re cooking up. Because I suppose I still have a lot.…”

“No. It isn’t money.” He was gazing at her dismally. “God bless you, my dear, and thank you.…”

“Stop it! Softy again? Don’t do that!”

“I’m not being soft. I’m merely remembering that you insisted on buying two thousand shares of our treasury corporation stock at a time when—”

“But why remember it? Anyway, I didn’t lose anything, did I?”

“No, thank God, at the market you show a profit—”

“Then forget it.” She smiled at him. “P. L. darling. You’d better forget about that murder too.” She arose to her feet and permitted the smile to become more devastating. “That’s the first time I ever saw you brought to a boil … you’ll have to make it a pretty good one. I doubt if Janet and I will get over much before ten, you know what dinner is like at Martin’s place—and I’m already sick of pheasant, he’ll have to give that up after we’re married.” She glanced at her wrist. “Good Lord, I’ve spoiled your morning.” She moved toward the door, fluttering a hand at him. “I’ll tell Dol it’s okay with her three points.”

“Sylvia!” Storrs snapped from his chair. “Come back here.”

She raised innocent brows. “What?”

“You come back here.” He glared at her. “You know very well I’m on to your tricks. You will tell Miss Bonner nothing of the sort. I haven’t agreed to that, and I won’t. You know what was said yesterday. Your connection with
that abom—with that enterprise, is to be severed completely and finally.”

She stood stiff and frowned at him. “P. L., I don’t really like that tone, you know. I suppose it was all right when I was a kid, but now that I’ve learned the multiplication table … after all, in six months …”

“I know. You’ll be twenty-one in March.” Storrs suddenly struck the table with his fist. “Damn it, Sylvia! Must I tell you again? My tone is my tone and you know it. I relinquish absolutely all claim to any authority, though there is still six months before you come of age. Look at you! My God, look at you! I have felt for three years that to assert authority over you would be like … like … it would be nonsense. History and fiction are full of instances where an elderly guardian has fallen—”

“You’re not elderly.”

He glared at her. “I’m fifty-three. Middle-aged? What’s the difference? Where an elderly guardian has fallen in love with his ward. I haven’t fallen in love with you, but it wouldn’t take me long if my idiotic wife and daughter would go off to India, where they belong, and give me a chance to get something done besides selling these damned chemicals. I haven’t fallen in love with you, but you know damned well that you are the one person anywhere that I love. You were five years old when your parents died. I’ve been a pretty good guardian. You’re healthy and you’re beautiful, and you’ve never been run over and you’ve never been kidnaped, and you’re worth over three million dollars. What is most important, the connections between your brain and your other organs are still intact. Then what happens?”

“All right, P. L., you don’t need—”

“What happens is that a Wall Street gambler loses his shirt and kills himself, and because his daughter is an old friend of yours, you want to help her out. Fine so far. But she turns out to be a worse freak than her father, and she talks you into going into partnership with her—”

“She didn’t talk me in—”

“Partnership with her to start a detective agency! That was bad enough, it was intolerable. Then she feels she
needs some publicity. Naturally. Pah! She arranges to have it splashed all over a newspaper—”

“She did
not
arrange—”

“All over a newspaper! You’ve seen it. Not only her picture and her history, but your picture and your history, and as if that wasn’t enough, by heaven,
my
picture, and
my
history, as the guardian of a lady detective! You will be interested to know that I have threatened the Gazette with a suit for libel, and have at least had the satisfaction of knowing that the man who got it up has been fired.”

“You haven’t! P. L.! It was Len Chisholm, I told you, he needed—”

“He can go on needing! You, Sylvia, you say you don’t like my tone. I claim no authority over you. Not the slightest. I claim no gratitude for my efficiency as a guardian—I’ve probably enjoyed it more than you have. I claim nothing. I speak only as a friend so old that I once built a wading pool for you with my own hands and then put on a bathing suit and sat down in it with you. Merely as an old friend who loves you. What I say is that if you continue to have any connection whatever, financial or personal, with this damned detective business, it will be against my will and my wish, and in spite of my absolute disapproval and my strongest indignation. I add, that if you disregard my wishes and do it anyway, I shall continue to enjoy as much of your society as you can spare for me, and I shall love you no less—probably more in fact, as times goes on, if I get a chance.”

Sylvia had frowned at him throughout. She demanded: “Is that final?”

“Absolutely final.” He scowled. “Over my dead body.”

“Damn.” She compressed her lips, and after a moment lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “You’re too clever for me. I might have known you would be. I hope your hay fever is worse this weekend. See you tonight.”

She went out on her happy young legs, not quite so happy.

Down on the sidewalk, in the fine September morning, now approaching noon, she decided to walk. East to Fifth Avenue, and then north, she swung along, still frowning. She was regarding herself as put upon, and the devil of it
was that there was no one to blame. She nodded vaguely to two young women who spoke to her as they passed, and, a block further on, to an oldish gentleman who bowed in his stride. She knew how Dol would take it; there would be no blame there, either. The avenue was bright in the sun, and, while the Saturday crowd was of course anything but fashionable, it was certainly not dowdy either in apparel or in spirits. She loved the thousand glances at faces and clothes which the avenue afforded.

Near 44th Street she suddenly brought up short, side-stepped, and stopped square in the path of a man who was plodding along like a tractor. She stood with her nose a foot below his large-scale non-committal face, and smiled up at him as he lifted an enormous hand and clumsily removed an old black derby.

“Delk! How odd to run into you this way! I suppose you’re working?”

“Yeah. I’m on a job.”

“Tailing?”

“Naw, I’m just looking up some things.”

“The smallpox case?”

“Naw, just some junk about a dress a lady never got.”

“Oh. It doesn’t sound very exciting. Of course, that would depend on the dress. I mustn’t keep you. I stopped you—I just saw you and took the opportunity to tell you how pleasant it has been to be associated with you—I mean, it has been a lot of fun—”

The man opened his eyes and demanded from the side of his mouth, “Been?”

“Yes—but of course I shouldn’t have said that until—you’ll understand later—hey! Bart!” She darted aside. “Bart!” She came back with a young man by the arm, a young man who would obviously feel that he would have to have his coat pressed because the sleeve had been pulled at. Sylvia said, “I want you to meet—Mr. Delk, Mr. Travister. Bart you fool. You two should have a lot in common. Talk it over. ’Bye.”

She went off without looking back. At 47th Street she turned right, and on Park Avenue entered the lobby of an enormous business hive, took an elevator, and left it at the 32nd floor. A long walk down a corridor, and two turns,
took her to a door before which she stopped. She stood and looked at the inscription on it:

BONNER & RAFFRAY, INC.
DETECTIVES

“Damn,” she muttered, and opened the door and went in.

The ante-room was small, but neat and handsome. The walls were greenish cream, the lighting indirect, the floor’s rubber tiling dark maroon; chairs and a small table and a garment rack were of red and black lacquer with chromium-plated trim, and so was the desk at one end and the telephone switchboard, of toy dimensions, which rested on it; the switchboard alone, specially constructed, had cost a hundred dollars of Raffray money. There were two other doors, near the corners of the partition wall facing the entrance; the glass panel of the one on the left bore the legend, in slim elegant block letters in gold: MISS BONNER. The other said: MISS RAFFRAY.

Sylvia said, “Hullo.”

The girl seated behind the desk, obviously a Mediterranean, with a dark, pleasant face and black hair slick on her head, nodded amiably and professionally. “Good morning, Miss Raffray.”

“Miss Bonner in?”

The girl nodded. “In her room. Mr. Foltz and Mr. Pratt are with her.”

“Oh! Mr. Foltz came? I thought …” She crossed to the door on the left, tapped on it with her knuckles, opened it and went in.

“Hello, Sylvia.” That greeting was from Theodolinda
Bonner, Dol to a few, from her chair at her desk. The chair might as well have been a stool, for she sat straight without touching the back, as usual. Her curious caramel-colored eyes flashed a glance at her friend and partner from under coal-black lashes—seeming blacker from the cream-tinted transparency of the smooth skin of her rather narrow face.

“Sylvia! Where’ve you been—” That was from Martin Foltz, as he sprang to his feet to take Sylvia’s hands. His own hands were shy and nervous; so were his gray eyes as he leaned to her. His gesture was at once proprietary and unassuming; it was certainly not assertive. Syliva, her hand released, patted at his hair.

The third greeting, from Silky Pratt, was merely an unheeded mumble. Silky sat in the small chair at the far end of the desk, and stayed in it. He was small and unprepossessing and appeared to be negligible, unless you were observant enough to catch a glimpse of the cleverness in his sharp little eyes.

Martin Foltz, having pulled up a chair for Sylvia and resumed his own, was replying to a question from her: “Yes, I know I said I’d come in Monday, but I changed—I decided to come today.” His eyes, nervous and distressed, glanced at Dol Bonner, then back at his fiancée. “They—he came last night. It happened again.”

“What!” Sylvia gasped. Her tone was horrified: “Martin! It didn’t!”

He nodded. Dol Bonner said, low from her throat but briskly, “Yes. We were discussing it. Pratt just got here. I’m going to put him on it—that is, if you agree—”

Sylvia demanded, “Rabbits or pheasants?”

“Four pheasants. Mongolians. In a shelter roost.”

“How awful!” Sylvia was on the edge of her chair. “I tell you, Martin, the only thing is to wire the whole place with alarms, runs and all. Either that or get rid of them.”

Foltz shook his head. “You know … getting rid of them … and wiring everything would cost too much. We went into that before. Anyway … whoever it is, he’s so confounded slick …”

“But good Lord, you can’t let it go on indefinitely! It’s—” Sylvia shivered a little. “It’s revolting! Of course they get killed anyway, but there’s something ghastly about it—”

Dol Bonner put in, “We were discussing it. Do you want to hear me instruct Pratt, and see what you think?”

“But, Dol, you had Delk—and that other man, the one with gold teeth—” Sylvia stopped, and sat back. “All right. Shoot.”

Dol Bonner raised her hand and with the tip of her forefinger touched lightly, twice, a tiny black spot on the smooth skin covering the jawbone, below her right ear. It was not an old-fashioned court-plaster decoration, but her natural property, and was generally considered a distinction rather than a blemish. She turned to the little man at the end of the desk:

“Your notebook, Pratt? Put down: Martin Foltz. That’s this man. Two miles northwest of Ogowoc, on the Castleton road. Wolfram de Roode.” She spelled it. “11 P. M. to 5 A. M., starting tonight. Now.”

She swiveled to face him better. “On his estate, among other things, Foltz keeps hares and pheasants. He used to do it for amusement, recently he has made money from it, or tried to. There are four outdoor men on his place, not counting a chauffeur, and Wilfram de Roode—you have that down—is in charge of them. One morning last May, in a yard shelter, one of the men found two dead pheasants hanging by the neck on pieces of cord which were tied to a pipe supporting the netting. They had been deliberately strangled. The slip knot had been pulled tight enough to prevent their squawking, but loose enough so their struggles were prolonged; they lost a lot of feathers. Foltz and de Roode investigated, without any success. They were assisted by a man named Zimmerman, a friend of Foltz’s who was visiting there. A week later it happened again, this time three pheasants. They put on a night watch—”

Silky Pratt’s voice was a thin tenor: “Was Zimmerman there that time?”

“Yes. Not for you, though; you’re not going to deduce, you’re going to look. Zimmerman is an old and intimate friend of Foltz, from boyhood. After two weeks they discontinued the watch. Ten days later six strangled pheasants were found, by de Roode himself, details exactly the same. They put—”

“What kind of cord was it?”

Dol Bonner shook her head. “Please don’t. Didn’t I say not for you? All those trails have been followed to a dead end. They put locks on the yards and consulted the police. The police looked around and wandered off. Early in July two hares were found in the same fix. Rabbits. That had required more technique, for rabbits would just as soon squeal at night as in the daytime, and no squeals had been heard.—You don’t need to put down the statistics, I’m only telling you so you’ll know the situation. They locked the hutches and runs. Three weeks later four pheasants were killed, and the very next night three more hares. Don’t ask about keys. They had been kept where even an outsider might have got them if he had done some observing. Of course any of the men could. De Roode could. Even Foltz himself could. What, Martin?”