Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 (2 page)

“Then I’ll expect you. Please hold the wire. My secretary will give you the names of those who will be present. It will simplify the introductions if you know them in advance.”

Miss Fromm got on again. “Mr. Goodwin?”

“Still here.”

“You should have paper and pencil.”

“I always have. Shoot.”

“Stop me if I go too fast. There will be twelve at table. Mr. and Mrs. Robilotti. Miss Celia Grantham and Mr. Cecil Grantham. They are Mrs. Robilotti’s son and daughter by her first husband.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Miss Helen Yarmis. Miss Ethel Varr. Miss Faith Usher. Am I going too fast?”

I told her no.

“Miss Rose Tuttle. Mr. Paul Schuster. Mr. Beverly Kent. Mr. Edwin Laidlaw. Yourself. That makes twelve. Miss Varr will be on your right and Miss Tuttle will be on your left.”

I thanked her and hung up. Now that I was booked, I wasn’t so sure I liked it. It would be interesting, but it might also be a strain on the nerves. However, I was booked, and I rang Byne at the number he had given me and told him he could stay home and gargle. Then I went to Wolfe’s desk and wrote on his calendar Mrs. Robilotti’s name and phone number. He wants to know where to reach me when I’m out,
even when we have nothing important on, in case someone yells for help and will pay for it. Then I went to the hall, turned left, and pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen. Fritz was at the big table, spreading anchovy butter on shad roes.

“Cross me off for dinner,” I told him. “I’m doing my good deed for the year and getting it over with.”

He stopped spreading to look at me. “That’s too bad. Veal birds in casserole. You know, with mushrooms and white wine.”

“I’ll miss it. But there may be something edible where I’m going.”

“Perhaps a client?”

He was not being nosy. Fritz Brenner does not pry into other people’s private affairs, not even mine. But he has a legitimate interest in the welfare of that establishment, of the people who live in that old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, and he merely wanted to know if my dinner engagement was likely to promote it. It took a lot of cash. I had to be paid. He had to be paid. Theodore Horstmann, who spent all his days and sometimes part of his nights with the ten thousand orchids up in the plant rooms, had to be paid. We all had to be fed, and with the kind of grub that Wolfe preferred and provided and Fritz prepared. Not only did the orchids have to be fed, but only that week Wolfe had bought a Coelogyne from Burma for eight hundred bucks, and that was just routine. And so on and on and on, and the only source of current income was people with problems who were able and willing to pay a detective to handle them. Fritz knew we had no case going at the moment, and he was only asking if my dinner date might lead to one.

I shook my head. “Nope, not a client.” I got on a stool. “A former client, Mrs. Robert Robilotti—someone swiped a million dollars’ worth of rings and bracelets from her a couple of years ago and we got them back—and I need some advice. You may not be as great an expert on women as you are on food, but you have had your dealings, as I well know, and I would appreciate some suggestions on how to act this evening.”

He snorted. “Act with women? You? Ha! With your thousand triumphs! Advice from me? Archie, that is upside down!”

“Thanks for the plug, but these women are special.” With a fingertip I wiped up a speck of anchovy butter that had dropped on the table and licked it off. “Here’s the problem. This Mrs. Robilotti’s first husband was Albert Grantham, who spent the last ten years of his life doing things with part of the three or four hundred million dollars he had inherited—things to improve the world, including the people in it. I assume you will admit that a girl who has a baby but no husband needs improving.”

Fritz pursed his lips. “First I would have to see the girl and the baby. They might be charming.”

“It’s not a question of charm, or at least it wasn’t with Grantham. His dealing with the problem of unmarried mothers wasn’t one of his really big operations, but he took a personal interest in it. He would rarely let his name be attached to any of his projects, but he did with that one. The place he built for it up in Dutchess County was called Grantham House and still is. What’s that you’re putting in?”

“Marjoram. I’m trying it.”

“Don’t tell him and see if he spots it. When the
improved mothers were graduated from Grantham House they were financed until they got jobs or husbands, and even then they were not forgotten. One way of keeping in touch was started by Grantham himself a few years before he died. Each year on his birthday he had his wife invite four of them to dinner at his home on Fifth Avenue, and also invite, for their dinner partners, four young men. Since his death, five years ago, his wife has kept it up. She says she owes it to his memory—though she is now married to a specimen named Robert Robilotti who has never been in the improving business. Today is Grantham’s birthday, and that’s where I’m going for dinner. I am one of the four young men.”

“No!” Fritz said.

“Why no?”

“You, Archie?”

“Why not me?”

“It will ruin everything. They will all be back at Grantham House in less than a year.”

“No,” I said sternly. “I appreciate the compliment, but this is a serious matter and I need advice. Consider: these girls are mothers, but they are improved mothers. They are supposed to be trying to get a toehold on life. Say they are. Inviting them to dinner at that goddam palace, with four young men from the circle that woman moves in as table partners, whom they have never seen before and don’t expect ever to see again, is one hell of a note. Okay, I can’t help that; I can’t improve Grantham, since he’s dead, and I would hate to undertake to improve Mrs. Robilotti, dead or alive, but I have my personal problem: how do I act? I would welcome suggestions.”

Fritz cocked his head. “Why do you go?”

“Because a man I know asked me to. That’s another question, why he picked me, but skip it. I guess I agreed to go because I thought it would be fun to watch, but now I realize it may be pretty damn grim. However, I’m stuck, and what’s my program? I can try to make it gay, or clown it, or get one of them talking about the baby, or get lit and the hell with it, or shall I stand up and make a speech about famous mothers like Venus and Mrs. Shakespeare and that Roman woman who had twins?”

“Not that. No.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, you are just talking.”

“All right, you talk a while.”

He aimed a knife at me. “I know you so well, Archie. As well as you know me, maybe. This is just talk and I enjoy it. You need no suggestions. Program?” He slashed at it with the knife. “Ha! You will go there and look at them and see, and act as you feel. You always do. If it is too painful you will leave. If one of the girls is enchanting and the men surround her, you will get her aside and tomorrow you will take her to lunch. If you are bored you will eat too much, no matter what the food is like. If you are offended—There’s the elevator!” He looked at the clock. “My God, it’s eleven! The larding!” He headed for the refrigerator.

I didn’t jump. Wolfe likes to find me in the office when he comes down, and if I’m not there it stirs his blood a little, which is good for him, so I waited until the elevator door opened and his footsteps came down the hall and on in. I have never understood why he doesn’t make more noise walking. You would think that his feet, which are no bigger than mine, would make quite a business of getting along under his seventh
of a ton, but they don’t. It might be someone half his weight. I gave him enough time to cross to his desk and get himself settled in his custom-built oversize chair, and then went. As I entered he grunted a good morning at me and I returned it. Our good mornings usually come then, since Fritz takes his breakfast to his room on a tray, and he spends the two hours from nine to eleven, every day including Sunday, up in the plant rooms with Theodore and the orchids.

When I was at my desk I announced, “I didn’t deposit the checks that came yesterday on account of the weather. It may let up before three.”

He was glancing through the mail I had put on his desk. “Get Dr. Vollmer,” he commanded.

The idea of that was that if I let a little thing like a cold gusty March rain keep me from getting checks to the bank I must be sick. So I coughed. Then I sneezed. “Nothing doing,” I said firmly. “He might put me to bed, and in all this bustle and hustle that wouldn’t do. It would be too much for you.”

He shot me a glance, nodded to show that he was on but was dropping it, and reached for his desk calendar. That always came second, after the glance at the mail.

“What is this phone number?” he demanded. “Mrs. Robilotti? That woman?”

“Yes, sir. The one who didn’t want to pay you twenty grand but did.”

“What does she want now?”

“Me. That’s where you can get me this evening from seven o’clock on.”

“Mr. Hewitt is coming this evening to bring a Dendrobium and look at the Renanthera. You said you would be here.”

“I know, I expected to, but this is an emergency. She phoned me this morning.”

“I didn’t know she was cultivating you, or you her.”

“We’re not. I haven’t seen her or heard her since she paid that bill. This is special. You may remember that when she hired you and we were discussing her, I mentioned a piece about her I had read in a magazine, about the dinner party she throws every year on her first husband’s birthday. With four girls and four men as guests? The girls are unmarried mothers who are being rehabil—”

“I remember, yes. Buffoonery. A burlesque of hospitality. Do you mean you are abetting it?”

“I wouldn’t say abetting it. A man I know named Austin Byne phoned and asked me to fill in for him because he’s in bed with a cold and can’t go. Anyhow, it will give me a fresh outlook. It will harden my nerves. It will broaden my mind.”

His eyes had narrowed. “Archie.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do I ever intrude in your private affairs?”

“Yes, sir. Frequently. But you think you don’t, so go right ahead.”

“I am not intruding. If it is your whim to lend yourself to that outlandish performance, very well. I merely suggest that you demean yourself. Those creatures are summoned there for an obvious purpose. It is hoped that they, or at least one of them, will meet a man who will be moved to pursue the acquaintance and who will end by legitimating, if not the infant already in being, the future produce of the womb. Therefore your attendance there will be an imposture, and you know it. I begin to doubt if you will ever
let a woman plant her foot on your neck, but if you do she will have qualities that would make it impossible for her to share the fate of those forlorn creatures. You will be perpetrating a fraud.”

I was shaking my head. “No, sir. You’ve got it wrong. I let you finish just to hear it. If that were the purpose, giving the girls a chance to meet prospects, I would say hooray for Mrs. Robilotti, and I wouldn’t go. But that’s the hell of it, that’s not it at all. The men are from her own social circle, the kind that wear black ties six nights a week, and there’s not a chance. The idea is that it will buck the girls up, be good for their morale, to spend an evening with the cream and get a taste of caviar and sit on a chair made by Congreve. Of course—”

“Congreve didn’t make chairs.”

“I know he didn’t, but I needed a name and that one popped in. Of course that’s a lot of hooey, but I won’t be perpetrating a fraud. And don’t be too sure I won’t meet my doom. It’s a scientific fact that some girls are more beautiful, more spiritual, more fascinating, after they have had a baby. Also it would be an advantage to have the family already started.”

“Pfui. Then you’re going.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve told Fritz I won’t be here for dinner.” I left my chair. “I have to see to something. If you want to answer letters before lunch I’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

I had remembered that Saturday evening at the Flamingo someone had spilled something on the sleeve of my dinner jacket, and I had used cleaner on it when I got home, and hadn’t examined it since. Mounting the two flights to my room, I took a look and found it was okay.

I
was well acquainted with the insides of the Grantham mansion, now inhabited by Robilottis, on Fifth Avenue in the Eighties, having been over every inch of it, including the servants’ quarters, at the time of the jewelry hunt; and, in the taxi on my way uptown, preparing my mind for the scene of action, I had supposed that the pre-dinner gathering would be on the second floor in what was called the music room. But no. For the mothers, the works.

Hackett, admitting me, did fine. Formerly his manner with me as a hired detective had been absolutely perfect; now that I was an invited guest in uniform he made the switch without batting an eye. I suppose a man working up to butler could be taught all the ins and outs of handling the hat-and-coat problem with different grades of people, but it’s so darned tricky that probably it has to be born in him. The way he told me good evening, compared with the way he had formerly greeted me, was a lesson in fine points.

I decided to upset him. When he had my hat and coat I inquired with my nose up, “How’s it go, Mr. Hackett?”

It didn’t faze him. That man had nerves of iron. He merely said, “Very well, thank you, Mr. Goodwin. Mrs. Robilotti is in the drawing room.”

“You win, Hackett. Congratulations.” I crossed the reception hall, which took ten paces, and passed through the arch.

The drawing room had a twenty-foot ceiling and could dance fifty couples easily, with an alcove for the orchestra as big as my bedroom. The three crystal chandeliers that had been installed by Albert Grantham’s mother were still there, and so were thirty-seven chairs—I had counted them one day—of all shapes and sizes, not made by Congreve, I admit, but not made in Grand Rapids either. Of all the rooms I had seen, and I had seen a lot, that was about the last one I would pick as the place for a quartet of unwed mothers to meet a bunch of strangers and relax. Entering and casting a glance around, I took a walk—it amounted to that—across to where Mrs. Robilotti was standing with a group near a portable bar. As I approached she turned to me and offered a hand.