Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 (5 page)

“Mr. Tingley is very busy. He wants to know what you want to see him about.”

The man in the gray suit got out the tools again, tore out a sheet from the notebook and wrote on it, “Quinine,” folded it and handed it through the hole.

“Send that to him, please.”

In another three minutes he was invited inside and a woman with a snub nose appeared to conduct him to the room whose door still said
THOMAS TINGLEY.
He entered, said good morning politely, and told the man seated at the roll-top desk that it was Mr. Arthur Tingley he had asked to see.

“I’m Arthur Tingley.” The plump but sagging face of the man at the desk looked as harried and exasperated as his voice sounded. He exhibited a slip of paper. “What the devil is this? Who are you?”

“I sent my name in. Fox. A man by the name of Fox.” The visitor pre-empted a chair that was by the corner of the desk, and smiled pleasantly. “I live up in the country, up near Brewster. Last week I bought some jars of Tingley’s Titbits, and when one of them was opened it tasted bitter. A chemist friend of mine analyzed it for me, and he says it has quinine in it. How do you suppose that happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Tingley shortly. “Where is it?”

“The jar? My friend still has it.”

“What kind was it?”

“Liver Pâté Number Three.”

Tingley grunted. “Where did you buy it?”

“At Bruegel’s on Madison Avenue.”

“Bruegel’s? My God! That’s the first—” Tingley stopped abruptly and regarded his caller with a flinty stare.

“I rather supposed,” said Fox sympathetically,
“that I was bringing you some startling news, but apparently not. You see, I’m a detective. Tecumseh Fox. You may possibly have heard of me.”

“How the devil would I hear of you?”

“I thought you might be one of the few who have.” Only the perceptive eyes of a Pokorny would have caught the faint flicker of his vanity’s discomfiture. “No matter. The point is that, being trained to observe, I remark that your lack of astonishment and the sentence you chopped off indicate that you’ve heard of quinine before. Do you know how it got into your liver pâté?”

“No. I don’t.” Tingley wriggled in his chair. “I realize, Mr. Fox, that you certainly have a justifiable complaint—”

“I’m not complaining.” Fox waved the idea away. “Why, have you had a lot of complaints?”

“We … there have been a few …”

“Any from the pure food people? The government? Or have any of the newspapers—”

“My God, no! There’s no reason—there’s nothing dangerous about quinine—”

“That’s true. But it isn’t much of an appetizer, and it isn’t on the label. As I say, though, I am not complaining. What I’m really here for is to call to your attention the damage someone might do, me for instance, by informing the government or sicking a newspaper like the
Gazette
on it. Or both. Not that I’m going to do it. I’m merely threatening to do it.”

Tingley leaned forward and surveyed his caller with an angry glare. Fox smiled at him. Finally Tingley said in a strained voice, “You are, are you?”

“I am.”

“Why, you—” Tingley was trembling with rage. “You dirty scoundrel—” His jaw continued to move,
but for a moment there were no more words. Then he managed some: “By God, you’ll tell
me
something! Who are you working for? The P. & B.?” He spat the hated initials from him.

“I’m working for no one but myself—”

“Like hell you are! So this is the squeeze, is it?” Tingley thrust out a trembling fist. “You can tell Mr. Cliff—”

“You’re wrong. I don’t know any Mr. Cliff. This is my own private personal idea. I thought it up alone.”

Fox’s tone could carry conviction when required, and it did then. Tingley sat back and scowled at him with his lips compressed to a thin line. At length he growled:

“Private personal blackmail. Huh?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to inspect your factory and talk with your employees. I want to do whatever is necessary to find out who put quinine in that stuff. I’m an investigator and I want to investigate.”

“Of course you do.” Tingley was savagely sarcastic. “And how much am I to pay you for it?”

“Nothing. Not a cent. It’s none of your business why I want to do it, since you’ll be permitting it under duress anyway, so we’ll just say I want to satisfy my curiosity. The fact is, you’re getting a break. I am a good detective. Do you know any police officials? You must, since you’ve been in business here all your life. Call up one of them and ask about me.” Fox reached in his pocket for the leather fold containing his driving license, opened it and handed it across. “There’s the name.”

Tingley looked at it, grunted something, hesitated, and reached for his phone. After getting a number he
asked for Captain Darst, and in a moment started asking questions. He covered the ground thoroughly, even to the point of reciting a detailed description of Fox’s appearance, and finally hung up and swiveled to face the caller again.

He looked a little relieved, but not satisfied. “Who sent you?” he demanded.

“No one,” said Fox patiently. “Don’t start that again. You must be pretty busy. Just give me a passport to the premises and forget about me.”

“You must be some kind of a damn fool.”

“Certainly I am. Right now I ought to be up home helping with a dormant sulfur spray on my peach trees, and look what I’m doing. Look at you. You ought to be out on the road trotting five miles under wraps, but here you are.”

“Are you from Consolidated Cereals?”

“I am not from anybody.”

“Exactly what do you want to do?”

“What I said. Look your factory over and ask questions of people. You can hitch a trusted subordinate to my elbow.”

“You’re damned right I can. You’re either a liar or you’re crazy. In either case—” Tingley reached for a row of old-fashioned massive bell pushes and pressed his finger on the second from the left. Then he leaned back and glowered at the other in silence during the moments that lapsed before a door in the side wall opened. A woman appeared—a woman over fifty but probably not sixty, with a figure of generous proportions, a muscular face and efficient-looking dark eyes—and approached them with energetic steps.

“We’re just starting some mixes on the middle run—”

“I know,” Tingley cut her off. “Just a minute, Miss
Yates. This man’s name is Fox. He’s a detective. He’s going to look around the factory, and he can ask questions of you or Sol or Carrie or Edna or Thorpe. No one else. I don’t trust him. I’ll explain later why he’s here. One of you stay with him.”

“Does he go in the sauce room?”

“Yes, but hold up while he’s there.”

Miss Yates, obviously too busy to waste time on questions, nodded at Fox and said crisply, “Come on.”

When he was alone again, Arthur Tingley put his elbows on his grandfather’s roll-top desk and pressed his palms against his forehead, squeezing his eyes tight shut. He sat that way, motionless, for a full ten minutes, then stirred, blinked around, and regarded with grim distaste the basket of morning mail. In it, unquestionably, would be indignant letters about inedible titbits, and a batch of cancellations.

Any ordinary business day of any business man is apt to have headaches, but before that Tuesday was past Tingley’s amanuensis—an angular and tenacious girl of forty-three whose name was Berdine Pilt and whom he always called “my clerk” and never “my stenographer” or “my secretary”—became aware that he was setting an all-time record for growling, barking and snapping. She blamed it chiefly on the quinine, but surmised that the morning’s callers had mysteriously made it worse; his ejaculations and comments, and the letters he dictated, offered no clue.

The room she occupied being divided from his by two partitions, she missed a good deal. She heard not a word, for instance, of the conference he had at half past two in the afternoon with Miss Yates and the sales manager, Sol Fry; nor had she cognizance of a
peculiar expedition which he made precisely at four o’clock. It was brief and appeared to be surreptitious. He slipped out by the door through which Miss Yates had in the morning conducted Tecumseh Fox, walked fifteen paces down a partitioned corridor, stopped at an open door, glanced up and down the corridor, and dived within. He was in a long narrow room with female wearing apparel ranged along both walls and a partition down the middle, mostly coats disposed on hangers. Going straight to a worn coat with a muskrat collar, he glanced around again, warily, plunged his hand into the pocket of the coat and withdrew it again clutching a small covered glass jar, went back to the corridor and returned to his office. At that moment Berdine Pilt knocked on the other door with mail to sign, and he dropped the jar into a drawer of his desk and hastily shut it.

Berdine did know that there was something to be said to Phil Tingley when he came in at five o’clock, for she had been told to convey the message to the front; but since she went home at that time, along with everyone else on the premises except Miss Yates, who usually stayed in the factory until around six, she was divided from that interview by more than two partitions. She saw Phil’s arrival a minute or so after five, but not his departure some forty minutes later; and eight subway miles separated her from what was perhaps the most surprising phenomenon of the day, a telephone conversation which occurred at a quarter to six, five minutes after Phil’s departure.

Arthur Tingley scowled at a row of pigeonholes as he spoke:

“Buchanan four three oh one one? Is this you, Amy? This is your Uncle Arthur. I want—uh—I have—uh—a problem, and I want you to help me out.
Can you come here to the office at six—no, wait a minute, damn it, that won’t do—can you come at seven o’clock? No no, not that. Not on the telephone. No, I can’t. Well, damn it, I’m asking you. All right, I’m asking it as a favor—a family favor—my sister was your mother, wasn’t she? We can discuss that when you come …”

Amy Duncan, in the living room of her apartment on Grove Street, returned the phone to its cradle and sat down on the sofa with an expression on her face of disgusted bewilderment.

“That’s a hot one,” she told nobody aloud. “And I said I’d go. I certainly have a head full of mush. I should have told him to take his darned problem to Miss Bonner the detective.”

She sat there some time and then went to the bathroom and took an aspirin. It had been a highly unsatisfactory day. She had got up late and done nothing. There had been nothing to do. She had plenty of leisure now for rearranging the neck and letting out the hem of the green dress, as she had intended to do for her dining date, but now there was no date. At a moment during the endless afternoon she had got the dress out anyway and started ripping the hem, but hadn’t finished it. Nothing literally nothing, had happened, with the single exception that around four o’clock Tecumseh Fox had phoned to say that he might have something to report in a day or two.

The friend who shared the apartment had flitted in shortly after five, changed clothes like a cyclone, and flitted out again. After taking the aspirin Amy drifted into the bedroom, glanced into the mirror and saw nothing encouraging there, and lay down on the bed
and closed her eyes. She stayed there over an hour. When she finally moved she jerked up with a quick start, looked at her watch, and scrambled to her feet.

“You poor simple-minded female,” she said, again aloud in a tone of disgust, “if you think you don’t know what you don’t want to think about, don’t think.” Then abruptly, she burst into laughter. “Hey! That’s good! I must tell—wah!”

Then in some haste she started to clean up and dress, choosing from the closet an old blue thing which she had never liked. There would be no time to eat, but she could do that later, and she wasn’t hungry anyway. As near as she could tell through the windows, in the early November darkness, it was drizzling outdoors, but when she got to the street, finding that it was a cold windy rain, she decided on a taxi and was lucky enough to get one before reaching the corner. In front of the Tingley building on 26th Street she dismissed it and made a dive through the wet gusts for the entrance, pushed the door open, and entered.

But she stopped just inside, not closing the door, for there was no light. The dilapidated stairs led up into blackness. Then she remembered one of the countless inconveniences of the ancient place: there were no wall switches. She moved cautiously into the hall with both hands above her head groping in the air, found the chain, pulled it and got light, closed the outer door, and started up the stairs. The sound of her footsteps on the patient old boards penetrated into an encompassing silence. At the top she groped in the air again and pulled another chain, then crossed and opened the door to the anteroom. There was no light there either.

She stood motionless half a moment, and a shiver ran over her.

The shiver was a muscular reflex caused by a flash of panic along her nerves, but it was utterly uncalled for. The dead engulfing silence was certainly profound, but Uncle Arthur would not necessarily be stamping up and down, and there was no reason to suppose that any other noise-producing beings were in the building. As for the absence of light, there was nothing alarming about that; during her employment there Amy had once remarked that leaving after dark was like going through a series of stick-ups. Tingley’s didn’t believe in wasting electricity.

Nevertheless, she shivered. She even felt for an instant an almost uncontrollable impulse to shout her uncle’s name, but succeeded in downing that weakness. She did, however, leave the door to the hall open; and she continued that tactic as she made her way, stopping to grope for more chains throughout her progress, through the maze of partitions which led her to the door that said THOMAS TINGLEY. There, finally, the chain had already been pulled; the door stood open and the room was light. As she entered a glance showed Amy that Tingley was not at his desk. She halted, started forward again, and—according to those who claim that consciousness is an essential of animate existence—there was no more Amy Duncan.

She returned to a state of being—no telling, for her then, how long after leaving it—in much the manner of a slippery thing pushing painfully through the slime at the bottom of a muddy river. The agony was so dull that it was not agony. For some moments she was still not in any real sense a live creature, but merely an incoherent and distant buzz of nerve impulses. Then something happened; namely, her eyes
opened; but she hadn’t quite reached the level of knowing it. Soon, though, she did; she groaned and made a mighty effort to lift herself with her arm as a lever; but her hand slipped and she was flat again just as enough consciousness returned for her to know that what her hand had slipped in was a pool of blood, and the object there on the floor an arm’s length away was the face and throat of Uncle Arthur; and the throat….