Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 Read Online Free PDF

file, it looked as if Joan had had not only beauty and intelligence but also good old-fashioned virtue. The three boy friends who had been flushed were unanimous on that. They had admired and respected her. One of them had been after her for a year to marry him and had had hopes. If any of them had had reason to prefer her dead, the Bronx had failed to dig up a hint of it.
    I went back home and typed it all up for Wolfe, and got reports on the phone from Saul and Fred and Orrie.
    I spent most of Wednesday at the office of Scholl and Hanna on Forty-fifth Street. What I got out of it was a respectful appreciation of the book-publishing business as a means of corralling jack. The office took up two whole floors, with nothing spared anywhere in the way of rugs and furniture. Scholl was in Florida, I was told, and Hanna never got in until ten-thirty. I was escorted down a hall to the room of a junior executive who needed a haircut and was chewing gum, and when I showed him the note I had from our client he said they would be glad to cooperate with the bereaved father oftheir late employee, and I could ask questions of any of the staff I cared to see, starting with him if I wanted to. But would I please tell him, had something new turned up? City detectives, three of them, had been there again yesterday, for hours, and now here was Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin. What was stirring? I told him something harmless and began on him.
    The fact that Wolfe never leaves the office on business, unless there is an incentive more urgent than the prospect of a fee, such as saving his own skin, has a lot to do with the way I work. When I’m out on a case and get something helpful I like to recognize it before I deliver it to Wolfe, but as I left Scholl and Hanna’s I couldn’t see a crumb. It was hard to believe that I had spent nearly five hours in the office where Joan Wellman had worked, questioning everybody from the office boy to Hanna himself, without getting a single useful item, but that was how it looked. The one thing that tied in at all was an entry in the columns of a big book I had been shown. I give it with the column headings:
    NUMBER : 16237
DATE : Oct. 2
    NAME AND ADDRESS : Baird Archer, General Delivery, Clinton Station, N. Y. City
    TITLE : Put Not Your Trust
DETAIL : Novel 246 pp.
POSTAGE ENCLOSED : 63¢
READ BY : Joan Wellman
DISPOSITION : Rejected ret’d. mail Oct. 27
    That was my haul. The manuscript had been received by mail. No one had ever heard of Baird Archer, except for that entry. No one else had looked at the manuscript or remembered anything about it. If Joanhad made any comment on it to anyone they had forgotten it. She had not mentioned the phone call from Baird Archer or her appointment with him. I could go on with negatives for a page.
    When I reported to Wolfe that evening I told him, “It looks to me as if we’re all set. Two hundred and forty-six sheets of typewriter paper weigh a lot more than twenty-one ounces. Either he wrote on both sides, or he used thin light paper, or he didn’t enclose enough postage. All we have to do is find out which and we’ve got him.”
    “Harlequin,” he growled.
    “Have you a better suggestion? From what I’ve brought in?”
    “No.”
    “Did I get anything at all?”
    “No.”
    “Okay. That’s what I mean. Two days of me, nothing. Two days of the boys calling on typing services, nothing. At two hundred bucks a day, four C’s of Wellman’s money already gone. This would be all right for an agency or the cops, that’s how they work, but it’s not your way. I’ll bet you a week’s pay you haven’t turned your brain on it once during the forty-eight hours!”
    “On what?” he demanded. “I can’t grapple with a shadow. Get me something of him—a gesture, an odor, a word, a sound he made. Bring me something.”
    I had to admit, though of course not to him, that he had a point. You could say that Cramer had a trained army looking for Baird Archer, but it