Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t mean much. They had no idea what he looked like. They had no evidence that anyone had ever known him, or even met him, by that name. There was no proof that Baird Archer had ever been anything
but
a name. It would be about the same if you just made up a name for a man,say Freetham Choade, and then tried to find him. After you look in the phone book, what do you do next?
    I spent the rest of that week collecting some very interesting data about the quality and tone of publishers’ offices. I learned that Simon and Schuster, in Rockefeller Center, had fallen hard for modern and didn’t give a damn what it cost; that Harper and Brothers liked old desks and didn’t care for ashtrays; that the Viking Press had a good eye for contours and comeliness when hiring female help; that the Macmillan Company had got itself confused with a Pullman car; and so on. I covered the whole trade, big and little, and the only concrete result was a dinner date with a young woman at Scribner’s who struck me as worth following up on the chance that she might have something I would like to know about. No one anywhere knew anything about a Baird Archer. If he had submitted the manuscript of “Put Not Your Trust” to any other firm than Scholl and Hanna, there was no record or memory of it.
    Over the weekend I had a couple of talks with Purley Stebbins. If we were getting nowhere fast, so were the cops. They had uncovered a Baird Archer somewhere down in Virginia, but he was over eighty and couldn’t read or write. Their big idea was to find some link between Leonard Dykes and Joan Wellman, and three of Cramer’s best men were clawing away at it. When I reported that to Wolfe Sunday evening he snorted.
    “Jackassery. I gave them the link.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said sympathetically. “That was what tired you out.”
    “I am not tired out. I am not even tired.”
    “Then I lied to our client. The second time he called today I told him that you were exhausted with overwork on his case. I had to tell him something drasticbecause he’s getting impatient. What’s wrong with the beer? Too cold?”
    “No. I am considering you. Most of these typing services are run by women, aren’t they?”
    “Not most. All.”
    “Then you will start on that tomorrow morning. You may be luckier than Saul and Fred and Orrie, but they will continue at it too. We’ll finish that job before we try something else. Some of the women are surely young and personable. Don’t overwork.”
    “I won’t.” I gazed at him admiringly. “It’s uncanny, these flashes of inspiration you get. Absolutely brilliant!”
    He exploded. “Confound it, what have I got? Get me something! Will you get me something?”
    “Certainly.” I was composed. “Drink your beer.”
    So the next day, Monday, after finishing the morning office chores I took a geographical section of the list Saul and I had compiled, and went at it. The other three had covered downtown Manhattan up to Fourteenth Street, the Grand Central section, and the West Side from Fourteenth to Forty-second. That day Fred was in Brooklyn, Orrie in the Bronx, and Saul on the East Side. I took the West Side from Forty-second Street up.
    At ten-thirty I was in bedlam, having entered through a door inscribed BROADWAY STENOGRAPHIC SERVICE . In a room big enough to accommodate comfortably five typewriter desks and typists, double that number were squeezed in, hitting the keys at about twice my normal speed. I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf.
    “A woman like you should have a private room!”
    “I have,” she said haughtily, and led me through a door in a partition to a cubbyhole. Since the partitionwas only six feet high, the racket bounced down on us off the ceiling. Two minutes later the woman was telling me, “We don’t give out any information about clients. Our business is strictly confidential.”
    I had given her my business card. “So is ours!” I shouted.