Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families (8 page)

“Airing the house?” I demanded.

“He’s gone,” Fritz said.

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. During the night. When I saw the door was open—”

“What’s that in your hand?”

“He left them on the table in his room—for Theodore and me, and one for you—”

I snatched the pieces of paper from his trembling hand and looked at the one on top. The writing on it was Wolfe’s.

I went through them again, watching each word, told Fritz and Theodore, “Come and sit down,” went to the office, and sat at my desk. They moved chairs to face me.

“He’s gone,” Fritz said, trying to convince himself.

“So it seems,” I said aggressively.

“You know where he is,” Theodore told me accusingly. “It won’t be easy to move some of the plants without damage. I don’t like working on Long Island, not for two hundred dollars a week. When is he coming back?”

“Look, Theodore,” I said, “I don’t give a good goddam what you like or don’t like. Mr. Wolfe has always pampered you because you’re the best orchid nurse alive. This is as good a time as any to tell you that you remind me of sour milk. I do not know where Mr. Wolfe is nor if or when he’s coming back.
To you he sent his regards. To me he sent his very best regards and wishes. Now shut up.”

I shifted to Fritz. “He thinks Marko Vukcic should pay you twice as much as he does. That’s like him, huh? You can see I’m sore as hell, his doing it like this, but I’m not surprised. To show you how well I know him, this is what happened: not long after I phoned him last night he simply wrote these notes to us and walked out of the house, leaving the door open—you said you found it open—to show anyone who might be curious that there was no longer anyone or anything of any importance inside. You got up at your usual time, six-thirty, saw the open door, went up to his room, found his bed empty and the notes on the table. After going up to the plant rooms to call Theodore, you returned to his room, looked around, and discovered that he had taken nothing with him. Then you and Theodore stared at each other until I arrived. Have you anything to add to that?”

“I don’t want to work on Long Island,” Theodore stated.

Fritz only said, “Find him, Archie.”

“He told me not to.”

“Yes—but find him! Where will he sleep? What will he eat?”

I got up and went to the safe and opened it, and looked in the cash drawer, where we always kept a supply for emergency expenses. There should have been a little over four thousand bucks; there was a little over a thousand. I closed the safe door and twirled the knob, and told Fritz, “He’ll sleep and eat. Was my report accurate?”

“Not quite. One of his bags is gone, and pajamas,
toothbrush, razor, three shirts, and ten pairs of socks.”

“Did he take a walking stick?”

“No. The old gray topcoat and the old gray hat.”

“Were there any visitors?”

“No.”

“Any phone calls besides mine?”

“I don’t know about yours. His extension and mine were both plugged in, but you know I don’t answer when you’re out unless he tells me to. It rang only once, at eight minutes after twelve.”

“Your clock’s wrong. That was me. It was five after.” I went and gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Okay. I hope you like your new job. How’s chances for some breakfast?”

“But Archie! His breakfast …”

“I could eat that too. I drove forty miles on an empty stomach.” I patted him again. “Look, Fritz. Right now I’m sore at him, damn sore. After some griddle cakes and broiled ham and eight or ten eggs in black butter and a quart of coffee, we’ll see. I think I’ll be even sorer than I am now, but we’ll see. Is there any of his favorite honey left that you haven’t been giving me lately? The thyme honey?”

“Yes—some. Four jars.”

“Good. I’ll finish off with that on a couple of hot cakes. Then we’ll see how I feel.”

“I would never have thought—” Fritz’s voice had a quaver, and he stopped and started over again. “I would never have thought this could happen. What is it, Archie?” He was practically wailing. “What is it? His appetite has been good.”

“We were going to repot some Miltonias today,” Theodore said dismally.

I snorted. “Go ahead and pot ’em. He was no help
anyhow. Beat it and let me alone. I’ve got to think. Also I’m hungry. Beat it!”

Theodore, mumbling, shuffled out. Fritz, following him, turned at the door. “That’s it, Archie. Think. Think where he is while I get your breakfast.”

He left me, and I sat down at my desk to do the thinking, but the cogs wouldn’t catch. I was too mad to think. “Don’t look for me.” That was him to a T. He knew damn well that if I should ever come home to find he had vanished, the one activity that would make any sense at all would be to start looking for him, and here I was stopped cold at the take-off. Not that I had no notion at all. That was why I had left Leeds’ place without notice and stepped it up to eighty-five getting back: I did have a notion. Two years had passed since Wolfe had told me, “Archie, you are to forget that you know that man’s name. If ever, in the course of my business, I find that I am committed against him and must destroy him, I shall leave this house, find a place where I can work—and sleep and eat if there is time for it—and stay there until I have finished.”

So that part was okay, but what about me? On another occasion, a year later, he had said to five members of a family named Sperling, in my presence, “In that event he will know it is a mortal encounter, and so will I, and I shall move to a base of operations which will be known only to Mr. Goodwin and perhaps two others.” Okay. There was no argument about the mortal encounter or about the move. But I was the Mr. Goodwin referred to, and here I was staring at it—“Don’t look for me.” Where did that leave me? Certainly the two others he had had in mind were Saul Panzer and Marko Vukcic, and I didn’t even dare to phone Saul and ask a couple of
discreet questions; and besides, if he had let Saul in and left me out, to hell with him. And what was I supposed to say to people—for instance, people like the District Attorney of Westchester County?

That particular question got answered, partly at least, from an unexpected quarter. When I had finished with the griddle cakes, ham, eggs, thyme honey, and coffee, I went back to the office to see if I was ready to quit feeling and settle down to thinking, and was working at it when I became aware that I was sitting in Wolfe’s chair behind his desk. That brought me up with a jerk. No one else, including me, ever sat in that chair, but there I was. I didn’t approve of it. It seemed to imply that Wolfe was through with that chair for good, and that was a hell of an attitude to take, no matter how sore I was. I opened a drawer of his desk to check its contents, pretending that was what I had sat there for, and was starting a careful survey when the doorbell rang.

Going to answer it, I took my time because I had done no thinking yet and therefore didn’t know my lines. Seeing through the one-way glass panel in the front door that the man on the stoop was a civilian stranger, my first impulse was to let him ring until he got tired, but curiosity chased it away and I opened the door. He was just a citizen with big ears and an old topcoat, and he asked to see Mr. Nero Wolfe. I told him Mr. Wolfe wasn’t available on Sundays, and I was his confidential assistant, and could I help. He thought maybe I could, took an envelope from a pocket, extracted a sheet of paper, and unfolded it.

“I’m from the
Gazette”
he stated. “This copy for
an ad we got in the mail this morning—we want to be sure it’s authentic.”

I took the paper and gave it a look. It was one of our large-sized letterheads, and the writing and printing on it were Wolfe’s. At the top was written:

Beneath that was Wolfe’s signature. It was authentic all right.

Having learned it by heart, I handed it back. “Yeah, that’s okay. Sure. Give it a good spot.”

“It’s authentic?”

“Absolutely.”

“Listen, I want to see him. Give me a break! Good spot hell; it’s page one if I can get a story on it.”

“Don’t you believe your own ads? It says that Mr. Wolfe will not hereafter be available.” I had the door swung to a narrow gap. “I never saw you before, but
Lon Cohen is an old friend of mine. He gets to work at noon, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, but—”

“Tell him not to bother to phone about this. Mr. Wolfe is not available, and I’m reserved for clients, as the ad says. Watch your foot, here comes the door.”

I shut it and put the chain bolt on. As I went back down the hall Fritz emerged from the kitchen and demanded, “Who was that?”

I eyed him. “You know damn well,” I said, “that when Mr. Wolfe was here you would never have dreamed of asking who was that, either of him or of me. Don’t dream of it now, anyway not when I’m in the humor I’m in at present.”

“I only wanted—”

“Skip it. I advise you to steer clear of me until I’ve had a chance to think.”

I went to the office and this time took my own chair. At least I had got some instructions from Wolfe, though his method of sending them was certainly roundabout. The ad meant, of course, that I wasn’t to try to cover his absence; on the contrary. More important, it told me to lay off the Rackham thing. I was to handle inquiries from clients on unfinished matters, but only from clients; and since Mrs. Rackham, being dead, couldn’t inquire, that settled that. Another thing—apparently I still had my job, unlike Fritz and Theodore. Rut I couldn’t sign checks, I couldn’t—suddenly I remembered something. The fact that I hadn’t thought of it before indicates the state I was in. I have told, in my account of another case of Wolfe’s, how, in anticipation of the possibility that some day a collision with Arnold Zeck would drive him into a foxhole, he had instructed me to put fifty thousand dollars in cash in a
safe deposit box over in Jersey, and how I obeyed instructions. The idea was to have a source of supply for the foxhole; but anyway, there it was, fifty grand, in the box rented by me under the name I had selected for the purpose. I was sitting thinking how upset I must have been not to have thought of that before when the phone rang and I reached for it.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

I thought it proper to use that, the familiar routine, since according to Wolfe’s ad he wouldn’t retire until the next day.

“Archie?” A voice I knew sounded surprised. “Is that you, Archie?”

“Right. Hello, Marko. So early on Sunday?”

“But I thought you were away! I was going to give Fritz a message for you. From Nero.”

Marko Vukcic, owner and operator of Rusterman’s Restaurant, the only place where Wolfe really liked to eat except at home, was the only man in New York who called Wolfe by his first name. I told him I would be glad to take a message for myself.

“Not from Nero exactly,” he said. “From me. I must see you as soon as possible. Could you come here?”

I said I could. There was no need to ask where, since the only place he could ever be found was the restaurant premises, either on one of the two floors for the public, in the kitchen, or up in his private quarters.

I told Fritz I was going out and would be back when he saw me.

As I drove crosstown and up to Fifty-fourth Street, I was around eighty per cent sure that within a few minutes I would be talking with Wolfe. For
him it would be hard to beat that for a foxhole—the place that cooked and served the best food in America, with the living quarters of his best and oldest friend above it. Even after I had entered at the side door, as arranged, ascended the two flights of stairs, seen the look on Marko’s face as he welcomed me, felt the tight clasp of his fingers as he took my hands in his, and heard his murmured, “My friend, my poor young friend!”—even then I thought he was only preparing dramatically to lead me to Wolfe in an inner room.

But he wasn’t. All he led me to was a chair by a window. He took another one, facing me, and sat with his palms on his knees, his head cocked a little to one side as usual.

“My friend Archie,” he said sympathetically. “It is my part to tell you exactly certain things. But before I do that I wish to tell you a thing of my own. I wish to remind you that I have known Nero a much longer time than you have. We knew each other as boys in another country—much younger than you were that day many years ago when you first saw him and went to work for him. He is my old and dear friend, and I am his. So it was natural that he should come to me last night.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Why not?”

“You must feel no pique. No
courroux.”

“Okay. I’ll fight it down. What time did he come?”

“At two o’clock in the night. He was here an hour, and then left. That I am to tell you, and these things. Do you want to write them down?”

“I can remember them if you can. Shoot.”

Marko nodded. “I know of your great memory. Nero has often spoken of it.” He shut his eyes and in a moment opened them again. “There are these five
things. First, the plants. He telephoned Mr. Hewitt last night, and tomorrow Mr. Hewitt will arrange for the plants to be moved to his place, and also for Theodore to go there to work. Second—”

“Am I to list the plants? Do the records go too?”