Times and News, maybe. Gazette, yes.
Your notebook. Two columns wide, four inches or so. At the top, one hundred dollars, in figures, thirty-point or larger, boldface. Below in fourteen-point, also boldface: will be paid in cash for information regarding the maker, comma, or if not the maker the source, comma, of buttons made by hand of white horsehair. Period. Buttons of any size or shape suitable for use on clothing. Period. I want to know, comma, not who might make such buttons, comma, but who has actually done so. Period. The hundred dollars will be paid only to the person who first supplies the information. At the bottom, my name, address, and telephone number.
Boldface?
No. Standard weight, condensed.
As I turned and reached for the typewriter I would have given dozen polyester buttons to know whether he had planned it while he was dictating letters or while he was reading Travels with Charley.
The house rules in the old brownstone on West 35th Street are of course set by Wolfe, since he owns the house, but any variation in the morning routine usually comes from me. Wolfs sticks to his personal schedule: at 8:15 breakfast in his room on the second floor, on a tray taken up by Fritz, at nine o’clock to the elevator and up to the plant rooms, and down to the office at eleven. My schedule depends on what is stirring and on what time I turned in. I need to be flat a full eight hours, and at night I adjust the clock on my bedstand accordingly; and since I spent that Wednesday evening at a theater, and then at the Flamingo, with a friend, and it was after one when I got home, I set the pointer at 9:30.
But it wasn’t the radio, nudged by the clock, that roused me Thursday morning. When it happened I squeezed my eyes tighter shut to try to figure out what the hell it was. It wasn’t the phone, because I had switched my extension off, and anyway it wasn’t loud enough. It was a bumblebee, and why the hell was a bumblebee buzzing around 35th Street in the middle of the night? Or maybe the sun was up. I forced my eyes open and focused on the clock. Six minutes to nine. And it was the house phone, of course, I should have known. I rolled over and reached for it.
Archie Goodwin’s room, Mr. Goodwin speaking.
I’m sorry, Archie. Fritz. But she insists Who?
A woman on the phone. Something about buttons. She says Okay, I’ll take it. I flipped the switch of the extension and got the receiver. Yes? Archie Goodwin speak I want Nero Wolfe and I’m in a hurry!
He’s not available. If it’s about the ad It is. I saw it in the News. I know about some buttons like that and I want to be first. You are. Your name, please?
Beatrice Epps. E-P-P-S. Am I first?
You are if it fits. Mrs. Epps, or Miss?
Miss Beatrice Epps. I can’t tell you now. Where are you, Miss Epps?
I’m in a phone booth at Grand Central. I’m on my way to work and I have to be there at nine o’clock, so I can’t tell you now, but I wanted to be first.
Sure. Very sensible. Where do you work?
At Quinn and Collins in the Chanin Building. Real estate. But don’t come there, they wouldn’t like it. I’ll phone again on my lunch hour.
What time?
Half past twelve.
Okay, I’ll be at the newsstand in the Chanin Building at twelve-thirty and I’ll buy you a lunch. I’ll have an orchid in my buttonhole, a small one, white and green, and I’ll have a hundred. I’m late, I have to go. I’ll be there. The connection went. I flopped back onto the pillow, found that I was too near awake for another half-hour to be any good, swung around, and got my feet on the floor.
At ten o’clock I was in the kitchen at my breakfast table, sprinkling brown sugar on a buttered sour-milk griddle cake, with the Times before me on the rack. Fritz, standing by, asked, No cinnamon?
No, I said firmly. I’ve decided it’s an aphrodisiac.
Then for you it would be how is it? Taking coal somewhere.
Coals to Newcastle. That’s not the point, but you mean well and I thank you.
I always mean well. Seeing that I had taken the second bite, he stepped to the range to start the next cake. I saw the advertisement. Also I save the things on your desk that you brought in the suitcase. I have heard that the most dangerous kind of case for a detective is a kidnaping case.
Maybe and maybe not. It depends.
And in all the years I have been with him this is the first kidnaping case he has ever had.
I sipped coffee. There you go again, Fritz, circling around. You could just ask, is it a kidnaping case? and I would say no. Because it isn’t. Of course the baby clothes gave you the idea. Just between you and me, in strict confidence, the baby clothes belong to him. It isn’t decided yet when the baby will move in here, and I doubt if the mother ever will, but I understand she’s a good cook, and if you happen to take a long vacation…
He was there with the cake and I reached for the tomato and lime marmalade. With it no butter. You are a true friend, Archie, he said.
They don’t come any truer.
Vraiment. I’m glad you told me so I can get things in. Is it a boy?
Yes. It looks like him.
Good. Do you know what I will do? He returned to the range and gestured with the cake turner. I will put cinnamon in everything!
I disapproved and we debated it.
Instead of waiting until Wolfe came down, to report the development, after I had done the morning chores in the office opening the mail, dusting, emptying the wastebaskets, removing sheets from the desk calendars, putting fresh water in the vase on Wolfe’s desk I mounted the three flights to the plant rooms. June is not the best show-off month for a collection of orchids, especially not for one like Wolfe’s, with more than two hundred varieties. The first room, the tropical, had only a few splotches of color; the next one, the intermediate, was more flashy but nothing like March; the third one, the cool, had more flowers but they’re not so gaudy. In the last one, the potting room, Wolfe was at the bench with Theodore Horstmann, inspecting the nodes on a pseudo-bulb. As I approached he turned his head and growled, Well? He is supposed to be interrupted up there only in an emergency.
Nothing urgent, I said. Just to tell you that I’m taking a Cypripedium lawrenceanum hyeanum one flower. To wear. A woman phoned about buttons, and when I meet her at twelve-thirty it will mark me.
When will you leave?
A little before noon. I’ll stop at the bank on the way to deposit a check.
Very well. He resumed the inspection. Too busy for questions. I went and got the posy and on down. When he came down at eleven he asked for a verbatim report and got it, and had one question: What about her? I told him his guess was as good as mine, say one chance in ten that she really had it, and when I said I might as well leave sooner and get the overalls from Hirsh and have them with me, he approved.
So when I took post near the newsstand in the lobby of the Chanin Building, a little ahead of time, having learned from the directory that Quinn and Coffin was on the ninth floor, I had the paper bag. That kind of waiting is different, with faces to watch coming and going, male and female, old and young, sure and saggy. About half of them looked as if they needed either a doctor or a lawyer or a detective, including the one who stopped in front of me with her head tilted back. When I said, Miss Epps? she nodded.
I’m Archie Goodwin. Shall we go downstairs? I have reserved, a table.
She shook her head. I always eat lunch alone.
I want to be fair, but it’s fair to say that she had probably had very few invitations to lunch, if any. Her nose was flat and she had twice as much chin as she needed. Her age was somewhere between thirty and fifty. We can talk here, she said.
At least we can start here, I conceded. What do you know about white horsehair buttons?
I know I’ve seen some. But before I tell you how do I know you’ll pay me?
You don’t. I touched her elbow and we moved aside, away from the traffic. But I do. I got a card from my case and handed it to her. Naturally I’ll have to check what you tell me, and it will have to be practical. You could tell me you knew a man in Singapore who made white horsehair buttons but he’s dead.