” `For she has hired me for another job should it become necessary (period). If her property is not returned to her (comma), or if it is damaged beyond repair (comma), I have engaged to devote my time (comma), energy (comma), and talent (comma), for as long as may be required (comma), to ensure just and fitting requital (semicolon); and she has determined to support me to the full extent of her resources (period). If you do not know enough of me to be aware of the significance of this engagement to your future (comma), I advise you to inform yourself regarding my competence and my tenacity (period).’ Beneath, in fourteen-point boldface, `Nero Wolfe.’ To be billed to me. Can you do it by phone?”
“To Lon Cohen at the Gazette, yes. The others, maybe.” I swiveled and reached for the phone, but he stopped me.
“Just a moment.” He turned to Mrs Vail. “You heard that. As you said, your husband may already be dead. If so, I am irrevocably committed by the publication of that notice. Are you? No matter what it costs in time and money?”
“Certainly. If they kill him-certainly. But I don’t- Is that all you’re going to do, just that?”
“I may not do it, madam, and if I don’t I shall do nothing. There’s nothing else I could do. I’ll proceed if, and after, you give me another check for fifty thousand dollars and phone your secretary to come here at once.” He slapped the chair arm. “Do you realize that I will be staking my repute, whatever credit I have established in all my years? That’s what you must pay for; and the commitment. If your husband is already dead, or if Mr Knapp, not seeing my notice or ignoring it, kills him after he gets the money, I shall have no alternative; and what if you default? I might have to spend much more than sixty thousand dollars. Of course if your husband returns safely there will be no commitment and I’ll return some of it to you. How much will be in my discretion. Less if I learn that my notice was a factor; more if it wasn’t. I value my reputation, which I am risking in your interest, but I am not rapacious.” He looked up at the wall clock. “If what Mr Knapp told you to do is to be done tonight, the notice must appear today to have any effect. It’s nearly one o’clock.”
The poor woman-or rather, the rich woman-had her teeth clamped on her lip. She looked at me. People often do that when they are being bumped around by Wolfe, apparently hoping I will come and pat them. Sometimes I wouldn’t mind obliging them, but not Althea Vail, Mrs Jimmy Vail. She just didn’t warm me. Meeting her eyes, I let mine be interested but strictly professional, and when she saw that was all I had to offer she left me. She got out her checkfold, put it on the stand, and wrote, her teeth still clamping her lip. When she tore it out I was there to take it and hand it to Wolfe. Fifty grand. Wolfe gave it a glance, dropped it on his desk, and spoke.
“I hope you’ll get a large part of it back, madam. I do indeed. You may use Mr Goodwin’s phone to call your secretary. When that’s done he’ll use it to place that notice, in all three papers if possible.”
She fluttered a hand. “Is it really necessary, Mr Wolfe? My secretary?”
“Yes, if you want me to proceed. You’re going to your bank, and it will soon be lunchtime. Tell her to be here at three o’clock.”
She got up and went to my chair, sat, and dialed.
CHAPTER 2
When Dinah Utley arrived at 3:05, five minutes late, Wolfe was at his desk with a book, The Lotus and the Robot, by Arthur Koestler. We had started lunch later than usual because Wolfe had told Fritz not to put the shad roe in the skillet until he was notified, and it was close to half past one when I finally quit trying to persuade the Post and World-Telegram to get the ad in. Nothing doing. It was all set for the Gazette, thanks to Lon Cohen, who knew from experience that he would get a tit for his tat if and when. It was also set for all editions of the morning papers. The bulldogs would be out around eleven, and if Mr Knapp saw one after he got the money and before he erased Jimmy Vail, he might change the script.
Our client had left, headed for her bank, as soon as it was definite from Lon Cohen that the ad would be in the last two editions. Part of the time while I was phoning, for some minutes at the end, Wolfe was standing at my elbow, but not to listen to me. He had the note Mrs Vail had got from Mr Knapp in his hand, and he pulled my typewriter around and studied the keyboard, then looked at the note, then back at the keyboard; and he kept that up, back and forth, until Fritz came to announce lunch. That was no time for me to comment or ask a question, with sauteed shad roe fresh and hot from the skillet, and the sauce, with chives and chervil and shallots, ready to be poured on, and of course nothing relating to business is ever mentioned at the table, so I waited until we had left the dining room and crossed the hall back to the office to say, “That note was typed on an Underwood, but not mine, if that’s what you were checking. The `a’ is a little off-line. Also it wasn’t written by me. Whoever typed it has a very uneven touch.”
Sitting, he picked up The Lotus and the Robot. His current book is always on his desk, at the right edge of the pad, in front of the vase of orchids. That day’s orchids were a raceme of Miltonia vexillaria, brought by him as usual when he had come down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock. “Ummmp,” he said. “I was merely testing a conjecture.”
“Any good?”
“Yes.” He opened the book to his place and swiveled, giving me his acre or so of back. If I wanted to test a conjecture I would have to use one of my own. A visitor was due in ten minutes, and since according to him the best digestive is a book because it occupies the mind and leaves the stomach in privacy, he darned well was going to get a few pages in. And when, a quarter of an hour later, I having spent most of it inspecting the note from Mr Knapp with occasional glances at my typewriter keyboard, the doorbell rang, and I went to the hall and returned with the visitor, and pronounced her name, and put her in the red leather chair, Wolfe stuck with his book until I had gone to my desk and sat. Then he marked his place and put it down, looked at her, and said, “Are you an efficient secretary, Miss Utley?”
Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled. If she had been doing any crying along with her employer it had certainly left no traces. At sight I had guessed her age at thirty, but that might have been a couple of years short.
“I earn my salary, Mr Wolfe,” she said.
She was cool-cool eyes, cool smile, cool voice. With some cool ones the reaction is that it would be interesting to apply a little heat and see what happens, and you wouldn’t mind trying, but with others you feel that they are cool clear through, and she was one of them, though there was nothing wrong with her features or figure. You could even call her a looker.
Wolfe was taking her in. “No doubt,” he said. “As you know, Mrs Vail phoned you from here. I heard her tell you not to tell me what Mr Knapp said to her on the phone yesterday, but you may feel that she is under great strain and your judgment on that point is better than hers. Do you?”
“No.” Very cool. “I’m in her employ.”
“Then I won’t try to cajole you. Do you always open Mrs Vail’s mail?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that comes?”
“Yes.”
“How many items were there in yesterday morning’s mail?”
“I didn’t count them. Perhaps twenty.”
“The envelope with that note in it, did you open it first or further along in the process?”
Of course that tactic is three thousand years old, maybe more, asking for a detail of a reported action, looking for hesitation or confusion. Dinah Utley smiled. “I always sort it out first, leaving circulars and other obvious stuff until later. Yesterday there were four-no, five-that I opened at once. The envelope with that note was the third one I opened.”