Rex Stout – Nero Wolfe – Three Doors To Death

The woman stood a moment, looking us over, turned to signal to someone through the open door, closed the door, and went to a chair near the end of the front row that had evidently been held for her. She was no sooner seated than the door opened again and out came the girl that I was waiting to marry. I put my teeth together to keep from whistling. I got the impression that she was the girl they were all waiting to marry, seeing how concentrated and alert everyone became the second she appeared, and then I realized what this meant to the buyers. For them it was the make or break. It meant their jobs. They had just so many thousands to spend, on so many numbers, and it was up to them to pick the winners or else.

Anyone could have picked the girl with one eye shut, but they weren’t picking girls. She stepped up on the platform, came to the front edge, walking in a highly trained manner, extended her arms to the sides, full out, and said in a clear and friendly voice, “Six-forty-two.” Six-forty-two was a dress and coat, looking like wool and I suppose it was, sort of confused about colors like a maple tree in October. She gave it the works. She walked to the right and then to the left, threw her arms around to show that the seams would hold even if you got in a fight or wore it picking apples, and turned around to let us see the back. She said “Six-forty-two” four times altogether, at appropriate intervals, distinctly and amiably, with just the faintest suggestion in her voice and manner that she wouldn’t dream of letting that out except to the few people she was very fond of; and when she took the coat off and draped it over her arm and lifted her chin to smile at the back row, there was some clapping of hands.

She left by the other door, the one on the right, and immediately the one on the left opened and out came the girl I was waiting to marry, only this was a blonde, and she had on a gray fur evening wrap lined in bright red, and what she said was “Three-eighty and Four-nineteen.” The 380, I gathered from neighbors’ mutterings, was the wrap, and the 419 was the simple red evening gown that was disclosed when she ditched the wrap. It was fairly simple in front at the top, just covering essentials, but at the back it got even simpler by simply not starting until it hit the waistline. The woman on my right whispered to the one on her other side, “The hell of that is I’ve got a customer that would love it but I wouldn’t dare let her buy it”

To clear up one point, they had there that afternoon six of the girls I was waiting to marry, if you count Cynthia Nieder, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Each of them made around a dozen appearances, some more, some less, and as for picking and choosing, if the buyers were as far up a stump as I was by the time it was over the only way they could possibly handle it was to send in an order for one of each.

As I explained to Wolfe in the office that evening, after I had reported a blank and we were conversing, “Imagine it! After the weddings I will of course have to take a good-sized apartment between Fifth and Madison in the Sixties. On a pleasant autumn evening I’ll be sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. I’ll toss the paper aside and clap my hands, and in will come Isabel. She will have on a calf-exposing kitchen apron with a double hemline and will be carrying a plate of ham sandwiches and a pitcher of milk. She will say seductively, ‘Two-ninety-three,’ make interesting motions and gestures without spilling a drop, put the plate and pitcher on a table at my elbow, and go. In will come Francine. She will be wearing slim-silhouette pajamas with padded shoulders and a back-flaring hipline. She’ll walk and wave and whirl, say ‘Nine-thirty-one’ four times, and light me a cigarette and dance out. Enter Delia. She’ll be dressed in a highstyled bra of hand-made lace with a billowing sweep to the—”

“Pfui,” Wolfe said curtly. “Enter another, naked, carrying a basket full of bills, your checkbook, and a pen.”

He has a personal slant on women.

Back to the show. It lasted over two hours, and for some of the numbers the applause was unrestrained, and it looked to me as if the Daumery and Nieder profits were likely to go on swelling up. Cynthia, in my opinion, was the star, and others seemed to agree with me. The numbers she modeled got much more applause than the rest of the line, and I admit I furnished my share, which was as it should be since I was her guest. Remarks from my neighbor on the right, who was evidently in the know, informed me that Cynthia’s numbers had all been designed by herself, whereas the others were the work of Ward Roper, who had been Paul Nieder’s assistant and was merely a good imitator and adapter.

In the office that evening I explained that to Wolfe, too, partly because I knew it would bore and irritate him, and partly because I wanted to demonstrate that I hadn’t been asleep although my report of results had had no bodice at all and a very short skirt.

A breath and a half had done it. “I got in by following Cynthia’s instructions, found a seat in the fifth row, and sat down after doing a survey of the two hundred customers and seeing no whiskers. Miss Nieder made fourteen appearances and did not signal me. When she came out front after the show she was immediately encircled by people, and I beat it, again following instructions, went down to the sidewalk, told Saul nothing doing, and handed Herb Aronson a ten-dollar bill.”

Wolfe grunted. “What next?”

“That requires thought, which is your department. We can’t sick the cops on him because the client doesn’t want that. We can buy a gross of combs and comb the city. Or we can try again at their next show for buyers, which, as you know, will be Thursday morning at ten. Or you may remember what the client said about her uncle’s private file.”

Wolfe poohed. “She doesn’t even know whether it exists. She thinks Jean Daumery took it and locked it up, and that the nephew, Bernard Daumery, is hanging onto it. She thinks she may possibly be able to find it.”

“Okay, you admit she thinks, so why not you? You’re merely objecting, not thinking. Think.”

That was before dinner. If he did put his brain in motion there were no visible or audible results. After dinner, back in the office again, he started reading a book. That disgusted me, because after all we had a case, and for the sake of appearances I started in on a blow-by-blow account of the Daumery and Nieder show. The least I could do was to make it hard for him to read. I went on for over an hour, covering the ground, and then branched out into commentary.

“Imagine it!” I said. “After the weddings I will of course have to take a good-sized apartment…”

I’ve already told about that.

The next morning, Tuesday, he was still shirking. When we have a job on he usually has breakfast instructions for me before he goes up to the plant rooms for his nine-to-eleven session with Theodore and the orchids, but that day there wasn’t a peep out of him, and when he came down to the office at eleven o’clock he got himself comfortable in his chair behind his desk, rang for Fritz to bring beer—two short buzzes—and picked up his book. Even when I showed him the check from Cynthia which had come in the morning mail, two thousand smackers, he merely nodded indifferently. I snorted at him and strode to the hall and out the front door, on my way to the bank to make a deposit. When I got back he was on his second botde of beer and and deep in his book. Apparently his idea was to go on reading until Thursday’s show for buyers.

For one o’clock lunch in the dining room, which was across the hall from the office, Fritz served us with chicken livers and tomato halves fried in oil and trimmed with chopped peppers and parsley, followed by rice cakes and honey. I took it easy on the livers because of my attitude toward Fritz’s rice cakes. I was on my fifth cake, or maybe sixth, when the doorbell rang. During meals Fritz always answers the door, on account of Wolfe’s feeling that the main objection to atom bombs is that they may interrupt people eating. Through the open door from the dining room to the hall I saw Fritz pass on his way to the front, and a moment later his voice came, trying to persuade someone to wait in the office until Wolfe had finished lunch. There was no other voice, but there were steps, and then our visitor was marching in on us—a man about Wolfe’s age, heavy-set, muscular, red-faced, and obviously aggressive.

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