Chapter 1
That wasn’t the first time I ever saw Bess Huddleston.
A couple of years previously she had phoned the office one afternoon and asked to speak to Nero Wolfe, and when Wolfe got on the wire she calmly requested him to come at once to her place up at Riverdale to see her. Naturally he cut her off short. In the first place, he never stirred out of the house except in the direction of an old friend or a good cook; and secondly, it hurt his vanity that there was any man or woman alive who didn’t know that. An hour or so later here she came, to the office-the room he used for an office in his old house on West 35th Street, near the river-and there was a lively fifteen minutes. I never saw him more furious. It struck me as an attractive proposition. She offered him two thousand bucks to come to a party she was arranging for a Mrs. Somebody and be the detective in a murder game. Only four or five hours’ work, sitting down, all the beer he could drink, and two thousand dollars. She even offered an extra five hundred for me to go along and do the leg work. But was he outraged! You might have thought he was Napoleon and she was asking him to come and deploy the tin soldiers in a nursery.
After she had gone I deplored his attitude. I told him that after all she was nearly as famous as he was, being the most successful party-arranger for the upper brackets that New York had ever had, and a combination of the talents of two such artists as him and her would have been something to remember, not to mention what I could do in the way of fun with five hundred smackers, but all he did was sulk.
That had been two years before. Now, this hot August morning with no air conditioning in the house because he distrusted machinery, she phoned around noon and asked him to come up to her place at Riverdale right away. He motioned to me to dispose of her and hung up. But a little later, when he had gone to the kitchen to consult with Fritz about some problem that had arisen in connection with lunch, I looked up her number and called her back. It had been as dull as a blunt instrument around the office for nearly a month, ever since we had finished with the Nauheim case, and I would have welcomed even tailing a laundry boy suspected of stealing a bottle of pop, so I phoned and told her that if she was contemplating a trip to 35th Street I wanted to remind her that Wolfe was incommunicado upstairs with his orchid plants from nine to eleven in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, but that any other time he would be delighted to see her.
I must say he didn’t act delighted, when I ushered her in from the hall around three o’clock that afternoon. He didn’t even apologize for not getting up from his chair to greet her, though I admit no reasonable person would have expected any such effort after one glance at his dimensions.
“You,” he muttered pettishly, “are the woman who came here once and tried to bribe me to play the clown.”
She plopped into the red leather chair I placed for her, got a handkerchief out of her large green handbag, and passed it across her forehead, the back of her neck, and her throat. She was one of those people who don’t look much like their pictures in the paper, because her eyes made her face and made you forget the rest of it when you looked at her. They were black and bright and gave you the feeling they were looking at you when they couldn’t have been, and they made her seem a lot younger than the forty-seven or forty-eight she probably was.
“My God,” she said, “as hot as this I should think you would sweat more. I’m in a hurry because I’ve got to see the Mayor about a Defense Pageant he wants me to handle, so I haven’t time to argue, but your saying I tried to bribe you is perfectly silly. Perfectly silly! It would have been a marvelous party with you for the detective, but I had to get a policeman, an inspector, and all he did was grunt. Like this.” She grunted.
“If you have come, madam, to-”
“I haven’t. I don’t want you for a party this time. I wish I did. Someone is trying to ruin me.”
“Ruin you? Physically, financially-”
“Just ruin me. You know what I do. I do parties-”
“I know what you do,” Wolfe said curtly.
“Very well. My clients are rich people and important people, at least they think they’re important. Without going into that, they’re important to me. So what do you suppose the effect would be-wait, I’ll show it to you-”
She opened her handbag and dug into it like a terrier. A small bit of paper fluttered to the floor, and I stepped across to retrieve it for her, but she darted a glance at it and said, “Don’t bother, wastebasket,” and I disposed of it as indicated and returned to my chair.
Bess Huddleston handed an envelope to Wolfe. “Look at that. What do you think of that?”
Wolfe looked at the envelope, front and back, took from it a sheet of paper which he unfolded and looked at, and passed them over to me.
“This is confidential,” Bess Huddleston said.
“So is Mr. Goodwin,” Wolfe said dryly.
I examined the exhibits. The envelope, stamped and postmarked and slit open, was addressed on a typewriter:
Mrs. Jervis Horrocks
902 East 74th Street
New York City
The sheet of paper said, also typewritten:
Was it ignorance or something else that caused Dr.
Brady to prescribe the wrong medicine for your
daughter? Ask Bess Huddleston. She can tell you if
she will. She told me. |
There was no signature. I handed the sheet and envelope back to Wolfe.
Bess Huddleston used her handkerchief on her forehead and throat again. “There was another one,” she said, looking at Wolfe but her eyes making me feel she was looking at me, “but I haven’t got it. That one, as you see, is postmarked Tuesday, August 12th, six days ago. The other one was mailed a day earlier, Monday, the 11th, a week ago today. Typewritten, just like that. I’ve seen it. It was sent to a very rich and prominent man, and it said- I’ll repeat it. It said: ‘Where and with whom does your wife spend most of her afternoons? If you knew you would be surprised. My authority for this is Bess Huddleston. Ask her.’ The man showed it to me. His wife is one of my best-”
“Please.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. “Are you consulting me or hiring me?”
“I’m hiring you. To find out who sent those things.”
“It’s a mean kind of a job. Often next to impossible. Nothing but greed could induce me to tackle it.”
“Certainly.” Bess Huddleston nodded impatiently. “I know how to charge too. I expect to get soaked. But where will I be if this isn’t stopped and stopped quick?”
“Very well. Archie, your notebook.”
I got it out and got busy. She reeled it off to me while Wolfe rang for beer and then leaned back and closed his eyes. But he opened one of them halfway when he heard her telling me about the stationery and the typewriter. The paper and envelopes of both the anonymous letters, she said, were the kind used for personal correspondence by a girl who worked for her as her assistant in party-arranging, named Janet Nichols; and the letters and envelopes had been typed on a typewriter that belonged to Bess Huddleston herself which was used by another girl who worked for her as her secretary, named Maryella Timms. Bess Huddleston had done no comparing with a magnifying glass, but it looked like the work of that typewriter. Both girls lived with her in her house at Riverdale, and there was a large box of that stationery in Janet Nichols’ room.
Then if not one of the girls—one of the girls? Wolfe muttered, “Facts, Archie.” Servants? No use to bother about the servants, Bess Huddleston said; no servant ever stayed with her long enough to develop a grudge. I passed it with a nod having read about the alligators and bears and other disturbing elements in newspaper and magazine pieces. Did anyone else live in the house? Yes, a nephew, Lawrence Huddleston, also on the payroll as an assistant party-arranger, but, according to Aunt Bess, not on any account to be suspected. That all? Yes. Any persons sufficiently intimate with the household to have had access to the typewriter and Janet Nichols’ stationery?