The Doorbell Rang

Chapter 8

There were more than a hundred Odells in the phone books of the five boroughs, but no Frank. That established, I sat at my desk at half past nine Friday morning and considered recourses. It wasn’t the kind of problem to discuss with Wolfe, and anyway he wasn’t available. Saul Panzer had come at nine o’clock on the dot, and instead of going up to the plant rooms Wolfe had come down, put on his heavy overcoat and broad-brimmed beaver hat, and followed Saul out to the curb to climb into the Heron sedan. Of course he knew that the heater, if turned on full, could make the inside of the Heron like an oven, but he took the heavy coat because he distrusted all machines more complicated than a wheelbarrow. He would have been expecting to be stranded at some wild and lonely spot in the Long Island jungle even if I had been driving.

It took will power to fasten my mind on the Frank Odell caper, which was merely a stab in the dark blindfolded, ordered by Wolfe only because he preferred the second of the three alternatives. Where my mind wanted to be was on Long Island. In all my experience of Wolfe’s arrangements of circumstances I had never known him to concoct anything as tricky as the program he was going to rope Lewis Hewitt in for, and I should have been there. Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn’t leak and no tire is flat. I would have insisted on going if it hadn’t been for Saul Panzer. Wolfe had said that Saul would sit in, and he is the one man I would turn any problem over to if I broke a leg.

I forced my mind onto Frank Odell. The obvious thing was to ring the New York State Parole Division and ask if they had him listed. But of course not on our phone. If the FBI knew that we were spending time and money on Odell after what Quayle had said about him, they would know it wasn’t just prudence, that we thought there was actually a chance that he was involved, and that wouldn’t do. I decided to play it absolutely safe. If some G-man reads this and thinks I’m overrating his outfit, he isn’t inside far enough to know all the family secrets. I’m not inside at all, but I’ve been around a lot.

After going to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving and to the hall for my coat and hat, I let myself out, walked to Tenth Avenue and on to the garage, got permission from Tom Halloran to use the phone, dialed the Gazette number, and got Lon Cohen. He was discreet. He didn’t ask me how we were making out with Mrs. Bruner and the FBI. He did ask if I knew where he could get a bottle of brandy.

“I might send you one someday,” I said, “if you earn it. You can start now. About two years ago a man named Frank Odell was sent up for fraud. If he behaved himself and got a reduction he may be out and on the parole list. I’ve gone in for social work and I want to find him, quick, and rehabilitate him. You can get me, the sooner the better, at this number.” I gave it to him. “I’m keeping my social work secret, so please don’t mention it.”

He said an hour should do it, and I went out to the floor to give motor vehicles a look. Wolfe buys a new one every year, thinking that reduces the risk of a collapse, which it doesn’t, and he leaves the choice to me. I have been tempted to get a Rolls, but it would be a shame to ditch it after only a year. That day there was nothing on the floor I would have traded the Heron for. Tom and I were discussing the dashboard of a 1965 Lincoln when the phone rang and I went. It was Lon, and he had it. Frank Odell had been released in August and would be on parole until the end of February. He lived at 2553 Lamont Avenue, Bronx, and he had a job at a branch of the Driscoll Renting Agency at 4618 Grand Concourse. Lon said that a good way to start rehabilitating him would be to get him in a poker game, and I said I thought craps would be better.

I decided to take the subway instead of a taxi, not to save the client money, but because I thought it was about time to do something about tails. There had been two days and nights since the FBI had presumably got interested in us, and twenty-five hours since they had asked Perazzo to take our licenses, and I still had seen no sign that I had company. Of course I had dodged or hadn’t looked. I now decided to look, but not while walking. I waited until I was at the Grand Central subway station and had boarded an uptown express.

If you think you have a tail on a subway train and want to spot him you keep moving while the train is under way, and at each station you stand close enough to a door so that you might get off. At a rush hour it’s difficult, but it was ten-thirty in the morning and we were going uptown. I had him by the time we made the third stop — or rather, them. There were two. One was a chunky specimen, barely tall enough to meet the specifications, with big brown eyes that he didn’t know how to handle, and the other was the Gregory Peck type except for his curly little ears. The game, just for the hell of it, was to spot them without their knowing I had, and when I got off at the 170th Street station I was pretty sure I had won it. Out on the sidewalk again, I ignored them.

Tailing on New York streets, if you know you have it and want to shake it and aren’t a birdbrain, is a joke. There are a thousand dodges, and the tailee merely picks the one that fits the time and place. There on Tremont Avenue I moseyed along, glancing occasionally at my wristwatch and at the numbers on doors, until I saw an empty taxi coming. When it was thirty yards away I scooted between parked cars, flagged it, hopped in, told the hackie as I pulled the door shut, “Step on it,” and saw Gregory Peck stare at me as we went by. The other one was across the street. We did seven blocks before a red light stopped us, so that was that. I admit I had kept an eye on the rear. I gave the driver the Grand Concourse address, and the light changed, and we rolled.

Some realty agency branch offices are upstairs, but that one was the ground floor of an apartment building, of course one of the buildings it serviced. I entered. It was small, two desks and a table and a filing cabinet. A beautiful young lady with enough black hair for a Beatle was at the nearest desk, and when she smiled at me and asked if she could help me I had to take a breath to keep my head from swimming. They should stay home during business hours. I told her I would like to see Mr. Odell, and she turned her beautiful head and nodded to the rear.

He was at the other desk. I had waited to see him before deciding on the approach, and one look was enough. Some men, after a hitch in the jug, even a short one, have got a permanent wilt, but not him. In size he was a peanut, but an elegant peanut. Fair-skinned and fair-headed, he was more than fair-dressed. His pinstripe gray suit had set him, or somebody, back at least two Cs.

He left his chair to come, said he was Frank Odell, and offered a hand. It would have been simpler if he had had a room to himself; possibly she didn’t know she was cooped up with a jailbird. I said I was Archie Goodwin, got out my case, and handed him a card. He gave it a good look, stuck it in his pocket, and said, “My goodness, I should have recognized you. From your picture in the paper.”

My picture hadn’t been in the paper for fourteen months, and he had been behind bars, but I didn’t make an issue of it. “I’m beginning to show my years,” I told him. “Can you give me a few minutes? Nero Wolfe has taken on a little job involving a man named Morris Althaus and he thinks you might be able to furnish some information.”

He didn’t bat an eye. No wilt. He merely said, “That’s the man that was murdered.”

“Right. Of course the police have been around about that. Routine. This is just a private investigation on a side issue.”

“If you mean the police have been here, they haven’t. We might as well sit down.” He moved to his desk, and I followed and took a chair at its end. “What’s the side issue?” he asked.

“It’s a little complicated. It’s about some research he was doing at the time he was killed. You may know something about it if you saw him during that period — say the month of November, last November. Did you see him around then?”

“No, the last time I saw him was two years ago. In a courtroom. When some people that I thought were friends of mine were making me the goat. Why would the police be seeing me?”

“Oh, in a murder case they can’t crack they see everybody.” I waved it away. “What you say about being made the goat, that’s interesting. It might have some bearing on what we want to know, whether Althaus was in the habit of doctoring his stuff. Was he one of the friends who made you the goat?”

“My goodness, no. He wasn’t a friend. I only met him twice, while he was doing that piece, or getting ready to. He was looking for bigger fish. I was just a hustler, working for Bruner Realty.”

“Bruner Realty?” I wrinkled my brow. “I don’t remember that name in connection with the case. Of course I’m not any too familiar with it. Then it was your friends in Bruner Realty who made you the goat?”

He smiled. “You certainly are not familiar with it. It was some outside deals that I had a hand in. That all came out at the trial. The Bruner people were very nice about it, very nice. The vice-president even arranged for me to see Mrs. Bruner herself. That was the second time I saw Althaus, in her office at her house. She was nice too. She believed what I told her. She even paid my lawyer, part of it. You see, she realized that I had got mixed up in a shady deal, but I explained to her that I hadn’t known what I was getting into, and she didn’t want a man who was working for her company to get a bum deal. I call that nice.”

“So do I. I’m surprised you didn’t go back to Bruner Realty when you got — when you could.”

“They didn’t want me.”

“That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

“Well, it’s the philosophy of it. After all, I had been convicted. The president of the company is a pretty tough man. I could have gone to Mrs. Bruner, but I have a certain amount of pride, and I heard about this opening with Driscoll.” He smiled. “I’m not licked, far from it. There’s plenty of opportunity in this business, and I’m still young.” He opened a drawer. “You gave me a card, I’ll give you one.”

He gave me about a dozen, not one, and some information about the Driscoll Renting Agency. They had nine offices in three boroughs and handled over a hundred buildings, and they gave the finest service in the metropolitan area. I received a strong impression that Driscoll was nice. I listened to enough of it to be polite, and thanked him, and on the way out I took the liberty of exchanging glances with the beautiful young lady, and she smiled at me. That was certainly a nice place.

I strolled down the Grand Concourse in the winter sunshine, cooling off; I hadn’t been invited to remove my coat. I was listing the items of the coincidence:

That was no coincidence; it was cause and effect in a hell of a mess. I started to sort it out but soon found that there were so many combinations and possibilities that you could even come up with the notion that Mrs. Bruner had shot Althaus, which wouldn’t do, since she was the client. The one conclusion was that there was a needle in this haystack, and it had to be found. Wolfe had stolen another base. He had merely asked Yarmack if the articles Althaus had written for Tick-Tock were innocuous, and had merely told me to find Odell because he couldn’t think of anything sensible for me, and here was this.

I couldn’t have called Wolfe even if he had been at home, and I decided not to ring him at Hewitt’s. Not only does a place like that have a dozen or more extensions, but also G-men had probably followed him there, since Saul had been told to ignore tails, and tapping a line in the country was a cinch for them. I happen to know that they once — But I’ll skip it.

But I was not going to go home and sit on it until he got back. I found a phone booth, dialed Mrs. Bruner’s number and got her, and asked if she could meet me at Rusterman’s at twelve-thirty for lunch. She said she could. I rang Rusterman’s and got Felix and asked if I could have the soundproofed room upstairs, the small one. He said I could. I went out and got a taxi.

Rusterman’s has lost some of the standing it had when Marko Vukcic was alive. Wolfe is no longer the trustee, but he still goes there about once a month and Felix comes to the old brownstone now and then for advice. When Wolfe goes, taking Fritz and me, we eat in the small room upstairs, and we always start with the queen of soups, Germiny à l’Oseille. So I knew that room well. Felix was there with me, being sociable, when Mrs. Bruner came, only ten minutes late.

She wanted a double dry martini with onion. You never know; I would have guessed hers would be sherry or Dubonnet, and certainly not the onion. When it came she took three healthy sips in a row, looked to see that the waiter had closed the door, and said, “Of course I didn’t ask you on the phone. Something has happened?”

I had a martini to keep her company, without the onion. I took a sip and said, “Nothing big. Mr. Wolfe has broken two rules today. He skipped his morning session in the plant rooms, and he left the house on business — your business. He is out on Long Island seeing a man. That could develop into something, but don’t hold your breath. As for me, I just made a trip to the Bronx to see a man named Frank Odell. He used to work for you — Bruner Reality. Didn’t he?”

“Odell?”

“Yes.”

She frowned. “I don’t — Oh, of course. Odell, that’s the little man who had all that trouble. But he — isn’t he in prison?”

“He was. He was paroled out a few months ago.”

She was still frowning. “But why on earth were you seeing him?”

“It’s a long story, Mrs. Bruner.” I took a sip. “Mr. Wolfe decided to try getting a start by checking a little on FBI activities in and around New York. Among other things, we learned that last fall a man named Morris Althaus had been gathering material for a piece on the FBI for a magazine, and seven weeks ago he was murdered. That was worth looking into, and we did some checking on him. We learned that he did a piece called ‘The Realty Racket’ a couple of years ago, and as a result a man named Frank Odell had got a jail sentence for fraud. Mr. Wolfe had me look him up, and I located him and went to see him and learned that he had worked for your firm. So I thought I ought to ask you about it.”

She had put the glass on the table. “But what is there to ask me?”

“Just questions. For instance, about Morris Althaus. How well did you know him?”

“I didn’t know him at all.”

“He came at least once to your house — your office. According to Odell.”

She nodded. “That’s right, he did. I remembered that when I read about him — the murder.” Her chin was up. “I don’t like your tone, Mr. Goodwin. Are you intimating that I have concealed something?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bruner, I am. That you may have. We might as well clear it up before lunch instead of after. You have hired Mr. Wolfe to do a job that’s as close to impossible as a job can get. The least you can do is tell us everything that could conceivably have a bearing on it. The fact that you had known Morris Althaus, at least you had met him, naturally suggests questions. Did you know he was working at a piece on the FBI? Let me finish. Did you know or suspect that the FBI was involved in his murder? Was that why you sent those books? Was that why you came to Nero Wolfe? Just stay in the buggy. We simply have to know everything you know, that’s all.”

She did all right. A woman who can toss you a check for a hundred grand without blinking hasn’t had much practice listening to reason from a hireling, but she managed it. She didn’t count ten, at least not audibly, but she picked up her glass and drank, gave me a straight look, put the glass down, and spoke. “I didn’t ‘conceal’ anything. It just didn’t occur to me to mention Morris Althaus. Or perhaps it did occur to me while I was thinking about it, but not while I was talking to Mr. Wolfe. Because it was just — I didn’t really know anything. I don’t know anything now. I had read about the murder and remembered that I had met him, but the only connection it had with the FBI was what Miss Dacos, my secretary, had told me, and that was just a girl talking. She didn’t really know anything either. It had nothing to do with my sending the books. I sent them because I had read it, and I thought it was important for important people to read it. Does that answer your questions?”

“Pretty well, but it raises another one. Just keep in mind that I’m working on your job. What had Miss Dacos told you?”

“Nothing but talk. She lived at the same address, she still does. Her—”

“What same address?”

“The same as that man, Morris Althaus. In the Village. Her apartment is on the second floor, below his. She was out that evening, and soon after—”

“The night he was killed?”

“Yes. Stop interrupting me. Soon after she returned to her apartment she heard footsteps outside, people going down the stairs, and she was curious about who it might be. She went to the window and looked out and saw three men leave the house and walk to the corner, and she thought they were FBI men. The only reason she had for thinking they were FBI men was that they looked like it; she said they were ‘the type.’ As I said, she didn’t know anything, and I didn’t know there was any connection between Morris Althaus and the FBI. You asked if I knew he was working on a piece on the FBI. No, not until you told me. I resent your suggestion that I concealed something.” She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s after one o’clock, and I have an appointment at half past two, a committee meeting that I must be on time for.”

I pushed a button, two shorts, on a slab on the table, and begged her pardon for asking her to lunch and then starving her. In a couple of minutes Pierre came with the lobster bisque, and I told him to bring the squabs in ten minutes without waiting for a ring.

There was a little question of etiquette. As a matter of business it would have been proper to tell her that neither Nero Wolfe nor I was ever allowed to pay for anything we or our guests ate at Rusterman’s, so it wouldn’t be an item on the expense account, but such a remark didn’t seem to fit with Squabs à la Moscovite, Mushrooms Polonaise, Salade Béatrice, and Soufflé Armenonville. I vetoed it. I didn’t resume on Miss Dacos, but our only known common interest was the FBI. I learned that she had received 607 letters thanking her for the book, most of them just a polite sentence or two; 184 disapproving letters, some pretty strong; and 29 anonymous letters and cards calling her names. I was surprised that it was only 29; out of the 10,000 there must have been a couple of hundred members of the John Birch Society and similar outfits.

With the coffee I returned to Miss Dacos, having done some calculating. If Wolfe left Hewitt’s at four o’clock he would get back around five-thirty, but he might leave, say five and arrive at six-thirty, in need of refreshment after the dangerous trip in the dark of night surrounded by thousands of treacherous machines. It would have to be after dinner. When Pierre left after serving coffee I told Mrs. Bruner, “Of course Mr. Wolfe will have to see Miss Dacos. She may know nothing, as you say, but he’ll have to satisfy himself on that. Will you tell her to be here at nine o’clock this evening? In this room. Our office may be bugged.”

“But I told you it was just a girl talking.”

I said she was probably right, but one of Wolfe’s specialties was prying something useful out of people who just talk, and when she finished her coffee I took her to Felix’s office in the rear, and she got Miss Dacos on the phone and arranged it.

After I escorted her downstairs and into her car I went back up and had another cup of coffee. I would wait to call Wolfe until I was sure they had finished lunch. I sat and looked things over. I had slipped up on one point; I hadn’t asked if Miss Dacos had been present when Morris Althaus and Frank Odell had talked with Mrs. Bruner in her office. Of course Miss Dacos could tell us, but it was the kind of detail that Wolfe expects me to cover, and I expect me to too. How good a guess was it that it was Sarah Dacos who had told the cops about the three men? Not good at all, unless she had dressed it up or down either for the cops or for Mrs. Bruner. She couldn’t see them go to a car around the corner, and get the license number, from the window of Number 63. Then we could be getting corroboration, but for the first alternative, that the FBI killed him, not for the one we preferred. But so what, since it was no longer futile, according to Wolfe’s program.

I remembered how, crossing Washington Square yesterday on my sightseeing trip, I had thought it was coincidence that Arbor Street was in the Village and Sarah Dacos lived in the Village. Now it might be more than coincidence; it might be some more cause and effect.

At three o’clock I went to Felix’s office and called Lewis Hewitt’s number. There’s something wrong with the way the people in that palace handle phone calls. It took a good four minutes, but finally Wolfe’s voice came.

“Yes, Archie?”

“Yes and no,” I said, “but more yes than no. I’m at Rusterman’s. Mrs. Bruner and I had lunch here. If you get here before six-thirty I can report before dinner. We might as well eat here because someone is coming at nine o’clock to discuss things.”

“Coming there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why? Why not the office?”

“It will be better here. Unless you want an attractive young woman practically sitting on your lap for a couple of hours with the radio going.”

“What young woman?”

“Sarah Dacos, Mrs. Bruner’s secretary. I’ll report when you come.”

“If I come. Very well.” He hung up.

I dialed the number I knew best and told Fritz we would dine at Rusterman’s and he would have to leave the venison chops in the marinade until tomorrow. Then I got Mrs. David Althaus’s number from the book and dialed it, but by the time she got on I had decided not to ask her on the phone. All I wanted to know was if she had ever heard her son mention a girl named Sarah Dacos, but I had three hours to kill, so I might as well take a walk. I asked if she would let me in if I came around four-thirty, and she said yes. On the way out I told Felix that Wolfe and I would be there for dinner.