The League of Frightened Men

Chapter 15

I didn’t go out again that morning. Wolfe got loquacious. Leaning back with his fingers interlaced in front of his belly, with his eyes mostly shut, he favored me with one of his quiet endless orations, his subject this time being what he called bravado of the psyche. He said there were two distinct species of bravado: one having as its purpose to impress outside spectators, the other being calculated solely for an internal audience. The latter was bravado of the psyche. It was a show put on by this or that factor of the ego to make a hit with all the other factors. And so on. I did manage, before one o’clock, to make a copy of the first warning on the Harvard Club junk, and put it under the glass. It was it. Chapin had typed his poems of friendship on that machine.

After lunch I got in the roadster to hunt for Hibbard. The usual reports had come from the boys, including Saul Panzer: nothing. Fred Durkin had cackled over the phone, at a quarter to one, that he and his colleagues had made a swell procession following Paul Chapin to Nero Wolfe’s house, and had retired around the corner, to Tenth Avenue, to await news of Wolfe’s demise. Then they had trailed Chapin back home again.

I had about as much hope of finding Hibbard as of getting a mash note from Greta Garbo, but I went on poking around. Of course I was phoning his niece, Evelyn, twice a day, not in the expectation of getting any dope, since she would let us know if she got any kind of news, but because she was my client and you’ve got to keep reminding your clients you’re on the job. She was beginning to sound pretty sick on the telephone, and I hardly had the heart to try to buck her up, but I made a few passes at it.

Among other weak stabs I made that Friday afternoon was a visit to the office of Ferdinand Bowen the stockbroker. Hibbard had an account with Galbraith & Bowen that had been fairly active fooling with bonds, not much margin stuff, and while I more or less took Bowen in my stride, calling on all the members of the league, there was a little more chance of a hint there than with the others. Entering the office on the twentieth floor of one of the Wall Street buildings, I told myself I’d better advise Wolfe to give a boost to Bowen’s contribution to the pot, no matter what the bank report said. Surely they had the rent paid, and that alone must have been beyond the dreams of avarice. It was one of those layouts, a whole floor, that give you the feeling that a girl would have to be at least a duchess to get a job there as a stenographer.

I was taken into Bowen’s own room. It was as big as a dance hall, and the rugs made you want to walk around them. Bowen sat behind a beautiful dark-brown desk with nothing on it but the Wall Street Journal and an ash tray. One of his little hands held a long fat cigarette with smoke curling up from it that smelled like a Turkish harlot — at least it smelled like what I would expect if I ever got close to one. I didn’t like that guy. If I’d had my choice of pinning a murder on him or Paul Chapin, I’d have been compelled to toss a coin.

He thought he was being decent when he grunted to me to sit down. I can stand a real tough baby, but a bird that fancies himself for a hot mixture of John D. Rockefeller and Lord Chesterfield, being all the time innocent of both ingredients, gives me a severe pain in the sitter. I told him what I was telling all of them, that I would like to know about the last time he had seen Andrew Hibbard, and all details. He had to think. Finally he decided the last time had been more than a week before Hibbard disappeared, around the twentieth of October, at the theater. It had been a party, Hibbard with his niece and Bowen with his wife. Nothing of any significance had been said, Bowen declared, nothing with any bearing on the present situation. As he remembered it, there had been no mention of Paul Chapin, probably because Bowen had been one of the three who had hired the Bascom detectives, and Hibbard disapproved of it and didn’t want to spoil the evening with an argument.

I asked him, “Hibbard had a trading account with your firm?”

He nodded. “For a long while, over ten years. It wasn’t very active, mostly back and forth in bonds.”

“Yeah. I gathered that from the statements among his papers. You see, one thing that might help would be any evidence that when Hibbard left his apartment that Tuesday evening he had an idea that he might not be back again. I can’t find any. I’m still looking. For instance, during the few days preceding his disappearance, did he make any unusual arrangements or give any unusual orders regarding his account here?”

Bowen shook the round thing that he used to grow his hair on. “No. I would have been told... but I’ll make sure.” From a row on the wall behind him he pulled out a telephone, and talked into it. He waited a while, and talked some more. He pushed the phone back, and turned to me. “No, as I thought. There has been no transaction on Andy’s account for over two weeks, and there were no instructions from him.”

I bade him farewell.

That was a good sample of the steady progress I made that day in the search for Andrew Hibbard. It was a triumph. I found out as much from the other six guys I saw as I did from Ferdinand Bowen, so I was all elated when I breezed in home around dinner time, not to mention the fact that with the roadster parked on Ninetieth Street some dirty lout scraped the rear fender while I was in seeing Dr. Burton. I didn’t feel like anything at all, not even like listening to the charming gusto of Wolfe’s dinner conversation — during a meal he refused to remember that there was such a thing as a murder case in the world — so I was glad that he picked that evening to leave the radio turned on.

After dinner we went to the office. Out of spite and bitterness I started to tell him about all the runs I had scored that afternoon, but he asked me to bring him the atlas and began to look at maps. There were all sorts of toys he was apt to begin playing with when he should have had his mind on business, but the worst of all was the atlas. When he got that out I gave up. I fooled around a while with the plant records and the expense account, then I closed my affairs for the night and went over to his desk to look him over. He was doing China! The atlas was a Gouchard, the finest to be had, and did China more than justice. He had the folded map opened out, and with his pencil in one hand and his magnifying glass in the other, there he was buried in the Orient. Without bothering to say good night to him, for I knew he wouldn’t answer, I picked up his copy of Devil Take the Hindmost and went upstairs to my room, stopping in the kitchen for a pitcher of milk.

After I had got into pajamas and slippers I deposited myself in my most comfortable chair, under the reading lamp, with the milk handy on the little tile-top table, and took a crack at Paul Chapin’s book. I thought it was about time I caught up with Wolfe. I flipped through it, and saw there were quite a few places he had marked — sometimes only a phrase, sometimes a whole sentence, occasionally a long passage of two or three paragraphs. I decided to concentrate on those, and I skipped around and took them at random:

For Alan there was no choice in the matter, for he knew that the fury that spends itself in words is but the mumbling of an idiot, beyond the circumference of reality.

I read a dozen more, yawned, and drank some milk. I went on:

There was a lot of that. I got through it, and went on to the next. Then some more. It got monotonous, and I skipped around. There were some places that looked interesting, some conversations, and a long scene with three girls in an apple orchard, but Wolfe hadn’t done any marking there. Around the middle of the book he had marked nearly a whole chapter which told about a guy croaking two other guys by manicuring them with an axe, with an extended explanation of how psychology entered into it. I thought that was a pretty good job of writing. Later I came across things like this, for instance:

At eleven o’clock I gave up. The milk was all gone, and it didn’t seem likely that I would catch up with where Wolfe thought he was if I sat up all night. I thought I detected a hint here and there that the author of that book was reasonably bloodthirsty, but I had some faint suspicions on that score already. I dropped the book on the table, stretched for a good yawn, went and opened the window and stood there looking down on the street long enough to let the sharp cold air make me feel like blankets and hopped for the hay.

Saturday morning I started out again. It was all stale bread to me, and I suppose I did a rotten job of it; if one of those guys had had some little fact tucked away that might have helped there wasn’t much chance of my prying it loose, the way I was going about it. I kept moving anyhow. I called on Elkus, Lang, Mike Ayers, Adler, Cabot and Pratt. I phoned Wolfe at eleven o’clock and he had nothing to say. I decided to tackle Pitney Scott the taxi-driver. Maybe my wild guess that day had been right; there was a chance that he did know something about Andrew Hibbard. But I couldn’t find him. I called up the office of his cab company, and was told that he wasn’t expected to report in until four o’clock. They told me that his usual cruising radius was from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth streets, but that he might be anywhere. I went down and looked around Perry Street, but he wasn’t there. At a quarter to one I phoned Wolfe again, expecting to be invited home to lunch, and instead he handed me a hot one. He asked me to grab a bite somewhere and run out to Mineola for him. Ditson had phoned to say that he had a dozen bulbs of a new Miltonia just arrived from England, and had offered to give Wolfe a couple if he would send for them.

The only times I ever really felt like turning Communist were the occasions when, in the middle of a case, Wolfe sent me chasing around after orchids. It made me feel too damn silly. But it wasn’t as bad this time as usual, since the particular job I was on looked like a washout anyhow. It was cold and raw that Saturday afternoon, and kept trying to make out that it was going to snow, but I opened both windows of the roadster and enjoyed the air a lot and the Long Island traffic not at all.

I got back to Thirty-fifth Street around three-thirty, and took the bulbs in the office to show them to Wolfe. He felt them and looked them over carefully, and asked me to take them upstairs to Horstmann and tell him not to snip the roots. I went up, and came back down to the office, intending to stop only a minute to enter the bulbs in the record book and then beat it again to get Pitney Scott. But Wolfe, from his chair, said:

“Archie.”

I knew from the tone it was the start of a speech, so I settled back. He went on:

“Now and then I receive the impression that you suspect me of neglecting this or that detail of our business. Ordinarily you are wrong, which is as it should be. In the labyrinth of any problem that confronts us, we must select the most promising paths; if we attempt to follow all at once we shall arrive nowhere. In any art — and I am an artist or nothing — one of the deepest secrets of excellence is a discerning elimination. Of course that is a truism.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes. Take the art of writing. I am, let us say, describing the actions of my hero rushing to greet his beloved, who has just entered the forest. He sprang up from the log on which he had been sitting, with his left foot forward; as he did so, one leg of his trousers fell properly into place but the other remained hitched up at the knee. He began running towards her, first his right foot, then his left, then his right again, then left, right, left, right, left, right... As you see, some of that can surely be left out — indeed, must be, if he is to accomplish his welcoming embrace in the same chapter. So the artist must leave out vastly more than he puts in, and one of his chief cares is to leave out nothing vital to his work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You follow me. I assure you that the necessity I have just described is my constant concern when we are engaged in an enterprise. When you suspect me of neglect you are in a sense justified, for I do ignore great quantities of facts and impingements which might seem to another intelligence — let it go without characterization — to be of importance to our undertaking. But I should consider myself an inferior workman if I ignored a fact which the event proved actually to have significance. That is why I wish to make this apology to myself, thus publicly, in your hearing.”

I nodded. “I’m still hanging on. Apology for what?”

“For bad workmanship. It may prove not to have been disastrous, it may even turn out of no importance whatever. But sitting here this afternoon contemplating my glories and sifting out the sins, it occurred to me, and I need to ask you about it. You may remember that on Wednesday evening, sixty-five hours ago, you were describing for me the contents of Inspector Cramer’s bean.”

I grinned. “Yeah.”

“You told me that it was his belief that Dr. Elkus was having Mr. Chapin shadowed.”

“Yep.”

“And then you started a sentence; I think you said, But one of those dicks — Something approximating that. I was impatient, and I stopped you. I should not have done so. My impulsive reaction to what I knew to be nonsense betrayed me into an error. I should have let you finish. Pray do so now.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I remember. But since you’ve dumped the Dreyer thing into the ash can, what does it matter whether Elkus—”

“Archie. Confound it, I care nothing about Elkus; what I want is your sentence about a dick. What dick? Where is he?”

“Didn’t I say? Tailing Paul Chapin.”

“One of Mr. Cramer’s men.”

I shook my head. “Cramer has a man there too. And we’ve got Durkin and Gore and Keems, eight-hour shifts. This bird’s an extra. Cramer wondered who was paying him and had him in for a conference, but he’s tough, he never says anything but cuss words. I thought maybe he was Bascom’s, but no.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yeah, I went down there. He was eating soup, and he’s like you about meals, business is out. I waited on him a little, carried his bread and butter and so on, and came on home.”

“Describe him.”

“Well... he hasn’t much to offer to the eye. He weighs a hundred and thirty-five, five feet seven. Brown cap and pink necktie. A cat scratched him on the cheek and he didn’t clean it up very well. Brown eyes, pointed nose, wide thin mouth but not tight, pale healthy skin.”

“Hair?”

“He kept his cap on.”

Wolfe sighed. I noticed that the tip of his finger was doing a little circle on the arm of his chair. He said, “Sixty-five hours. Get him and bring him here at once.”

I got up. “Yeah. Alive or dead?”

“By persuasion if possible, certainly with a minimum of violence, but bring him.”

“It’s five minutes to four. You’ll be in the plantrooms.”

“Well? This house is comfortable. Keep him.”

I got some things from a drawer of my desk and stuffed them in my pockets, and beat it.