Archie Goes Home

Chapter 1

This all began innocently, although I have been around long enough to be suspicious of what seems to be an innocuous telephone call like the one I received on a sunny June morning as I sat in the office with coffee after breakfast. The voice at the other end belonged to my aunt Edna, who was phoning from down in southern Ohio, the area where I was born and reared.

Edna usually calls when she’s concerned about my mother, which has gotten to be a little more frequently the last few years. “Is it about Mom?” I asked, clenching the receiver as if I were trying to strangle it.

“Oh, well, she is... all right, Archie, she is just fine,” my aunt said without conviction. “And please don’t tell her that I telephoned you. I have enough of a reputation as a busybody as it is.”

“Then what is the problem?” I learned long ago that you don’t rush Edna Wainwright, my mother’s slightly younger sister. She is going to tell a story at her own pace, and there is nothing anyone can do to speed her up. Maybe that’s because of where she lives. Everything in that hilly, semirural region down near the Ohio River moves at a pace New Yorkers would call excruciatingly slow. I leaned back in my desk chair and drained the last of Fritz Brenner’s fine brew from my cup. The sweep second hand on my watch had nearly made a full revolution when Aunt Edna cleared her throat. Progress.

“I am sure that you must remember Logan Mulgrew.”

“How could I forget him, even after all the years I’ve been away,” I said. “He has run the Farmer’s State Bank & Trust since long before I snuck out of town and headed to New York lo those many eons ago.”

“He doesn’t run it anymore, Archie. He was found dead at home three days ago.”

“Hardly a surprise. He must have been close to eighty, wasn’t he?”

“Eighty-four, to be exact. But he did not die of natural causes,” Aunt Edna said. “When he had not shown up at the bank for two days, his grandniece got worried and went to his house — you know, that big old pile of brick and stone south of town out on the Portsmouth Road, not far from where your mother lives.”

“I remember the house well; it was the largest place around by far, wasn’t it?”

“And without doubt the gloomiest,” she said. “Logan had lived there alone ever since his wife, Sylvia, died early last year. And they never had any children. Anyway, when Donna Newman, that’s the grandniece, went into the house, she found her uncle dead on the sofa in the living room, with a hole in his temple and a pistol lying on the seat cushion next to his outstretched hand. He had been dead for some time.”

“Suicide,” I said.

“Not likely,” Aunt Edna replied in a tone that defied contradiction. “I probably knew Logan as well as almost anyone in the area, and he was not a man to take his own life, that much I can say.”

“He probably found out that he had a terminal illness, and he didn’t want to—”

“No, Archie, no,” my aunt interrupted. “His grandniece said he recently had a checkup, and the physician found him so fit that he could have passed for a man at least fifteen years younger.”

“What do the police think?”

“The police — that would be our young chief, Tom Blankenship — has said the doctor who examined the body found nothing to indicate anything suspicious in the way of a disease.”

“What is your opinion of this Blankenship?”

“Oh, he’s all right, I suppose,” Edna said dismissively. “He has been on the job for five... well, almost six years now, and there really hasn’t been much crime around here, unless you count a car chase after a holdup in which a couple of shots got fired, which fortunately didn’t hit anybody. This isn’t like New York, you know, where violence is just a way of life.”

“It really is not that bad,” I told her, but I was not about to press the point. I knew the image that small-town America — Aunt Edna included — has of New York and other large cities, while exaggerated, contains some merit. “So what do you plan to do about Mr. Mulgrew’s death?”

“It has been quite a while since you came down here to see your mother,” Edna remarked, in what seemed to be a non sequitur. But I knew damned well what she was up to.

“You are aware that she spent two weeks with me in New York just a couple of years ago,” I said in an attempt to parry her.

“That simply is not the same,” she replied. “I know, Archie, that she would love to have you stay with her for a time. It would mean so much to her.”

“You say that her health’s been good?”

“Well, we are all getting older, you know, that is just a fact of life. Nobody knows just how much time they have left,” she said, sidestepping my question.

“Has she been sick in the last few months? She hasn’t mentioned anything in her letters, or in the telephone call we had a few weeks ago.”

“If there are any problems, she wouldn’t talk about it, Archie. And she probably wouldn’t say anything to me. You know how she is, never been one to complain.”

I was getting frustrated with my aunt’s evasiveness, and I saw no benefit in prolonging the conversation, so I told her that I would consider a trip to Ohio at some point, if only to get her off the subject. When Edna pressed me further, I had to bring out the artillery. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Wolfe is signaling me. It seems we have a crisis in a case we’re struggling with. I really have to go. It was good talking to you, as it always is.”

I hung up and took a deep breath, thinking about my mother. There was no way Edna Wainwright could know that Nero Wolfe never came down to the office from his morning visit with his ten thousand orchids in the greenhouse on the roof until eleven o’clock, which was still more than an hour away.

When Wolfe did come down, by elevator as usual, he carried a raceme of purple Cymbidium, placed it in a vase on his blotter, settled his seventh of a ton into his reinforced chair, and asked if I had slept well. I replied in the affirmative. He then pressed the button in the leg-hole of his desk, which triggered a buzzer in the kitchen that alerted Fritz to bring him two bottles of Remmers beer along with a chilled glass.

As he flipped through the mail I had opened and stacked on his desk, he looked up at me. “Is something troubling you?” he asked.

“No, should it?”

“Your forehead is creased, which is a rare occurrence and one usually brought on by some degree of angst. And yet we have no cases at present for you to stew over,” he said, returning to his perusal of the mail.

I long ago gave up trying to mask my feelings from Wolfe, whose radar is always in operation. I reported the telephone conversation with Aunt Edna as he popped the cap off a bottle of beer and poured its contents into the glass, eyeing the foam as it settled. “You of course have not heard the last of that woman, who assuredly will continue to badger you.”

“In all probability,” I conceded.

“As I just said, we have no case at present, and as you reported to me yesterday, our bank balance is healthier than it has been in months, maybe even in years.”

“I take it you’re suggesting I go down to Ohio and stick my nose into the death of an old banker?”

“I suggest nothing,” Wolfe replied as he picked up his current book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, by Alan Bullock. “But such a trip would at least give you an opportunity to visit your mother, with whom you have remained close.”

“Who would open your mail and pay the bills and make sure that the orchid germination records are kept up to date?”

“Saul Panzer has on occasion performed those roles and others admirably over the years in your absence — that is, if you have no objection to his sitting at your desk.”

“No objection whatever,” I said. “That is not to say I am going to Ohio, however.” Wolfe chose to make no response, immersing himself in the book.