Blood Will Tell

1

Naturally most of the items in the mail that is delivered to the old brownstone on West 35th Street are addressed to Nero Wolfe, but since I both work and live there eight or ten out of a hundred are addressed to me. It is my custom to let my share wait until after I have opened Wolfe’s, looked it over, and put it on his desk, but sometimes curiosity butts in. As it did that Tuesday morning when I came to an elegant cream-colored envelope, outsize, addressed to me on a typewriter, with the return address in the corner engraved in dark brown:

Never heard of him. It wasn’t flat; it bulged with something soft inside. Like everybody else, I occasionally get envelopes containing samples of something that bulges them, but not expensive envelopes with engraving that isn’t phony. So I slit it open and removed the contents. A folded sheet of paper that matched the envelope, including the engraved name and address, had a message typed in the center:

“This” was a necktie, a four-in-hand, neatly folded to go in the envelope. I stretched it out — long, narrow, maybe silk, light tan, almost the same color as the stationery, with thin brown diagonal lines. A Sutcliffe label, so certainly silk, say twenty bucks. But he should have sent it to the cleaners instead of me, because it had a spot, a big one two inches long, near one end, about the same tone of brown as the thin lines; but the lines’ brown was clean and live and the spot’s brown was dirty and dead. I sniffed at it, but I am not a beagle. Having seen a few dried bloodstains here and there, I knew the dirty color was right, but that’s no phenolphthalin test. Even so, I told myself as I dropped the tie in a drawer, supposing that James Neville Vance worked in a butcher shop and forgot his bib, why pick on me? As I closed the drawer I shrugged.

That’s the way to take it when you get a bloodstained (maybe) necktie in the mail from a stranger, just shrug, but I admit that in the next couple of hours I did something and didn’t do something else. What I did do was ring Lon Cohen at the Gazette to ask a question, and an hour later he called back to say that James Neville Vance, now in his late fifties, still owned all the real estate he had inherited from his father, still spent winters on the Riviera, and was still a bachelor; and what did he want of a private detective? I reserved that What I didn’t do was take a walk. When nothing is stirring and Wolfe has given me no program I usually go out after the routine morning chores to work my legs and have a look at the town and my fellow men, not to mention women, but that morning I skipped it because JNV might come or phone. It had been an honest shrug, but you can’t shrug all day.

I might as well have had my walk because the phone call didn’t come until a quarter past eleven, after Wolfe had come down to the office from his two-hour morning session with the orchids up in the plant rooms on the roof. He had put a spray of Cymbidium Doris in the vase on his desk and got his personal seventh of a ton disposed in his oversize custom-made chair, and was scowling at the dust jacket of a book, one of the items that had been addressed to him, when the phone rang and I got it.

“Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Is this Archie Goodwin?”

Three people out of ten will do that I am always tempted to say no, it’s a trained dog, and see what comes next, but I might get barked at. So I said, “It is. In person.”

“This is James Neville Vance. Did you receive something in the mail from me?”

His voice couldn’t decide whether to be a squeak or a falsetto and had the worst features of both. “Yes, presumably,” I said. “Your envelope and letterhead.”

“And an enclosure.”

“Right.”

“Please destroy it. Burn it. I intended— But what I intended doesn’t matter now... I was mistaken. Burn it. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

He hung up.

I cradled the phone and swiveled. Wolfe had opened the book to the title page and was eying it with the same kind of look a man I know has for a pretty girl he has just met.

“If I may interrupt,” I said. “Since there’s nothing urgent in the mail I have an errand, personal or professional, I don’t know which.” I got the envelope, letterhead, and enclosure from the drawer, rose, and handed them to him. “If that spot on the tie is blood, my theory was that someone stabbed or shot James Neville Vance and got rid of the corpse all right but didn’t know what to do with the tie, so he sent it to me, but that phone call was a bagpipe saying he was James Neville Vance, and he had been mistaken, and I would please burn what he had sent me by mail. So evidently—”

“A bagpipe?”

“I merely meant he squeaked. So evidently he couldn’t burn it himself because he didn’t have a match, and now he’s impersonating James Neville Vance, who owns — or owned — various gobs of real estate, and it is my duty as a citizen and a licensed private detective to expose and denounce—”

“Pfui. Some floundering numskull.”

“Okay. I’ll go out back to burn it. It’ll smelt.”

He grunted. “It may not be blood.”

I nodded. “Sure. But if it’s ketchup and tobacco juice I can tell him how to get it out and charge him two bucks. That will be a bigger fee than any you’ve collected for nearly a month.”

Another grunt. “Where is Horn Street?”

“In the Village. Thirty-minute walk. I’ve had no walk.”

“Very well.” He opened the book.