In the Best Families

Chapter 12

One or two of my friends have tried to tell me that some of my experiences that summer are worth telling about, but even taking them at their word, I’m not going to drag it in here. However, it is true that after I ran an ad in the Gazette and word got around I soon quit keeping count of the incoming calls. All I’ll do here is summarize it by months:

May. Woman with pet cat stolen. Got it back; fifty dollars and expenses. Guy who got rolled in a joint on Eighth Avenue and didn’t want to call the cops. Pound her and scared most of it out of her. Two Cs for me. Man who wanted his son pried loose from a blond sharpie. Shouldn’t have tried; fell on my nose; took a C above expenses anyhow. Restaurant with a dumb cashier with sticky fingers; took only one afternoon to hook her; client beefed about my request for sixty-five dollars but paid it.

June. Spent two full weeks handling a hot insurance case for Del Bascom and damn near got my skull cracked for good. Cleaned it up. Del had the nerve to offer me 3 Cs; demanded a grand and got it. My idea was to net more per week than I had been getting from Wolfe, not that I cared for the money, but as a matter of principle. Found a crooked bookie for a man from Meadville, Pa. A hundred and fifty dollars. Man wanted me to find his vanished wife, but it looked dim and he could pay only twenty bucks a day, so I passed it. Girl unjustly accused, she said, of giving secret business dope to a rival firm, and fired from her job, pestered me into tackling it. Proved she was right and got her job back, doing five hundred dollars’ worth of work for a measly hundred and twenty, paid in installments. Her face wasn’t much, but she had a nice voice and good legs. Got an offer of a job from the FBI, my ninth offer from various sources in six weeks, and turned it down.

July. Took a whirl at supervising ten men for a bunch of concessionaires at Coney Island; caught one of them taking a cut from doobey stands; he jumped me with a cooler and I broke his arm. Got tired of looking at a thousand acres of bare skin, mostly peeling, practically all nonseductive, and quit. Eight fifty for seventeen days. Had passed up at least two thousand worth of little chores. Screwball woman on Long Island had had jewelry stolen, uninsured, thought cops were in on it and stalling. Two things happened: I got some breaks, and I did a damn good piece of work. It took me into August. I got all the jewelry back, hung it on an interior decorator’s assistant with proof, billed her for thirty-five hundred gross, and collected.

August. I had drawn no pay from Wolfe’s checkbook since May sixth, I had not gone near my personal safe deposit box, and my personal bank balance had not only not sunk, it had lifted. I decided I had a vacation coming. The most I had ever been able to talk Wolfe out of was two weeks, and I thought I should double that at least. A friend of mine, whose name has appeared in print in connection with one of Wolfe’s cases, had the idea that we should take a look at Norway, and her point of view seemed sound.

Slow but sure, I was working myself around to an attitude toward life without Nero Wolfe on a permanent basis. One thing that kept it slow was the fact that early in July Marko Vukcic had asked me to bring him another check for five grand drawn to cash. Since if you wanted to eat in his restaurant you had to reserve a table a day in advance, and then pay six bucks for one helping of guinea hen, I knew he wasn’t using it himself, so who was? Another thing, the house hadn’t been sold, and, doing a little snooping on my own account, I had learned that the asking price was a hundred and twenty thousand, which was plain silly. On the other hand, if Marko was getting money to Wolfe, that didn’t prove that I was ever going to see him again, and there was no hurry about selling the house until the bank balance began to sag; and also there was Wolfe’s safe deposit box. Visiting his safe deposit box was one item on the select list of purposes for which Wolfe had been willing to leave his house.

I did not really want to leave New York, especially to go as far as Norway. I had a feeling that I would about be passing Sandy Hook when word would come somehow, wire or phone or letter or messenger, to Thirty-fifth Street or 1019, in a code that I would understand — if I was there to get it. And if it did come I wanted to be there, or I might be left out of the biggest charade Wolfe had ever staged. But it hadn’t been days or weeks, it had been months, and my friend was pretty good at several things, including riding me about hanging on forever to the short end of the stick, so we had reservations on a ship that sailed August twenty-sixth.

Four days before that, August twenty-second, a Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk at 1019, to keep an appointment with a man who had phoned. I had told him I was soon leaving for a month’s vacation, and he hadn’t felt like giving a name, but I thought I recognized the voice and had agreed to see him. When he walked in on the dot, at 3:15, I was glad to know that my memory for voices was holding up. It was my old cellmate, Max Christy.

I got up and we shook. He put his panama on the desk and glanced around. His black mop was cut a little shorter than it had been in April, but the jungle of his eyebrows hadn’t been touched, and his shoulders looked just as broad in gray tropical worsted. I invited him to sit and he did.

“I must apologize,” I said, “for never settling for that breakfast. It was a life-saver.”

He waved it away. “The pleasure was mine. How’s it going?”

“Oh — no complaints. You?”

“I’ve been extremely busy.” He got out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face and neck. “I certainly sweat. Sometimes I think it’s stupid, this constant back and forth, push and shove.”

“I hear you mentioned around.”

“Yes, I suppose so. You never phoned me. Did you?”

“The number,” I said, “is Churchill five, three two three two.”

“But you never called it.”

“No, sir,” I admitted, “I didn’t. One thing and another kept coming up, and then I didn’t care much for your line about if I got taken in and my being given a trial. I am by no means a punk, and the ink on my license dried long ago. Here, look behind my ears.”

He threw back his head and haw-hawed, then shut it off and told me soberly, “You got me wrong, Goodwin. I only meant we’d have to go slow on account of your record.” He used the handkerchief on his forehead. “I certainly do sweat. Since then your name has been discussed a little, and I assure you, you are not regarded as a punk. We have noticed that you seem to have plenty of jobs since you opened this office, but so trivial for a man like you. Why did you turn down the offer from the Feds?”

“Oh, they keep such long hours.”

He nodded. “And you don’t like harness, do you?”

“I never tried it and don’t intend to.”

“What have you got on hand now? Anything important?”

“Nothing whatever, important or otherwise. I told you on the phone, I’m taking a vacation. Sailing Saturday.”

He regarded me disapprovingly. “You don’t need a vacation. If anybody needs a vacation it’s me, but I don’t get one. I’ve got a job for you.”

I shook my head. “Not right now. When I get back maybe.”

“It won’t wait till you get back. There’s a man we want tailed and we’re short of personnel, and he’s tough. We had two good men on him, and he spotted both of them. You would need at least two helpers; three would be better. You use men you know, handle that yourself, and pay them and expenses out of the five hundred a day you’ll get.”

I whistled. “What’s so hot about it?”

“Nothing. It’s not hot.”

“Then who’s the subject, the Mayor?”

“I’m not naming him. Perhaps I don’t even know. It’s merely a straight tailing job, but it has to be watertight and no leaks. You can net three hundred a day easy.”

“Not without a hint who he is or what he looks like.” I waved it away. “Forget it. I’d like to oblige an old cellmate, but my vacation starts Saturday.”

“Your vacation can wait. This can’t. At ten o’clock tonight you’ll be walking west on Sixty-seventh Street halfway between First and Second Avenues. A car will pick you up, with a man in it that wants to ask you some questions. If your answers suit him he’ll tell you about the job — and it’s your big chance, Goodwin. It’s your chance for your first dip into the biggest river of fast dough that ever flowed.”

“What the hell,” I protested, “you’re not offering me a job, you’re just giving me a chance to apply for one I don’t want.”

It was perfectly true at that point, and it was still true ten minutes later, when Max Christy left, that I didn’t want the job, but I did want to apply for it. It wasn’t that I had a hunch that the man in the car who wanted to ask me some questions would be Arnold Zeck, but the way it had been staged gave me the notion that it was just barely possible; and the opportunity, slim as it was, was too good to miss. It would be interesting to have a chat with Zeck; besides, he might give me an excuse to take a poke at him and I might happen to inadvertently break his neck. So I told Christy that I would be walking on Sixty-seventh Street at ten that evening as suggested. I had to break a date to do it, but even if the chance was only one in a million I wanted it.

To get that point settled and out of the way, the man who wanted to quiz me was not Arnold Zeck. It was not even a long black Cadillac; it was only a ’48 Chevy two-door sedan.

It was a hot August night, and as I walked along that block I was sweating a little myself, especially my left armpit under the holster. There was a solid string of parked cars at the curb, and when the Chevy stopped and its door opened and my name was called, not loud, I had to squeeze between bumpers to get to it. As I climbed in and pulled the door shut the man in the front seat, behind the wheel, swiveled his head for a look at me and then, with no greeting, went back to his chauffeuring, and the car started forward.

My companion on the back seat muttered at me, “Maybe you ought to show me something.”

I got out my display case and handed it to him with the license — detective, not driver’s — uppermost. When we stopped for a light at Second Avenue he inspected it with the help of a street lamp, and returned it. I was already sorry I had wasted an evening. Not only was he not Zeck; he was no one I had ever seen or heard of, though I was fairly well acquainted, at least by sight, with the high brass in the circles that Max Christy moved in. This bird was a complete stranger. With more skin supplied for his face than was needed, it had taken up the slack in pleats and wrinkles, and that may have accounted for his sporting a pointed brown beard, since it must be hard to shave pleats.

As the car crossed the avenue and continued west, I told him, “I came to oblige Max Christy — if suggestions might help any. I’ll only be around till Saturday.”

He said, “My name’s Roeder,” and spelled it.

I thanked him for the confidence. He broadened it. “I’m from the West Coast, in case you wonder how I rate. I followed something here and found it was tied in with certain operations. I’d just as soon leave it to local talent and go back home, but I’m hooked and I have to stick.” Either he preferred talking through his nose or that was the only way he knew. “Christy told you we want a man tailed?”

“Yes. I explained that I’m not available.”

“You have got to be available. There’s too much involved.” He twisted around to face me. “It’ll be harder than ever now, because he’s on guard. It’s been messed up. They say if anyone can do it you can, especially with the help of a couple of men that Nero Wolfe used. You can get them, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I can get them, but I can’t get me. I won’t be here.”

“You’re here now. You can start tomorrow. As Christy told you, five Cs a day. It’s a straight tailing job, where you’re working for a man named Roeder from Los Angeles. The cops might not like it too well if you tied in with a local like Wilts or Brownie Costigan, but what’s wrong with me? You never heard of me before. You’re in business as a private detective. I want to hire you, at a good price, to keep a tail on a man named Rackham and report to me on his movements. That’s all, a perfectly legitimate job.”

We had crossed Park Avenue. The light was dim enough that I didn’t have to be concerned about my face showing a reaction to the name Rackham. The reaction inside me was my affair.

“How long would it last?” I inquired.

“I don’t know. A day, a week, possibly two.”

“What if something hot develops? A detective doesn’t take a tailing job sight unseen. You must have told me why you were curious about Rackham. What did you tell me?”

Roeder smiled. I could just see the pleats tightening. “That I suspected my business partner had come east to make a deal with him, freezing me out.”

“That could be all right if you’ll fill it in. But why all the mystery? Why didn’t you come to my office instead of fixing it to pick me off the street at night?”

“I don’t want to show in the daytime. I don’t want my partner to know I’m here.” Roeder smiled again. “Incidentally, that’s quite true, that I don’t want to show in the daytime — not any more than I can help.”

“That I believe. Skipping the comedy, there aren’t many Rackhams. There are none in the Manhattan phone book. Is this the Barry Rackham whose wife got killed last spring?”

“Yes.”

I grunted. “Quite a coincidence. I was there when she was murdered, and now I’m offered the job of tailing him. If he gets murdered too that would be a coincidence. I wouldn’t like it. I had a hell of a time getting out from under a bond as a material witness so I could take a vacation. If he got killed while I was on his tail—”

“Why should he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know why she should either. But it was Max Christy who arranged this date, and while he is not himself a marksman as far as I know, he moves in circles that like direct action.” I waved a hand. “Forget it. If that’s the kind of interest you’ve got in Rackham you wouldn’t tell me anyhow. But another thing: Rackham knows me. It’s twice as hard to tail a guy that knows you. Why hire a man that’s handicapped to begin with? Why not—”

I held it because we had stopped for a red light, on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and our windows were open, and the open window of a car alongside was only arm’s distance away.

When the light changed and we rolled again Roeder spoke. “I’ll tell you, Goodwin, this thing’s touchy. There’ll be some people scattered around that are in on things together, and they trust each other up to a point. As long as their interests all run the same way they can trust each other pretty well. But when something comes up that might help some and hurt others, then it gets touchy. Then each man looks out for himself, or he decides where the strength is and lines up there. That’s where I am, where the strength is. But I’m not trying to line you up; we wouldn’t want to even if we could; how could we trust you? You’re an outsider. All we want you for is an expert tailing job, and you report to me and me only. Where are you going, Bill?”

The driver half-turned his head to answer, “Here in the park it might be cooler.”

“It’s no cooler anywhere. I like straight streets. Get out again, will you?”

The driver said he would, in a hurt tone. Roeder returned to me. “There are three men named Panzer, Cather, and Durkin who worked for Nero Wolfe off and on. That right?”

I said it was.

“They’ll work for you, won’t they?”

I said I thought they would.

“Then you can use them, and you won’t have to show much. I’m told they’re exceptionally good men.”

“Saul Panzer is the best man alive. Cather and Durkin are way above average.”

“That’s all you’ll need. Now I want to ask you something, but first here’s a remark. It’s a bad thing to mislead a client, I’m sure you realize that, but in this case it would be worse than bad. I don’t have to go into details, do I?”

“No, but you’re going too fast. I haven’t got a client.”

“Oh, yes, you have.” Roeder smiled. “Would I waste my time like this? You were there when Mrs. Rackham was killed, you phoned Nero Wolfe and in six hours he was gone, and you were held as a material witness. Now here I want to hire you to tail Rackham, and you don’t know why. Can you say no? Impossible.”

“It could be,” I suggested, “that I’ve had all I want.”

“Not you, from what I’ve heard. That’s all right, not being able to let go is a good thing in a man, but it brings up this question I mentioned. You’re on your own now apparently, but you were with Nero Wolfe a long time. You’re still living in his house. Of course you’re in touch with him — don’t bother to deny it — but that’s no concern of ours as long as he doesn’t get in the way. Only on this job it has to be extra plain that you’re working for the man who pays you. If you get facts about Rackham and peddle them elsewhere, to Nero Wolfe for example, you would be in a very bad situation. Perhaps you know how bad?”

“Sure, I know. If I were standing up my knees would give. Just for the record, I don’t know where Mr. Wolfe is, I’m not in touch with him, and I’m in no frame of mind to peddle him anything. If I take this on, tailing Rackham, it will be chiefly because I’ve got my share of monkey in me. I doubt if Mr. Wolfe, wherever he is, would recognize the name Rackham if he heard it.”

The brown pointed beard waggled as Roeder shook his head. “Don’t overplay it, Goodwin.”

“I’m not. I won’t.”

“You are still attached to Wolfe.”

“Like hell I am.”

“I couldn’t pay you enough to tell me where he is — assuming you know.”

“Maybe not,” I conceded. “But not selling him is one thing, and carrying his picture around is another. I freely admit he had his good points, I have often mentioned them and appreciated them, but as the months go by one fact about him stands out clearer than anything else. He was a pain in the ass.”

The driver’s head jerked around for a darting glance at me. We had left the park and were back on Fifth Avenue, headed uptown in the Eighties. My remarks about Wolfe were merely casual, because my mind was on something else. Who was after Rackham and why? If it was Zeck, or someone in one of Zeck’s lines of command, then something drastic had happened since the April day when Zeck had sent Wolfe a package of sausage and phoned him to let Rackham alone. If it wasn’t Zeck, then Max Christy and this Roeder were lined up against Zeck, which made them about as safe to play with as an atomic stockpile. Either way, how could I resist it? Besides, I liked the logic of it. Nearly five months ago Mrs. Rackham had hired us to do a survey on her husband, and paid in advance, and we had let it slide. Now I could take up where we had left off. If Roeder and his colleagues, whoever they were, wanted to pay me for it, there was no use offending them by refusing.

So, rolling north on the avenue, Roeder and I agreed that we agreed in principle and got down to brass tacks. Since Rackham was on guard it couldn’t be an around-the-clock operation with less than a dozen men, and I had three at the most. Or did I? Saul and Fred and Orrie might not be immediately available. There was no use discussing an operation until I found out if I had any operators. Having their phone numbers in my head, I suggested that we stop at a drugstore and use a booth, but Roeder didn’t like that. He thought it would be better to go to my office and phone from there, and I had no objection, so he told the driver to go over to Madison and downtown.

At that hour, getting on toward eleven, Madison Avenue was wide open, and so was the curb in front of the office building. Roeder told the driver we would be an hour or more, and we left him parked there. In the brighter light of the elevator the pleats of Roeder’s face were less noticeable, and he didn’t look as old as I would have guessed him in the car, but I could see there was a little gray in his beard. He stood propped in a corner with his shoulder slumped and his eyes closed until the door opened for the tenth floor, and then came to and followed me down the hall to 1019. I unlocked the door and let us in, switched on the light, motioned him to a chair, sat at the desk, pulled the phone to me, and started dialing.

“Wait a minute,” he said gruffly.

I put it back on the cradle, looked at him, got a straight clear view of his eyes for the first time, and felt a tingle in the small of my back. But I didn’t know why.

“This must not be heard,” he said. “I mean you and me. How sure are you?”

“You mean a mike?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, pretty sure.”

“Better take a look.”

I left my chair and did so. The room being small and the walls mostly bare, it wasn’t much of a job, and I made it thorough, even pulling the desk out to inspect behind it. As I straightened up from retrieving a pencil that had rolled off the desk when I pushed it back in place, he spoke to my back.

“I see you have my dictionary here.”

Not through his nose. I whirled and went rigid, gaping at him. The eyes again — and now other items too, especially the forehead and ears. I had every right to stare, but I also had a right to my own opinion of the fitness of things. So while staring at him I got myself under control, and then circled the end of my desk, sat down and leaned back, and told him, “I knew you all—”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“Very well. I knew you all the time, but with that damn driver there I had to—”

“Pfui. You hadn’t the slightest inkling.”

I shrugged. “That’s one we’ll never settle. As for the dictionary, it’s the one from my room which you gave me for Christmas nineteen thirty-nine. How much do you weigh?”

“I’ve lost a hundred and seventeen pounds.”

“Do you know what you look like?”

He made a face. With the pleats and whiskers, he didn’t really have to make one, but of course it was an old habit which had probably been suppressed for months.

“Yes,” he said, “I do. I look like a sixteenth-century prince of Savoy named Philibert.” He flipped a hand impatiently. “This can wait, surely, until we’re home again?”

“I should think so,” I conceded. “What’s the difference, another year or two? It won’t be as much fun, though, because now I’ll know what I’m waiting for. What I really enjoyed was the suspense. Were you dead or alive or what? A perfect picnic.”

He grunted. “I expected this, of course. It is you, and since I decided long ago to put up with you, I even welcome it. But you, also long ago, decided to put up with me. Are we going to shake hands or not?”

I got up and went halfway. He got up and came halfway. As we shook, our eyes met, and I deliberately focused on his eyes, because otherwise I would have been shaking with a stranger, and one hell of a specimen to boot. We returned to our chairs.

As I sat down I told him courteously, “You’ll have to excuse me if I shut my eyes or look away from time to time. It’ll take a while to get adjusted.”