The Missing Chapter

Thirteen

The rattling of Belinda Meeker’s pickup truck had barely faded when I hit the pillow. I got my requisite 510 minutes’ sleep before rising, sans wake-up call. Taking the motel clerk’s advice, I drove into town and sampled the breakfast fare at the Old Skillet.

The narrow, vaulted, cream-colored room with ceiling fans was crowded, probably for several reasons: Coffee on a par with Fritz Brenner’s; buttermilk wheat-cakes, only a shade below what I get dished up each morning in the brownstone; fried eggs that were neither too soft nor too firm; and sausages cooked precisely the way I like them. As I read the Evansville paper on a stool at the counter, I considered sending my compliments to the chef but opted instead for slipping an extra dollar to my waitress, a grinning, rosy-cheeked, white-haired specimen named Lettie who bustled from tables to counter and back and called everybody in the place by name except me. But I knew that all I’d have to do was come in three days in a row to develop a “Hi, Archie, Baby!” relationship with her, complete with a squeeze on the arm and a motherly pat on the cheek.

That was almost worth staying around for. As I ate, I thought about making another stab at Louise Wingfield but vetoed the impulse without even bothering to call Wolfe. He would have said something like, “Is it probable that she will be more forthcoming than on your previous visit?” to which I would have replied in the negative.

I checked out of The Travelers’ Haven a few minutes before ten, which disappointed the long, lean clerk. “Sorry you can’t stay longer,” Tom twanged, sounding like he meant it. “We got our Spring Festival coming up in town starting Wednesday. It’s a lot of fun, even for city folk like you.”

I told him I was sure I would have enjoyed it, but that duty called. I exceeded the speed limit by ten miles an hour and sometimes fifteen as I headed north, and I settled into a seat on my plane at the Indianapolis airport all of seven minutes before takeoff. On the flight back to New York, I closed my eyes, sipped bad coffee, and reviewed the events of my short stay with the Hoosiers, straining to figure out whether it had been worth either the time or the expense.

Well before we touched down at LaGuardia, I decided the answer to both questions was a qualified yes, although I was by no means confident Nero Wolfe would agree. We now had a new suspect, one Clarice Wingfield — or did we? Maybe I was overly reacting to Belinda Meeker’s earnestness. She seemed genuine, all right, but did her outspoken dislike of her cousin color everything she felt about the woman? As for Clarice, was she really in New York? If so, would we find her? And if she was located, how would we — presumably I — approach her?

When my cab pulled up to the brownstone at two-fifty-five, I put these questions out of my mind and climbed the steps. I unlocked the door with my key, but the inside bolt was on so I hit the bell. Fritz answered after my second ring.

“Archie, I am glad you are back.” His tone suggested I had been gone for decades rather than thirty-two hours. “The elevator business — quelle horreur! The workers arrived yesterday morning, about an hour after you left, and they have been so noisy. This is probably necessary, and it doesn’t bother me, but I know it is very difficult for him.” He cocked his head in the direction of the office as I set my bag down and hung my raincoat in the front hall.

“He’ll get used to it,” I answered without sympathy as I heard the shrill whine of an electric saw or a drill or some other power tool coming from the elevator shaft. “Has he been going up to the plant rooms on schedule?”

Fritz nodded grimly. “Always at the usual times.”

“I read someplace that a crisis often brings out the best in us,” I told him. “I’ll go in and supply moral support before I unpack.”

In the office, Wolfe was doing what he does most often at his desk — reading and drinking beer. He didn’t look to be suffering from the rigors of the last two days.

“Don’t worry, I’m not about to quote Robert Louis Stevenson this time,” I said as I slid into my chair. “Fritz informs me the workmen have made their presence felt. If the racket right now is indicative, I imagine the last two days haven’t exactly been a picnic.”

He scowled his answer, then set down the book. “Are you well? Have you eaten?”

“Yes and sort of. Breakfast today was fine, no complaints. As for lunch, I know you haven’t been on a plane in years, but my guess is that you still remember what airline food was like. I passed on it.”

He nodded and made a face. “Indeed. We are having breast of veal with sausage-and-Swiss-chard stuffing for dinner.”

“I find nothing to object to in that. Are you ready for a debriefing?”

He drained half the beer in his glass, then leaned back and closed his eyes, which is one of his ways of telling me to proceed without having to exercise his vocal cords. I went on, and for the next half-hour, I filled him in on my activities in the heartland, including my meetings with Melva and Belinda Meeker, Chet Southworth, Gina Marks, and Louise Wingfield. He sat through my recitation, much of which was verbatim, without stirring; when I finished, he came forward in his chair, placing his hands palms down on his blotter.

“After you have unpacked, we will begin the quest to locate Miss Wingfield,” he said, returning to his book.

“I can start in on that right now,” I told him. “I’ll just—”

“No.” He held up a hand. “You have been under stress. Tend to your ablutions first.”

I could have pointed out what Wolfe already knows: That I find travel both stimulating and energizing, but rarely stressful. The effort would have been wasted, however. As I said earlier, he views any venture beyond the sanctuary of the brownstone to be extremely perilous, and one involving aircraft borders on the unthinkable. So lest you think he was being solicitous, forget it. He simply didn’t want me working in what he viewed to be a weakened condition.

After unpacking, changing, and indulging in ablutions to the extent of splashing cold water on my face, I went down to the office and set about trying to find Clarice Wingfield. In the cabinets beneath the bookshelves, we keep the most recent month’s copies of the Times and the Gazette, and also the current telephone directories for the five boroughs of New York City, as well as Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties and the nearby areas of New Jersey and Connecticut.

Even though Belinda Meeker had said her Aunt Louise made a bunch of calls to directory assistance in the New York area, I started from scratch. First, I hunted for any listings in the books for a Clarice (or C.) Wingfield — or Avery. I read someplace once that women who disappear frequently go back to using their maiden name, and Belinda Meeker affirmed this about her cousin. In Clarice’s case, though, I thought it was possible that when she made the move East, she went in the opposite direction and returned to the married name she had shunned. No dice. Ditto when I punched up directory assistance for each of the local area codes. I didn’t even get a “This is a nonpublished number, withheld at the request of the customer” response from any of those automaton-voiced men and women at the other end of the line.

“A trio of possibilities,” I said to Wolfe, whose book was between me and his face. “One, Clarice Wingfield is not in the New York area; two, she has changed her name; or three, she is somehow managing to survive without a telephone, inconceivable as that seems.”

Wolfe, who himself would rather do without Mr. Bell’s invention most of the time, lowered his book and glared at me. “Get Saul,” he rumbled.

“Your wish, et cetera,” I said lightly, wheeling around in my chair and punching one of the dozen-odd numbers I know from memory.

“Panzer,” the familiar hoarse voice responded. Wolfe picked up his instrument and I stayed on the line.

“Saul, this is Nero Wolfe. Can you join Archie and me for dinner? We’re having breast of veal, with a stuffing that Fritz developed. It has been called incomparable by no less than the owner of the most-renowned restaurant in Lyon — and probably in all of France. He had the exceedingly good fortune to dine with us two years ago.”

“I know the dish, and the stuffing, that you’re talking about, because I enjoyed it at your place once, too. And it is incomparable,” Saul said. “I had an engagement tonight, but I just this instant decided to cancel it. Shall I be there at seven?”

The time was agreed on, and we hung up. Invitations to meals in the brownstone get issued about as often as Mets pitchers toss back-to-back shutouts, so I was surprised about Saul’s invite, but only for a few seconds, before I figured out what was up.

At dinner, Wolfe directed the conversation as he always does. Maybe as therapy for his current miseries, he chose to elaborate on the history of the elevator, starting back in the third century B.C: “Tradition has it that the Greek mathematician Archimedes invented a rope-and-pulley device that was capable of lifting one person.” When he got to the development of elevator safety devices by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century, Saul jumped in.

“How’s this for a weird elevator story? I was in a six-story, block-square warehouse over in Long Island City about ten, maybe twelve years back. It was actually unoccupied at the time — which was the problem. The owners had hired me to try to stop whoever was hauling away their building piece by bloody piece. The thieves were getting in at night and stripping the building of the fluorescent light fixtures, the plumbing, even the doorknobs. Anyway, I holed up in a damp, dark little room in the basement for close to twenty-four hours, with sandwiches and iced tea which wasn’t iced by the time I was done.

“At first I didn’t think they were going to show up, but finally, just after dawn, they came — turns out they were sneaking in through a three-block-long tunnel that the owners didn’t even know existed. It had been built at the turn of the century to bring coal from the East River into the basement in little mine-type railroad cars and to haul trash out the same way, but it had been boarded up God knows how many years ago. Somehow, though, these thieves knew about it.

“There were three of them dismantling the place,” Saul continued. “And by God, they were even taking the freight elevator apart, piece by piece, for whatever the parts were worth as scrap metal. Well, I snuck out of my hiding place and was just about to blow the whistle on them when one guy fell four floors, probably sixty feet, down the elevator shaft. The idiot had unbolted a section of the floor from the walls — while he was in the thing!”

“Of course that finished him,” I put in.

Saul shook his head. “Incredibly, not even a broken bone. Some poor homeless creature had found his way into the building weeks earlier and had hauled three old mattresses in with him. He’d piled them at the bottom of the shaft and had been sleeping on them until he apparently found himself a better place to bunk. He left the mattresses behind, though, and this other guy fell, screaming all the way, onto the pile. He bounced a couple of times and ended up with a bunch of bruises and a burglary charge. If there’s a moral, it got by me.

Wolfe damn near chuckled, although not quite. He both likes Saul Panzer and esteems him. A comment here about Saul: You wouldn’t grade him high on looks; he’s not much bigger than a jockey, and his face is mostly nose, and what isn’t nose is ears. He always needs a shave, regardless of the time of day. His clothes never seem to fit quite right, and the closest thing he makes to a fashion statement is a flat wool cap that he wears except when the mercury goes above seventy Fahrenheit. All that might make you take Saul lightly, which would be a big mistake.

He is a free-lance operative, the best in New York — possibly in the world — at a number of things, including tailing people who don’t want to be tailed and finding people who don’t want to be found. Saul charges top dollar and gets far more business than he can handle, although he almost never says no to Wolfe, who has been throwing work his way for years without complaints.

I knew why Wolfe wanted to sign Saul on this time, of course. The three of us were in the office with coffee after dinner, and I had also poured generous snifters of Remisier brandy for Saul and me. Wolfe sipped from his Wedgwood cup and set it deliberately in its saucer. “We need to locate an individual,” he told Saul. “A woman. She is said to be in the New York area, but as Archie discovered this afternoon, she has no telephone listing. This problem may be too mundane for you, especially given your crowded docket. If so, I understand completely.”

Wolfe was laying it on. As I mentioned, he esteems Saul, but he is not above using flattery, which is okay, because Saul knows exactly what Wolfe is doing, and Wolfe knows that Saul knows it, and Saul knows that Wolfe — well, you get the idea. Anyway, we had all been through this dance before. Saul, who always does have plenty of business, took a sip of the brandy, licked his lips, and nodded appreciatively. “Lon Cohen has mentioned more than once that this is the finest cognac in the world. He and I don’t agree on everything — especially on the value of bluffing in poker — but I can’t quarrel with his assessment of this nectar. Tell me about the woman.”

Wolfe rang for beer and adjusted his bulk. “Her name is Clarice Wingfield, although it is conceivable she may be using the surname of her ex-husband, which is Avery.”

“Or she may be using a completely manufactured moniker,” Saul observed. “What else you got?”

Wolfe turned toward me. “A snapshot, taken three or four years ago,” I said, pulling it from my center desk drawer. “Also, according to her cousin back in the Midwest, Clarice is a frustrated artist.” I gave Saul the rest of the Indiana scenario, including Clarice Wingfield’s interest in art, and then quickly filled him in on our commission from Horace Vinson.

With his eyes roving around the room, Saul looked like he was daydreaming while I talked, but I knew better; he heard every word, picked up every inflection. When I was done, he finished the last of his brandy. “I’ll start in the morning,” he said. “I assume that you’ve tried Missing Persons?”

“No, sir,” Wolfe replied, “but the question begs response. Archie shall undertake that tomorrow, as well as showing Miss Wingfield’s photograph to others who might have seen her with Mr. Childress.”

It is always heartening to be among the first to learn what my role will be. I threw a snarl Wolfe’s way, but either he didn’t notice or he was too busy concentrating on the bubbles that rose like spiraling strands of pearls in his beer glass.

“Do you see the need to utilize Fred?” he asked Saul. Fred Durkin is another free-lance operative we frequently hire. Fred is not as bright as Saul, not by light-years, and he is not as effective. But put him down as brave, loyal, and hard working.

Saul looked at his cap, which was perched on his knee. “Maybe, but for now, I think it will work best if I give it a go alone,” he responded. “If you like, I can get a couple of quick copies made of that snapshot and have the original back here first thing in the morning. I’d like to carry one with me, and keep another in reserve in case Fred gets brought in.”

Wolfe allowed as to how that was a capital idea, so I handed Saul the photo of Clarice Wingfield, then refilled his snifter with some of that cognac Lon Cohen swears is the finest in the world. Saul smiled his thanks and we retired to the front room for some gin rummy. That smile was even wider when he left the brownstone ninety minutes later; he had seventeen dollars in his pocket that hadn’t been there when he walked in.