The Missing Heiress

Chapter 12

The next morning, Lily called and said she was coming over with Maureen’s mail. I then called Eric Mason and filled him in on Sofia’s visit to the brownstone and Wolfe’s interrogation of her.

“I really should have been present,” the ad man had grumped.

“You would have found the evening to be a colossal waste of time. One thing Wolfe requested at that time was to get Maureen’s mail, which has been stacking up at her place. Lily Rowan is bringing it here this morning. You’re welcome to come over when we take a look at it, although we don’t plan to open it.”

“When is Lily coming to your place?”

“At eleven, the same time Mr. Wolfe comes into the office from the plant rooms.”

“I will be there.”

Mason and Lily arrived within a minute of each other, and both were seated in the office when Wolfe came in, eyed both of them, placed a raceme of yellow Odontoglossum in the vase on his desk, and rang for beer.

“I have brought Maureen’s mail,” Lily told him from the red leather chair, which Mason had graciously insisted she take. “It’s in this paper bag,” she said as she handed it to Wolfe.

“I had expected more,” he said, opening the bag, pulling a two-inch-high pile of items out, and stacking them on his blotter.

Wolfe riffled through them. “A probable statement from Continental Bank and Trust, fat sales flyers from four stores, including Saks and Bloomingdale’s, likely invoices from Saks and Lord and Taylor, and envelopes bearing the return addresses of a number of charities, including Breast Cancer Research, Women’s Rights Organization, and a Manhattan orphanage.”

“Maureen is on the boards of all those groups,” Lily said, “and these probably are notifications of upcoming meetings. In fact, there was a meeting of the WRO last week that I attended, and Maureen’s absence was remarked on because she so rarely misses attending these sessions.”

Wolfe scowled and pushed the mail aside as if it were contaminated. “Nothing here adds to our knowledge concerning Miss Carr’s whereabouts, although I had suspected this was what Archie calls a long shot.” He turned to Lily. “Nonetheless, you should continue to monitor the woman’s mail, and you can return this batch to her residence.”

I knew Wolfe was at a loss and was flailing about, which is never a pretty sight. Lily and Eric Mason rose to leave, and I escorted them down the hall. “It seems like we’re at a dead end,” Mason said in a dejected tone. “I’m supposed to have a creative mind, but I’ll be damned if I have any suggestions as to what we should be doing next.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” Lily added in a tone meant to mollify the advertising whiz. “I can’t remember ever being this frustrated.”

“The good news is,” I told them, “that Nero Wolfe does not have the word surrender in his vocabulary. I realize the situation at the moment seems bleak, but we’ve been in worse spots than this before, and he invariably pulls the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.” I knew I sounded like a cheerleader trying to exude a confidence I did not at the moment possess.

They both must have sensed my underlying doubts, because neither of them seemed cheered by my little sermon as they left the brownstone wearing somber expressions.

When I got back to the office, Wolfe was in the process of cradling his telephone receiver. I gave him a questioning look, and he said, “I have just given Saul an assignment, and it may be of some help to us. I am a lackwit for not thinking of it before this.”

When he shared with me the subject of his conversation with Saul Panzer, I was inclined to agree that he was a lackwit, but then, that made me one as well. And Wolfe told me that Saul was himself chagrined.

Speaking of Saul, he knows well the daily schedule at the brownstone, so it was not surprising that he telephoned, saying he wanted to stop by at six, which is of course when Wolfe rides the elevator down from the plant rooms. “I have got some atoning to do, and the sooner the better,” he told me.

Saul already was ensconced in the red leather chair with the scotch I had poured him when Wolfe strode into the office after the afternoon session with those ten thousand orchids up on the roof.

“I have been a ninnyhammer, to use a word of yours,” Saul told him.

“No more than Archie and me,” replied Wolfe, who has always felt that Saul could do no wrong.

“Nonetheless, I have not been using the brain that Mrs. Panzer gifted me with all of those decades ago. Today, however, I have gotten lucky beyond anything I have a right to deserve.”

“Please continue,” Wolfe urged as Fritz entered the office with two bottles of beer and a frosted stein on a tray.

“I went to the sedate Park Avenue tower where Maureen Carr resides, and who should I find as the doorman but none other than Seamus Rafferty.”

“I have met him,” I put in.

“Don’t interrupt, Archie,” Wolfe said, holding up a palm and turning to Saul. “Please continue.”

“I had occasion to run into Rafferty some years back when he was about to find himself in big trouble. He was a grifter running short cons and was working the old shell game on a Lower East Side street corner. I had learned from another freelance dick that the cops were planning a major raid on the cons who were running rampant in the neighborhood. I happened to walk by Rafferty, who was at work on some sucker and I told him that he had better close up shop, which he did. And wouldn’t you know that fifteen minutes later, a patrol car came by and nailed another grifter, who was working three-card monte on some sucker in the very same block.

“Rafferty was grateful to me. He was so thankful that he insisted on buying me drinks at a nearby saloon, which I of course accepted. ‘I will never forget this,’ he told me. ‘Any time I can help you, just ask.’”

“So he ended up going straight,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s one piece of good news. Another is that he has an extremely good memory, and when I walked up to him on Park Avenue today, he spoke my name and wanted to throw his arms around me.”

“Very touching,” I remarked dryly.

“Don’t worry, Archie, I didn’t let him hug me. But I took him up on that offer he had made way back when. I told him I was working for a close relative of Maureen Carr, and that this relative is terribly worried about her whereabouts. I asked if he had seen her leave home sometime in the last three weeks with a suitcase and he said no, but one of the other doormen might have.”

“How many of these sentinels are there?” Wolfe asked.

“During the week, three, who each work eight-hour shifts, plus relief men who come in on weekends. Seamus gave me their telephone numbers, and my luck held as I managed to reach all of them, including at least one who I probably woke up. I struck out on the first three calls, including the graveyard shift man, who said he couldn’t remember Maureen Carr leaving at any time on his watch, and the same with the weekend men. But I hit paydirt with the evening guy, named Henry, who works four to midnight. He remembered getting a cab for Maureen about four thirty p.m. about a month ago but he can’t remember the date.”

“Did she have luggage?”

“Yes, just a single suitcase, which suggests a short trip. Henry thinks he heard her tell the cabbie to take her to Grand Central, but again, he can’t recall for sure.”

“Where do trains go when they leave Grand Central?” I stipulate that Wolfe is a genius, but yawning gaps exist in his knowledge, including the country’s current transportation system. He probably cannot name a major railroad, airline, or bus system.

“Its trains run mostly west,” Saul said in answer to Wolfe’s query. “They go as far as Chicago and St. Louis, as well as to hundreds of places in between. Given the time Miss Carr was picked up, she could have been taking the Pacemaker, which leaves here at three.”

“The Pacemaker?” Wolfe raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, sorry, Mr. Wolfe. The Pacemaker, final destination, Chicago.”

“Whom do you have covering Grand Central?” Wolfe asked.

“Fred. I’ll have him show Miss Carr’s picture around. It’s an unlikely bet, but somebody might remember her.”

The unlikely bet paid off, at least to a degree. Fred called the next morning to tell me he had some news. “I can bring it at eleven,” he said.

Fred Durkin has always been in awe of Wolfe, and he’s like the hardworking, earnest kid in grade school who desires nothing more than to please his teacher. He knows very well when Wolfe begins his working day in the office, so picking that time to show up at the brownstone was not an accident.

Fred already was parked in one of the yellow chairs when Wolfe entered the office, greeted him, and reached down to press the button in the leg-hole of his desk as a signal to Fritz. “Will you join me in having a beer?” Wolfe asked.

“Yes, sir,” was the response from Fred, who may or may not like beer, but as I have reported, he always has one with Wolfe because he thinks that it’s the thing to do.

After they both were settled with their drinks, Wolfe said, “Archie tells me you learned something while at Grand Central Terminal.”

“Yes, sir, I did. Saul had told me that Maureen Carr took a taxi from home to the station a while back — he did not know the exact date — but it would have been at a time of day when the Pacemaker was preparing to leave. I timed it yesterday so that I got there when she would have, and I managed to talk my way onto the Pacemaker’s platform when the passengers were boarding.

“I had the picture of Miss Carr and showed it to a couple of conductors, asking if they recognized her, but they just shrugged and walked away from me. Then I saw a redcap who had delivered bags to one of the cars and was coming toward me with his empty two-wheeled cart. ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ I asked him.

“He looked at the photo, looked at it some more, squinting, and said, ‘Yeah, I do. I carried her bag some time back, and what I remember, besides her being very pretty, was how friendly she was to me. Most of the folks who take this train, they’re rich, and they let you know it — maybe she’s loaded, too — but they are not nice, not polite, at least not to me, they aren’t. They act like big shots. But her, she asked me how my day was going and made it seem like she really meant it. She also gave me a bigger tip than she needed to, but that’s not what I remember most about her, it’s the way she treated me.’”

“Was there anything else the redcap had to tell you about her?”

“Yes, Mr. Wolfe. He told me she acted like she was sad about something, but of course he didn’t know what. Also, he said that from what he could tell, she was going only as far as Albany, which he said seems strange for someone riding a train that runs all the way west to Chicago. There are other, cheaper New York Central trains that she could have taken to Albany.”

“Satisfactory, Fred.”

Durkin flushed and smiled at the praise. If he knew how rarely Nero Wolfe doles out that word, his grin would have been even wider.