Cramer’s crack about no fee had of course been deserved. Wolfe hated to start his brain going on what he called work, and during the years I had been on his payroll the occasions had been rare when anything but a substantial retainer had jarred him into it. But he is not a loafer. He can’t be, since his income as a private detective is what keeps that old house going, with the rooms on the roof full of orchid plants, with Theodore Horstmann as tender, and Fritz Brenner serving up the best meals in New York, and me, Archie Goodwin, asking for a raise every time I buy a new suit, and sometimes getting it. It takes a gross of at least ten thousand a month to get by.
That January and the first half of February business was slow, except for the routine jobs, where all Wolfe and I had to do was supervise Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, and for a little mix-up with a gang of fur hijackers during which Fred and I got shot at. Then, nearly six weeks after the day Cramer dropped in to see what would happen if he showed a piece of paper to a genius, and got a brush-off, a man named John R. Wellman phoned on Monday morning for an appointment, and I told him to come at six that afternoon. When he arrived, a few minutes early, I escorted him to the office and sat him in the red leather chair to wait until Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, sliding the little table near his right elbow, for his convenience if he needed to do any writing, for instance in a checkbook. He was a plump short guy, going bald, without much of a nose to hold up his rimless glasses. His plain gray suit and haberdashery didn’t indicate opulence, but he had told me on the phone that he was a wholesale grocer from Peoria, Illinois, and there had been time to get a report from the bank. We would take his check if that was on the program.
When Wolfe entered, Wellman stood up to shake hands. Sometimes Wolfe makes an effort to conceal his dislike of shaking hands with strangers, and sometimes he doesn’t. This time he did fairly well, then rounded the corner of his desk and got his seventh of a ton deposited in the only chair on earth that really suits him. He rested his forearms on the arms of the chair and leaned back.
“Yes, Mr. Wellman?”
“I want to hire you,” Wellman said.
“For what?”
“I want you to find—” He stopped short, and his jaw muscles began to work. He shook his head violently, took off his glasses, dug at his eyes with his fingertips, put the glasses back on, and had trouble getting them adjusted. “I’m not under very good control,” he apologized. “I haven’t had enough sleep lately and I’m tired. I want you to find the person who killed my daughter.”
Wolfe shot a glance at me, and I got my notebook and pen. Wellman, concentrating on Wolfe, wasn’t interested in me. Wolfe asked him, “When and where and how did she die?”
“She was run over by a car in Van Cortlandt Park seventeen days ago. Friday evening, February second.” Wellman had himself in hand now. “I ought to tell you about her.”
“Go ahead.”
“My wife and I live in Peoria, Illinois. I’ve been in business there over twenty years. We had one child, one daughter, Joan. We were very—” He stopped. He sat completely still, not even his eyes moving, for a long moment, and then went on. “We were very proud of her. She graduated from Smith with honors four years ago and took a job in the editorial department of Scholl and Hanna, the book publishers. She did well there—I have been told that by Scholl himself. She was twenty-six last November.” He made a little gesture. “Looking at me, you wouldn’t think I’d have a beautiful daughter, but she was. Everybody agreed she was beautiful, and she was extremely intelligent.”
He got a large envelope from his side pocket. “I might as well give you these now.” He left his chair to hand Wolfe the envelope. “A dozen prints of the best likeness we have of her. I got them for the police to use, but they weren’t using them, so you can. You can see for yourself.”
Wolfe extended a hand with one of the prints, and I arose to take it. Beautiful is a big word, but there’s no point in quibbling, and if that was a good likeness Joan Wellman had been a good-looking girl. There was slightly too much chin for my taste, but the forehead and eyes were all any father had a right to expect.
“She was beautiful,” Wellman said, and stopped and was still again.
Wolfe couldn’t stand to see people overcome. “I suggest,” he muttered, “that you avoid words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘proud.’ The colder facts will serve. You want to hire me to learn who drove the car that hit her?”
“I’m a damn fool,” Wellman stated.
“Then don’t hire me.”
“I don’t mean I’m a damn fool to hire you. I mean I intend to handle this efficiently and I ought to do it.” His jaw muscles moved, but not through loss of control. “It’s like this. We got a wire two weeks ago Saturday that Joan was dead. We drove to Chicago and took a plane to New York. We saw her body. The car wheels had run over the middle of her, and there was a big lump on her head over her right ear. I talked to the police and the medical examiner.”
Wellman was being efficient now. “I do not believe Joan was walking in that secluded spot in that park, not a main road, on a cold evening in the middle of winter, and neither does my wife. How did she get the lump on her head? The car didn’t hit her head. The medical examiner says it’s possible she fell on her head, but he’s careful how he says it, and I don’t believe it. The police claim they’re working on it, doing all they can, but I don’t believe that either. I think they think it was just a hit-and-run driver, and all they’re doing is to try to find the car. I think my daughter was murdered, and I think I know the name of the man that killed her.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a little. “Have you told them so?”
“I certainly have, and they just nod and say they’re working on it. They haven’t got anywhere and they’re not going to. So I decided to come to you—”
“Have you any evidence?”
“I call it evidence, but I guess they don’t.” He took an envelope from his breast pocket. “Joan wrote home every week, hardly ever missed.” He removed a sheet of paper from the envelope and unfolded it. “This is a copy I had typed, I let the police have the original. It’s dated February first, which was a Thursday. I’ll read only part of it.
“Oh, I must tell you, I have a new kind of date tomorrow evening. As you know, since Mr. Hanna decided that our rejections of manuscripts must have the personal touch, except when it’s just tripe, which I must say most of it is, I return quite a lot of stuff with a typed note with my name signed, and so do the other readers. Well, last fall sometime I did that with the manuscript of a novel by a man named Baird Archer, only I had forgotten all about it, until yesterday there was a phone call for me, at the office, and a man’s voice said he was Baird Archer, and did I remember the note I had sent him returning his manuscript, and I said I did. He asked if anyone else had read it, and I said no, and then he propositioned me! He said he would pay me twenty dollars an hour to discuss the novel with him and make suggestions to improve it! How do you do that? Even if it’s only five hours, that will be an extra hundred dollars for the exchequer, only it won’t stay in the exchequer very long, as you know, my darling and doting parents, if you know me, and you ought to. I’m to meet him tomorrow right after office hours.”
Wellman waggled the paper. “Now she wrote that on—”
“May I see it, please?” Wolfe was leaning forward with a gleam in his eye. Apparently something about Joan Wellman’s letter home had given him a kick, but when Wellman handed it to him he gave it only a brief glance before passing it to me. I read it clear through with my eyes while my ears recorded their talk for the notebook.
“She wrote that,” Wellman said, “on Thursday, February first. Her appointment with that man was the next day, Friday, right after office hours. Early Saturday morning her body was found on that out-of-the-way road in Van Cortlandt Park. What’s wrong with thinking that that man killed her?”
Wolfe was leaning back again. “Was there any evidence of assault? Assault as a euphemism for rape?”
“No.” Wellman’s eyes went shut, and his hands closed into fists. After a moment the eyes opened again. “Nothing like that. No sign at all of that.”
“What do the police say?”
“They say they’re still trying to find that man Archer and can’t. No trace of him. I think—”
“Nonsense. Of course there’s a trace. Publishers must keep records. He submitted a manuscript of a novel last fall, and it was returned to him with a note from your daughter. Returned how and where?”
“It was returned by mail to the only address he gave, General Delivery, Clinton Station. That’s on West Tenth Street.” Wellman’s fists became hands again, and he turned a palm up. “I’m not saying the police have just laid down on the job. Maybe they’ve even done the best they can, but the fact remains that it’s been seventeen days now and they haven’t got anywhere, and I don’t like the way they talked yesterday and this morning. It looks to me like they don’t want it to be an unsolved murder, and they want to call it manslaughter, and that’s all it would be if it was a hit-and-run accident. I don’t know about these New York police, but you tell me, they might do a thing like that, mightn’t they?”
Wolfe grunted. “It is conceivable. And you want me to prove it was murder and find the murderer, with evidence?”
“Yes.” Wellman hesitated, opening his mouth and closing it again. He glanced at me and returned to Wolfe. “I tell you, Mr. Wolfe, I am willing to admit that what I am doing is vindictive and wicked. My wife thinks it is, and so does the pastor of my church. I was home one day last week, and they both said so. It is sinful to be vindictive, but here I am, and I’m going through with it. Even if it was just a hit-and-run accident I don’t think the police are going to find him, and whatever it was I’m not going back to Peoria and sell groceries until he’s found and made to pay for it. I’ve got a good paying business, and I own some property, and I never figured on dying a pauper, but I will if I have to, to get the murderous criminal that killed my daughter. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know you too well, I only know you by reputation, and maybe you won’t want to work for a man who can say an unchristian thing like that, so maybe it’s a mistake to say it, but I want to be honest about it.”
Wellman took his glasses off and started wiping them with a handkerchief. That showed his better side. He didn’t want to embarrass Wolfe by keeping his eyes on him while Wolfe was deciding whether to take on a job for such an implacable bastard as John R. Wellman of Peoria, Illinois.
“I’ll be honest too,” Wolfe said dryly. “The morality of vengeance is not a factor in my acceptance or refusal of a case. But it was a mistake for you to say it, because I would have asked for a retainer of two thousand dollars and now I’ll make it five thousand. Not merely to gouge you, though. Since the police have turned up nothing in seventeen days, it will probably take a lot of work and money. With a few more facts I’ll have enough to start on.”
“I wanted to be honest about it,” Wellman insisted.
When he left, half an hour later, his check was under a paperweight on my desk, along with the copy of Joan Wellman’s last letter home, and there was an assortment of facts in my notebook—plenty, as Wolfe had said, for a start. I went to the hall with him and helped him on with his coat. When I opened the door to let him out he wanted to shake hands, and I was glad to oblige.
“You’re sure you won’t mind,” he asked “if I ring you fairly often? Just to find out if there’s anything new? I’ll try not to make a nuisance of myself, but I’m like that. I’m persistent.”
“Any time,” I assured him. “I can always say ‘no progress.’”
“He is good, isn’t he? Mr. Wolfe?”
“He’s the best.” I made it positive.
“Well—I hope—all right.” He crossed the sill into an icy wind from the west, and I stood there until he had descended from the stoop to the sidewalk. The shape he was in, he might have tumbled down those seven steps.
Returning down the hall, I paused a moment before entering the office, to sniff. Fritz, as I knew, was doing spareribs with the sauce Wolfe and he had concocted and, though the door to the kitchen was closed, enough came through for my nose, and it approved. In the office, Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed. I picked up Wellman’s check, gave it an admiring glance, went and put it in the safe, and then crossed to Wolfe’s desk for another look at one of the prints of Joan Wellman’s likeness. As near as you can tell from a picture, it would have been nice to know her.
I spoke. “If you’re working, knock off. Dinner in ten minutes.”
Wolfe’s eyes opened.
I asked, “Have we got a murder or not?”
“Certainly we have.” He was supercilious.
“Oh. Good for us. Because she wouldn’t go for a walk in the park in February?”
“No.” He humphed.” “You should have a better reason.”
“Me? Thanks. Me have a reason?”
“Yes, Archie. I have been training you for years to observe. You are slacking. Not long ago Mr. Cramer showed us a list of names on a sheet of paper. The seventh name on that list was Baird Archer. The evening she was killed Miss Wellman had an appointment with a man named Baird Archer. Leonard Dykes who wrote that list of names was murdered. It would be silly not to hypothesize that Miss Wellman was also murdered.”
I turned on my heel, took the two paces to my swivel chair, turned it so I would face him, and sat. “Oh, that,” I said carelessly. “I crossed that off as coincidence.”
“Pfui. It never struck you. You’re slacking.”
“Okay. I am not electronized.”
“There is no such word.”
“There is now. I’ve used it.” I was getting indignant. “I mean I am not lightning. It was six weeks ago that Cramer showed us that list of names, and I gave it the merest glance. I know you did too, but look who you are. What if it were the other way around? What if I had remembered that name from one short glimpse of that list six weeks ago and you hadn’t? I would be the owner of this house and the bank account, and you would be working for me. Would you like that? Or do you prefer it as it is? Take your pick.”
He snorted. “Call Mr. Cramer.”
“Right.” I swiveled to the phone and dialed.