THE VISIT FROM DEBRA MITCHELL on Wednesday was the most exciting event in the brownstone over the next twenty-four hours, unless you count the guy from the elevator construction crew who fell and bruised his arm while getting out of the truck on Thursday morning. He couldn’t have been hurt too badly, though, because after sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating two of Fritz’s freshly baked apple turnovers, he was back on the job.
But things picked up Thursday, in the form of two telephone calls. The first was from LeMaster Gilliam: “Archie, sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, but I had to put out a couple of dandy brush fires here, and I didn’t get home until so late that the Letterman show was over. Anyway, that woman you asked about, Clarice Wingfield or Clarice Avery, has not been reported as missing, nor has anyone—living or dead—turned up in the last several weeks who even vaguely resembles the photo you left with me.”
“I guess that’s good news,” I said, thanking him and trying to figure out what to do next. Wolfe’s morale had begun to flag. He didn’t seem overly concerned about our case, and the business with the elevator had gotten his goat. After lunch, he went up to his room instead of heading for the office. Fritz went up twice with beer and reported back to me with some distress that the patient was propped up in bed reading and apparently was going to skip his afternoon session with the orchids. And then a distraught Theodore Horstmann stormed into the office, demanding that I speed up the work on the elevator.
“It’s a pity that you are unhappy,” I told him, “but you’re yapping in the wrong direction; try those fellows working in the shaft. But if I were you, I’d steer clear of the one with the long scar on his left cheek. He looks like he quit smiling permanently the day he learned the truth about Santa Claus. And besides, he banged up his arm this morning when he tripped getting out of the truck.” Theodore didn’t enjoy my stab at humor, but then, I’ve never viewed it as a high priority to keep him amused. He went back up to the plant rooms muttering, and I went back to pondering a strategy.
As I pondered, the phone rang again, and I gave the standard spiel: “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”
“Ah, yes, I was told you would be the one who answered.” It was a raspy but precise male voice. “My name is Pemberton, Claude Pemberton, and I am a member of an organization called PROBE, which stands for—”
“Passionate Roster of Orville Barnstable Enthusiasts,” I put in.
“Ah! I’m so glad that you have heard of us, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, our national, dues-paying membership is well over a thousand, and … well, we know from talking to Horace Vinson that Mr. Wolfe is investigating the death of Charles Childress, so doubtless, you and he—Mr. Wolfe, that is—have heard of our existence.”
“That is correct, Mr. Pemberton. What can’we do for you?”
Claude Pemberton cleared his throat. “Well, it actually may be the reverse, which is to say, what we can do for you. Two other members of PROBE and I would like to pay Mr. Wolfe a visit.”
“For what purpose?”
“I would prefer to discuss that with Mr. Wolfe in person, if you and he have no objection, of course.”
“When could you be here?”
“The others are with me now—we all are New Yorkers. We could be there whenever you say, sooner rather than later—preferably this afternoon.”
I told Pemberton to hold on, and I called Wolfe in his room. “Me,” I said when he picked up his instrument. “A guy from PROBE, the Barnstable fan group, is holding on the other line. He and two colleagues from the group want to stop by, preferably yesterday. He doesn’t want to say why. Should I lean on him for specifics?”
I could hear Wolfe exhaling. “No. Tell them to come at four.”
“So you really are passing up your afternoon visit with the plants?” I asked. My answer was a line that had gone dead. I reconnected with Pemberton, who sounded pleased that Wolfe would see him and the others—whom he identified as Wilma Race and Daniel McClellan—in less than ninety minutes.
No sooner had I cradled the receiver than the phone jingled again. “Debra Mitchell tells me she stopped in to see you and Wolfe yesterday,” Horace Vinson said with irritation in his deep voice. “First, I want you to know she made the visit without my knowledge. Second, I am concerned that you haven’t kept me apprised of your activities. And third, I am disturbed that almost no progress has been made, at least according to Debra.”
“Your first point is duly noted,” I told him. “As for points two and three, you have presented the explanation yourself: We haven’t kept you apprised simply because there hasn’t been anything to apprise you about.”
“Any idea when there will be?” He still sounded irked.
“Mr. Vinson, we are following several intriguing leads right now,” I half-lied. “I will tell Mr. Wolfe that you called.”
“Please do,” he responded, saying a good-bye that contained not a dollop of warmth or goodwill. So now our client was riled up.
I reported the conversation with Vinson when a grumpy Wolfe came down at three-forty-five, but he waved it away, busying himself with signing the correspondence that I had completed and stacked neatly on his blotter. Undeterred, I plowed onward.
“I know you are dying to know if Saul has checked in with any information about the elusive Clarice,” I said. “Alas, the answer is negative, and I can’t very well question him tonight, being that business is every bit as verboten at our poker table as at your dinner table. But then, you already know that.”
“Which of course means it was unnecessary for you to remark upon it,” Wolfe replied offhandedly, not bothering to look up. He was showing that I hadn’t gotten under his skin, but he was trying to get under mine.
The doorbell rang precisely at four. I went to the hallway and sized them up through the one-way glass: A motley crew of three, one long, thin man with a long, thin, sorrowful face; one medium-sized, auburn-haired woman of indeterminate years with a pleasant half-smile and the smooth, creamy complexion of an acne-free teenager; and one compact young man—I put him at twenty-eight—wearing a pink crew-neck sweater and a guileless expression. Lest you think I used a disparaging term by calling them motley, I quote from that word’s definition in Webster’s Second, the only traditional dictionary Nero Wolfe will allow on his shelves: “Composed of different or various parts … diverse; heterogeneous … discordantly composite.”
I opened the door to this diverse, discordantly composite trio, and the tall one—he must have been more than six-and-a-half feet from wing tips to wispy, graying hair—almost smiled down at me. “Hello. Would you be Mr. Archie Goodwin?”
I answered that I would be and he, stooping slightly, held out a large hand. “I am Claude Pemberton, president of the New York posse—that’s what we call our chapters—of PROBE. Meet Wilma Race and Dan McClellan, both of whom are officers in our posse. Thank you for allowing us to come, Mr. Goodwin, especially on such short notice.”
“Thank you for coming,” I said, steering the three down the hall to the office. I introduced them to Wolfe, who dipped his chin a fraction of an inch but remained otherwise impassive, which is standard. Because Pemberton appeared to be their spokesman, I gave him the red leather chair and gestured Ms. Race and Mr. McClellan to the matching yellow ones.
“Will you have anything to drink?” Wolfe asked, adjusting his bulk and studying the visitors without pleasure. “I’m having beer.”
They shook their heads or made other negative gestures. Claude Pemberton cleared his throat. “Mr. Wolfe,” he said, leaning forward and kneading his large hands, “we have come on short notice, for which we thank you. As I told Mr. Goodwin, we are conscious of this sudden intrusion upon your privacy. We are officers in the New York posse—a fanciful name for chapter—of PROBE, which is a national organization made up of people who follow the exploits of Sergeant Orville Barnstable. Now I know you probably think we’re a bunch of eccentric weirdos who dote on a fictional character, but—”
Wolfe held up a silencing hand. “I start with no preconceptions whatever either about you”—he took in the three with a sweeping glance—“or your organization. What one person perceives as eccentricity may appear as commonplace behavior to a second and tedious normality to a third.”
Pemberton actually smiled. “That’s nice, very nice—who said it?”
“I did,” Wolfe replied, dabbing his lips with a handkerchief after drinking beer. “Continue.”
“Well, as I was telling Mr. Goodwin on the phone earlier, PROBE is a nationwide organization, plus Canada and the U.K., and we have more than a thousand dues-paying members on our rolls. About half are concentrated in and around New York, but we also have posses in at least a dozen other cities, including Toronto, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles. We loved Darius Sawyer’s books, and we were delighted when Charles Childress continued the stories after Mr. Sawyer’s death.”
“Was there a consensus within your ranks as to the quality of Mr. Childress’s writing?” Wolfe asked.
“We loved it,” Wilma Race interposed, her animated hands accenting her words. “Most of us felt it was remarkably similar in style to Mr. Sawyer’s, wouldn’t you say so?” She looked for affirmation from the men who flanked her.
“In some ways, I actually liked the Childress books better,” replied Dan McClellan, with a somber nod. “For one thing, he was more contemporary, you know? His books had a lot more current references.”
“Well, now, Dan, that’s because his last book was written more than five years after Darius Sawyer died,” Pemberton chided gently. “Of course he was more contemporary.”
“I only meant that—”
“If I may move along,” Wolfe rumbled, cutting McClellan off cleanly and boring in on Pemberton, “you told Mr. Goodwin on the telephone that you had something to discuss with me.”
“Indeed we do,” the tall man said, straightening up. “It has only been—what, Wilma, five days?—since we learned from Horace Vinson that you had been asked to investigate Mr. Childress’s death.” Wilma nodded vigorously. “I had called Mr. Vinson, who I met at a PROBE meeting some years back, and I asked if he knew anything about what happened beyond what we’ve learned from the newspapers. He told me that although he had no proof, he was convinced that Charles Childress was killed—and that he had hired you in the hopes you would find the murderer.
“Well,” Pemberton went on after pausing for breath, “we got excited about that, and we conducted a national telephone canvass of our members, using volunteers both here and in a half-dozen other key cities. We divided the whole country, plus Canada, into regions. And in seventy-two hours, we got firm commitments for twelve thousand, three hundred dollars.” He pronounced the figure precisely, and with unabashed pride.
“For what purpose?” Wolfe growled.
Pemberton hit the side of his head with a palm. “Oh—I’m sorry. I guess I’m not telling this in a very orderly way, am I?” he said apologetically. “This money is to help compensate you for the investigation.
Here is a certified check, made out to your name, for the figure I mentioned.” He leaned forward and slid an envelope across the desk toward Wolfe.
“I admire your resourcefulness, sir, but I must decline your offer,” Wolfe replied, eyeing the envelope without interest. “I prefer to work with a single client, and as you know, I already have one.”
Wilma Race took over. “As Claude mentioned, when our members learned that you were working to discover the cause of Charles’s death, they, like we, were heartened, and all of us felt that PROBE should bear a portion of the cost.” If I had seen a more earnest face than her pleasantly round one recently, I couldn’t recall it.
“Incredible,” Wolfe murmured, his eyes wide. “Did they all electronically transfer money to New York?”
“Oh no,” McClellan put in. “We’ve gotten only a few checks and money orders so far, those by mail and mostly from the New York and Philadelphia and Boston posses, plus the one in Princeton, New Jersey. But we have the verbal commitments, which, considering our members, is the same as cash. And Claude here made up the difference out of his own pocket so that we could present you a check today.”
“I know that the members are good for it,” Pemberton said, nodding. “It will all come in, every last cent.”
“Madam. Gentlemen,” Wolfe said as his gaze moved over the trio, “I appreciate your confidence. However, I reiterate that I can serve but one master at a time. Your organization and Mr. Vinson have identical aims: To learn whether Mr. Childress was murdered, and if so, to have the perpetrator exposed. Assuming I find answers to both, you will have achieved those ends, and with no financial outlay on your part.”
“True,” Wilma Race conceded eagerly, “but we—PROBE, that is—desire to buy into the resolution of the case, indeed, to play an integral role. If Charles Childress was the victim of foul play, as we all believe he was, and if you identify his murderer, as we all believe you will, we want to feel that we have been a part of it. Call it pride, or hubris, or whatever you want to, but it is very important to those of us who have enjoyed the Barnstable stories that we be involved.”
“There is something else,” Daniel McClellan said. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but hell, why not?” He shrugged his pink shoulders and pressed his lips together. “We’ve all read about how you gather all the suspects right here in this office when you are about to finger a killer, and we were hoping—”
“Dan! That’s really out of line!” Pemberton admonished, sounding remarkably like my high school chemistry teacher, Orrin Fitzmorris, when he bawled out someone who was talking or, worse—sleeping—during one of his interminable lectures.
“What is it you were hoping, Mr. McClellan?” Wolfe demanded. He thinks nothing of cutting someone off in mid-sentence, but he does not tolerate it in others.
I felt sorry for the young guy, who hunched his shoulders in embarrassment and looked like he wanted to withdraw like a turtle into the shell that was his bulky sweater. He glanced at Pemberton, then at Wilma Race, and finally at Wolfe, swallowing. “We were hoping that as a co-client with Horace Vinson, we could have someone from PROBE be in the room—this room—when you … well, name the murderer. Assuming there is one, of course.”
Wolfe scowled. “Sir, this is not a theater, nor does it magically transmogrify into one on those occasions to which you refer. Your suggestion is impractical at best, absurd at worst.”
“Mr. Wolfe,” a flustered Pemberton interjected, “if I may take the liberty of amending what Dan said, PROBE’s primary interest is not in having someone attend one of your denouements, although I confess that we discussed the possibility with some relish. Rather, we want, as Wilma said, to buy into the investigation, thus showing the depth of our support for your efforts.”
“I acknowledge that support,” Wolfe said. “It is not necessary to affirm it with mammon. However, I have some questions, the answers to which might prove illuminating.”
“Ask anything,” Pemberton replied, spreading his long arms with a flourish.
Wolfe drained the beer in his glass and poured from the second bottle Fritz had brought in, watching the foam dissipate and the bubbles rise. “Do you know of anyone within your sodality, either in its New York chapter or elsewhere, who had reason—and desire—to dispatch Mr. Childress?”
Claude Pemberton looked at Wilma Race and then at McClellan, relaying Wolfe’s query with his facial expression. Both responded with a shake of the head, as did Pemberton himself. “No, I can’t imagine anyone from PROBE doing this, although of course most of the members we know are in the local posse,” he answered. “But Mr. Childress was very popular with our members. He spoke about his writing twice at New York meetings and each time, he answered questions for almost an hour.”
“And very graciously, too,” Wilma added, her pretty hands dancing once more. “The first time we invited him, it was with some trepidation, because we had heard that he could be, well, difficult. But Mr. Wolfe, that was not the case at all. He was engaging and humorous.”
Wolfe frowned. “On either appearance, did Mr. Childress mention receiving angry letters or calls from readers?”
“I don’t recall,” she answered. “Do you, Claude, or Dan?”
McClellan shook his head, and Pemberton leaned back in the red leather chair, wrinkling his brow, presumably in deep thought. “Oh, he did mention a couple of notes that he’d gotten from readers who had minor bones to pick over details in his books. I got the impression that kind of thing mildly irked him, but it was passed over quite briefly.”
“You said Mr. Childress answered numerous questions posed by your members,” Wolfe continued. “What was the nature of the queries?”
“Oh, they were pretty much what you’d expect,” Pemberton replied promptly. “Things like ‘Where do you get your plots?’ and ‘How hard has it been to recreate the Sawyer characters?’ and ‘When do you do your writing?’ ”
“Did you find any of his responses either surprising or unexpected?”
“I didn’t think so,” Pemberton said, and his PROBE colleagues nodded their agreement. I could tell that Wolfe was losing interest in the proceedings, and I wondered how he would terminate them. I didn’t have long to wait.
He levered himself upright, dipping his head slightly to each of our guests. “I must excuse myself because of a previous engagement,” he told them. “Mr. Goodwin will want to know how to reach you in the event that I have further questions. Good day.” He moved around his desk and marched out of the office.
Following his directive, I wrote down the names and addresses of the threesome and also returned the check to Claude Pemberton, who was reluctant to accept it. “Take the thing,” I urged. “If you don’t, Mr. Wolfe will tear it up, and that will rile him, given his distaste for physical exertion of any kind. Besides, Horace Vinson can afford the exorbitant fees we charge.”
“But our members already have pledged the money,” he protested.
“So? Send it back, or set up a fund for a Christmas party, or a newsletter.”
“We already have a national newsletter, financed by dues,” Pemberton grumbled, but he gave up, sliding the envelope with the check into the breast pocket of his gray herringbone sportcoat. I saw the PROBE trio to the front door, thanking them for their time, which I thought was unusually gracious of me, given it was they who requested the parley.
After locking the door behind them, I went to the kitchen, where I found Wolfe watching Fritz prepare dinner from the wooden chair with arms near the window that had been constructed to his specifications. He threw a glower my way.
“Ah, the ‘previous engagement’ trick, eh?” I said. “Leaving good ol’ Archie to shovel the intruders unceremoniously into the street. Well, I did, and you’ll be pleased to know that the check is gone, too, although Pemberton was none too happy about it. Any observations on them?”
Wolfe drank beer and closed his eyes. “Well-meaning, although not particularly helpful,” he pronounced.
“You were perhaps expecting them to supply the murderer’s name, along with a signed and notarized confession?”
He kept his eyes closed, probably hoping I would disappear. I obliged.