“Hell, I don’t know. I never know anything. Spell it.”
I spelled it. He said he would call back, and I went and stood at a window and watched a couple of dozen flakes of snow that were darting around pretending they were a blizzard. When the phone rang it was Lon himself, which was a compliment, since he was near the top at the Gazette.
“You timed it fine,” he said. “Was your Hattie Annis a character that owned a house on 47th Street between Eighth and Ninth?”
“Was? Is.”
“Not anymore. A hit-and-run driver got her on Tenth Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street at 11:05 this morning. Three blocks from your place. We just got the identification verified ten minutes ago. They found the car at two o’clock double-parked on West Fortieth Street. It was hot. It had been taken from where the owner had parked it on Thirty-sixth Street. Now give. If Wolfe’s interested it wasn’t just some hooligan. Who’s your client?”
“No client. He’s not interested. Have you—”
“Come off it! Give!”
“Not a crumb. You know damn well I’ve given you plenty of breaks, and I’ll hand you another one if and when. If you run a paragraph that Nero Wolfe is asking about Hattie Annis I’ll chew your ear personally. Have you got a description of the driver?”
“No. But now that you’ve called we’ll sure try to get one.”
“Man or woman?”
“Not even that. Look, Archie, just a helpful hint. I’ll put horseradish on my ear.”
I told him I didn’t like horseradish, which wasn’t true, hung up, stood a minute, and stepped to the window. The snowflakes were getting reinforcements. I was deciding how to take it. I had liked her even before I had learned from Tammy Baxter that she was a screwball, and we could use more screwballs. Not that I was blaming myself. It was true that if I had postponed my trip to the bank and kept her there she might still be alive, but what the hell, you can’t base your actions on the theory that anyone you don’t keep your eye on is apt to get killed. That wasn’t it. But I admit my feelings were personal. Even at the minimum, I was sore because I had gone out of my way to maneuver Wolfe into seeing her, and at five minutes past eleven, exactly when I was picking the right words and tone to get him, some skunk was smashing her just three blocks away.
Having settled for that as a minimum, I got rubber gloves from a drawer of my desk, put them on, went to the front room, knelt to reach under the couch for the package, took it to the office, to my desk, untied the string, and, without touching more than I had to, removed the wrapping paper. No Hope diamond. It was a stack of new twenty-dollar bills. I picked it up and flipped the corners, the whole stack. All twenties. I got a ruler from a drawer and measured its thickness — one and seven-eighths inches. New bills run 250 to the inch. Nine thousand dollars.
It was a comedown. Nine grand is not hay, but it is less than one percent of a million; and besides, nothing is more uninteresting than a stack of currency when it’s not yours and not going to be. I picked off the top one and gave it a look. B67380945B. Of course they would be more interesting if... I went and got a new twenty from the safe and put them side by side for inspection, first just with my eyes, which are good, and then with a glass Wolfe keeps in his desk. Three minutes with the glass settled it, and I took the bill from the bottom of the stack and one from the middle, and used the glass on them, with the same result. They were phonies.
I returned the three bills to the stack, rewrapped it as before, tied it with the string, also as before, went upstairs to my room, put it in the back of my shirt drawer, went back down to the office, took off the rubber gloves and put them away, sat, and considered matters.
II
There were a lot of aspects. For instance, the essential thing about counterfeit money is to keep it out of circulation. I was doing so. As for having it in my possession, nobody could prove I didn’t still think it was the Hope diamond or the secret Pentagon war plans or used typewriter ribbons.
Take the Wolfe aspect. Consulting him was out. Since there was no prospect of a client and a fee, he would merely instruct me to call the Treasury Department and tell them to come and get it.
Or the conflict-of-interest aspect. The T-men would rather see the skunk get five years for passing phonies than the chair for murder, naturally. Homicide, specifically Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins, the reverse, also naturally. Not that they are not on speaking terms, but they jostle. I had heard the inside dope on how the Lorber case had been messed up a couple of years ago. I was for Homicide, but if I took the package to West 20th Street and reported my chats with Hattie Annis and Tammy Baxter they would have to call the Treasury within an hour after they opened the package, and the jostling would start.
Or the personal aspect. She had entrusted the package to me. Any reward coming to her now would be in a different jurisdiction, but she had hated cops, and as her trustee it was my duty to see that they didn’t horn in on her estate. If there actually was a reward, which was doubtful, I could turn it over to the Actors’ Fund. As for my position, no one but Wolfe knew she had come, and even he didn’t know she had left a package with me.
Or the logical aspect. Since she had rarely left her house and never went more than a block away, it was a fair assumption that she had found the bills there and that one of her tenants had put them there, probably in his or her room. That was enough to start; going on to assume that he had followed her downtown could wait.
Those were the main aspects. After looking them over, along with a few minor ones, I got the address by finding Annis, Hattie, in the phone book, buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to tell Wolfe I was going out on an errand, went to the hall for my coat and hat, and left. With the snow coming down thicker and the wind swirling it around there would be no such thing as an empty taxi at that time of day, so I walked, twelve short blocks uptown and one long one across.
It was a dump all right, like hundreds of others in that part of town. I stood across the street for a survey through the snow, blinking it from my lashes. I didn’t care to bump into Sergeant Purley Stebbins or any of the others, but of course it wasn’t likely that Homicide was around, since it was probably being handled as a routine hit-and-run. There was no police car in sight, and I crossed over and entered the vestibule. It had never been converted for multiple tenancy — only one mailbox, and one button, on the jamb. I pressed it and waited for a click, but none came. Instead, after half a minute, the door opened and a tall thin guy with a marvelous mane of wavy white hair was there, boring a hole through me with deep-set blue-gray eyes.
“You a reporter?” he boomed. It almost blew me back out of the vestibule.
“Not guilty,” I told him. “I would like to see Miss Baxter. My name’s Goodwin.”
“Do you recognize me?” he demanded.
“No. I have a feeling that I would in a better light, but no.”
“Raymond Dell.”
“Sure. Of course. Certainly.”
He turned on his heel and strode down the dim and dingy hall. I entered and shut the door. He kept going, to a door at the end of the hall and on through, and, since he hadn’t told me to wait, I followed. As I crossed the sill he was saying, “For you, Tammy. A Philistine. Goodman.”
It was the kitchen. Tammy Baxter and another girl, and two men, were seated at a big table with a linoleum top, dining or maybe teaing — sandwiches on paper plates and coffee in big white heavy cups. There was a fifth chair and the white-maned Raymond Dell was taking it and picking up what remained of a sandwich.
“Hi,” Tammy said. “Not Goodman, Ray. Goodwin. Archie Goodwin. I met him somewhere. A Philistine but not a barbarian. Martha Kirk, Mr. Goodwin. Raymond Dell. Noel Ferris. Paul Hannah. I don’t ask what you want... because I may not have it. I hope it’s not a sandwich?”