The office was divided into three sections. There was a small room with a desk and filing cabinets in it. There was another room in which Kettering undoubtedly took his pictures. And there was a darkroom. The office did not carry the sweet smell of success. Neither did it carry any dust. Each night, the building’s cleaning woman came in to empty the waste baskets and wipe off the furniture. The office was spotlessly clean. If Kettering had been there recently, the cleaning woman had wiped away all traces of his visit.
There was no mail outside the entrance doorway. There was a pile of mail inside the door, just below the mail slot. Several printed postal forms in the pile informed Kettering that the post office was holding packages too large to put through the slot. In the silence of Kettering’s office, Carella and Hawes illegally opened his mail. There was nothing significant in the pile. All the letters had to do with his business. Even the manila envelopes contained photographs that were coming back from magazines. The photos were not of the cheesecake variety. Nor did any of Kettering’s mail indicate that he was fond of photographing girls. His forte, apparently, was do-it-yourself pictures. Most of the correspondence was from service magazines, and all of the photos in the manila envelopes dealt with subjects like “How to Put up a Hammock,” and “Refinish That Old Table!” The photos showed how to do it, step by captioned step. If there was a connection between Kettering and Lucy Mencken, it seemed rather remote at the moment.
There were some opened letters on the desk in the smallest room. The letters were dated the latter part of August. None of them had been answered. Evidently Kettering had opened these before he left for his hunting trip. Some of the new letters were letters wanting to know why a request made in August had not yet been answered.
A workbench had been set up under the lights in the studio room. A paint brush with a hole drilled through the center, a long stiff wire, and an empty coffee tin were on the center of the workbench. A plate was in the camera, loaded with film, ready to go. In the darkroom, there were negatives and prints of the first stages of the do-it-yourself project Kettering had been shooting. This one was teaching the reader how to keep a paint brush in good order by drilling a hole, putting the stiff wire through it and using the wire to support the brush over the coffee tin without bending the bristles. The photographic essay had not been finished. Apparently Kettering’s hunting trip had intruded upon its completion.
Apparently, too, Kettering had not been back to his office since last August.
Carella left the office with Hawes, and both men went down to see the building manager. The building manager was a well-groomed man in his thirties. He seemed unhurried and unruffled. His name was Colton.
“I’m going to dispossess him,” Colton said. “Hell, he hasn’t paid his rent for all these months. That office is losing revenue for me. I’m going to dispossess him, that’s all.”
“You sound as if you don’t want to,” Carella said.
“Well, Phil Kettering’s a nice fellow. I hate like hell to throw him out into the street. But what can I do? Can I continue to lose revenue? He’s skipped town, so I lose money. Is that fair?”
“How do you know he’s skipped town?”
“He’s not around, is he? I’m going to dispossess him, that’s all. I called the building’s lawyer already. We’re going to post a copy of the summons and complaint on the office door. We can stick it there with Scotch tape or with a tack, the lawyer said. That’s called ‘substitute service’ in this state.”
“Will you sue him for the back rent?” Hawes asked.
“How can I get a judgment for the back rent?” Colton asked. “He has to be served papers in person for that and who the hell knows where he is? But I can get a judgment evicting him. Substitute service. That’s what they call it in this state. I hate to do it to Phil, but can I lose revenue? You can bet your life the building doesn’t like to lose revenue.”
“Did Kettering give you any idea he was leaving?” Hawes asked.
“None whatever. How do you like that? Skips town. Doesn’t even have the decency to tell me he doesn’t want the office any more. What’s he hiding from? Is it the police? Is he hiding from you? Is he planning a bank robbery or something? A murder? What? Why does the man suddenly skip town like that? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Carella and Hawes nodded almost simultaneously.
Carella said it for both of them. “That’s what we’d like to know, too,” he said. Then they thanked him and left his office.
There was nothing to do but question the other men who had been on the hunting trip.
They divided the men between them, and then Carella and Hawes split up.
* * *
THE ADVERTISING AGENCY was called the Ruther-Smith Company. It was a going concern, with twenty employees. Frank Ruther was a partner in the firm, and the man who wrote most of the company’s copy.
“I’d rather be writing books,” he told Hawes. “The trouble is, I can’t.”
He was a man in his early forties, with dark hair and brown eyes. He did not dress at all like a Jefferson Avenue advertising man. He dressed, instead, like the stereotyped idea of an author, tweed jacket, soft-collared shirt, quiet tie, dark flannel trousers. Too, like someone’s stereotyped idea of a writer—perhaps his own—he smoked a pipe. He had greeted Hawes cordially and warmly, and they sat now in his tastefully furnished office, talking and smoking.
“My grandfather made a hell of a lot of money,” Ruther said. “He sold pots. He traveled from town to town selling his pots, and pretty soon he could afford to hire people to sell his pots for him. He left a lot of money to my dad.”
“What did your father do?” Hawes asked.
“He parlayed it into even more money. He was a dog fancier. He began importing French poodles. It doesn’t sound as if there could be much money in it, but he had the biggest kennel on Sand’s Spit. Quality dogs, Mr. Hawes. And my dad was a shrewd businessman. When he died, I inherited money earned by two generations of Ruthers.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I wanted to be a writer. I wrote dozens of novels, which I threw into the wastepaper basket. At the same time, I was living big. I’d always lived big when my father was alive, and I saw no reason to stop living big when he died. I went through quite a lot of money. In a little less than twenty years, I spent almost the entire fortune two generations had worked to build. I stopped writing novels when I had about fifteen thousand dollars left. I started this company with Jeff Smith. It’s earning its keep now. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m finally accomplishing something. It’s a bad feeling, Mr. Hawes, when you know you’re not accomplishing anything.”
“I suppose so,” Hawes said.
“A good copywriter could outline the history of my family in three words, if he wanted to. At least, the history of my family until I started this agency—when I was still fooling around writing books.”
“And what are those three words?” Hawes asked.
“My grandfather, my father, and me,” Ruther said. “Three generations and three occupations. The three words? A peddler, a poodler, and a piddler. I was the piddler.”