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.