“Yes, I am.”
“That’s too bad. I’m not a butcher and I’m not a retailer. In fact I’m not in meat at all. But I’ll see-” He broke it off and looked at me as if I was the butler. “Ring Lincoln six-three two three two, between seven and ten in the morning and ask for Tom and use my name.”
“Thank you, sir.” Wolfe was as sweet as stick candy. “I assure you this is appreciated. Now for your own business. Mr. Goodwin told you on the phone this morning that I was too busy to see you. Of course that was flummery. What was in his mind was that while the occupational hazards are relatively high in the detective business, in your business-that is to say, in any activity connected with you-they are substantially higher, and a combination of the two would be inadvisable. I must admit, regretfully, that I agree with him. It would be foolish for you to entrust me with secrets only to be told that I can’t undertake a job for you, so I tell you in advance. I’m sorry.”
“I need help,” Perrit said.
“Doubtless, or you wouldn’t have-”
“I don’t often need help. When I do I get the best there is. I like everything the best. For what I need now, I’ve picked you as the best. I pay for what I get.” Perrit took from his breast pocket a neat little stack of bills, unfolded, held with a rubber band, and tossed it onto Wolfe’s desk. “Fifty Cs. Five grand. That will do for a start. I’m being blackmailed and your job is to stop it.” I goggled at him. The idea of Dazy Perrit being pestered by a blackmailer was about the same as Billy Sunday being pestered by an evangelist trying to convert him.
“But I’ve told you, Mr. Per-”
“I’m being blackmailed by my daughter. That’s one thing nobody in the world knows except me, and now you and this man of yours. Here’s another thing, and this is even more particular. This is very particular. I wouldn’t tell it to my mother even if I still had one, but I need help. My daughter is-”
“Hold it!”
Dazy Perrit was not easy to stop, but I made it positive enough to stop him. I was out of my chair, standing in front of him. “I want to warn you,” I told his eyes, “that Mr. Wolfe is fully as stubborn as you are. This is damn dangerous for all concerned. He’s told you he doesn’t want to hear it, and neither do I!”
I turned savagely to Wolfe. “Good God, what’s wrong with spaghetti and cheese?”
I picked up the stack of bills and stuck them out at Perrit.
He ignored it. His eyes hadn’t even shifted to me. He went on to Wolfe, “The particular thing is that my daughter isn’t really my daughter-the one that’s blackmailing me, I mean. Now you know that too, you and this man. I said that nobody else in the world knows it, but she does. I have got a daughter, born in nineteen twenty-five, twenty-one years ago. She’ll be twenty-one next month, November eighth. There’s a job for you to do with her too. What’s up?”
“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Perrit.” Wolfe had glanced at the wall clock, pushed his chair back from the desk, and was manipulating his bulk upright. He moved from behind the desk and then stopped, because Perrit, also on his feet, was standing square in his path.
“Where you going?” Perrit asked in a tone which implied that no conceivable answer would be acceptable. I stood up too, my hand leaving my pocket with the gun in it-that is, in my hand. That may strike some as corny, but it was instinctive and the instinct was sound. I got around town some and was fairly well informed, and so far as I knew no serious argument with Dazy Perrit had ever been settled with any tool but a gun; and up to then Perrit had done all the settling, either personally or by staff work. With what he had already spilled I could see nothing ahead but one fine mess, and I still believe, corn or no corn, that if he had so much as poked a finger at Wolfe’s central bulge I would have dropped him.
But Wolfe said, unperturbed, “I always spend from four to six upstairs with my plants. Always. If you insist on confiding your troubles to me, tell Mr. Goodwin about it. I’ll phone you this evening or in the morning.” The point was settled, not with words, but with eyes. Wolfe’s eyes won. Perrit moved a step to the right. Wolfe went on by and out, and a moment later the bang of the door on his personal elevator sounded.
Perrit sat down and told me, “You’re crazy. Both of you. What’s that thing in your hand for? Crazy as bedbugs.”
I put the gun on the desk and heaved a sigh. “Okay, tell me about it.”
III
At one point I thought Dazy Perrit was going to break down and cry. That was when he was telling me that his daughter, his real daughter, was up among the top of her class at Columbia. Apparently that made him feel so proud he could hardly bear it.
It wasn’t really very complicated. In his early days in St. Louis Perrit had got married and there was a daughter. Then three things happened in the same week: the daughter had her second birthday, the mother died, and Perrit got three years in the hoosegow for a stick-up. I got only a rough sketch of this and practically nothing of the years that followed, up to 1945; all he gave me was that somewhere along the line, when he had begun to get prosperous, he had got daughter-conscious and had dug her up somewhere in Missouri. He didn’t say where or how he had got her away, but in order to give me the picture he had to explain that she didn’t know she was his daughter. She thought he was merely representing her father, who was very wealthy and couldn’t disclose himself because he was planning to get elected President of the United States or something.
“It was okay,” Dazy Perrit said sourly. “It was working fine. I saw her about every three months and gave her money. Plenty. It was a break for me when she picked a school right here in town. Then Thumbs Meeker hitched it up. He sent a punk to tell me that if there was any little favor he could do for my daughter just to let him know.”
That, of course, from my standpoint, made it even sweeter. Mr. Meeker, called Thumbs on account of his favorite method of getting information from reluctant persons, in which he used both thumbs, was the cave man on the other side of the mountain. If to be associated with Dazy Perrit in anything whatever was a doubtful pleasure, to be yanked in between him and Thumbs Meeker was enough to start ulcers.
I went on listening to Perrit because there was nothing else to do but shoot him, and I had missed the psychological moment for that. It appeared from developments, he said, that Meeker had not actually tagged his daughter but had merely learned that he had one concealed somewhere. But, he said, the one thing on earth he was afraid of was that someone would find his daughter and tell her the facts. That was what had ruined his life, having a daughter.
“It ruined me,” he said, “because it put water in my guts. Where she’s concerned I can’t think straight and I can’t act straight. You’ve heard I’m tough? You’ve heard that?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it said.”
“Okay, I’m tough. But there’s plenty of tough ones. The point is I’ve got brains. I’ve got better brains than any man I’ve ever met. If I had got started on another track I could have been anything you care to name. But where she’s concerned my brains don’t work. Look at my coming here and spilling this. Worse yet, look at what I did a year ago April. I rented a penthouse off Fifth Avenue and brought a girl there as my daughter. I knew it was dumb but my brain wouldn’t work and I did it.”