Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 Read Online Free Page B

you have.” Cramer came up out of his chair, still springy in spite of his years. “I’ll be going. Damn it, I was going home.”
    He headed for the hall. I followed.
    When I returned to the office after letting the law out, Wolfe was placidly opening a bottle of beer.
    “What do you say,” I suggested, “I get on the phone and call in Saul and Fred and Orrie, and you lay it out, and we set a deadline, sundown tomorrow would do, for solving
both
cases? Just to make a monkey out of Cramer?”
    Wolfe scowled at me. “Confound it, don’t bounce like that. This will be no skirmish. Mr. Cramer’s men have been looking, more or less, for a Baird Archer for seven weeks. The Bronx men have been looking for one for seventeen days. Now they’ll get serious about it. What if there isn’t one?”
    “We know there was enough of one to date Joan Wellman for February second.”
    “We do not. We know only that she wrote her parents that a stranger on the telephone had said he was Baird Archer, and that a manuscript of a novel bearing that name had been submitted to her employers, read by her, and returned in the mail to a Baird Archer at General Delivery.” Wolfe shook his head. “No, this willbe more than a skirmish. Before we’re through Mr. Wellman may indeed be a pauper unless his rancor wears thin. Let the police do their part.”
    Knowing him as I did, I didn’t care for that. I sat down. “Sitzlust again?” I demanded offensively.
    “No. I said let the police do their part. This will take work. We’ll start with the assumption, not risky I think, that Miss Wellman’s letter to her parents was straightforward. If so, it had something for us besides the name of Baird Archer. He asked her if anyone else had read his manuscript and she said no. It could have been an innocent question, but in the light of what happened to her it raises a point. Was she killed because she had read the manuscript? As a conjecture that is not inane. How many public stenographers are there in the city? Say in Manhattan?”
    “I don’t know. Five hundred. Five thousand.”
    “Not thousands surely. People who make presentable copies of documents or manuscripts from drafts.”
    “That’s typing services, not public stenographers.”
    “Very well.” Wolfe drank beer and leaned back. “I thought of suggesting this to Mr. Cramer, but if we’re to spend some of Mr. Wellman’s money this is as good a way to start as any. I would like to know what that novel was about. Baird Archer may have typed the manuscript himself, but he may not. We’ll put Saul and Fred and Orrie on a round of the typing services. Have them here at eight in the morning and I’ll give them instructions. There is a possibility not only of learning about the novel, but also of getting a description of Baird Archer.”
    “Right.” This was more like it. “It wouldn’t hurt me to stretch my legs too.”
    “You will. There’s a chance, though this may be slimmer, that the novel had previously been submittedto another publisher. It’s worth trying. Start with the better firms, of the class of Scholl and Hanna. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow get all you can from the police files on both Miss Wellman and Dykes, covering everything. For instance, did Dykes have a typewriter in his apartment?”
    I lifted a brow. “Do you think Dykes was Baird Archer?”
    “I don’t know. He wrote that list of names, obviously inventions. He certainly wasn’t Baird Archer on February second, since he had been dead five weeks. You will also go to Scholl and Hanna. In spite of what Miss Wellman wrote her parents, it’s possible that someone else read that manuscript, or at least glanced through it. Or Miss Wellman may have said something about it to one of her associates. Or, less likely, Baird Archer may have delivered the manuscript in person and be remembered—of course that was last fall, months ago.”
    Wolfe heaved a sigh and reached for his glass. “I suggest that you extend