Rex Stout
The Doorbell Rang
1
Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe's desk, where Mrs Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.
She had been there half an hour, having arrived a few minutes after six o'clock. Since her secretary had phoned for an appointment only three hours earlier there hadn't been much time to check on her, but more than enough for the widow who had inherited the residual estate of Lloyd Bruner. At least eight of the several dozen buildings Bruner had left to her were more than twelve stories high, and one of them could be seen from anywhere within eye range-north, east, south, or west. All that had been necessary, really, was to ring Lon Cohen at the Gazette to ask if there was any news not fit to print about anyone named Bruner, but I made a couple of other calls, to a vice-president of our bank and to Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer. I got nothing, except at one point the vice-president said, 'Oh… a funny thing…' and stopped.
I asked what.
Pause. 'Nothing, really. Mr Abernathy, our president, got a book from her…'
'What kind of a book?'
'It- I forget. If you will excuse me, Mr Goodwin, I'm rather busy.'
So all I had on her, as I answered the doorbell in the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street and let her in, and ushered her to the office, was that she had sent a man a book. After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.
He was regarding her without enthusiasm. The trouble was, a new year had just started, and it seemed likely that he was going to have to go to work. In a November or December, when he was already in a tax bracket that would take three-quarters-more, formerly-of any additional income, turning down jobs was practically automatic, but January was different, and this was the fifth of January, and this woman was stacked. He didn't like it. 'Mr Goodwin named you,' he said coldly, 'and I read newspapers.'
She nodded. 'I know you do. I know a great deal about you, that's why I'm here. I want you to do something that perhaps no other man alive could do. You read books too. Have you read one entitled The FBI Nobody Knows?'
'Yes.'
'Then I don't need to tell you about it. Did it impress you?'
'Yes.'
'Favorably?'
'Yes.'
'My goodness, you're curt.'
'I answered your questions, madam.'
'I know you did. I can be curt too. That book impressed me. It impressed me so strongly that I bought ten thousand copies of it and sent them to people all over the country.'
'Indeed.' Wolfe's brow was up an eighth of an inch.
'Yes. I sent them to the members of the cabinet, the Supreme Court justices, governors of all the states, all senators and representatives, members of state legislatures, publishers of newspapers and magazines, and editors, heads of corporations and banks, network executives and broadcasters, columnists, district attorneys, educators, and others-oh yes, chiefs of police. Do I need to explain why I did that?'
'Not to me.'
There was a flash in the brown-black eyes. 'I don't like your tone. I want you to do something, and I'll pay you the limit and beyond the limit, there is no limit, but there's no point in going on unless- You said that book impressed you favorably. Do you mean you agree with the author's opinion of the FBI?'
'With some minor qualifications, yes.
'And of J. Edgar Hoover?'
'Yes.'
