Rex Stout
In The Best Families
Chapter One
It was nothing out of the ordinary that Mrs Barry Rackham had made the appointment with her finger pressed to her lips. That is by no means an unusual gesture for people who find themselves in a situation where the best thing they can think of is to make arrangements to see Nero Wolfe.
With Mrs Barry Rackham the shushing finger was only figurative, since she made the date speaking to me on the phone. It was in her voice, low and jerky, and also in the way she kept telling me how confidential it was, even after I solemnly assured her that we rarely notified the press when someone requested an appointment on business. At the end she told me once more that she would have preferred to speak to Mr Wolfe himself, and I hung up and decided it rated a discreet routine check on a prospective client, starting with Mr Mitchell at the bank and Lon Cohen at the Gazette. On the main point of interest, could she and did she pay her bills, the news was favourable: she was worth a good four million and maybe five. Calling it four, and assuming that Wolfe's bill for services rendered would come to only half of it, that would be enough to pay my current salary-as Wolfe's secretary, trusted assistant and official gnat-for a hundred and sixty-seven years; and in addition to that, living as I did there in
Wolfe's house, I also got food and shelter. So I was fixed for life if it turned out that she needed two million bucks' worth of detective work.
She might have at that, judging from the way she looked and acted at eleven o'clock the next morning, Friday, when the doorbell rang and I went to let her in. There was a man on the stoop with her, and after glancing quickly east and then west she brushed past him and darted inside, grabbed my sleeve, and told me in a loud whisper, “You're not Nero Wolfe!
Instantly she released me, seized the elbow of her companion to hurry him across the sill, and whispered at him explosively, “Come in and shut the door! You might have thought she was a duchess diving into a hock shop.
Not that she was my idea of a duchess physically. As I attended to the door and got the man's hat and topcoat hung on the rack, I took them in. She was a paradox-bony from the neck up and ample from the neck down. On her chin and jawbone and cheekbone the skin was stretched tight, but alongside her mouth and nose were tangles of wrinkles.
As I helped her off with her fur coat I told her, “Look, Mrs Rackham. You came to consult Nero Wolfe, huh?
“Yes, she whispered. She nodded and said right out loud, “Of course.
“Then you ought to stop trembling if you can. It makes Mr Wolfe uneasy when a woman trembles, because he thinks she's going to be hysterical, and he might not listen to you. Take a deep breath and try to stop.
“You were trembling all the way down here in the car, the man said in a mild baritone.
“I was not! she snapped. That settled, she turned to me. This is my cousin,
Calvin Leeds. He didn't want me to come here, but I brought him along anyhow.
Where's Mr Wolfe?
I indicated the door to the office, went and opened it, and ushered them in.
I have never figured out Wolfe's grounds for deciding whether or not to get to his feet when a woman enters his office. If they're objective they're too complicated for me, and if they're subjective I wouldn't know where to start.
This time he kept his seat behind his desk in the corner near a window, merely nodding and murmuring when I pronounced names. I thought for a second that Mrs
Rackham was standing gazing at him in reproach for his bad manners, but then I saw it was just surprised disbelief that he could be that big and fat. I'm so used to the quantity of him that I'm apt to forget how he must impress people seeing him for the first time.
He aimed a thumb at the red leather chair beyond the end of his desk and muttered at her, “Sit down, madam.
She went and sat. I then did likewise, at my own desk, not far from Wolfe's and at right angles to it. Calvin Leeds, the cousin, had sat twice, first on the couch towards the rear and then on a chair which I moved up for him. I would have guessed that both he and Mrs Rackham had first seen the light about the same time as the twentieth century, but he could have been a little older. He had a lot of weather in his face with its tough-looking hide, his hair had been brown but was now more grey, and with his medium size and weight he looked and moved as if all his inside springs were still sound and lively. He had taken
Wolfe in, and the surroundings too, and now his eyes were on his cousin.
