Plot It Yourself

me, with an invoice enclosed which included an item of a dollar, fifty for messenger service. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and was looking through the morning’s mail. When I handed him the book he made a face at it and dropped it on his desk, but in a couple of minutes he picked it up, frowned at the cover, and opened it. He was well into it when The Moth That Ate Peanuts arrived, and since, as I said, my function is whatever an occasion calls for, I tackled that one, looking for “aver” or “not for nothing” or something like “Barely had the moth swallowed the ten-thousandth peanut when it got a stomach-ache.” Also, of course, semicolons and paragraphing. I was more than halfway through when Wolfe asked for it, and I got up and handed it to him and took Barrage at Dawn.

A little after one, with lunchtime approaching, Wolfe shut The Moth That Ate Peanuts, tossed it onto his desk, and growled, “Pfui. Neither one. Confound it.”

I closed Barrage at Dawn and put it down. “I can see,” I said, “that you might cross Simon Jacobs off, but Alice Porter’s is a children’s book. You wouldn’t expect a moth to aver, even if it was a peanut addict. I would hate to give up Alice Porter. She started it and she’s repeating.”

He glared at me. “No. She didn’t write those stories.”

“If you say so. Why glare at me? I didn’t write them. Is this final or are you just sore because he or she was smart enough to wear gloves?”

“It’s final. No one is that smart. Those two are eliminated.”

“Then that leaves Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert.”

“Jane Ogilvy is highly unlikely. The woman who wrote those three pseudo-poems and used the terms and locutions that appear in her testimony at the trial is almost certainly incapable of writing those three stories, including the one that she claimed she had written. Kenneth Rennert is of course a possibility, the only one left of the quartet. But his claim is based on a play outline, not a story, and we don’t have it. It might even be that his was an independent operation. Could we get copies of the television scripts he has written?”

“I don’t know. Shall I find out?”

“Yes, but there is no urgency. According to that report, they were dramatic in form and so contained nothing but dialogue, and would tell us next to nothing. I would like your opinion. Our job now is to find a person, man or woman: the person who in 1955 read The Colour of Passion, by Ellen Sturdevant, wrote a story with the title ‘There Is Only Love,’ incorporating its characters and plot and action, persuaded Alice Porter to use it as the basis for a claim of plagiarism, putting her name on it, the bait being presumably a share of the proceeds, and at an opportune moment somehow entered the summer home of Ellen Sturdevant and concealed the manuscript in a bureau drawer; who repeated the performance a year later with Hold Fast to All I Give You, by Richard Echols, using another accomplice, Simon Jacobs, changing only the method of establishing the existence and priority of the manuscript, suggested by the convenient circumstance that Jacobs had once sent a story to Echols’s agent and had it returned; who in 1957 again repeated the performance with Sacred or Profane, by Mariorie Lippin, using still another accomplice, Jane Ogilvy, following the same pattern, with the advantage of another convenient circumstance, the death of Mariorie Lippin. I would like your opinion. Is Kenneth Rennert that person?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know him well enough.”

“You have read that report.”

“Yeah.” I considered. “Offhand I would vote no. One will get you ten that he isn’t. From the general impression I got of him. Especially I doubt if he would monkey around with accomplices. A specific point: There is no evidence that he had any connection with writing or writers until he took a shot at television in 1955, so how did he get on to Alice Porter and Jacobs and Jane Ogilvy? Another one: If he used them on the first three, splitting the take with them, because he didn’t want to do it himself, why did he do it himself for the fourth and then go back to Alice Porter for the fifth?”

Wolfe nodded. “I agree. We are caught in our own noose. By discovering that those three stories were written by the same person we thought we had simplified the problem. It now appears that we have complicated it. If those four were merely cat’s-paws, where is the monkey? He is presumably a United States citizen. There are a hundred and seventy million of them.”

“It’s not that bad,” I averred. “He’s probably in the metropolitan area. Fifteen million. Not counting children, illiterates, millionaires, people in jail-”

Fritz had appeared at the door. “Lunch is ready, sir.”

“I have no appetite,” Wolfe growled.

It was off a little. He only ate four Creole fritters with cheese sauce instead of the usual five.

Chapter 5

So he pulled a mutiny, the first one in three years. His mutinies are like other people’s. Other people mutiny against the Army or Navy or some other authority, but he mutinies against himself. It was his house and his office, and he had taken the job, but now he turned his back on it. His discovery that the three stories had all been written by one person, which I admit was fairly neat, had backfired on him, and he quit. Of course business is never mentioned at the table, but from his mood I knew he was smoldering, so when we returned to the office after lunch I asked politely whether there would be instructions then or later.

“Now,” he said. “You will see, at your convenience and theirs, Miss Porter, Miss Ogilvy, Mr Jacobs, and Mr Rennert. In whatever order you prefer. Make their acquaintance.”

I stayed polite. “It will be a pleasure to meet them. What are we to talk about?”

“Whatever occurs to you. I have never known you to be short of words.”

“How about bringing them, one at a time, to make your acquaintance?”