Death Times Three SSC (3 page)

Hattie Annis is the most successful of several characters Rex based on his mother's sister, Alice Todhunter Bradley, who as a young woman, in the 1880s, traveled through the West alone, lecturing, serving as schoolmistress to Brigham Young's kin and, eventually, as a confidante to Eugene Debs. In the original "Counterfeit for Murder" Hattie does not meet Nero Wolfe. In the rewrite she not only meets him, she flabbergasts him by asking him for "lamb kidneys bourguignon" when he invites her to lunch. This scene alone justifies the rewrite. Rarely is Nero Wolfe ever put out of countenance by anyone. By story's end Wolfe is won over by Hattie's homely candor and integrity. No mistake about it, Hattie is a straight-arrow.

If it is incumbent on us to ask what else readers gain in the rewrite of "Counterfeit for Murder," the question can at least be speedily answered. Wolfe is given more to do here. Once again he is able to utilize, to good advantage, the services of Saul, Fred, and Orrie, and to stage one of his revealing assemblies. We also learn the source of the counterfeit bills, a detail skimped on in the original story. And, finally, Wolfe is able to compromise severely the dignity of Albert Leach (that his surname recalls a parasite is not accidental), a T-man whose patronizing attitude has awakened his indignation. This scene foreshadows Wolfe's brilliant coup in humbling J. Edgar Hoover, six years later, in The Doorbell Rang.

We need not suppose that the rewrite of "Counterfeit for Murder" cannibalized the original, stripping from it its most meritorious parts. Tamaris Baxter, who changes roles with Hattie in the rewrite, to become the needed corpse, is intelligent and resourceful but a bit starchy, probably because she is not the person she pretends to be. To dispense with her is no hardship. But the original story has several wonderful scenes that can ill be spared. The restoration of them to a place in the corpus is a gain that all discriminating Neronians will applaud. Early in the story tensions run high between Wolfe and Archie. Archie comes upon Wolfe studying a terrestrial globe, "probably picking out a place for me to be exiled in." Wolfe fires Archie, and Archie reports, "I turned and marched out, chin up, with my ego patting me on the back, and mounted the stairs to my room." It is a joy to see Wolfe later weasel out of this commitment when he realizes he needs Archie after all.

Midway in the story we are treated to two superb scenes, one treading close on the heels of the other. Albert Leach, accompanied by a team of four other T-men, invades the brownstone and conducts an inchby-inch search, even to sifting through the files in Wolfe's office and the osmundine in his plant rooms. "'My house has been invaded, my privacy has been outraged, and my belongings have been pawed," Wolfe declares. He locks himself in his bedroom and refuses to emerge until the T-men are gone. Unfortunately, for himself, Inspector Cramer chooses this disagreeable hour--it is eleven-thirty at night--to call, and Wolfe, with unprecedented vigor, uses his physical bulk to block his entrance, in what surely is one of the great moments of the saga.

Archie's witty sallies and disclosures, as usual, are sprinkled through the story and add to its zest. It is intriguing to learn that he once spent nine rainy hours in a doorway on a stakeout. At one point he tells us, too, "I no longer had any illusions about dimples. The most attractive and best-placed ones I had ever seen were on the cheeks of a woman who had fed arsenic to three husbands in a row." The invasion of the brownstone by the T-men sparks some of his most audacious quips. He asks one of them, "'Did you find the snow in the secret drawer? " And he also asks the man to turn his mattress because it's due for a turning. He explains further that FBI stands for "Foiled By Intelligence." We cannot pass from the subject of Archie without noting one curious detail attaching to the original manuscript. Archie's crucial maneuver of leaving his hat and coat in Hattie's parlor was, for Rex, an afterthought. He actually taped that detail over the passage it replaced. For Rex such backtracking in his manuscripts was unprecedented.

William S. Baring-Gould surmised that the events recounted in "Counterfeit for Murder" occurred on a Monday and Tuesday in the winter of 1960-1961. He was wrong. Rex's notes show that they occurred in 1959, on Monday, January 26, and Tuesday, January 27. These dates, used in the original, were retained in the rewrite.

The year in which Rex wrote his two versions of "Counterfeit for Murder" was, for him, an
annus mirabilis
. He wrote three stories in 1958 and three again in 1960. In 1959 he worked on five. "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo," was finished in January. Between January and March he produced his two versions of "Counterfeit for Murder." Plot It Yourself was begun in May and finished in July. "The Rodeo Murder" was begun in September and finished in October. A suggestion that he wrote "Counterfeit for Murder" twice because he was unsure of himself can have no validity. Rex was far from being written out. Indeed, he would write another seventeen Nero Wolfe stories, eleven of them novels, before he racked up his quill at eighty-nine. That he could do a second version of "Counterfeit for Murder" and come within ten lines of making it exactly the same length as its predecessor bespeaks a virtuosity that confirms that his mastery over his material was unimpaired.

While Rex was writing "Counterfeit for Murder," his grandsons, Chris and Reed Maroc, aged three and five, were living at High Meadow. When their mother, Rex's daughter Barbara, told them not to bother their grandfather because he was "busy with a counterfeiting plot," they took this literally and invaded Rex's study to confront him with drawn, toy pistols. "They had a point," Rex conceded. "It could be argued that all fiction writing is counterfeiting." When "The Counterfeiter's Knife" was published in The Saturday Evening Post, the boys, clad in, respectively, Superman outfit and western gear, restaged their stickup for a photograph to accompany the story. This, Rex explained, did not make them liable to charges of false arrest. "A reconstruction," he said, "is no good as evidence." As encountered in this volume, Rex's own reconstructions, however, are excellent evidence of the fecundity of his genius.

--John J. McAleer

By Rex Stout

A Nero Wolfe Short Story

Included in the Death Times Three Short Story Collection

In the old brownstone house which was the dwelling, and also contained the office, of Nero Wolfe on West 35th Street near the Hudson River, in New York, heavy gloom had penetrated into every corner of every room, so that there was no escaping from it. Fritz Brenner was in bed with the grippe. If it had been Theodore Horstmann, who nursed the 3,000 orchids on the top floor, it would have been merely an inconvenience. If it had been me, Archie Goodwin, secretary, bodyguard, goad, and goat, Wolfe would have been no worse than peevish. But Fritz was the cook; and such a cook that Marko Vukcic of Rusterman's famous restaurant, had once offered a fantastic sum for his release to the major leagues, and met with scornful refusal from Wolfe and Fritz both. On that Tuesday in November the kitchen had not seen him for three days, and the resulting situation was not funny. I'll skip the awful details--for instance, the desperate and disastrous struggle that took place Sunday afternoon between Wolfe and a couple of ducklings and go on with the climax.

It was lunchtime Tuesday. Wolfe and I were at the dining table. I was doing all right with a can of beans I had got at the delicatessen. Wolfe, his broad face dour and dismal, took a spoonful of stuff from a little glass jar that had just been opened, dabbed it onto the end of a roll, bit it off, and chewed. All of a sudden, with nothing to warn me, there was an explosion like the bursting of a ten-inch shell. Instinctively I dropped my sandwich and put up my hands to protect my face, but too late. Little gobs of the stuff, and particles of masticated roll, peppered me like shrapnel.

I glared at him. "Well," I said witheringly. I removed something from my eyelid with the corner of my napkin. "If you think for one moment you can get away--"

I left it hanging. With as black a fury on his face as any I had ever seen there, he was on his feet and heading for the kitchen. I stayed in my chair. After I had done what I could with the napkin, hearing meanwhile the garglings and splashings of Wolfe at the kitchen sink, I reached for the jar, took a look at the contents, and sniffed it. I inspected the label. It was small and to the point:

I was sniffing at it again when Wolfe marched in with a tray containing three bottles of beer, a chunk of cheese, and a roll of salami. He sat down without a word and started slicing salami.

"The last man who spat at me," I said casually, "got three bullets in his heart before he hit the floor."

Pfui," Wolfe said coldly.

"And at least," I continued, "he really meant it.

Whereas you were merely being childish and trying to show what a supersensitive gourmet you are--"

"Shut up. Did you taste it?"

"No"

"Do so. It's full of poison."

I regarded him suspiciously. It was ten to one he was stringing me, but, after all, there were a good many people who would have regarded the death of Nero Wolfe as a ray of sunshine in a dark world, and a few of them had made efforts to bring it about. I picked up the jar and a spoon, procured a morsel about the size of a pea, and put it in my mouth. A moment later I discreetly but hastily ejected it into my napkin, went to the kitchen and did some rinsing, returned to the dining-room and took a good large bite from a dill pickle.

After the pickle's pungency had to some extent quieted the turmoil in my taste buds, I reached for the jar and smelled it again.

"That's funny," I said.

Wolfe made a growling noise.

"I mean," I continued hastily, "that I don't understand it. How could it be some fiend trying to poison you? I bought it at Bruegel's and brought it home myself, and I opened it, and I'd swear the lid hadn't been tampered with. But I don't blame you for spitting, even though I happened to be in the line of fire. If that's Tingley's idea of a rare, exotic flavor to tempt the jaded appetite--"

"That will do, Archie." Wolfe put down his empty glass. I had never heard his tone more menacing. "I am not impressed by your failure to understand this abominable outrage. I might bring myself to tolerate it if some frightened or vindictive person shot me to death, but this is insupportable." He made the growling noise again. "My food. You know my attitude toward food." He aimed a rigid finger at the jar, and his voice trembled with ferocity. "Whoever put that in there is going to regret it."

He said no more, and I concentrated on the beans and pickles and milk. When he had finished the cheese he got up and left the room, taking the third bottle of beer along, and when I was through I cleared the table and went to the kitchen and washed up. Then I proceeded to the office. He had his mass deposited in the oversized chair behind his desk, and was leaning back with his eyes closed and a twist to his lips which showed that the beer descending his gullet had washed no wrath down with it. Without opening his eyes he muttered at me, "Where's that jar?"

"Right here." I put it on his desk.

"Get Mr. Whipple, at the laboratory."

I sat at my desk, and looked up the number and dialed it. When I told Wolfe I had Whipple he got himself upright and reached for his phone and spoke to it:

"Mr. Whipple? ... This is Nero Wolfe ... Good afternoon, sir. Can you do an analysis for me right away? ... I don't know. It's a glass jar containing a substance which I foolishly presumed to be edible ... I have no idea. Mr. Goodwin will take it down to you immediately."

I was glad to have an errand that would take me away from that den of dejection for an hour or so, but something more immediate intervened. The doorbell rang and, since Fritz was out of commission, I went to answer it. Swinging the front door open, I found myself confronted by something pleasant. While she didn't reach the spectacular and I'm not saying that I caught my breath, one comprehensive glance at her gave me the feeling that it was foolish to regard the world as an abode of affliction merely because Fritz had the grippe. Her cheeks had soft in-curves and her eyes were a kind of chartreuse, something the color of my bathroom walls upstairs. They looked worried.

"Hello," I said enthusiastically.

"Mr. Nero Wolfe?" she asked in a nice voice from west of Pittsburgh. "My name is Amy Duncan." I knew it was hopeless. With Wolfe in a state of mingled rage and despondency, and with the bank balance in a flourishing condition, if I had gone and told him that a good-looking girl named Duncan wanted to see him, no matter what about, he would only have been churlish. Whereas there was a chance.
I invited her in, escorted her down the hall and into the office, and pulled up a chair for her.