Archie Meets Nero Wolfe -

238 Pages·2012·1.07 MB·English

by  Stout Rex

ARCHIE MEETS NERO WOLFE
Robert Goldsborough
To Barbara Stout and Rebecca Stout Bradbury,
whose support and encouragement have been
appreciated more than I can ever say
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Author Notes
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
E
ven though September was barely half over, the wind off the Hudson made me
wish I had worn my new fur-lined jacket. In the two-plus weeks I had patrolled
the Moreland Import Company docks, each night seemed colder than the one
before it. At this rate, I would freeze before Halloween.
I wouldn’t have taken the job if anything better had turned up, but I felt
lucky just to have work of any kind. I saw enough of those long lines on the
sidewalks outside the soup kitchens to appreciate getting a paycheck, even a
small one. Besides, I was not about to go back to Chillicothe, Ohio, with my tail
between my legs.
Bates had told me to be especially alert, what with the big shipment of
Swiss watches and fancy clocks on the boat that docked an hour before I came
on duty. They would get unloaded tomorrow morning. “Probably nothin’ will
happen, kid, but we don’t want to take no chances,” he said, patting me on the
shoulder. “Remember, if you see anybody messin’ around, fire into the air.
That’ll bring the cops soon enough and scare ’em away.”
I fingered the revolver nestled in the holster on my hip. Although I had
hunted ducks with a shotgun along the rivers back home with my father, I had
never used a pistol and figured I wouldn’t have to on this job.
I had just finished my third circuit of the long pier and found myself staring
at the lights of New Jersey across the river when I heard a sound like the
scuffing of a shoe somewhere behind me. I flattened myself against the wall of
the warehouse and pulled out my flashlight. Before I could turn it on, though, I
saw a figure disappear around the bow of the ship.
“Stop!” I yelled, running toward the bow. I fired one shot into the air,
startled by its report. I slowed as I got close to where I had seen the figure and
was about to fire into the air again when another shot was fired—at me!
The shell buried itself in the wall of the warehouse just over my shoulder,
which sent me into a fast crouch. Cold night or not, I started sweating as I
crawled around the bow of the big freighter, gun drawn. Two men, silhouetted
against those Jersey shore lights, began to shinny like monkeys up one of the
hawsers that secured the freighter to the dock.
“Stop!” I shouted again. Both men fired this time, but their aim was bad
because they struggled to hold on to both the rope and their guns as they swayed.
My aim was better. I got off a pair of shots, and two bodies thudded onto the
dock.
And they turned out to be bodies, all right, though I didn’t know it yet. I
approached them with my revolver still drawn, but relaxed when I saw that their
guns were several feet from them and they were not moving. The realization
began to hit me: I had just killed two people.
Suddenly, I found myself in a spotlight. “Hold it right there!” a voice
holding an electric torch boomed. “Drop the gun. Hands in the air!”
I did both, fast.
“Lord Almighty, what have we got here?” a heavyset New York cop said as
he shone his torch in my face and studied my uniform. “Are the piers so hard up
they’re hirin’ teenagers as guards now?”
“Blame it on this cursed Depression, Murph,” a second cop said as he ran
up to us, wheezing. “They can get these young guys cheap.”
“How old are you, son?” the first cop asked.
“Nineteen. And they fired at me first, after I’d given them a warning shot
into the air,” I said, gesturing toward the two prone figures with a shaking hand
and then pointing out the bullet hole in the wall of the pier. “There’s a big order
of expensive Swiss watches and clocks on board,” I added. “I was told to be
extra-cautious tonight.”
“Well, I’ll be damned, it’s Jake McCaffey,” the second cop said, shining his
light on one face, then the other. “And his two-bit sidekick, Rumson. This pair
has been pulling heists, or trying to, on the docks along here for years. Well,
they’ll never do it again,” he added without emotion.
“What’s your name, son?” asked the one called Murph.
“Archie Goodwin,” I said hoarsely.
“Well, Archie Goodwin, it looks like they shot first all right, but you’ll still
have to come down to the precinct. There’s reports to file, questions to answer,
like it or not.”
I
ended up spending three-plus hours at the Tenth Precinct, which I learned also
was headquarters for Homicide West. For at least two of those hours, I got
grilled by a surly lieutenant named Rowcliff, who had bulging eyes and a
snarling voice that broke into a stutter when he got excited, which seemed to be
much of the time.
He kept trying to get me to say that I fired at the robbers first. I was
nervous, but when I wouldn’t budge off my story, his stuttering got worse, which
would have been funny under different circumstances. In the end, Rowcliff gave
up with a growl, and I was told to go but to let the cops know where to reach me,
which I did.
Back in my room, I went over the events of the night, asking myself what I
should have done differently. No good answer popped up. Two men, bad men,
were dead. Why wasn’t I feeling better about it?
T
he next afternoon when I reported for work, I was met at the door of the
Moreland Import office by my boss, Luke Bates. “Sorry, Goodwin, but we’re
going to have to let you go,” he said with a shrug.
“Why? I was just—”
“I know, I know. You were just protecting the ship and its cargo, which we
appreciate. But having a trigger-happy guard is bad for the company’s image.
That’s just how it is.”
“You know they fired at me first, after I had fired into the air,” I said. “And
that they’d been looting on these docks for years.”
He shrugged again, as if to underscore his helplessness. “Tell you what, it’s
against regulations given what a short time you’ve been here, but I’ll authorize a
week’s severance pay to go along with your two weeks’ wages.”
So it was that after my first month in New York, I had the equivalent of
three weeks’ salary in my pocket, along with no job and no prospects.
CHAPTER 2
I
trudged back to my rooming house on West Fifty-Second Street near Tenth
Avenue, wishing I knew Manhattan well enough to find a speakeasy and get a
drink, assuming they would even serve me, given my age. I had come to the city
to get away from the dullness of small-town Ohio and find excitement. That had
not taken long at all.
The first thing that caught my eye back in my small, tired third-floor room
was the copy of Black Mask magazine on the nightstand. I had picked up the
habit of buying the occasional detective magazine a couple of years earlier.
Reading about fictional private eyes and their cases was okay, as far as it went,
but I felt that if given a fair chance, I’d be as smart as any of the shamuses in
those pulps.
I thumbed idly through Black Mask then set it down, making a decision. On
a shelf next to the pay telephone in the hall outside my room sat Manhattan’s fat
classified directory. I turned to “detective agencies” and started down the
alphabet, going past AAA Investigations and ACE People Finders as too slick-
sounding. A little farther along, I stopped at the listing for the Bascom Detective
Agency, which had an address only six blocks away from the rooming house.
A
pawnshop with a half-dozen musical instruments behind its dusty windows
occupied the street level of the run-down, narrow, four-story building. A sign
over a door to the right of the shop listed the building’s upstairs tenants:
Madame LeBlanc—Reader-Adviser; Holman’s Coin & Stamp Shop; The
Bascom Detective Agency.
The open-cage elevator piloted by a bald, tobacco-chewing scrag in a
sweat-stained shirt rattled its way to the fourth floor, depositing me across the
hall from a frosted glass door that simply read BASCOM. I thought about knocking