Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 38 - The Mother Hunt, page 1
part #38 of Nero Wolfe Series
Rex Stout
REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas but left to enlist in the navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sight-seeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system that was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds from his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erie Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program Speaking of Liberty, and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.
The Rex Stout Library
Fer-de-Lance
The League of Frightened Men
The Rubber Band
The Red Box
Too Many Cooks
Some Buried Caesar
Over My Dead Body
Where There’s a Will
Black Orchids
Not Quite Dead Enough
The Silent Speaker
Too Many Women
And Be a Villain
The Second Confession
Trouble in Triplicate
In the Best Families
Three Doors to Death
Murder by the Book
Curtains for Three
Prisoner’s Base
Triple Jeopardy
The Golden Spiders
The Black Mountain
Three Men Out
Before Midnight
Might As Well Be Dead
Three Witnesses
If Death Ever Slept
Three for the Chair
Champagne for One
And Four to Go
Plot It Yourself
Too Many Clients
Three at Wolfe’s Door
The Final Deduction
Gambit
Homicide Trinity
The Mother Hunt
A Right to Die
Trio for Blunt Instruments
The Doorbell Rang
Death of a Doxy
The Father Hunt
Death of a Dude
Please Pass the Guilt
A Family Affair
Death Times Three
Introduction
I can’t help it: I’m a sucker for quality and an admirer of someone who can take a set of basic materials and use simple tools to transform them into something vibrant, unique, and enduring. And that’s exactly what Rex Stout has done in the Nero Wolfe series.
Even before I met him on the pages of a book fifteen years ago, I knew quite a lot about Nero Wolfe. His reputation had preceded him: he was an imposing giant of a man who holed up in a spectacular midtown Manhattan brownstone, grew orchids, was a beer aficionado … and he was distinctly uncomfortable in the company of women.
Despite some initial reluctance to spend a whole book’s worth of time with a man who flirted with misogyny, I took the plunge. Wolfe, after all, had the good sense to live in Manhattan, and besides, you had to like a man who surrounded himself with exotic tropical plants, consumed epicurean meals, and had the chutzpah to make the universe conform to his rules. And when I met Archie Goodwin, his ebullience and his earthy, rakish charm won me over.
Hooked, I devoured as many Nero Wolfe books as I could find in one gluttonous wintertime reading orgy. Toward the end of the tenth book I realized that, cabin fever aside, I was getting impatient. I wanted to see Wolfe shaken up a little; the man was becoming downright complacent. And in The Mother Hunt that’s exactly what happens: Nero Wolfe not only leaves his brownstone, he actually sleeps in a strange bed in a different house. And to make matters more tenuous for the great man, he’s forced into several face-to-face meetings with women.
Delicious! With these challenges to the known and predictable world, Wolfe is thrown off balance. Will he wobble into ineffectiveness? Will the resounding fall make front-page headlines in all of New York City? Devoted readers of the series grow breathless wondering about the effects of everything tossed topsy-turvy. Suspense abounds as the bodies pile up and Nero Wolfe is forced to search for a solution without the solace of his orchids and his routine, his so-very-rational thought processes in danger of being corrupted by close contact with a woman.
Wolfe, of course, declines to be undone and he triumphs. Critical to solving the case is Archie’s delight in the company of women, in direct proportion to the discomfort his boss feels. From the vantage of the 1990s, Archie seems especially astute. Following a conversation with a woman, Archie observes, “Her reaction to the report had been in the groove for a woman. She had wanted to know what Carol Mardus had said, every word, and also how she had looked and how she had been dressed. There was an implication that the way she had been dressed had a definite bearing on the question, was Richard Valdon the father of the baby? but of course I let that slide. No man with any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.”
The italics are mine but the observation is pure Archie and way ahead of its time. Not until the nineties did gender differences in communication styles become a hot topic. I wonder whether Rex Stout considered himself a pioneer.
Despite Wolfe’s daring foray beyond Thirty-fifth Street, The Mother Hunt is really vintage Stout: lots of grumbling and fine dining and brilliant thinking on Wolfe’s part, while Archie has a grand old time out and about in the world. Rex Stout made the most of the contrast between thinker and doer, achieving a delicate, ever-changing balance between the curmudgeonly detective and his bubbly assistant. Yet just when Wolfe seems a purely cerebral being, his physical bulk and the very corporeal acts of eating and drinking remind you that he is indeed a creature of the flesh. Whenever Archie appears to be all action, chasing from button manufacturer to baby-sitter to a beachfront rendezvous with the shapely client in the name of detection, he comes up with a brilliant ploy proving that he is no slouch in the thinking department.
Between them, Wolfe and Archie ensure that justice will ultimately prevail, and they do it within a classic structure. The reader in me recognizes that the opening of The Mother Hunt is a staple of private-eye fiction, the ending a fixture of the “cozy village” mystery. The book begins with a client coming to Wolfe for help, and at once questions arise. Is she all that she seems, or is there a womanly abundance of secrets lurking in her past? Does she really want a solution to the question she hired Wolfe to answer, or is she after something else? Given Wolfe’s feelings about women, it’s easy to project duplicity all over the place. And after a Wolfe-thinks-Archie-does investigation, the final scene gathers the suspects together for a drawing-room confrontation/revelation.
The writer in me admires Rex Stout’s ability to shape those elements into something uniquely his.
I understood something about Rex Stout’s skill as a writer when I had the personal good fortune to meet one of his daughters, Rebecca Stout Bradbury, a warm, intelligent woman with a forthright gaze and a gracious charm that immediately put me at my ease. During the morning I spent with her, we talked about her father, our own children, and the state of the American economy. And she showed me several pieces of furniture—a desk and a dresser stand out in my memory—that her father had made.
The wood was so smooth it glowed with a burnished light. Strong and true joints (no nails used here!) held together the graceful, sturdy pieces, carefully crafted and lovingly made. When I was in school, girls took home ec. while boys went to shop. Harder, more mysterious than French toast, for sure, making furniture still seems to me to be just short of magic. The lightness of each element contributes to a whole somehow greater, more pleasing in its finished state than its parts would suggest.
The same can be said of Rex Stout’s mysteries, I realized on my way home that day. He chose his materials with care—characters with zest and a good share of quirky charm; a setting so palpable and familiar you can practically smell it; plots that play on readers’ assumptions—and he crafted them with the same attention to detail, sure hand, and joy in the act of creation that it takes to make fine furniture.
Lingering visions of rollt op desks and dressers with hidden jewelry compartments danced in my head as I drove home. And inspiration struck as I walked in my f
Aha, I thought, maybe Rex Stout would have suggested a little extracurricular woodshop: learn how to make mortise-and-tenon joints for a new set of book- cases and thicken my plot at the same time….
Chapter 1
When the doorbell rang a little after eleven that Tuesday morning in early June and I went to the hall and took a look through the one-way glass panel in the front door, I saw what, or whom, I expected to see: a face a little too narrow, gray eyes a little too big, and a figure a little too thin for the best curves. I knew who it was because she had phoned Monday afternoon for an appointment, and I knew what she looked like because I had seen her a few times at theaters or restaurants.
Also I had known enough about her, part public record and part hearsay, to brief Nero Wolfe without doing any research. She was the widow of Richard Valdon, the novelist, who had died some nine months ago—drowned in somebody’s swimming pool in Westchester—and since four of his books had been best sellers and one of them, Never Dream Again, had topped a million copies at $5.95, she should have no trouble paying a bill from a private detective if and when she got one. After reading Never Dream Again, five or six years ago, Wolfe had chucked it by giving it to a library, but he had thought better of a later one, His Own Image, and it had a place on the shelves. Presumably that was why he took the trouble to lift his bulk from the chair when I ushered her to the office, and to stand until she was seated in the red leather chair near the end of his desk. As I went to my desk and sat I was not agog. She had said on the phone that she wanted to consult Wolfe about something very personal and confidential, but she didn’t look as if she were being pinched where it hurt. It would probably be something routine like an anonymous letter or a missing relative.
Putting her bag on the stand at her elbow, she turned her head for a look around, stopped her big gray eyes at me for half a second as she turned back, and said to Wolfe, “My husband would have liked this room.”
“M-m,” Wolfe said. “I liked one of his books, with reservations. How old was he when he died?”
“Forty-two.”
“How old are you?”
That was for my benefit. He had a triple conviction: that a) his animus toward women made it impossible for him to judge any single specimen; that b) I needed only an hour with any woman alive to tag her; and that c) he could help out by asking some blunt impertinent question, his favorite one being how old are you. It’s hopeless to try to set him right.
At that, the way Lucy Valdon took it was a clue. She smiled and said, “Old enough, plenty old enough. I’m twenty-six. Old enough to know when I need help—and here I am. It’s about—it’s extremely confidential.” She glanced at me.
Wolfe nodded. “It usually is. My ears are Mr. Goodwin’s and his are mine, professionally. As for confidence, I don’t suppose you have committed a major crime?”
She smiled again. It came quick and went quick, but she meant it. “I wouldn’t have the nerve. No, no crime. I want you to find somebody for me.”
I thought, uh-huh, here we go. Cousin Mildred is missing and Aunt Amanda has asked her rich niece to hire a detective. But she went on; “It’s a little—well, it’s kind of fantastic. I have a baby, and I want to know who the mother is. As I said, this is confidential, but it’s not really a secret. My maid and my cook know about it, and my lawyer, and two of my friends, but that’s all, because I’m not sure I’m going to keep it—the baby.”
Wolfe was frowning at her, and no wonder. “I’m not a judge of babies, madam.”
“Of course not. What I want—but I must tell you. I’ve had it two weeks. Two weeks ago Sunday, May twentieth, the phone rang and I answered it, and a voice said there was something in my vestibule, and I went to look, and there it was on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. I took it in, and pinned to the blanket inside was a slip of paper.” She got her bag from the stand and opened it, and by the time she had the paper out I was there to take it. A glance was enough to read what was on it, but instead of handing it to Wolfe across his desk I circled around to him for another look as he held it. It was a four-by-six piece of ordinary cheap paper, and the message on it, in five crooked lines, printed with one of those rubber-stamp outfits for kids, was brief and to the point:
MRS RICHARD VALDON THIS BABY IS FOR YOU BECAUSE A BOY SHOULD LIVE IN HIS FATHERS HOUSE
There were two pinholes near a corner. Wolfe put it on his desk, turned to her, and asked a question. “Indeed?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Of course I don’t. But it could be true.”
“Is it likely or merely credible?”
“I guess it’s likely.” She closed the bag and returned it to the stand. “I mean it’s likely that it could have happened.” She gestured with the hand that sported a wedding ring. Her eyes came to me and back to Wolfe. “This is in confidence, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Well … since I’m telling you I want you to understand. Dick and I were married two years ago—it will be two years next month. We were in love, I still think we were, but I admit that for me there was this too, that he was a famous man, that I would be Mrs. Richard Valdon. And for him there was my—well, who I was. I was an Armstead. I didn’t know how much that meant to him until after we were married, when he realized that I was sick and tired of being an Armstead.”
She took a breath. “He had a sort of a Don Juan reputation before he married me, but it was probably exaggerated—those things often are. For two months we were completely …” She stopped and her eyes closed. In a moment they opened. “There was nothing for me but us, and I think for him too. I’m sure. After that I simply don’t know, I only know it wasn’t the same. During that year, the last year of his life, he may have had one woman, or two, or a dozen—I just don’t know. He could have had, I know that. So the baby— what did I say? It’s likely that it could have happened. You understand?”
Wolfe nodded. “So far. And your problem?”
“The baby, of course. I intended to have one, or two or three, I sincerely did, and Dick wanted to, but I wanted to wait. I put it off. When he died that was hard, maybe the hardest, that he had wanted me to have a baby and I had put it off. Now there is one, and I have it.” She pointed at the slip of paper on Wolfe’s desk. “I think what that says is right. I think a boy should live in his father’s house, and certainly he should have his father’s name. But the problem is, was Richard Valdon this baby’s father?” She gestured. “There!”
Wolfe snorted. “Pfui. Never to be solved and you know it. Homer said it: no man can know who was his father. Shakespeare said it: it is a wise father that knows his own child. I can’t help you, madam. No one can.”
She smiled. “I can say ‘pfui’ too. Of course you can help me. I know you can’t prove that Dick was the father, but you can find out who put the baby in my vestibule, and who its mother is, and then we can— Here.” She got her bag and opened it. “I have figured it out.” She produced another slip of paper, not the same size or kind. “The doctor said the baby was four months old, that evening, the day it came, May twentieth, so I used that date.” She looked at the paper. “So it was born about January twentieth, so it was conceived about April twentieth, last year. When you know who the mother is you can find out about her and Dick, how sure it is, or anyway how likely it is, that they were together then. That won’t prove this baby is his son, but it can come close—close enough. And besides, if it’s just a trick, if Dick wasn’t the father and couldn’t have been, and you find that out, that would help me, wouldn’t it? So the first thing is to find out who left it in my vestibule, and then who the mother is. Then I may want to ask her some questions myself, but I don’t— Well, we’ll see.”
Wolfe was leaning back, scowling at her. It was beginning to look like a job he could refuse only with a phony excuse, and he hated to work, and the bank balance was fairly healthy. “You’re assuming too much,” he objected. “I’m not a magician, Mrs. Valdon.”
“Of course not. But you’re the best detective in the world, aren’t you?”
“Probably not. The best detective in the world may be some rude tribesman with a limited vocabulary. You say your lawyer knows about the baby. Does he know you are consulting me?”
