Death of a Doxy (Crime Line)

"You're going to have more company. I'm licked. I have met my match. Julie Jaquette. I would give a week's pay to know if you could have handled her. The trouble is partly that Nero Wolfe's a celebrity, so she says, but mostly it's the orchids. If he will show her his orchids she'll tell him all about Isabel Kerr. She won't tell me a damn thing. Nothing."

"Well, well. It might have taken me a whole ten minutes."

"Go soak it. I said a week's pay. She -"

"Where are you?"

"A booth on Christopher Street. The one at the Ten Little Indians had a line waiting. She's working. She'll be off until eight and then from nine-ten to ten-fifteen."

"Then it's simple. Bring her at nine-ten."

"Like hell it's simple." It clicked and he was gone.

I don't expect you to believe me when I report the first words I heard as I re-entered the office, but you have a right to know why we got about as little from Avery Ballou as Saul had got from Julie Jaquette. The words, uttered by Ballou, were, "Rudyard Kipling." As I crossed to my desk my head kept turning to have my eyes on him. As I sat, Wolfe asked him, "The poems?"

"Mostly the poems," Ballou said, "but some of the stories too. And Robert Service and Jack London. A little of some others, but of those three, Kipling and Service and London, I had complete sets there, bound in leather. There's something I have wanted to ask about, but haven't, and you would know. Can they get my fingerprints from those bindings? The leather isn't smooth, it's rippled."

Wolfe's head turned. "Archie?"

"Probably not," I told Ballou, "from rippled leather, but your prints must be on other surfaces there. Are they on file anywhere?"

"I don't know. I simply don't know."

Wolfe's shoulders went up a quarter of an inch and down. "Then on that you can only abide. But this isn't easy to believe, Mr. Ballou, that you spent ten hours or more a week there, five hundred hours a year for three years, and Miss Kerr never spoke of how she spent the other – let's see – nearly twenty-five thousand hours. The places she went, the people she saw."

"I have told you," Ballou said, "under coercion. Except for physical intimacy there was no sharing of experience. But I did not read those poems and stories just to hear myself. I did not impose them on her. She understood them and enjoyed them, and we discussed them. You realize that I am not enjoying this. This is the first time in my life that I have wanted to tell a man to go to hell and can't."