Murder by the Book

The fact that Wolfe never leaves the office on business, unless there is an incentive more urgent than the prospect of a fee, such as saving his own skin, has a lot to do with the way I work. When I'm out on a case and get something helpful I like to recognize it before I deliver it to Wolfe, but as I left Scholl and Hanna's I couldn't see a crumb. It was hard to believe that I had spent nearly five hours in the office where Joan Wellman had worked, questioning everybody from the office boy to Hanna himself, without getting a single useful item, but that was how it looked. The one thing that tied in at all was an entry in the columns of a big book I had been shown. I give it with the column headings:

number: 16237

date: Oct. 2

name and address: Baird Archer, General Delivery,

Clinton Station, N. Y. City title: Put Not Your Trust detail: Novel 246 pp. postage enclosed: 630 read by: Joan Wellman disposition: Rejected ret'd. mail Oct. 27

That was my haul. The manuscript had been received by mail. No one had ever heard of Baird Archer, except for that entry. No one else had looked at the manuscript or remembered anything about it. If Joan had made any comment on it to anyone they had forgotten it. She had not mentioned the phone call from Baird Archer or her appointment with him. I could go on with negatives for a page.

When I reported to Wolfe that evening I told him, "It looks

to me as if we're all set. Two hundred and forty-six sheets of typewriter paper weigh a lot more than twenty-one ounces. Either he wrote on both sides, or he used thin light paper, or he didn't enclose enough postage. All we have to do is find out which and we've got him,"

"Harlequin," he growled.

"Have you a better suggestion? From what I've brought in?"

"No."

"Did I get anything at all?"

"No."

"Okay. That's what I mean. Two days of me, nothing. Two days of the boys calling on typing services, nothing. At two hundred bucks a day, four C's of Wellman's money already gone. This would be all right for an agency or the cops, that's how they work, but it's not your way. I'll bet you a week's pay you haven't turned your brain on it once during the forty-eight hours!"

"On what?" he demanded. "I can't grapple, with a shadow. Get me something of him-a gesture, an odor, a word, a sound he made. Bring me something."