Murder by the Book

I had to admit, though of course not to him, that he had a point. You could say that Cramer had a trained army looking for Baird Archer, but it wouldn't mean much. They had no idea what he looked like. They had no evidence that anyone had ever known him, or even met him, by that name. There was no proof that Baird Archer had ever been anything but a name. It would be about the same if you just made up a name for a man, say Freetham Choade, and then tried to find him. After you look in the phone book, what do you do next?

I spent the rest of that week collecting some very interesting data about the quality and tone of publishers' offices. I learned that Simon and Schuster, in Rockefeller Center, had fallen hard for modern and didn't give a damn what it cost; that Harper and Brothers liked old desks and didn't care for ashtrays; that the Viking Press had a good eye for contours and comeliness when hiring female help; that The Macmillan Company had got itself confused with a Pullman car; and so on. L covered the whole trade, big and little, and the only concrete "result was a dinner date with a young woman at Scribner's who struck me as worth following up on the chance that she might have something I would like to know about. No one anywhere knew anything about a Baird Archer. If he had submitted the manuscript of "Put Not Your Trust" to any

other firm than Scholl and Hanna, there was no record or memory of it.

Over the weekend I had a couple of talks with Purley Steb-bins. If we were getting nowhere fast, so were the cops. They had uncovered a Baird Archer somewhere down in Virginia, but he was over eighty and couldn't read or write. Their big idea was to find some link between Leonard Dykes and Joan Wellman, and three of Cramer's best men were clawing away at it. When I reported that to Wolfe Sunday evening he snorted.

"Jackassery. I gave them the link."

"Yes, sir," I said sympathetically. "That was what tired you out."

"I am not tired out. 1 am not even tired."

"Then I lied to our client. The second time he called today I told him that you were exhausted with overwork on his case. I had to tell him something drastic because he's getting impatient. What's wrong with the beer? Too cold?"

"No. I am considering you. Most of these typing services are run by women, aren't they?"

"Not most. All."