Rex Stout
In The Best Families
Chapter One
It was nothing out of the ordinary that Mrs Barry Rackham had made the appointment with her finger pressed to her lips. That is by no means an unusual gesture for people who find themselves in a situation where the best thing they can think of is to make arrangements to see Nero Wolfe.
With Mrs Barry Rackham the shushing finger was only figurative, since she made the date speaking to me on the phone. It was in her voice, low and jerky, and also in the way she kept telling me how confidential it was, even after I solemnly assured her that we rarely notified the press when someone requested an appointment on business. At the end she told me once more that she would have preferred to speak to Mr Wolfe himself, and I hung up and decided it rated a discreet routine check on a prospective client, starting with Mr Mitchell at the bank and Lon Cohen at the Gazette. On the main point of interest, could she and did she pay her bills, the news was favourable: she was worth a good four million and maybe five. Calling it four, and assuming that Wolfe's bill for services rendered would come to only half of it, that would be enough to pay my current salary-as Wolfe's secretary, trusted assistant and official gnat-for a hundred and sixty-seven years; and in addition to that, living as I did there in
Wolfe's house, I also got food and shelter. So I was fixed for life if it turned out that she needed two million bucks' worth of detective work.
She might have at that, judging from the way she looked and acted at eleven o'clock the next morning, Friday, when the doorbell rang and I went to let her in. There was a man on the stoop with her, and after glancing quickly east and then west she brushed past him and darted inside, grabbed my sleeve, and told me in a loud whisper, “You're not Nero Wolfe!
Instantly she released me, seized the elbow of her companion to hurry him across the sill, and whispered at him explosively, “Come in and shut the door! You might have thought she was a duchess diving into a hock shop.
Not that she was my idea of a duchess physically. As I attended to the door and got the man's hat and topcoat hung on the rack, I took them in. She was a paradox-bony from the neck up and ample from the neck down. On her chin and jawbone and cheekbone the skin was stretched tight, but alongside her mouth and nose were tangles of wrinkles.
