Before Midnight Read online

  "From Jack I learned love all the way,

  And to the altar would be led;

  But on my happy wedding day

  I married Charles instead."

  He lifted his hand to his glasses, but only shifted them a little on his nose. "Does that suggest anything to you?"

  "No," Wolfe said emphatically.

  "It does to me. Not any detail of it, but the flavor. I have no idea what her name was, but I think I know where to find her. I may be wrong, but I doubt it, and if not, there's one right off."

  He probably had it. Either he had had a lucky hunch, or he knew a lot about flavors, or he had got the paper from Dahlmann's wallet and was preparing the ground for a later explanation of how and where he got the answers. I could certainly have impressed him by asking if the book he would go to first would be Jacques Casanova's Memoirs, but he might have suspected me if I had also told him her name was Christine and he should try Volume Two, pages one hundred seventy-two to two hundred one, of the Adventures edition.

  Wolfe said abruptly, "Then I mustn't keep you, if you're going to work. I wouldn't care to stir the choler of a demon." He put his hands on the desk edge to push his chair back, and arose. "I hope to see you again, Mr. Rollins, but I shall try to interfere as little as may be with your labors. You will excuse me." He headed for the door and was gone.

  Rollins looked at me. "What was that, pique? Or did I betray myself and he has gone for handcuffs?"

  "Forget it." I stood up. "Don't you smell anything?"

  He sniffed. "Nothing in particular. What is it?"

  "Of course," I conceded, "you're not a bloodhound. It's shad roe in casserole with parsley, chervil, shallot, marjoram, bay leaf, and cream. That's his demon, or one of them. He has an assortment. You're going? If you don't mind, what was Number Nine? I think it was. It goes:

  "By the law himself had earlier made

  I could not be his legal wife;

  The law he properly obeyed

  And loved me all my life."

  He had turned at the door, and his smile was super-superior. "That was palpable. Aspasia and Pericles."

  "Oh, sure. I should have known."

  We went to the hall and I held his coat. As I opened the door he inquired, "Wasn't that Miss Tescher here when I came?"

  I told him yes.

  "Who were the three men?"

  "Advisers she brought along. You should have heard them. They talked Mr. Wolfe into a corner."

  He thought he was going to ask me more, vetoed it, and went. I shut the door and started for the kitchen to tell Wolfe about Aspasia and Pericles, but the phone ringing pulled me into the office. I answered it, bad a brief exchange with the caller, and then went to the kitchen, where Wolfe was in conference with Fritz, and told him:

  "Talbott Heery will be here at a quarter past nine."

  Already on edge, he roared. "I will not gallop through my dinner!"

  I told him, apologetically, that I was afraid he'd have to. He only had an hour and a half.

  Chapter 9

  The subject of discussion at Wolfe's dinner table, whether we had company or not, might be anything from politics to polio, so long as it wasn't current business. Business was out. That evening was no exception, strictly speaking, but it came close. Apparently at some time during the day Wolfe had found time to gallop through the encyclopedia article on cosmetics, and at dinner he saw fit, intermittently, to share it with me. He started, when we had finished the chestnut soup and were waiting for Fritz to bring the casserole, by quoting verbatim a bill which he said had been introduced into the English Parliament in 1770. It ran, he said:

  "All women of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree, whether virgins, maids, or widows, that shall, from and after this Act, impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony, any of His Majesty's subjects, by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high heeled shoes, bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanors and the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void."

  I asked him what Spanish wool was, and had him. He didn't know, and because he can't stand not knowing the meaning of any word or phrase he sees or hears, I asked why he hadn't looked hi the dictionary, and he said he had but it wasn't there. Another item was that Mary Queen of Scots bathed in wine regularly, and so did the elder ladies of the court, but the younger ones couldn't afford it and had to use milk. Another was that when they found unguent vases in old Egyptian tombs they had dug into, the aromatics in them were still fragrant, after thirty-five hundred years. Another, that Roman fashion leaders at the time of Caesar's wife bleached their hair with a kind of soap that came from Gaul. Another, that Napoleon liked Josephine to use cosmetics and got them for her from Martinique. Another, that Cleopatra and other Egyptian babes painted the under side of their eyes green, and the lid, lashes, and eyebrows black. For the black they used kohl, and put it on with an ivory stick.

  I admitted it was very interesting, and made no remark about how helpful it would be in finding out who swiped Dahlmann's wallet, since that would have touched on business. Even after we finished with cheese and coffee and left the dining room to cross the hall to the office, I let him digest in peace, and went to my desk and dialed Lily Rowan's number. When I told her I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words. While we were talking the doorbell rang, but Fritz had been told about Heery, so I went ahead and finished the conversation properly. When I hung up and swiveled, Heery was in the red leather chair.

  He measured up to it, both vertically and horizontally, much better than either Rollins or Mrs. Wheelock. In a dinner jacket, with the expanse of white shirt front, he looked broader even than before. Apparently he had been glancing around, for he was saying, "This is a very nice room. Very personal. You like yellow, don't you?"

  "Evidently," Wolf muttered. Such remarks irritate him. Since the drapes and couch cover and cushions and five visible chairs were yellow, it did seem a little obvious.

  "Yellow is a problem," Heery declared. "It has great advantages, but also it has a lot of drawbacks. Yellow streak. Yellow journalism. Yellow fever. It's very popular for packaging, but Louis Dahlmann wouldn't let me use it. Formerly I used it a great deal. Seeing all your yellow made me think of him."

  "I doubt," Wolfe said drily, "if you needed my decor to remind you of Mr. Dahlmann at this juncture."

  "That's funny," Heery said, perfectly serious.

  "It wasn't meant to be."

  "Anyway, it is, because it's wrong. That's the first time I've thought of him today. Ten seconds after I heard he was dead, and how he had died, I was in a stew about the effect on the contest and my business, and I'm still in it. I haven't had any room for thinking about Louis Dahlmann. Have you seen all the contestants?"

  "Four of them. Mr. Goodwin saw Mr. Younger."

  "Have you got anywhere?"

  Wolfe hated to work right after dinner. He said testily, "I report only to my client, Mr. Heery."

  "That's funny too. Your client is Lippert, Buff and Assa. I'm one of their biggest accounts---their commission on my business last year was over half a million. I'm paying all the expenses of the contest, and of course the prizes. And you won't even tell me if you've got anywhere?"

  "Certainly not." Wolfe frowned at him. "Are you really as silly as you sound? You know quite well what my obligation to my client is. You have a simple recourse: get one of them on the phone and have me instructed--- preferably Mr. Buff or Mr. Assa."

  It seemed a good spot for Heery to offer to knock his block off, but instead he got to his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets, and looked around, apparently for something to look at, for he marched across to the globe and stood there staring at it. His back looked even broader than his front. Pretty soon he turned and came back and sat down.
r />   "Have they paid you a retainer?" he asked.

  "No, sir."

  He took a thin black leather case from his breast pocket, opened it and tore off a strip of blue paper, produced a midget fountain pen, put the paper on the table at his elbow, and wrote. After putting the pen and case away he reached to send the paper fluttering onto Wolfe's desk and said, "There's ten thousand dollars. I'm your client now, or my firm is. If you want more say so."

  Wolfe reached for the check, tore it across, again, again, and leaned to the right to drop it in the waste-basket. He straightened up. "Mr. Heery. I am never too complaisant when my digestion is interrupted, and you are trying me. You might as well go."

  I'll be damned if Heery didn't look at me. Wanting to save him the embarrassment of offering me a twenty, possibly even a C, to put him back on the track, and getting another turndown, and also thinking that if Wolfe wanted his nose pushed in I might as well help, I met his eyes and told him, "When you do go, if you're still looking for a better time and place there's a little yard out back."

  He burst out laughing-a real good hearty laugh. He stopped long enough to say, "You're a team, you two," and then laughed some more. We sat and looked at him. He took out a folded handkerchief and coughed into it a couple of times, and was sober.

  "All right," he said, "I'll tell you how it is."

  "I know how it is." Wolfe was good and sore.

  "No, you don't. I went about it the wrong way, so I'll start over. LBA has a good deal at stake in this mess, I know that, but I have more. If this contest explodes in my face it could ruin me. Will you listen?"

  Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed. "I'm listening," he muttered.

  "You have to know the background. I started my business twenty years ago on a shoestring. I worked hard, but I had some luck, and my biggest piece of luck was that a man named Lippert, an advertising man, got interested. The firm's name then was McDade and Lippert. My product was good, but Lippert was better than good, he was great, and in ten years my company was leading the field in dollar volume. It was sensational. Then Lippert died. Momentum kept us on the rise for a couple of years, and then we started to sag. Not badly, we had some ups too, but it was mostly downs. I still had a good organization and a good product, but Lippert was gone, and that was the answer."

  He looked at his folded handkerchief as if he wondered what it was for, and stuck it back in his pocket. "In nineteen-fifty the LBA people submitted some names for a new line we were getting ready to start, and from the list I picked Pour Amour. I didn't learn until later that that name had been suggested by a young man named Louis Dahlmann who hadn't been with them long. Do you know anything about the agency game?" "No."

  "It's very tough, especially with the big ones. The men who have made it, who have got up around the top, most of them spend a lot of their time kicking the faces of the ones who are trying to climb. Of course that's more or less true in any game because it's how people are made, but advertising agencies are about the worst, I mean the big ones. It took me two years to find out who thought of that name Pour Amour, and it was another year before Dahlmann was allowed to confer with me on my account. By that time he had shown so much stuff there was no holding him. There was a lot of talk---you may have heard of him?"

  "No."

  "He wasn't very likable. He was too cocky, and if he thought you were a goddam fool he said so, but he had real brains and there's no substitute for brains, and his were a special kind. I don't say that Oliver Buff and Pat O'Garro and Vern Assa haven't got brains. Buff has some real ability. He's a good front man. Lippert trained him and knew what he was good for. Now he's the senior member of the firm. For presenting an outline for an institutional campaign to the heads of a big national corporation, he's as good as anybody and better than most, but that kind of approach never has sold cosmetics and never will. I've been one of the firm's big accounts for years, and he has never personally come up with an idea that was worth a dime."

  Heery turned a hand over. "There's Pat O'Garro. He knows about as much about advertising, my kind, as I know about Sanskrit, but he's at the very top as a salesman. He could sell a hot-water bottle to a man on his way to hell, and most of the accounts LBA has today, big and little, were landed by him, but that's nothing in my pocket. I don't need someone to sell me on LBA, I need someone who can keep my products sliding over the counters from Boston to Los Angeles and New Orleans to Chicago, and O'Garro's not the man. Neither is Vern Assa. He started in as a copy writer, and that's where he shines. He has a big reputation, and now he's a member of the firm---so is O'Garro of course. I did a lot of analyzing of Vern and his stuff during the years after Lippert died, and it had real quality, I recognize that, but there was something lacking-the old Lippert touch wasn't there. It's not just words, you've got to have ideas before you're ready for words, and LBA didn't have any that were worth a damn until Louis Dahlmann came along."

  He shook his head. "I thought my worries were over for good. I admit I didn't like him, but there are plenty of people to like. He was young, and within a year he would have been a member of the firm-he could have forced it whenever he pleased---and before too long he would be running the show, and he had a real personal interest in my account because it appealed to him. Now he's dead, and I'm through with LBA. I've decided on that, I'm through with them, but this goddam contest mess has got to be cleaned up. This morning, when they suggested hiring you, I didn't have my thoughts in order and I told them to go ahead, but with the situation the way it is and me deciding to cut loose from them as soon as this is straightened out it doesn't make sense for LBA to be your client. It will be my money you'll get anyhow. You were a little too quick tearing up that check."

  "Not under the circumstances," Wolfe said.

  "You didn't know all the circumstances. Now you do--- at least the main points. Another point, some important decision about this contest thing may have to be made at any minute, and be made quick, about what you do or don't do, and as it stands now they hired you and they'll decide it. I won't have it that way. I've got more at stake than they have." He took the black leather case from his pocket. "What shall I make it? Ten thousand all right?"

  "It can't be done that way," Wolfe objected. "You know it can't. You have a valid point, but you admit you told them to come and hire me. There's a simple way out: get them on the phone and tell them you wish to replace them as my client, and if they acquiesce they can speak to me and tell me so."

  Heery looked at him. He put his palms on the chair arms, and spread his fingers and held them stiff. "That would be difficult," he said. "My relations with them the past year or so, especially Buff, have been a little---" He let it hang, and in a moment finished positively, "No, I can't do that."

  Wolfe grunted. "I might be willing to phone them myself and tell them what you want. At your request."

  "That would be just as bad. It would be worse. You understand, I've got to avoid an open break right now."

  "I suppose so. Then I'm afraid you'll have to accept the status quo. I have sympathy with your position, Mr. Heery. Your interest is as deeply engaged as theirs, and as you say, the money they pay me will have come from you. At a minimum you have a claim to get my reports firsthand. Do you want me to phone them for authority to give them to you? That shouldn't be an intolerable strain on the thread of your relations. I shall tell them that it seems to me your desire is natural and proper."

  "It would be something," Heery said grudgingly.

  "Shall I proceed?"

  "Yes."

  The phone rang. I answered it, exchanged some words with the caller, asked him to hold on, and turned to tell Wolfe that Rudolph Hansen wished to speak to him. He reached for his instrument, changed his mind, left his chair, and made for the door. As he rounded the corner of his desk he pushed air down with his palm, which meant that I was to hang up when he was on-presumably to leave me free to chat with the company. A faint squeak that came via the hall reminded me that I had forgo
tten to oil the kitchen door. When I heard Wolfe's voice in my ear I cradled the phone.

  Heery and I didn't chat. He looked preoccupied, and I didn't want to take his mind off his troubles. We passed some minutes in silent partnership before Wolfe returned, crossed to his chair, and sat.

  He addressed Heery. "Mr. Hansen was with Mr. Buff, Mr. O'Garro, and Mr. Assa. They wanted my report and I gave it to them. They have no objection to my reporting to you freely, at any time."

  "That's damned sweet of them," Heery said, not appreciatively. "Did they have anything to report?"

  "Nothing of any consequence."

  "Then I'm back where I started. Have you got anywhere?"