Free Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough Page A

the vegetables, and she told me she finally had to practically push him out the door.”
    “How much time did all this foofaraw take?” Wolfe asked.
    “She said she didn’t know for sure, maybe two or three minutes, five at the most. I asked why she hadn’t mentioned anything about this before, and she told me she didn’t think it was important. Simply a mistake, or else one company trying to cut in on the business of another, she said.”
    “So she had told no one before?” Wolfe asked, eyebrows still raised.
    “Only me,” Cather said proudly.
    “Did she get a look at the man’s vehicle?” I cut in, receiving a glare from Wolfe for my trouble.
    “Yeah, she did,” Cather answered, looking at me as if he had forgotten I was in the room. “She followed him up the steps from the basement and watched as he got into a small enclosed white truck, the type food purveyors use. They’re as common as street-corner hot dog vendors. But, of course, she didn’t get his plate number, and she doesn’t know enough about automobiles and trucks to know what make it was.”
    “And the truck had no lettering of any kind on it, right?” I put in.
    “That’s exactly it!” Cather said. “What do you want to bet the Williamson kid was inside it?”
    “Anything else from the cook, Orrie?” Wolfe asked.
    “No, sir, not really, although she seemed puzzled that I was so interested in this mysterious purveyor. ‘That silly business can’t have had anything to do with Tommie’s ... with what has happened,’ she said. When I asked if she had any other ideas on who might have kidnapped him, she just shook her head and started muttering about all the evil in the world today. I thought she was going to launch into a sermon on sin.”
    “And the others you interviewed?”
    “Next I jawed with the butler, Waverly, in a small parlor just off the living room, and I did ninety percent of the talking. The guy’s a clam, I’ll tell ya. If I was to ask him if the sun came up today, he’d mull over his answer. He told me he was up in his room on the top floor of the house going over the household accounts at the time the boy disappeared. He says the first he knew about it was when the Stratton woman, the housekeeper, knocked on his door, yelling ‘something terrible has happened!’” Orrie took a sip of his highball and continued.
    “I asked him if the family had been concerned over the years about the possibility of Tommie being kidnapped, and he said they always made sure there was an adult with him when he was out in the yard. But he added that most of the families of other kids in Tommie’s school also were very protective of their children, given how wealthy the area is.”
    “Have there been other incidences of kidnapping in those environs?” Wolfe asked.
    “I asked him that,” Cather said proudly, “and he said that to his knowledge, there had been none, at least in the twenty years he has worked for the Williamsons. Before that, he says he was in England. I also pumped him on what he thought of the other members of the staff, and here he got very tight-lipped. If he has bad feelings about any of them, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let on to me about them.”
    Wolfe drained his second beer. “Anything further to add on Mr. Waverly?”
    “No, that’s it. Next, I talked to the young housemaid, Mary Trent. Saul described her very accurately to you—she’s small and dark haired, looks even younger than her nineteen years, and is very shy, I would even say timid. Maybe that’s understandable, given that she is by far the youngest person on the staff and this is her first job.
    “It was almost as hard to get her to talk as it was the butler. She did tell me how fond she is of Tommie and how she would spend time playing games with him when Sylvia Moore was out riding with Mrs. Williamson or otherwise occupied. I asked her if she recognized the voice of the person who telephoned for Miss Moore, and I thought she