Free Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 46 by A Family Affair Page A

working day was a good twelve hours. On the big question, the names of the guests at the dinner on October 18, nearly two weeks ago, he was a complete blank. He had never seen any of them before or since. All he knew was that it had been stag. Evidently he thought better of me than Philip did; he said he had some fresh pompano up from the Gulf and wanted to feed me, but I declined with thanks.
    It was 12:42 when I left by the front door and headed uptown. One of my more useless habits is timing all walks, though it may be helpful only about one time in a hundred. It took nine minutes to the
Gazette
building. Lon Cohen’s room, two doors down the hall from the publisher’s on the twentieth floor, barely had enough space for a big desk with three phones on it, one chair besides his, and shelves with a few books and athousand newspapers. It was his lunch hour, so I expected to find him alone, and he was.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You still loose?”
    “No.” I sat. “I’m a fugitive. I came to bring you a new picture of me. The one you ran Sunday, my nose is crooked. I admit it’s no treat, but it’s not crooked.”
    “It should be, after Monday night. Damn it, Archie, I’m an hour behind. I’ll get Landry, there’s a room down the hall, and—”
    “No. Not even what I had for breakfast. As I said on the phone, when I can spill one bean you’ll get it.” I rose. “Right now we could use a fact or two, but if you’re an hour behind—” I was going.
    “Sit down. All right, I’ll be two hours behind. But I’m not going to starve.” He took a healthy bite of a tuna-and-lettuce sandwich on whole wheat.
    “Not an hour.” I sat. “Maybe only three minutes if you can tell me the names of six men who ate dinner on Harvey H. Bassett at Rusterman’s, Friday, October eighteenth.”
    “What?” He stopped chewing to stare. “Bassett? What has that got to do with a bomb killing a man in Nero Wolfe’s house?”
    “It’s connected, but that’s off the record. Right now everything’s off the record. Repeat,
everything
. Pierre Ducos was the waiter at that dinner. Do you know who was there?”
    “No. I didn’t know
he
was there.”
    “How soon can you find out and keep me out of it?”
    “Maybe a day, maybe a week. It might be an hour if we could get to Doh Ray Me.”
    “Who is Doh Ray Me?”
    “His wife. Widow. Of course you don’t call her that now, not to her face. She’s holed up. She won’t see anybody, not even the DA. Her doctor eats and sleepsthere. They say. What are you staring for? Is
my
nose crooked?”
    “I’ll be damned.” I stood up. “Of course. Why the hell didn’t I remember? I must be in shock. See you tomorrow night—I hope. Forget I was here.” I went.
    There was no phone booth on that floor, so I went to the elevator. On the way down I pinched my memory. Having met only about a tenth of the characters—poets from Bolivia, pianists from Hungary, girls from Wyoming or Utah—who had been given a hand by Lily Rowan, I had never seen Dora Miller. Arriving in New York from Kansas, she had been advised by an artist’s agent to change her name to Doremi, and when nobody had pronounced it right, had changed it again to Doraymee. You would think that a singer with that name would surely go far, but at the time Lily had told me about her she had been doing TV commercials. Though the
Times
may not have mentioned that Mrs. Harvey H. Bassett had once been Doraymee, the
Gazette
must have, and I missed it. Shock.
    I entered one of the ten booths on the ground floor, shut the door, and dialed a number, and after eight rings, par for that number, a voice came. “Hello?” She always makes it a question.
    “Hello. The top of the afternoon to you.”
    “Well. I haven’t rung your number even once, so you owe me a pat on the head or a pat where you think it would do the most good. Are you alive and well? Are you at home?”
    “I’m alive. I’m also ten short blocks from you.