Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 19 by Murder by the Book

agree.”
    “I know they do.” Wellman was concentrating. “That’s something. You did that.”
    “I did more. Most of your money has been spent in an effort to find someone who could tell us something about either the manuscript or Baird Archer, or both. It missed success by a narrow margin. Yesterday afternoon a young woman named Rachel Abrams was murdered by being pushed from a window of her office. Mr. Goodwin entered her office three minutes later. This next detail is being withheld by the police and is not for publication. In a notebook in her desk Mr. Goodwin found entries showing that last September a Baird Archer paid her ninety-eight dollars and forty cents for typing a manuscript. Of course that clinches it that your daughter was killed because of her knowledge of themanuscript, but I was already acting on that assumption, so it doesn’t help any. We are—”
    “It proves that Baird Archer did it!” Wellman was excited. “It proves that he’s still in New York! Surely the police can find him!” He came up out of the chair. “I’m going—”
    “Please, Mr. Wellman.” Wolfe patted the air with a palm. “It proves that the murderer was in that building yesterday afternoon, and that’s all. Baird Archer is still nothing but a name, a will-o’-the-wisp. Having missed Rachel Abrams by the merest tick, we still have no one alive who has ever seen or heard him. As for finding his trail from yesterday, that’s for the police and they do it well; we may be sure that the building employees and tenants and passers-by are being efficiently badgered. Sit down, sir.”
    “I’m going up there. To that building.”
    “When I have finished. Sit down, please?”
    Wellman lowered himself, and nearly kept going to the floor when his fanny barely caught the edge of the leather. He recovered and slid back a few inches.
    “I must make it plain,” Wolfe said, “that the chance of success is now minute. I have three men interviewing Miss Abrams’ family and friends, to learn if she spoke to any of them about Baird Archer or his manuscript, but they have already talked with the most likely ones and have got nothing. Mr. Goodwin has seen everyone at the office of Scholl and Hanna who could possibly have what we’re after, and he has also called on other publishers. For a week the police, with far greater resources than mine, have been doing their best to find a trace of either Baird Archer or the manuscript. The outlook has never been rosy; now it is forlorn.”
    Wellman’s glasses had slipped down on his nose, andhe pushed them back. “I asked about you before I came here,” he protested. “I thought you never gave up.”
    “I’m not giving up.”
    “Excuse me. I thought you sounded like it.”
    “I’m merely describing the situation. Forlorn is not too strong a word. It would indeed be desperate but for one possibility. The name Baird Archer was first seen on a sheet of paper in the handwriting of Leonard Dykes. It would not be poopery to assume that when he wrote that list of names, obviously invented, he was choosing a pseudonym for a manuscript of a novel, whether written by him or another. But it is a fact, not an assumption, that he included that name in a list he compiled, and that that was the name of Miss Abrams’ client, and it was also the name on the manuscript read by your daughter, and the name given by the man who phoned her for an appointment. If I make this too elaborate it is because I must make sure that it is completely clear.”
    “I like it clear.”
    “Good.” Wolfe sighed. He was not enjoying himself. “I undertook to learn about that manuscript through your daughter’s associates or the person who typed it, and I have met defeat. I’ve been licked. The only connection with Baird Archer that has not been explored is that of Leonard Dykes, and it is certainly flimsy, the bare fact that he wrote that name down; but to explore it is our only hope.”
    “Then go