“Yes, sir. On shipments to a big estate in Jersey, the Cullen place. He would ship two hundred rhododendrons instead of one hundred and collect from Cullen for the extra hundred personally, at half price. It amounted to several thousand dollars.”
Anne lifted her head and turned it and made a noise of protest.
“Miss Tracy says it was only sixteen hundred dollars,” Johnny said. “I’m telling you what I was told. People exaggerate, and this never was made public, and Tracy wasn’t arrested. He stole it to pay a specialist for fixing his son’s eyes, something wrong with his son’s eyes. He can’t get another job. His daughter was Dill’s secretary and still is. She gets fifty a week and pays back twenty on what her father stole, so I was told. She refuses to verify those figures.”
Wolfe looked at Anne.
“It doesn’t matter,” Anne said, looking at me. “Does it?”
“I suppose not,” Wolfe said, but if it’s wrong, correct it.”
“It’s wrong. I get twenty dollars a week and I pay back ten.”
“Good God,” I blurted, “you need a union.”
That was probably Freudian. Probably subconsciously I meant she needed a union with me. So I added hastily, “I mean a labor union. Twenty bucks a week!”
Johnny looked annoyed. He’s a conservative. “So of course that gave me an in. I went to Miss Tracy’s home and explained to her confidentially the hole she was in. That this murder investigation would put the police on to her father’s crime, and that she and Dill were compounding a felony, which is against the law, and that the police would have to be fixed or they’d all be in jail, and there was only one man I knew of who could fix it because he was on intimate terms with high police officials, and that was Mr. Nero Wolfe. I said she’d better come and see you immediately, and she came. It was nearly eleven o’clock and there was no train in from Richdale, so we took a taxi.”