Help Wanted, Male

by Stout Rex

I eyed him coldly. “You scold us when we He, and you scold us when we tell the truth. What does the city pay you for anyhow?”

Back in the office there was the morning mail, which had been ignored on account of the interruption of the early visitor. I got busy with the opener. There was the usual collection of circulars, catalogues, appeals, requests for advice without enclosed check, and other items, fully up to the pre-war standard, and I was getting toward the bottom of the stack without encountering anything startling or promising when I slit another envelope and there it was.

I stared at it. I picked up the envelope and stared at that. I don’t often talk to myself, but I said loud enough for me to hear, “My goodness.” Then I left the rest of the mail for later and went and mounted the three flights to the plant rooms on the roof. Proceeding through the first three departments, past everything from rows of generating flasks to Cattleya hybrids covered with blooms, I found Wolfe in the potting room, with Theodore Horstmann, the orchid nurse, examining a crate of sphagnum that had just arrived.

“Well?” he demanded with no sign of friendliness. The general idea was that when he was up there I interrupted him at my peril.

“I suppose,” I said carelessly, “that I shouldn’t have bothered you, but I ran across something in the mail that I thought you’d find amusing,” and I put them on the bench before him, side by side: the envelope with his name and address printed on it by hand, in ink, and the piece of paper that had been clipped from something with scissors or a sharp knife, reading in large black script, printed but not by hand:

YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE—

AND I WILL WATCH YOU DIE!

“It sure is a coincidence,” I remarked, grinning at him.

III

I thought he would at least mutter “Indeed,” but he didn’t. He looked at the exhibits for a moment without touching them, sent me a sharp glance indicating an instantaneous suspicion that I was implicated, and said without any perceptible quiver, “I’ll look over the mail at eleven o’clock as usual.”