Where There's a Will

by Stout Rex

On the way uptown in the roadster I devised two or three nifty ruses for getting the professional fiend off the premises without annoying either cops or family, but by the time I arrived at 67th Street I had decided that direct action was the quickest and most feasible. A flatfoot out front who was keeping sightseers on the move seemed to think I wasn’t needed there, but I talked my way through him, pushed the button, and was admitted by the butler. I asked for Mr. Dunn.

In a few minutes Dunn joined me in the living room. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week and never expected to again. I told him Nero Wolfe had beat it the day before in order to pursue certain activities without restriction from the police, that he was at home and was on the job. The poor guy was so punch drunk that he couldn’t even ask an intelligent question. He sort of sputtered that he didn’t see what Wolfe could do, he hoped he could do something but what, it was beyond remedy, did Wolfe have any idea...

I had never expected to find myself patting John Charles Dunn on the shoulder to buck him up. But I did, and spent twenty minutes with him trying to persuade him that Nero Wolfe would roll the clouds away and the sun would shine. That was partly in preparation for telling him his daughter Sara was wanted in Wolfe’s office, but when I finally did so he wasn’t even curious as to why we wanted her. He had been under a strain for months, and now this had about finished him. He sent the butler for her, and in no time I had her out of the house and in the roadster.

But when I got to Wolfe’s house I drove on past without slowing down, eighty yards or so, and then rolled to the curb and stopped. Sara Dunn looked at me.

“What’s the matter? That’s it back there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but that car in front is Inspector Cramer’s, and what he don’t know won’t hurt him. We’ll wait here till he goes.”

“Oh. Darn it anyway. It would be simply marvelous, doings like this, if it wasn’t so — if it wasn’t my own f-family—”

“All right, sister. I’ll teach you to be a detective some day.” I patted her hand because her lip was trembling and I didn’t want her crying, but it only made it tremble more, so I quit. I twisted around on the seat to get a good view of the rear through the window, and after a while, ten minutes or so, saw Cramer emerge and start down the stoop. I started the car, went around the block and into 35th again, and parked in front of the house.

I was about half-bored as I sat and listened to Wolfe starting in on her. Not that I was too dumb to be able to figure that if her camera and films had been stolen it might have been done by somebody to conceal something connected either with the will or with the murder. Of course that was a possibility. But I was cold on it for two reasons. First, on account of Sara’s intimate disclosures when she confessed she had betrayed her father and slaughtered her uncle. I wanted proof that anything had been stolen at all. Second, although she was loony she wasn’t stupid, and she must have realized that if anybody was going to be exposed by investigating the theft of the camera it could only be someone in her family or close to it. I never knew until the following winter, when I took her to a show one evening, that she thought all the time she knew who had killed Hawthorne and Naomi Karn both, and it was someone she didn’t like.

Apparently Wolfe was taking the larceny seriously. He went into all the details, making sure she had actually left the camera in the bedroom, and the films in the suitcase; also, he wanted to know exactly how and when she had informed each of the others of her loss, and what they had said and how they had acted. She gave him all that without any visible reluctance or hesitation, except when he asked about Osric Stauffer. At that she balked for a moment, and then said she hadn’t mentioned it to Stauffer. Wolfe asked her why, and she said because she wouldn’t have believed anything Stauffer told her, so there was no use asking him.