Read Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 for Free Online Page B

case—” Tingley reached for a row of old-fashioned massive bell pushes and pressed his finger on the second from the left. Then he leaned back and glowered at the other in silence during the moments that lapsed before a door in the side wall opened. A woman appeared—a woman over fifty but probably not sixty, with a figure of generous proportions, a muscular face and efficient-looking dark eyes—and approached them with energetic steps.
    “We’re just starting some mixes on the middle run—”
    “I know,” Tingley cut her off. “Just a minute, MissYates. This man’s name is Fox. He’s a detective. He’s going to look around the factory, and he can ask questions of you or Sol or Carrie or Edna or Thorpe. No one else. I don’t trust him. I’ll explain later why he’s here. One of you stay with him.”
    “Does he go in the sauce room?”
    “Yes, but hold up while he’s there.”
    Miss Yates, obviously too busy to waste time on questions, nodded at Fox and said crisply, “Come on.”
    When he was alone again, Arthur Tingley put his elbows on his grandfather’s roll-top desk and pressed his palms against his forehead, squeezing his eyes tight shut. He sat that way, motionless, for a full ten minutes, then stirred, blinked around, and regarded with grim distaste the basket of morning mail. In it, unquestionably, would be indignant letters about inedible titbits, and a batch of cancellations.
    Any ordinary business day of any business man is apt to have headaches, but before that Tuesday was past Tingley’s amanuensis—an angular and tenacious girl of forty-three whose name was Berdine Pilt and whom he always called “my clerk” and never “my stenographer” or “my secretary”—became aware that he was setting an all-time record for growling, barking and snapping. She blamed it chiefly on the quinine, but surmised that the morning’s callers had mysteriously made it worse; his ejaculations and comments, and the letters he dictated, offered no clue.
    The room she occupied being divided from his by two partitions, she missed a good deal. She heard not a word, for instance, of the conference he had at half past two in the afternoon with Miss Yates and the sales manager, Sol Fry; nor had she cognizance of apeculiar expedition which he made precisely at four o’clock. It was brief and appeared to be surreptitious. He slipped out by the door through which Miss Yates had in the morning conducted Tecumseh Fox, walked fifteen paces down a partitioned corridor, stopped at an open door, glanced up and down the corridor, and dived within. He was in a long narrow room with female wearing apparel ranged along both walls and a partition down the middle, mostly coats disposed on hangers. Going straight to a worn coat with a muskrat collar, he glanced around again, warily, plunged his hand into the pocket of the coat and withdrew it again clutching a small covered glass jar, went back to the corridor and returned to his office. At that moment Berdine Pilt knocked on the other door with mail to sign, and he dropped the jar into a drawer of his desk and hastily shut it.
    Berdine did know that there was something to be said to Phil Tingley when he came in at five o’clock, for she had been told to convey the message to the front; but since she went home at that time, along with everyone else on the premises except Miss Yates, who usually stayed in the factory until around six, she was divided from that interview by more than two partitions. She saw Phil’s arrival a minute or so after five, but not his departure some forty minutes later; and eight subway miles separated her from what was perhaps the most surprising phenomenon of the day, a telephone conversation which occurred at a quarter to six, five minutes after Phil’s departure.
    Arthur Tingley scowled at a row of pigeonholes as he spoke:
    “Buchanan four three oh one one? Is this you, Amy? This is your Uncle Arthur. I want—uh—I have—uh—a problem, and