The Rubber Band/The Red Box 2-In-1 by Rex Stout Read Free Book Online

anything. I should warn you, Mr. Wolfe, I have a very long story to tell.”
    She hadn’t looked at me once. I decided to quit looking at her, and tried her companions. They were just barely people. Of course I remembered Harlan Scovil telling Anthony D. Perry that he wasn’t Mike Walsh. Apparently this bird was. He was a scrawny little mick, built wiry, over sixty and maybe even seventy, dressed cheap but clean, sitting only half in his chair and keeping an ear palmed with his right hand. The Lindquist dame, with a good square face and wearing a good brown dress, had size, though I wouldn’t have called her massive, first because it would have been only a half-truth, and second because she might have socked me. I guess she was a fine woman, of the kind that would be more apt to be snapping a coffee cup in her fingers than a champagne glass. Remembering Harlan Scovil to boot, it looked to me as if, whatever game Miss Fox was training for, she was picking some odd numbers for her team.
    Wolfe had told her that the longer the story the sooner it ought to begin, and she was saying:
    “It began forty years ago, in Silver City, Nevada. But before I start it, Mr. Wolfe, I ought to tell you something that I hope will make you interested. I’ve found out all I could about you, and I understand that you have remarkable abilities and an equally remarkable opinion of their cash value to people you do things for.”
    Wolfe sighed. “Each of us must choose his own brand of banditry, Miss Fox.”
    “Certainly. That is what I have done. If you agree to help us, and if we are successful, your fee will be one hundred thousand dollars.”
    Mike Walsh leaned forward and blurted, “Ten per cent! Fair enough?”
    Hilda Lindquist frowned at him. Clara Fox paid no attention. Wolfe said, “The fee always depends. You couldn’t hire me to hand you the moon.”
    She laughed at him, and although I had my notebook out I decided to look at her in the pauses. She said, “I won’t need it. Is Mr. Goodwin going to take down everything? With the understanding that if you decide not to help us his notes are to be given to me?”
    Cagey Clara. The creases of Wolfe’s cheeks unfolded a little. “By all means.”
    “All right.” She brushed her hair back. “I said it began forty years ago, but I won’t start there. I’ll start when I was nine years old, in 1918, the year my father was killed in the war, in France. I don’t remember my father much. He was killed in 1918, and he sent my mother a letter which she didn’t get until nearly a year later, because instead of trusting it to the army mail he gave it to another soldier to bring home. My mother read it then, but I never knew of it until seven years later, in 1926, when my mother gave it to me on her deathbed. I was seventeen years old. I loved my mother very dearly.”
    She stopped. It would have been a good spot for a moist film over her eyes or a catch in her voice, but apparently she had just stopped to swallow. She swallowed twice. In the pause I was looking at her. She went on:
    “I didn’t read the letter until a month later. I knew it was a letter father had written to mother eight years before, and with mother gone it didn’t seem to be of any importance to me. But on account of what mother had said, about a month after she died I read it. I have it with me. I’ll have to read it to you.”
    She opened her alligator-skin handbag and took out a folded paper. She jerked it open and glanced at it, and back at Wolfe. “May I?”
    “Do I see typewriting?”
    She nodded. “This is a copy. The original is put away.” She brushed her hair back with a hand up and dipping swift like a bird. “This isn’t a complete copy. There is—this is—just the part to read.
    “So, dearest Lola, since a man can’t tell what is going to
happen to him here, or when, I’ve decided to write you about a little incident that occurred last week, and make arrangements to be sure it gets to you,