Trouble In Triplicate Read Free

daughter. That's one thing nobody in the world knows except me, and now you and this man of yours. Here's another thing, and this is even more particular. This is very particular. I wouldn't tell it to my mother even if I still had one, but I need help. My daughter is-'
    'Hold it!'
    Dazy Perrit was not easy to stop, but I made it positive enough to stop him. I was out of my chair, standing in front of him. 'I want to warn you,' I told his eyes, 'that Mr. Wolfe is fully as stubborn as you are. This is damn dangerous for all concerned. He's told you he doesn't want to hear it, and neither do I!'
    I turned savagely to Wolfe. 'Good God, what's wrong with spaghetti and cheese?'
    I picked up the stack of bills and stuck them out at Perrit.
    He ignored it. His eyes hadn't even shifted to me. He went on to Wolfe, 'The particular thing is that my daughter isn't really my daughter-the one that's blackmailing me, I mean. Now you know that too, you and this man. I said that nobody else in the world knows it, but she does. I have got a daughter, born in nineteen twenty-five, twenty-one years ago. She'll be twenty-one next month, November eighth. There's a job for you to do with her too. What's up?'
    'You'll have to excuse me, Mr. Perrit.' Wolfe had glanced at the wall clock, pushed his chair back from the desk, and was manipulating his bulk upright. He moved from behind the desk and then stopped, because Perrit, also on his feet, was standing square in his path.
    'Where you going?' Perrit asked in a tone which implied that no conceivable answer would be acceptable. I stood up too, my hand leaving my pocket with the gun in it-that is, in my hand. That may strike some as corny, but it was instinctive and the instinct was sound. I got around town some and was fairly well informed, and so far as I knew no serious argument with Dazy Perrit had ever been settled with any tool but a gun; and up to then Perrit had done all the settling, either personally or by staff work. With what he had already spilled I could see nothing ahead but one fine mess, and I still believe, corn or no corn, that if he had so much as poked a finger at Wolfe's central bulge I would have dropped him.
    But Wolfe said, unperturbed, 'I always spend from four to six upstairs with my plants. Always. If you insist on confiding your troubles to me, tell Mr. Goodwin about it. I'll phone you this evening or in the morning.' The point was settled, not with words, but with eyes. Wolfe's eyes won. Perrit moved a step to the right. Wolfe went on by and out, and a moment later the bang of the door on his personal elevator sounded.
    Perrit sat down and told me, 'You're crazy. Both of you. What's that thing in your hand for'Crazy as bedbugs.'
    I put the gun on the desk and heaved a sigh. 'Okay, tell me about it.'

Nero Wolfe 14 - Trouble in Triplicate
    III
    At one point I thought Dazy Perrit was going to break down and cry. That was when he was telling me that his daughter, his real daughter, was up among the top of her class at Columbia. Apparently that made him feel so proud he could hardly bear it.
    It wasn't really very complicated. In his early days in St. Louis Perrit had got married and there was a daughter. Then three things happened in the same week: the daughter had her second birthday, the mother died, and Perrit got three years in the hoosegow for a stick-up. I got only a rough sketch of this and practically nothing of the years that followed, up to 1945; all he gave me was that somewhere along the line, when he had begun to get prosperous, he had got daughter-conscious and had dug her up somewhere in Missouri. He didn't say where or how he had got her away, but in order to give me the picture he had to explain that she didn't know she was his daughter. She thought he was merely representing her father, who was very wealthy and couldn't disclose himself because he was planning to get elected President of the United States or something.
    'It was okay,' Dazy Perrit said sourly.