Short Story Wednesday: "Kill Now—Pay Later" by Rex Stout

 

I read "Kill Now—Pay Later" in June, I think. Or it may have been early July. I have been having trouble reading short stories lately. This is one of the mystery novellas starring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The length was 70 pages. It is one of three stories in Trio for Blunt Instruments by Rex Stout, published in 1964.

This is how the  story begins:

That Monday morning Pete didn’t give me his usual polite grin, contrasting the white gleam of his teeth with the maple-syrup shade of the skin of his square leathery face. He did give me his usual greeting, “Hi-ho, Mr. Goodwin,” but with no grin in his voice either, and he ignored the established fact that I expected to take his cap and jacket and put them on the rack. By the time I turned from shutting the door he had dropped his jacket on the hall bench and was picking up his box, which he had put on the floor to free his hands for the jacket.

“You’re an hour early,” I said. “They going barefoot?”

 “Naw, they’re busy,” he said, and headed down the hall to the office. I followed, snubbed; after all, we had been friends for more than three years.

Pete came three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—around noon, after he had finished his rounds in an office building on Eighth Avenue. Wolfe always gave him a dollar, since it was a five-minute walk for him to the old brownstone on West 35th Street, and I only gave him a quarter, but he gave my shoes as good a shine as he did Wolfe’s. None better. I never pretended to keep busy while he was working on Wolfe because I liked to listen. It was instructive. Wolfe’s line was that a man who had been born in Greece, even though he had left at the age of six, should be familiar with the ancient glories of his native land, and he had been hammering away at Pete for forty months. That morning, as Wolfe swiveled his oversized chair, in which he was seated behind his desk, and Pete knelt and got his box in place, and I crossed to my desk, Wolfe demanded, “Who was Eratosthenes and who accused him of murder in a great and famous speech in four-oh-three B.C.?”

 

Pete Vassos is a bootblack. He had walked into the office of Dennis Ashby, vice-president of Mercer's Bobbin's, for his first scheduled appointment of the day, and the room was empty. He looked out the office window to the street below and saw a man's body on the sidewalk, with police around the body. It was his client, and Pete left the building and came directly to Nero Wolfe's office. When he described the situation, Wolfe tells him to go the police immediately. Pete is clearly perturbed and leaves.

A day later, Pete's daughter, Elma, comes to see Wolfe to tell him that Pete is dead. He was found at the base of a cliff, dead. And from there the story gets very complicated.

My thoughts on the story

This is one of those stories where the mystery is so-so but the content of the story is interesting and entertaining. In the Nero Wolfe mysteries, I like the setting in New York City (in this case, in the late 1950s). I spent some time looking into the history of bootblacks and whether there are bootblacks today (the answer is yes). It was all very interesting.

In this story, Wolfe works for nothing. That is not unheard of, but it is unusual. Pete Vasso's daughter insists that Wolfe clear her father's name and find out who killed him because Pete worshiped Nero Wolfe. 

Regular characters featured: Inspector Cramer, at his crankiest. Two of the freelance investigators, Saul and Fred. Saul is a genius but prefers to freelance.

Archie has a lot to do in this one; he does get quite irritated with Wolfe for not keeping him in the loop, but that is is a normal occurrence in this series.