Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 by Bad for Business

knife come from the rack out there, but the weight—did the police tell you he was struck on the head by a two-pound weight which came from this room—from that scale there?”
    “They tried to. But he wasn’t.”
    “Huh?” Fox’s head jerked and he stared. “He wasn’t?”
    “No. The weights that belong to that scale are all there. The one he was hit with belonged to a scale that old Thomas Tingley used when he started the business. Arthur kept it on his desk as a paperweight.”
    “I didn’t see it there yesterday, and I usually see things.”
    “It must have been there,” Miss Yates declared. “It may have been under papers instead of on them. It usually was. Why, is that important?”
    “I would call it vital,” said Fox dryly. “I don’t know about the police, but I have been regarding it as settled that the murderer was someone extremely familiar with this place, because he got that weight from this room before making the attack. But if the weight was right there on Tingley’s desk—that spreads it out in all directions. As for the knife—anyone—even someone who had never been in the factory—might have expected to find a sharp knife in a titbits factory. And there was plenty of time to look, with Tingley on the floor unconscious, and it was in plain sight there on the rack. Was it?”
    “Was it what?”
    “In plain sight. Are the knives left on the racks at night?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well. This certainly opens it up.” Fox was frowning. “You say you left last evening at a quarter past six?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tingley was in his office alone?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did he say anything to you about expecting any caller or callers?”
    “No.”
    “He didn’t mention that he had phoned to ask Miss Duncan to come to see him?”
    “No.”
    “Would you mind telling me exactly what he said—”
    The question was cut off by the entrance of a woman about half Miss Yates’s age in a working smock. She trotted up with the flurry of impending disaster on her face and in her gait. Fox knew her as Carrie Murphy, one of the five persons to whom hehad telephoned at midnight, but without taking any notice of his presence she blurted at Miss Yates:
    “Mr. Fry says the mix in vat three is too stiff and he’s going to add oil!”
    Miss Yates leaped from her chair and tore from the room, with Carrie Murphy at her heels.

Chapter 6

    A fter rising to examine the two-pound weight which was there in its place in the row on the little shelf above the scale, and finding that it differed slightly in detail from one he had inspected on the floor of Tingley’s office, Fox left the sauce room to stroll through the factory toward the front of the building. He saw no special evidence of grief on any faces of the girls and women working at the tables and benches and the various machines, but having himself met Arthur Tingley in the flesh, that did not seem to him shocking or even unexpected. Their curious glances at him as he passed along did, however, display an agreeably horrified suspense and perturbation, as well as an anticipatory gleam for the social supremacy they would have that evening among friends who worked for firms whose names were not in the papers at all, let alone in banner headlines on the front page.
    There was a slight commotion at the far side of the huge room, where Miss Yates, backed up by Carrie Murphy, was confronting a defiant but obviously defeated Sol Fry. Fox sent a chuckle in that direction and went on.
    A corridor led him past the open door of the long narrow room where the employees kept their wraps, and other doors as well. The last one on the right was closed. Fox turned the knob and pushed and breezed in. A broad-shouldered husky came at him, demanded angrily:
    “Hey, what the hell?”
    “My name’s Tecumseh Fox.”
    “I don’t care if it’s Franklin D. La Guardia! On out!”
    “I should think, shut up in here like this, you’d welcome an intruder once in a while to break the