The Doorbell Rang - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Mrs. Rachel Bruner inherited a large real estate investment business from her husband, and has run it successfully for some time. She has read The FBI Nobody Knows and thinks it should get a wider distribution than it has so far. Mrs. Bruner has attracted the Bureau's attention by buying 10,000 copies of the book and sending them to persons of influence, including cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, various state legislators, heads of corporations and banks, and so on.

Mrs. Bruner believes that, in retaliation, the FBI is following her and her family, that it has tapped her phones, and that it has questioned some of her employees. She blames the Bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover, and she wants Wolfe to stop him.

Wolfe accepts the job, over Archie's objections. Archie believes that the task is an impossible one and that taking it on will make a powerful enemy of the FBI. But Mrs. Bruner has offered a $100,000 retainer, and will pay both expenses and a fee to be determined by Wolfe, contingent on a successful outcome. Wolfe will not return the retainer. To do so would be to imply that he is afraid of what he terms a "bully."

Wolfe plans to get evidence of FBI malfeasance and use it to force the FBI to leave Mrs. Bruner alone. At first, Archie pursues various leads with little success, but then Doc Vollmer conveys to Archie a message that calls him to a meeting in a hotel room, and that warns him to "be sure you're loose." Although suspicious of being set up by the FBI, Archie goes to the hotel room, where he finds Inspector Cramer and a carton of milk.

Cramer has news, but he doesn't want it known that he's passed it along to Wolfe – hence the secret meeting. The FBI knows by now that Wolfe has accepted Mrs. Bruner's job and it has asked the state government to revoke Wolfe's and Archie's licenses to do business as private investigators. In turn, the state has asked the Police Commissioner for whatever negative information he has on Wolfe, and the Commissioner has asked Cramer for a report. Cramer knows that Wolfe has already annoyed the FBI, but before he writes the report he wants the full picture. Archie surmises that Cramer brought the milk, Archie's beverage of choice, to show that he's not eager to cooperate with the FBI's plan to harass Wolfe.

Archie is at first undecided. Normally he would check with Wolfe before opening up to Cramer, but he can't – their phone's surely tapped. Archie's intelligence, guided by experience, tells him to empty the bag for Cramer, and he does so. Then Cramer completes his own agenda by giving Archie some unpublished information about the recent, unsolved murder of Morris Althaus, shot to death in his apartment.

Althaus was a free-lance magazine writer and it is known that he had been preparing an article on the FBI. However, neither a draft of an article nor background information was found in his apartment. (Not even the bullet that killed him was found, although evidence indicates that the bullet passed through his chest, hit the wall and fell to the floor.) Furthermore, an eyewitness saw men leaving the scene and got their car's license number, which Cramer says belongs to the FBI. Cramer's inference is that FBI agents entered Althaus' apartment for a search, that they were surprised to find him there, that Althaus threatened them with his own gun and that they shot him.

Cramer has tried to get the FBI's cooperation in his investigation, but its special agent in charge in New York, Richard Wragg, stonewalls him. With no evidence and no cooperation from the FBI, Cramer is both blocked and seriously angry.

Later, in conference with Wolfe, Archie conjectures that Cramer "… knew we had stung them somehow, and he had a murder he couldn't tag them for, and he decided to hand it to you." Archie and Wolfe agree that, even if they were able to establish that the FBI was responsible for Althaus' death, it wouldn't help them complete their job for Mrs. Bruner. The only leverage they would have would be to trade their silence about the murder for the FBI's agreement to stop harassing Mrs. Bruner. That's not Wolfe's style.

So Wolfe chooses to demonstrate instead that the FBI did not kill Althaus. But he still needs leverage, and he decides that the best way to obtain it is to entice the FBI into an illegal entry. Wolfe enlists the help of his old friend Lewis Hewitt, a millionaire orchid fancier with an estate on Long Island. Hewitt will host a dinner of the Ten for Aristology, a group of gourmets (one that also figures in "Poison à la Carte"). The publicity given the newspapers states that Wolfe and Archie will attend and that Fritz will prepare the dinner. Two actors who strongly resemble Wolfe and Archie in superficial physical respects go in their place, thereby giving any FBI agents who might be watching the brownstone the impression that it is unoccupied. In fact it is not: Wolfe and Archie remain hidden in the darkened house; also present are Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, who were smuggled, along with the actors, into the house the day before.

Meantime, Archie, acting on his own, has located evidence pointing to the identity of Althaus' actual murderer. To secure the evidence, though, he has to leave it roughly where he found it. The situation preys on Archie's nerves: the timing of Wolfe's trap forces Archie to wait for a couple of days, and he worries that the murderer will decide to dispose of the evidence permanently.

Wolfe's plan to trap the FBI works as intended, and Wolfe catches two of its agents inside his house, with witnesses who can testify that they broke in. He allows the agents to leave, but only after appropriating their credentials, which FBI agents are permitted to display but not to relinquish. When Archie later describes this scene to Inspector Cramer, he sees a rare and broad smile crease the Inspector's face.

The credentials provide the leverage Wolfe needs to complete his job for Mrs Bruner. Wragg comes to Wolfe's office. Wolfe engages to leave the credentials in a safe deposit box and take no action against the FBI, if the harassment of Mrs. Bruner, her family and her employees stops. Wragg agrees. And as to the murder, Archie is at last able to tell Cramer that the FBI did not in fact kill Althaus, and where the evidence identifying Althaus' murderer can be found. Wragg then hands over the missing bullet, taken by the agents who searched the apartment, so that Cramer can close the case without having to put any of Wragg's men on the witness stand at a trial.

In the final scene, a new visitor arrives at the front door. Though he is not mentioned by name, Archie refers to him as "the big fish," suggesting that J. Edgar Hoover has come in person to retrieve the agents' credentials. Wolfe refuses to let him in, leaving him to keep ringing the doorbell.