I met her eyes. “I was hanging out up the street when you came, and a Homicide detective was following you. I exchanged a few words with him. If you want to spot him when you leave, he’s about my size, drags his feet a little, and is wearing a dark gray suit and a gray snap-brim hat.”
“He was following me?”
“Right.”
Her eyes left me for Wolfe. “Isn’t that what they do?”
But her left hand had started to tremble, and she had to grasp it with the other one and squeeze it. Wolfe shut his eyes, probably expecting some more tongue control. Instead, she arose abruptly and asked, “May I have—a bathroom?”
I told her certainly, and went and opened the door of the one partitioned off in the far corner, to the left of my desk, and she came and passed through, closing the door behind her.
She was in there a good quarter of an hour without making a sound. The partitions, like all the inner walls on the ground floor, are soundproofed, but I have sharp ears and heard nothing whatever. I said something to Wolfe, but he only grunted. After a little he looked up at the clock: twenty to four. Thereafter he looked at it every two minutes; at four sharp he would leave for the plant rooms. There were just nine minutes to go when the door in the partition opened and she was back with us.
She came and stood at Wolfe’s desk, across from him. “I beg your pardon,” she said in her low even voice. “I had to take some pills. The food at the hotel is quite good, but I simply can’t eat. I haven’t eaten much for quite a while. Do you want to tell me anything else?”
“Milk toast,” Wolfe said gruffly. “My cook, Fritz Brenner, makes it superbly. Sit down.”
“I couldn’t swallow it. Really.”
“Then hot bouillon. Our own. It can be ready in eight minutes. I have to leave you, but Mr. Goodwin—”
“I couldn’t. I’m going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee—I think I am—I’ll think about it on the bus. That’s cheating.” She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.
Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn’t break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it: When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.
“You put the answers in the safe,” he stated.
“Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O’Garro and Talbott Heery were there, but I didn’t report that Heery brought me downtown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him—”
“Verbatim, please.”
I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon’s interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, “For a footnote, Heery couldn’t knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?”
He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn’t been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.
I was in the middle of the Frazee notes when the phone interrupted me, and when I told it, “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking,” a male voice said, “I want to speak to Mr. Wolfe. This is Patrick O’Garro.”
They were certainly popping the precedents. He should have told his secretary, and she should have got me and spent five minutes trying to lobby me into putting Wolfe on. The best explanation was that they were playing it so close to their chins they were even keeping it from the staff that they had hired Nero Wolfe.
“He’s engaged,” I said, “and if I disengage him for a phone call it would have to be good. Can’t you use me for a relay?”
“I want to ask him if he’s made any progress.”
“If he has it’s in his head. He told you he would report later this evening. He has seen Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock. How about the others?”
“That’s why I’m calling. Susan Tescher will be there at six, and Harold Rollins at seven, but Younger can’t come. He’s in bed at the hotel with heart flutters. They sent him up from the District Attorney’s office in an ambulance. He wouldn’t go to a hospital. My doctor saw him and says it’s not serious, but he’s staying in bed until the doctor sees him tomorrow.”
I said I’d tell Wolfe and got the number of Younger’s room. After I hung up I got at the house phone and buzzed the plant rooms, and in a minute Wolfe’s voice blurted at me, “Well?”
“O’Garro just phoned. One’s coming at six and one at seven, but at the DA’s office Philip Younger’s heart began to flutter and he’s at the hotel in bed. Shall I go up and sit with him?”
“You must be back by six o’clock.”
I said I would and the connection went.
There was a slight problem. Years before, after a certain episode, I had made myself promise that I would never go on any errand connected with a murder case without a gun, but this wasn’t a murder case by the terms agreed upon. The job was to nail a thief. I decided that was quibbling, got my shoulder holster from the drawer and put it on, got the Marley .32 and loaded it and slipped it into the holster, went to the hall, and called to Fritz to come and bolt the door after me.
Chapter 6
It was safe to assume that the floor clerk on the eighteenth floor of the Churchill would be stubborn about it, since journalists were certainly stalking the quintet, so I anticipated her by first finding Tim Evarts, the hotel’s first assistant security officer, not to be called a house dick, who owed me a little courtesy from past events. He obliged by phoning her, after I promised to set no fires and find no corpses, and all she did was look at both sides of my card and one side of me and wave me on.
Eighteen-twenty-six was about halfway down a long corridor. There was no one in sight anywhere except a chambermaid with towels, and I concluded that the city employees hadn’t invaded the hotel itself for surveillance. My first knock on the door of eighteen-twenty-six got me an invitation to come in, not too audible, and I opened the door and entered, and saw that LBA had done well by their guests. It was the fifteen-dollar size, with the twin beds headed against the wall at the left. On one of them, under the covers, was Old King Cole with a hangover, his mop of white hair tousled and his eyes sick.
I approached. “My name’s Archie Goodwin,” I told him. “From Nero Wolfe, on behalf of Lippert, Buff and Assa.” There was a chair there, and I sat. “We need to clear up a few little points about the contest.” “Crap,” he said.
“That won’t do it,” I stated. “Not just that one word. Is the contest crap, or am I, or what?”
He shut his eyes. “I’m sick.” He opened them. “I’ll be all right tomorrow.”
“Are you too sick to talk? I don’t want to make you worse. I don’t know how serious a heart flutter is.”
“I haven’t got a heart flutter. I’ve got paroxysmal tachycardia, and it is never serious. I’d be up and around right now if it wasn’t for one thing—there are too many fools. The discomfort of paroxysmal tachycardia is increased by fear and anxiety and apprehension and nervousness, and I’ve got all of ’em on account of fools.”
He raised himself on an elbow, reached to the bedstand for a glass of water, drank about a spoonful, and put the glass back. He bounced around and settled on his side, facing me.