offense to you. The idea seemed to be that it would humiliate
you and make you ridiculous if a bull better than your best
bull was cooked and eaten. It struck me as farfetched. Mr.
Pratt maintained that the barbecue was to advertise his busi-
ness.”
“I don’t care a damn. What’s the difference?”
“None, I suppose. But the fact remains that the bull is
a central character in our problem, and it would be a mis-
take to lose sight of him. So is Mr. Pratt, of course. You
reject the possibility that his festering grievance might have
impelled him to murder.”
“Yes. That’s fantastic. He’s not insane … at least I
don’t think he is.”
“Well.” Wolfe sighed. “Will you send for your daughter?”
Osgood scowled. “She’s with her mother. Do you insist
on speaking to her? I know you’re supposed to be competent,
but it seems to me the people to ask questions of are at
Pratt’s, not here.”
“It’s my competence you’re hiring, sir. Your daughter
comes next. Mr. Waddell is at Pratt’s, where he belongs,
since he has authority.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “If you
please.”
Osgood got up and went to a table to push a button, and
then came back and downed his highball, which must have
been as warm as Wolfe’s beer by that time, in three gulps.
The pug-nosed lassie appeared and was instructed to ask Miss
Osgood to join us. Osgood sat down again and said:
“I don’t see what you’re accomplishing, Wolfe. If you
think by questioning me you’ve eliminated everybody at
Pratt’s-”
“By no means. I’ve eliminated no one.” Wolfe sounded
faintly exasperated, and I perceived that it was up to me to
arrange with Pug-nose for more and colder beer. “Elimination,
as such, is tommyrot. Innocence is a negative and can never
be established; you can only establish guilt. The only way I
can apodictically eliminate any individual from consideration
as the possible murderer is to find out who did it. You can’t
be expected to see what I am accomplishing; if you could
do that, you could do the job yourself. Let me give you a
conjecture for you to try your hand on: for example, is Miss
Rowan an accomplice? Did she join Mr. Goodwin last night
and sit with him for an hour on the running board of my car,
which he had steered into a tree, to distract him while the
crime was being committed? Or if you would prefer another
sort of problem …”
He stopped with a grimace and began preparations to
arise. I got up too, and Osgood started across the room toward
the door which had opened to admit his daughter, and
with her an older woman in a dark blue dress with her hair
piled on top of her head. Osgood made an effort to head off
the latter, and protested, but she advanced toward us any-
how. He submitted enough to introduce us:
“This is Mr. Nero Wolfe, Marcia. His assistant, Mr. Good-
win. My wife. Now dear, there’s no sense in this, it won’t help
any …”
While he remonstrated with her I took a polite look. The
farmer’s beautiful daughter who, according to one school of
thought, was responsible for Tom Pratt’s unlucky idea of
making beefsteak out of Hickory Caesar Grindon, was still
beautiful I suppose; it’s hard for me to tell when they’re
around fifty, on account of my tendency to concentrate on
details which can’t be expected to last that long. Anyway,
with her eyes red and swollen from crying and her skin
blotchy, it wasn’t fair to judge.
She told her husband, “No, Fred, really. I’ll be all right.
Nancy has told me what you’ve decided. I suppose you’re
right … you always are right … now you don’t need
to look like that … you’re perfectly right to want to find
out about it, but I don’t want just to shut myself away …
you know Clyde always said it wasn’t a pie if I didn’t have
my finger in it.. .” her lip quivered “… and if it is to be
discussed with Nancy I want to be here …”
“It’s foolish, Marcia, there’s no sense in it.” Osgood had
hold of her arm. “If you’ll just—”
“Permit me.” Wolfe was frowning, and made his tone
crisp. “Neither of you will stay. I wish to speak with Miss
Osgood alone.—Confound it, sir, I am working, and for you!
However I may want to sympathize with grief, I can’t afford
to let it interfere with my job. The job you want done. If you
want it done.”
Osgood glared at him, but said to his wife, “Come, Marcia.”
I followed them three steps and halted him: “Excuse me.
It would be to everyone’s advantage if he had more beer, say
three bottles, and make it colder.”
NANCY, sitting in the chair Osgood had vacated,
looked more adamant than the situation seemed
to call for, considering that Wolfe’s client was her father.
You might have thought she was confronted by hostile forces.
Of course her brother had just been killed and she couldn’t
be expected to beam with cheerful eagerness, but hei adffness
as she sat looked not only tense but antagoiwtic, and her
lips, which only 24 hours before had struck me -i:, being warm
and trembly, now formed a thin rigid colorless line.
Wolfe leaned back and regarded her with half-closed eyes.
“We’ll be as brief as we can with this. Miss Osgood,” he said,
with honey in his mouth. “I thought we might reach our
objective a little sooner with your father and mother absent.”
She nodded, her head tilted forward once and back again,
and said nothing. Wolfe resumed:
“We must manage to accompany your brother yesterday
afternoon as continuously as possible from the time he left
Mr. Pratt’s terrace. Were you and Mr. Bronson and he riding
in one car?”
Her voice was low and firm; “Yes.”
“Tell me briefly your movements after leaving the terrace.”
“We walked across the lawn and back to the car and got
in and came—no, Clyde got out again because Mr. McMillan
called to him and wanted to speak to him. Clyde went over
to him and they talked a few minutes and then Clyde
came back and we drove home.”
“Did you hear his conversation with Mr. McMillan?”
“No.”
“Was it apparently an altercation?”
“It didn’t look like it.”
Wolfe nodded. “Mr. McMillan left the terrace with the
announced intention of advising your brother not to do any-
thing foolish. He did it quietly then.”
“They just talked a few minutes, that was all.”
“So. You returned home, and Clyde had a talk with your
father.” .
“Did he?”
“Please, Miss Osgood.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “Discre-
tion will only delay us. Your father has described the …
unpleasant scene, he called it … he had with his son. Was
that immediately after you got home?”
“Yes. Dad was waiting for us at the veranda steps.”
“Infuriated by the phone call from Mr. Pratt. Were you
present during the scene?”
“No. They went into the library … this room. I went
upstairs to clean up … we had been at Crowfield nearly
all day.”
“When did you see your brother again?”
“At dinnertime.”
“Who was at table?”
“Mother and I, and Mr. Bronson and Clyde. Dad had
gone somewhere.”
“What time was dinner over?”
“A little after eight. We eat early in the country, and we
sort of rushed through it because it wasn’t very gay. Mother
was angry … Dad had told her about the bet Clyde had
made with Monte Cris—with Mr. Pratt, and Clyde was
glum—”
“You called Mr. Pratt Monte Cristo?”
“That was a slip of the tongue.”
“Obviously. Don’t be perturbed, it wasn’t traitorous, your
father has told me of Mr. Pratt’s rancor. You called him
Monte Cristo?”
“Yes, Clyde and I did, and …” Her lip started to quiver,
and she controlled it. “We thought it was funny when we
started it.”
“It may have been so. Now for your movements after
dinner, please.”
“I went to mother’s room with her and we talked a while,
and then I went to my room. Later I came downstairs and
sat on the veranda and listened to the katydids. I was
there when Dad came home.”
“And Clyde?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him after I went upstairs with
mother after dinner.”
She wasn’t much good as a liar; she didn’t know how to
relax for it. Wolfe has taught me that one of the most im-
portant requirements for successful lying is relaxed vocal
cords and throat muscles; otherwise you are forced to put on
extra pressure to push the lie through, and the result is that
you talk faster and raise the pitch and the blood shows in
your face. Nancy Osgood betrayed all of those signs. I
moved my eyes for a glance at Wolfe, but he merely murmured