understand that I required this document for the impression it would make on your friends, and knowing the impossibility of persuading you to sign it for me, I was compelled to write your , name myself. That is what I wish to apologize for. Here are your gloves, sir.
I take it that my apology is accepted.'
I The cripple took the gloves, felt them, put them in his inside breast pocket, grabbed the arms of his chair and raised himself. He stood leaning on his stick.
'You knew I wouldn't sign such a document? How did you know that?'
'Because I had read your books. I had seen you. I was acquainted with your – let us say, your indomitable spirit.'
'You have another name for it?'
'Many. Your appalling infantile contumacy. It got you a crippled leg. It got you a wife. It very nearly got you two thousand volts of electricity.'
Chapin smiled. 'So you read my books.
Read the next one. I'm putting you in it – a leading character.'
'Naturally.' Wolfe opened his eyes.
'And of course I die violently. I warn you, Mr. Chapin, I resent that. I actively resent it. I have a deep repugnance for violence in all its forms. I would go to any length in an effort to persuade you -'
He was talking to no one; or at least, merely to the back of a cripple who was hobbling to the door.
At the threshold Chapin turned for a moment, long enough for us to see him smile and hear him say: 'You will die, sir, in the most abhorrent manner conceivable to an appalling infantile imagination. I promise you.'
He went.
Wolfe leaned back and shut his eyes. I sat down. Later I could permit myself a grin at the thought of the awful fate in store for Nero Wolfe, but for the moment I had my mind back on Monday afternoon, examining details of various events. I remembered that when I had left to call on Mrs. Burton Wolfe had been there discussing soda water with Fritz, and when I returned he had gone, and so had the sedan. But not to the Tombs to see Paul Chapin. He had never left the house.
The sedan had gone to the garage, and Wolfe to his room, with his coat and hat and stick and gloves, to drink beer in his (easy chair. And at a quarter to four it was from his room that he had telephoned me to take the box to Mrs. Chapin, to give him a chance to fake a return. Of course Fritz had been in on it, so he had fooled me too. And Hibbard shooed off to the third floor for the afternoon…
They had made a monkey of me all right.
I said to Wolfe: 'I had intended to go to a movie after lunch, but now I can't.
I've got work ahead. I've got to figure out certain suggestions to make to Paul Chapin for his next book. My head is full of ideas.'
'Indeed.' Wolfe's bulk came forward to permit him to ring for beer. 'Archie.' He nodded at me gravely. 'Your head full of ideas? Even my death by violence is not too high a price for so rare and happy a phenomenon as that.'
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