“I don’t mean for your magazine, Mr. Lipscomb, I mean for you personally.”
He frowned. If he wasn’t straight he was good. “I’m afraid I don’t get you.”
“It’s perfectly simple. I heard that talk, all of it. That evening Mrs. Fromm was murdered, and you’re involved, and I have-”
“That’s absurd. I am not involved. Words are my specialty, Mr. Goodwin, and one difficulty with them is that everybody uses them, too often in ignorance of their proper meaning. I’m willing to assume that you used that word in ignorance-otherwise it was slanderous. I am not involved.”
“Okay. Are you concerned?”
“Of course I am. I wasn’t intimate with Mrs. Fromm, but I esteemed her highly and was proud to know her.”
“You were at the party at Horan’s Friday evening. You were one of the last to see her alive. The police, who specialize in words too in a way, have asked you a lot of questions and will ask you more. But say you’re concerned. Everything considered, including what I heard Mrs. Fromm tell Mr. Wolfe, I thought you might be concerned five thousand dollars’ worth.”
“This begins to sound like blackmail. Is it?”
“Search me. You’re the word specialist. I’m ignorant.”
His hands abruptly left his pockets, and for a second I thought he was going to make contact, but he only rubbed his palms together. “If it’s blackmail,” he said, “there must be a threat. If I pay, what then?”
“No threat. You get the information, that’s all.”
“And if I don’t pay?”
“You don’t get it.”
“Who does?”
I shook my head. “I said no threat. I’m just trying to sell you something.”
“Of course. A threat doesn’t have to be explicit. It has been published that Wolfe is investigating the death of Mrs. Fromm.”
“Right.”
“But she didn’t engage him to do that, since surely she wasn’t anticipating her death. This is how it looks. She paid Wolfe to investigate something or somebody, and that evening she was killed. He considered himself under obligation to investigate her death. You can’t be offering to sell me information that Wolfe regards as being connected with her death, because you couldn’t possibly suppress such evidence without Wolfe’s connivance, and you’re not claiming that, are you?”
“No.”
“Then what you’re offering is information, something Mrs. Fromm told Wolfe, that need not be disclosed as related to her death. Isn’t that correct?”
“No comment.”
He shook his head. “That won’t do. Unless you tell me that, I couldn’t possibly deal with you. I don’t say I
He about-faced and was looking out the window, if his eyes were open. All I had was his broad back. He stayed that way long enough to take his temperature, and then some. Finally he turned.
“I don’t see that it would help any, Goodwin, for me to characterize your conduct as it deserves. Good God, what a way to make a living! Here I am, giving all my time and talent and energy in an effort to improve the tone of human conduct-and there you are. But that doesn’t interest you-all you care about is money. Good God! Money! I’ll think it over. I may phone you and I may not. You’re in the book?”
I told him yes, Nero Wolfe’s number, and, not caring to hear any more ugly facts about myself as compared to him, I slunk out. My cheerful little friend at the switchboard might have been willing to buck me up some, but I felt it would be bad for her to have any contact with my kind of character and went right on by.
Down the street I found a phone booth, dialed the number I knew best, and had Wolfe’s voice in my ear.
“Ready with Number Four,” I told him. “Lipscomb. Are you comfortable?”
“Go ahead. No questions.”
His saying “No questions” meant that he was not alone. So I took extra care to give it all to him, including my spot opinion of the improver of the tone of human conduct. That done, I told him it was twenty minutes past twelve, to save him the trouble of looking up at the clock, and asked if I should proceed to Number Five, Paul Kuffner, the public-relations adviser who had operated on me so smoothly when he found me with Jean Estey.
“No,” he said curtly. “Come home at once. Mr. Paul Kuffner is here, and I want to see you.”
Chapter 10
