including gunmen-maybe housewives, I forget. He did not specifically mention police inspectors.
“Just forgot, perhaps.
“I suppose so. Another thing, those five exceptions that Mr Wolfe made out of his three thousand acquaintances, he didn't say who they were, but I was pretty sure I could name three of them. I thought probably one of the other two was you, but I could have been wrong. You have made a point of how you would hate to see him break his neck where he hasn't got a chance. You took the trouble to come here with a personal message but don't want to be quoted, which means that if I mention this conversation to anyone but Mr Wolfe you'll call me a liar. And what's the message? That he should lay off Zeck, that's what it amounts to. If in earning the fee Mrs Rackham paid him he is liable to hurt somebody Zeck doesn't want hurt, he should return the fee. The way it looks from here, sending a message like that to the best and toughest detective on earth is exactly the kind of service Zeck would pay good money for. I wouldn't say-
I didn't get to say what I wouldn't say. Cramer, out of his chair and coming, had a look on his face that I had never seen before. Time and again I had seen him mad at Wolfe, and me too, but never to the point where the pink left his cheeks completely and his eyes looked absolutely mean.
He swung with his right. I ducked. He came up from beneath with his left, and I stopped it with my forearm. He tried with the right again, and I jerked back, stepped aside, and dived around the corner of Wolfe's desk.
I spoke. “You couldn't hit me in a year and I'm not going to plug you. I'm twenty years younger, and you're an inspector. If I'm wrong, some day I'll apologise. If I'm wrong.
He turned and marched out. I didn't go to the hall to help him on with his coat and open the door.
Chapter Ten
Three weeks went by.
At first, that first night, I was thinking that word might come from Wolfe in the next hour. Then I started thinking it might come the next day. As the days kept creeping along they changed my whole attitude, and before the end of April
I was thinking it might come next week. By the time May had passed, and most of
June, and the calendar and the heat both said summer, I was beginning to think it might never come.
But first to finish with April. The Rackham case followed the routine of spectacular murders when they never quite get to the point of a first-degree charge against anyone. For a week, the front page by unanimous consent; then, for a week or ten days, the front page only by cooking up an angle; and then back to the minors. None of the papers happened to feel like using it to start a crusade in the name of justice, so it took a normal course. It did not roll over and die, not with that all-star cast, including Nobby and Hebe; even months later a really new development would have got a three-column spread; but the development didn't come.
I made three more trips, by official request, to White Plains, with no profit to anyone, including me. All I could do was repeat myself, and all they could do was think up new ways to ask the same questions. For mental exercise I tried to get a line on whether Cramer's notions about Arnold Zeck had been passed on to
Archer and Ben Dykes, but if so they never let on.
All I knew was what I read in the papers, until one evening I ran into Sergeant
Purley Stebbins at Jake's and bought him a lobster. From him I got two little unpublished items: two F.B.I, men had been called in to settle an argument about the legibility of fingerprints on the crinkly silver handle of the knife, and had voted no; and at one point Barry Rackham had been held at White Plains for twenty straight hours while the battle raged over whether they had enough to charge him. The noes won that time too.
The passing days got very little help from rne. I had decided not to start pawing the ground or rearing up until Wolfe had been gone a full month, which would be May ninth, and I caught up on a lot of personal things, including baseball games, which don't need to be itemised. Also, with Fred Durkin, I finished up the poison-pen case and other loose ends that Wolfe had left dangling-nothing important-drove out to Long Island to see if Theodore and the plants had got settled in their new home, and put one of the cars, the big sedan, in dead storage.
One afternoon when I went to Rusterman's Restaurant to see Marko Vukcic he signed the cheques I had brought for telephone and electricity bills and my weekly salary, and then asked me what the bank balance was. I told him a little over twenty-nine thousand dollars, but I sort of regarded Mrs Rackham's ten grand as more or less in bond, so I would rather call it nineteen.
“Could you bring me a cheque for five thousand tomorrow? Drawn to cash.
“Glad to. But speaking as the book-keeper, what do I charge it to?
“Why-expense.
“Speaking as a man who may some day have to answer questions from an internal revenue snoop, whose expense and what kind?
“Call it travel expense.
“Travel by whom and to where?
Marko made some kind of a French noise, or foreign at least, indicating impatience, I think. “Listen, Archie, I have a power of attorney without limit.
