She is remarkable too, in her way: the Spartan type. She didn't even clench her hands while I was sewing her; the fingers were positively relaxed.'
'Indeed. You will want her name and address for your record.',
'I have it, thanks. She wrote it down | for me.' i 'Thank you, doctor.'
Vollmer went. Wolfe got to his feet, pulled at his vest in one of his vain attempts to cover the strip of canary yellow shirt which encircled his magnificent middle, and preceded me to the office. I stopped to ask Fritz to clean off the inside of the furpiece as well as he could. • By the time I joined them Wolfe was back in his chair and she was sitting facing | him. He was saying to her: i 'I am glad it was no worse, Mrs. | Chapin. The doctor has told you, you must be careful not to jerk the stitches loose for a few days. By the way, his fee – did you pay him?'
'Yes. Five dollars.' ai 'Good. Reasonable, I should say. Mr. j Goodwin tells me your cab is waiting. Tell the driver to go slowly; jolting is always J abominable, in your present condition even dangerous. We need not detain you longer.'
She had her eyes fixed on him again.
Getting washed off and wrapped up hadn't made her any handsomer. She took a breath through her nose and let it out again so you could hear it.
She said, finally, 'Don't you want me to tell you about it? I want to tell you what he did.' Wolfe's head went left and right. 'It isn't necessary, Mrs. Chapin. You should go home and rest. I undertake to notify the police of the affair; I can understand your reluctant delicacy; after all, one's own husband to whom one has been married three years… I'll attend to that for you.'
'I don't want the police.' That woman could certainly pin her eyes. 'Do you think I want my husband arrested? With his standing and position… all the publicity… do you think I want that? •That's why I came to you… to tell you about it.'
'But, Mrs. Chapin.' Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. 'You see, you came to the wrong place. Unfortunately for you, you came to the one man in New York, the one man in the world, who would at once understand what really happened at your home this morning. It was unavoidable, I suppose, since it was precisely that man, myself, whom you wished to delude. The devil of it is, from your standpoint, that I have a deep aversion to being deluded.
Let's just call it quits. You really do need rest and quiet, after your nervous tension and your loss of blood. Go on home.'
Of course, as had happened a few times before, I had missed the boat; I was swimming along behind trying to keep up.
For a minute I thought she was going to get up and go. She started to. Then she was back again, looking at him. She said:
'I'm an educated woman, Mr. Wolfe.
I've been in service and I'm not ashamed of that, but I'm educated. You're trying to talk so I won't understand you, but I |do.' • w 'Good. Then there is no need -'
She snapped at him suddenly and violently. 'You're a fat fool!', ^ Wolfe shook his head. 'Fat visibly, though I prefer Gargantuan. A fool only in the broader sense, as a common characteristic of the race. It was not magnanimous of you, Mrs. Chapin, to blurt my corpulence at me, since I had spoken of your fatuity only in general terms and had refrained from demonstrating it. I'll do that now.' He moved a finger to indicate the knife which still lay on the newspaper on the desk.
'Archie, will you please clean that homely weapon.'
I didn't know, I thought maybe he was bluffing her. I picked up the knife and stood there with it, looking from her to him. 'Wash off the evidence?'
'If you please.'
I took the knife to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, rubbed the blood off with a piece of gauze, and wiped it.
Through the open door I couldn't hear any talking. I went back.
'Now,' Wolfe instructed me, 'grip the – handle firmly in your right hand. Come | towards the desk, so Mrs. Chapin can see you better; turn your back. So. Elevate your arm and pull the knife across your neck; kindly be sure to use the back of the blade, not to carry the demonstration too far. You noted the length and the position of the cuts on Mrs. Chapin? Duplicate them on yourself. – Yes. Yes, quite good.
A little higher for that one. Another, somewhat lower. Confound you, be careful. That will do. – You see, Mrs. 1 Chapin? He did it quite neatly, don't you think? I am not insulting your intelligence by hinting that you expected us to think the wounds could not have been selfinflicted in the position you chose for them. More likely, you selected it purely as a matter of precaution, knowing that the front, the neighborhood of the ( anterior jugular…' ^ He stopped, because he had no one to | talk to except me. When I turned around after my demonstration she was already getting up from her chair, holding her head stiff and a clamp on her mouth.
Without a word, without bothering to make any passes at him with her little gray glass eyes, she just got up and went; and ' – -'^ no attention, he went on with his speech until she had opened the office door and was through it. I noticed she was leaving her knife, but thought we might as well have it in our collection of odds and ends. Then all of a sudden I jumped for the hall.
'Hey, lady, wait a minute! Your fur!'
I got it from Fritz and caught her at the front door and put it around her. Pitney Scott got out of his cab and came over to help her down the stoop, and I went back in. •- • – - – ^ Wolfe was glancing through a letter from Hoehn and Company that had come in the morning mail. When he had finished he put it under a paperweight – a piece of petrified wood that had once been used to bust a guy's skull – and said:
'The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of a penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The
