'This is it. It's that typewriter in there that I showed you the number of and had you put a scratch under it. Mr. Wolfe wants it.'
Wright raised his brows. I went on:
'Of course you don't care why, but if you do maybe he'll tell you some day. The real reason is that he's fond of culture and he don't like to see the members of a swell organization like the Harvard Club using a piece of junk like that in there. I've got a brand new Underwood.' I touched it with my toe. ‹I just brought it, it's a new standard machine. I take it in there and leave it, and bring away the junk, that's _ all. If anyone sees me I am unconcerned. | It's just a playful lark; the club gets what it needs and Mr. Wolfe gets what he wants.'
Wright, smiling, sipped his vermouth. ‹(I hesitate chiefly because you had me mark the junk for identification. I would» do about anything for Nero Wolfe, but I would dislike getting in a mess and having ^L the club dragged in too, perhaps. I suppose you couldn't offer any guarantees on that score?'
I shook my head. 'No guarantees, but knowing how Mr. Wolfe is arranging this charade I'd take you on a thousand to one.' ^ Wright sat a minute and looked at me, and then smiled again. 'Well, I have to get back to the office. Go on with your lark. I'll wait here.'
There was nothing to it. I picked up the Underwood and walked into the alcove with it and set it down on the desk. The public stenographer was there only ten feet away, brushing up his machine, but I merely got too nonchalant even to glance at him. I pulled the junk aside and transferred the shiny cover to it, put the new one in its place, and picked up the Junk and walked out. Wright got up from his chair and walked beside me to the elevator.
On the sidewalk, at the street entrance, Bright shook hands with me. He wasn't smiling; I guessed from the look on his face that his mind had gone back four years to another time we shook hands. He said, 'Give Nero Wolfe my warmest regards, and tell him they will still be warm even if I get kicked out of the Harvard Club for helping to steal a typewriter.'
I grinned. 'Steal my eye, it nearly broke my heart to leave that new Underwood there.'
I carried my loot to where I had parked the roadster on Forty-fifth Street, put it on the seat beside me, and headed downtown. Having it there made me feel like we were getting somewhere. Not that I knew where, but Wolfe either did or thought he did. I didn't very often get really squeamish about Wolfe's calculations; I worried, all right, and worked myself into a stew when it seemed to me that he was overlooking a point that was apt to trip us up, but down in my heart I nearly always knew that anything he was missing would turn out in the end to be something we didn't need. In this case I wasn't so sure, and what made me not so sure was that damn cripple. There was something in the way the others spoke about him, in the way he looked and acted that Monday night, in the way those warnings sounded, that gave me an uneasy idea that for once Wolfe might be underrating a guy. That wasn't like him, for he usually had a pretty high opinion of the people whose fate he was interfering with. I was thinking that maybe the mistake he had made in this case was in reading Chapin's books. He had definite opinions about literary merit, and possibly having rated the books pretty low, he had done the same for the man who wrote them. If he was rating Chapin low, I was all ready to fall in on the other side. For instance, here beside me was the typewriter on which the warnings had been written, all three of them, no doubt about it, and it was a typewriter to which Paul Chapin had had easy and constant access, but there was no way in the world of proving that he had done it. Not only that, it was a typewriter to which most of the other Persons connected with the business had •had access too. No, I thought, as far as Writing those warnings went, nearly -anything you might say about Chapin would be underrating him.
When I got to the house it wasn't eleven o'clock yet. I carried the typewriter to the hall and put it down on the stand while I removed my hat and coat. There was another hat and coat there; I looked at 1 them; they weren't FarrelPs; I didn't recognize them. I went to the kitchen to ask Fritz who the visitor was, but he wasn't there, upstairs probably, so I went back and got the typewriter and took it to the office. But I didn't get more than six feet inside the door before I stopped.
Sitting there turning over the pages of a book, with his stick leaning against the arm of his chair, was Paul Chapin.
Something I don't often do, I went tongue-tied. I suppose it was because I • had under my arm the typewriter he had • written his poems on, though certainly he couldn't recognize it under the cover. But he could tell it was a typewriter. I stood and stared at him. He glanced up and informed me politely: ^I'm waiting for Mr. Wolfe.' « He turned another page in the book, and I saw it was Devil Take the Hindmost,
A
the one Wolfe had marked things in. I said:
'Does he know you're here?'
'Oh yes. His man told him some time ago. I've been here,' he glanced at his wrist, 'half an hour.'
There hadn't been any sign of his noticing what I was carrying. I went over and put it down on my desk and shoved it to the back edge. I went to Wolfe's desk and glanced through the envelopes of the morning mail, the corner of my eye telling me that Chapin was enjoying his book. I brushed off Wolfe's blotter and twisted his fountain pen around. Then I got sore, because I realized that I wasn't inclined to go and sit at my desk, and the reason was that it would put me with my back to Paul Chapin. So I went there and got into my chair and got some plant records from the drawer and began looking at them. It was a damn funny experience; I don't know what it was about that cripple that got under my skin so. Maybe he was magnetic. I actually had to clamp my jaw ^ keep from turning around to look at him, and while I was trying to laugh it off ^eas kept flashing through my mind such as whether he had a gun and if so was it the one with the hammer nose filed down.
I had a good deal stronger feeling of Paul Chapin, behind me, than I've had of lots of people under my eyes and sometimes under my hands too.
I flipped the pages of the record book,» and I didn't turn around until Wolfe came I in.
I had many times seen Wolfe enter the office when a visitor was there waiting for him, and I watched him to see if he would | vary his common habit for the sake of any effect on the cripple. He didn't. He stopped inside the door and said, 'Good morning, Archie.' Then he turned to Chapin and his trunk and head went forward an inch and a half from the • perpendicular, in a sort of mammoth | elegance. 'Good morning, sir.' He proceeded to his desk, fixed the orchids in the vase, sat down, and looked through the mail. He rang for Fritz, took out his pen and tried it on the scratch pad, and when Fritz came nodded for beer. He • looked at me:
