walk around them.
Bowen sat behind a beautiful dark-brown desk with nothing on it but the Wall Street Journal and an ash tray. One of his little hands held a long fat cigarette with smoke curling up from it that smelled like a Turkish harlot – at least it smelled like what I would expect if I ever got close to one. I didn't like that guy. If I'd had my choice of pinning a murder on him or Paul Chapin, I'd have been compelled to toss a coin. 1 He thought he was being decent when he grunted at me to sit down. I can stand a real tough baby, but a bird that fancies himself for a hot mixture of John D.
Rockefeller and Lord Chesterfield, being all the time innocent of both ingredients, gives me a severe pain in the sitter. I told him what I was telling all of them, that I would like to know about the last time he had seen Andrew Hibbard, and all details.
He had to think. Finally he decided the last time had been more than a week • before Hibbard disappeared, around the I twentieth of October, at the theater. It had been a party, Hibbard with his niece and Bowen with his wife. Nothing of any significance had been said, Bowen declared, nothing with any bearing on the present situation. As he remembered it, ^_ there had been no mention of Paul›k I Chapin, probably because Bowen had J been one of the three who had hired the Bascom detectives, and Hibbard disapproved of it and didn't want to spoil the evening with an argument.
I asked him, 'Hibbard had a trading account with your firm?'
He nodded. 'For a long while, over ten years. It wasn't very active, mostly back and forth in bonds.'
'Yeah. I gathered that from the statements among his papers. You see, one thing that might help would be any evidence that when Hibbard left his apartment that Tuesday evening he had an idea that he might not be back again. I can't find any. I'm still looking. For instance, during the few days preceding his disappearance, did he make any unusual arrangements or give any unusual orders regarding his account here?' | Bowen shook the round thing that he used to grow his hair on. 'No. I would have been told… but I'll make sure.'
From a row on the wall behind him he pulled out a telephone, and talked into it.
He waited a while, and talked some more.
He pushed the phone back, and turned to me. 'No, as I thought. There has been no transaction on Andy's account for over two weeks, and there were no instructions from him.'
I bade him farewell.
That was a good sample of the steady progress I made that day in the search for Andrew Hibbard. It was a triumph. I found out as much from the other six guys I saw as I did from Ferdinand Bowen, so I was all elated when I breezed in home around dinner time, not to mention the fact that with the roadster parked on Ninetieth Street some dirty lout scraped the rear fender while I was in seeing Dr.
Burton. I didn't feel like anything at all, not even like listening to the charming gusto of Wolfe's dinner conversation – during a meal he refused to remember that there was such a thing as a murder case in the world – so I was glad that he picked that evening to leave the radio turned on.
After dinner we went to the office. Out of spite and bitterness I started to tell him about all the runs I had scored that afternoon, but he asked me to bring him the atlas and began to look at maps.
There were all sorts of toys he was apt to begin playing with when he should have had his mind on business, but the worst of all was the atlas. When he got that out I gave up. I fooled around a while with the plant records and the expense account, then I closed my affairs for the night and went over to his desk to look him over. He was doing China! The atlas was a Gouchard, the finest to be had, and did China more than justice. He had the folded map opened out, and with his pencil in one hand and his magnifying glass in the other, there he was buried in the Orient.
Without bothering to say good night to him, for I knew he wouldn't answer, I picked up his copy of Devil Take the Hindmost and went upstairs to my room, stopping in the kitchen for a pitcher of milk.
B After I had got into pajamas and slippers I deposited myself in my most comfortable chair, under the reading lamp, with the milk handy on the little tile-top table, and took a crack at Paul |Chapin's book. I thought it was about •time I caught up with Wolfe. I flipped through it, and saw there were quite a few places he had marked – sometimes only a phrase, sometimes a whole sentence, occasionally a long passage of two or three paragraphs. I decided to concentrate on those, and I skipped around and took them at random: … not by the intensity of his desire, but merely by his inborn impulse to act; to do, disregarding all pale considerations…
For Alan there was no choice in the matter, for he knew that the fury that spends itself in words is but the mumbling of an idiot, beyond the circumference of reality.
I read a dozen more, yawned, and drank some milk. I went on:
She said, 'That's why I admire you… / don't like a man too squeamish to butcher his own meat.ff … and scornful of all the whining eloquence deploring the awful brutalities of war; for the true objection to war is not the blood it soaks into the grass and the thirsty soil, not the bones it crushes, not the flesh it mangles, not the warm nutritious viscera it exposes to the hunger of the innocent birds and beasts. These things have their beauty, to compensate for the fleeting agonies of this man and that man. The trouble with war is that its noble and quivering excitements transcend the capacities of our weakling nervous systems; we are not men enough for it; it properly requires for its sublime sacrifices the blood and bones and flesh of heroes, and what have we to offer? This little coward, that fat sniveler, all these regiments of puny cravens…
There was a lot of that. I got through it, and went on to the next. Then some more. It got monotonous, and I skipped around. There were some places that looked interesting, some conversations, and a long scene with three girls in an apple orchard, but Wolfe hadn't done any marking there. Around the middle of the book he had marked nearly a whole chapter which told about a guy croaking two other guys by manicuring them with an axe, with an extended explanation of | how psychology entered into it. I thought that was a pretty good job of writing.
Later I came across things like this, for instance: … for 'what counted was not the worship of violence, but the practice of it.
Not the turbulent and complex emotion, but the act. What had killed Art Billings and Curly Stephens? Hate? No. Anger?
No. Jealousy, vengefulness, fear, enmity?
