“How soon?”
“Right now. At once. Without delay.”
I rang off and whirled my chair to face the client. “He's up at your apartment.
I suppose they all are. Do we go? I can still tell him I'm shortsighted and it wasn't you in the chair.”
She arose. She faced Wolfe and she was sagging a little, but then she straightened out the spine. “Thank you,” she said. “If there really isn't anything…”
“I'm sorry, Miss Frost. Nothing now. Perhaps tomorrow. I'll get word to you.
Don't resent Mr. Cramer more than you must. He unquestionably means well. Good night.”
I got up and bowed her ahead and through the office door, and snared my hat in the hall as I went by.
I had put the roadster in the garage, so we had to walk there for it. She waited for me at the entrance, and after she got in and I turned into Tenth Avenue, I told her:
“You've been getting lefts and rights both, and you're groggy. Lean back and shut your eyes and breathe deep.”
She said thank you, but she sat straight and kept her eyes open and didn't say anything all the way to 65th Street. I was thinking that presumably I would make a night of it. Ever since she had busted in on us with the news, I had been kicking myself for having been in such a hell of a hurry to get away from 73rd
Street; it had happened right there at Gebert's car, parked in front of mine, not five minutes after I left. That had been luck for you. I could have been right there, closer than anyone else…
I didn't get to make a night of it, either. My sojourn at the Frost apartment as
Helen's escort was short and sour. She handed me her key to the door to the entrance hall, and as soon as I got it open there stood a dick. Another one was in a chair by the mirrors. Helen and I started to go on by, but got blocked. The dick told us:
“Please wait here a minute? Both of you.”
He disappeared into the living room, and pretty soon that door opened again and
Cramer entered. He looked preoccupied and unfriendly.
“Good evening, Miss Frost Come with me, please.
“Is my mother here? My cousin151”
“They're all here. – All right, Goodwin, much obliged. Pleasant dreams.”
I grinned at him. Tm not sleepy. I can stick around without interfering-”
“You can also beat it without interfering. I'll watch you do that.”
I could tell by his tone there was no use; he would merely have gone on being adamant. I ignored him. I bowed to our client:
“Good night, Miss Frost.”
I turned to the dick: “Look sharp, my man, open the door.”
He didn't move. I reached for the knob and swung it wide open and went on out, leaving it that way. I'll bet by gum he closed it.
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning, Saturday, there was no early indication that the detective business of Nero Wolfe had any burden heavier than a feather on either its mind or its conscience. I had my figure laved and clothed before eight o'clock, rather expecting a pre-breakfast summons to some sort of action from the head of the firm, but I might as well have snoozed my full 510 minutes. The house phone stayed silent. As usual, Fritz took a tray of orange juice, crackers and chocolate to Wolfe's room at the appointed moment, and there was no indication that I was scheduled for anything more enterprising than slitting open the envelopes of the morning mail and helping Fritz empty the wastebasket.
At nine o'clock, when I was informed by the hum of the elevator that Wolfe was ascending for his two hours with Horstmann in the plant rooms, I was seated at the little table in the kitchen, doing the right thing by a pile of toast and four eggs cooked in black butter and sherry under a cover on a slow fire, and absorbing the accounts in the morning papers of the sensational death of Perren
Gebert. It was a new one on me. The idea was that when he started to enter his car he had bumped his head against a sauce dish full of poison which had been perched on a piece of tape stuck to the cloth of the top above the driver's seat, and the poison had spilled on him, most of it going down the back of his neck. The poison wasn't named. I decided to finish with my second cup of coffee before going to the shelves in the office for a book on toxicology to glance over the possibilities. There couldn't be more than two or three that would furnish results as sudden and complete as that, applied externally.
A little after nine o'clock a phone call came from Saul Panzer. He asked for
Wolfe and I put him through to the plant rooms; and then, to my disgust but not my surprise, Wolfe
