There were a dozen or more FBI men with whom Wolfe and I had had dealings during the war, when he was doing chores for the government and I was in G-2. It had been decided that for the present purpose G. G. Spero, being approximately three per cent less tight-lipped than the others, was the man, so it was to him I sent my card. In no time at all a clean efficient girl took me to a clean efficient room, and a clean efficient face, belonging to G. G. Spero of the FBI, was confronting me. We chinned a couple of minutes and then he asked heartily:
“Well, Major, what can we do for you?”
“Two little things,” I replied. “First, quit calling me Major. I’m out of uniform, and besides, it stimulates my inferiority complex because I should have been a colonel. Second is a request from Nero Wolfe, sort of confidential. Of course he could have sent me to the Chief, or phoned him, but he didn’t want to bother him about it. It’s a little question about the Boone murder case. We’ve been told that the FBI is mixing in, and of course you don’t ordinarily touch a local murder. Mr. Wolfe would like to know if there is something about the FBI angle that would make it undesirable for a private detective to take any interest.”
Spero was still trying to look cordial, but training and habit were too much for him. He started to drum on the desk, realized what he was doing, and jerked his hand away. FBI men do not drum on desks.
“The Boone case,” he said.
“That’s right. The Cheney Boone case.”
“Yes, certainly. Putting aside, for the moment, the FBI angle, what would Mr. Wolfe’s angle be?”
He went at me and kept after me from forty different directions. I left half an hour later with what I had expected to leave with, nothing. The reliance on his three per cent under par in lip tightness was not for the sake of what he might tell me, but what he might tell about me.
Chapter 5
THE LAST NUMBER ON the program proved to be the most complicated, chiefly because I was dealing with total strangers. I didn’t know a soul connected with the National Industrial Association, and so had to start from scratch. The whole atmosphere, from the moment I entered the offices on the thirtieth floor of a building on Forty-first Street, made a bad impression on me. The reception room was too big, they had spent too much money on rugs, upholstery had been carried to extremes, and the girl at the desk, though not a bad specimen from the standpoint of design, had been connected up with a tube running from a refrigerating unit. She was so obviously congealed for good that there wasn’t the slightest temptation to start thawing her out. With females between twenty and thirty, meeting a certain standard in contour and coloring, I do not believe in being distant, but I was with that one as I handed her a card and said I wanted to see Hattie Harding.
The hurdles I had to make, you might have thought Hattie Harding was the goddess of a temple and this was it, instead of merely the Assistant Director of Public Relations for the NIA, but I finally made the last jump and was taken in to her. Even she had space, rugs, and upholstery. Personally, she had quality, but the kind that arouses one or two of my most dangerous instincts, and I do not mean what some may think I mean. She was somewhere between twenty-six and forty-eight, tall, well put together, well dressed, and had skeptical, competent dark eyes which informed you with the first glance that they knew everything in the world.
“This is a pleasure,” she declared, giving me a firm and not cold handshake. “To meet
I concealed my feelings. “On a beeline, Miss Harding. As the bee from the flower.”
She laughed competently. “What! Not to the flower?”
I laughed back. We were chums. “I guess that’s nearer the truth, at that, because I admit I’ve come to get a load of nectar. For Nero Wolfe. He thinks he needs a list of the members of the NIA who were at that dinner at the Waldorf Tuesday evening, and sent me here to get it. He has a copy of the printed list, but he needs to know who is on it that didn’t come and who came that isn’t on it. What do you think of my syntax?”
She didn’t answer that, and she was through laughing. She asked, not as chum to chum, “Why don’t we sit down?”
She moved toward a couple of chairs near a window, but I pretended not to notice and marched across to one for visitors at the end of her desk, so she would have to take her desk chair. The Memo from me to Wolfe, initialed for Inspector Cramer by me, was now in the side pocket of my coat, destined to be left on the floor of Miss Harding’s office, and with the corner of her desk between us the operation would be simple.
“This is very interesting,” she declared. “What does Mr. Wolfe want the list for?”
“Being honest,” I smiled at her, “I can but tell you an honest lie. He wants to ask them for their autographs.”
“I’m honest too,” she smiled back. “Look, Mr. Goodwin. You understand of course that this affair is in the highest degree inconvenient for my employers. Our guest of the evening, our main speaker, the Director of the Bureau of Price Regulation, murdered right there just as the dinner was starting. I am in a perfectly terrible spot. Even if for the past ten years this office has done the best public relations job on record, which I am not claiming for it, all its efforts may have been destroyed by what happened there in ten seconds. There is no-”
“How do you know it happened in ten seconds?”
She blinked at me. “Why-it must-the way-”
“Not proven,” I said conversationally. “He was hit four times on the head with the monkey wrench. Of course the blows could all have been struck within ten seconds. Or the murderer could have hit him once and knocked him unconscious, rested a while and then hit him again, rested some more and hit him the
