The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

feet.

Cramer, on the contrary, sat down. “Go to bed if you want to,” he said grimly, “but I’m having a talk with Goodwin.” Already it was Goodwin again. “I want to know who besides Kates had a chance to put that scarf in his coat.”

“Nonsense.” Wolfe was peevish. “With an ordinary person that might be necessary, but Mr. Goodwin is trained, competent, reliable, and moderately intelligent. If he could help on that he would have told us so. Merely ask him a question. I’ll ask him myself.– Archie. Is your suspicion directed at anyone putting the scarf in the coat, or can you eliminate anyone as totally without opportunity?”

“No sir twice,” I told him. “I’ve thought about it and gone over all of them. I was moving in and out between bell rings, and so were most of them. The trouble is the door to the front room was standing open, and so was the door from the front room to the hall.”

Cramer grunted. “I’d give two bits to know how you would have answered that question if you had been alone with Wolfe, and how you will answer it.”

“If that’s how you feel about it,” I said, “you might as well skip it. My resistance to torture is strongest at dawn, which it is now, and how are you going to drag the truth out of me?”

“I could use a nap,” G. G. Spero said, and he got the votes.

But what with packing the scarf in a box as if it had been a museum piece, which incidentally it now is, and collecting papers and miscellaneous items, it was practically five o’clock before they were finally out.

The house was ours again. Wolfe started for the elevator. I still had to make the rounds to see what was missing and to make sure there were no public servants sleeping under the furniture. I called to Wolfe:

“Instructions for the morning, sir?”

“Yes!” he called back. “Let me alone!”

Chapter 24

FROM THERE ON I had a feeling that I was out of it. As it turned out, the feeling was not entirely justified, but anyhow I had it.

What Wolfe tells me, and what he doesn’t tell me, never depends, as far as I can make out, on the relevant circumstances. It depends on what he had to eat at the last meal, what he is going to have to eat at the next meal, the kind of shirt and tie I am wearing, how well my shoes are shined, and so forth. He does not like purple. Once Lily Rowan gave me a dozen Sulka shirts, with stripes of assorted colors and shades. I happened to put on the purple one the day we started on the Chesterton-Best case, the guy that burgled his own house and shot a week-end guest in the belly. Wolfe took one look at the shirt and clammed up on me. Just for spite I wore the shirt a week, and I never did know what was going on, or who was which, until Wolfe had it all wrapped up, and even then I had to get most of the details from the newspapers and Dora Chesterton, with whom I had struck up an acquaintance. Dora had a way of-no, I’ll save that for my autobiography.

The feeling that I was out of it had foundation in fact. Tuesday morning Wolfe breakfasted at the usual hour-my deduction from this evidence, that Fritz took up his tray, loaded, at eight o’clock, and brought it down empty at ten minutes to nine. On it was a note instructing me to tell Saul Panzer and Bill Gore, when they phoned in, to report at the office at eleven o’clock, and furthermore to arrange for Del Bascom, head of the Bascom Detective Agency, also to be present. They were all there waiting for him when he came down from the plant rooms, and he chased me out. I was sent to the roof to help Theodore cross-pollinate. When I went back down at lunch time Wolfe told me that envelopes from Bascom were to reach him unopened.

“Hah,” I said. “Reports? Big operations?”

“Yes.” He grimaced. “Twenty men. One of them may be worth his salt.”

There went another five hundred bucks a day up the flue. At that rate the NIA retainer wouldn’t last long.

“Do you want me to move to a hotel?” I inquired. “So I won’t hear anything unfit for my ears?”

He didn’t bother to answer. He never let himself get upset just before a meal if he could help it.

I could not, of course, be really blackballed, no matter what whim had struck him. For one thing, I had been among those present, and was therefore in demand. Friends on papers, especially Lon Cohen of the Gazette, thought I ought to tell them exactly who would be arrested and when and where. And Tuesday afternoon Inspector Cramer decided there was work to be done on me and invited me to Twentieth Street. He and three others did the honors. What was eating him was logic. To this effect: The NIA was Wolfe’s client. Therefore, if I had seen any NIA person lingering unnecessarily in the neighborhood of Kates’s overcoat as it hung in the hall, I would have reported it to Wolfe but not to anyone else. So far so good. Perfectly sound. But then Cramer went on to assume that with two hours of questions, backtracking, leapfrogging, and ambushing, he and his bunch could squeeze it out of me, which was droll. Add to that, that there was nothing in me to squeeze, and it became quaint. Anyhow, they tried hard.

It appeared that Wolfe too thought I might still have uses. When he came down to the office at six o’clock he got into his chair, rang for beer, sat for a quarter of an hour and then said:

“Archie.”

It caught me in the middle of a yawn. After that was attended to I said:

“Yeah.”