third-”
“What are you doing?” she snapped. “Just trying to see how objectionable you can be?”
“No, I’m demonstrating what a murder investigation is like. If you made that remark to the police, that it happened in ten seconds, you’d never hear the last of it. With me it goes in one ear and out the other, and anyhow I’m not interested, since I’m here only to get what Mr. Wolfe sent me for, and we’d greatly appreciate it if you would give us that list.”
I was all set for quite a speech, but stopped on seeing her put both hands to her face, and I was thinking my lord she’s going to weep with despair at the untimely end of public relations, but all she did was press the heels of her palms against her eyes and keep them there. It was the perfect moment to drop the Memo on the rug, so I did.
She kept her hands pressed to her eyes long enough for me to drop a whole flock of memos, but when she finally removed them the eyes still looked competent.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I haven’t slept for two nights and I’m a wreck. I’ll have to ask you to go. There’s to be another conference in Mr. Erskine’s office about this awful business, it starts in ten minutes and I’ll have to do myself for it, and anyway you know perfectly well I couldn’t give you that list without approval from higher up, and besides if Mr. Wolfe is as intimate with the police as people say, why can’t he get it from them? Talk about your syntax, look at the way I’m talking. Only one thing you might tell me, I sincerely hope you will, who has engaged Mr. Wolfe to work on this?”
I shook my head and got upright. “I’m in the same fix you are, Miss Harding. I can’t do anything important, like answering a plain simple question, without approval from higher up. How about a bargain? I’ll ask Mr. Wolfe if I may answer your question, and you ask Mr. Erskine if you may give me the list. Good luck at your conference.”
We shook hands, and I crossed the rugs to the door without lingering, not caring to have her find the Memo in time to pick it up and hand it to me.
The midtown midday traffic being what it was, the short trip to West Thirty-fifth Street was a crawl all the way. I parked in front of the old stone house, owned by Nero Wolfe, that had been my home for over ten years, mounted the stoop, and tried to get myself in with my key, but found that the bolt was in and had to ring the bell. Fritz Brenner, cook, housekeeper, and groom of the chambers, came and opened up, and, informing him that the chances looked good for getting paid Saturday, I went down the hall to the office. Wolfe was seated behind his desk, reading a book. That was the only spot where he was ever really comfortable. There were other chairs in the house that had been made to order, for width and depth, with a guaranty for up to five hundred pounds-one in his room, one in the kitchen, one in the dining room, one in the plant rooms on the roof where the orchids were kept, and one there in the office, over by the two-foot globe and the book-shelves-but it was the one at his desk that nearly always got it, night and day.
As usual, he didn’t lift an eye when I entered. Also as usual, I paid no attention to whether he was paying attention.
“The hooks are baited,” I told him. “Probably at this very moment the radio stations are announcing that Nero Wolfe, the greatest living private detective when he feels like working, which isn’t often, is wrapping up the Boone case. Shall I turn it on?”
He finished a paragraph, dog-eared a page, and put the book down. “No,” he said. “It’s time for lunch.” He eyed me. “You must have been uncommonly transparent. Mr. Cramer has phoned. Mr. Travis of the FBI has phoned. Mr. Rohde of the Waldorf has phoned. It seemed likely that one or more of them would be coming here, so I had Fritz bolt the door.”
That was all for the moment, or rather for the hour or more, since Fritz entered to announce lunch, which that day happened to consist of corn cakes with breaded fresh pork tenderloin, followed by corn cakes with a hot sauce of tomatoes and cheese, followed by corn cakes with honey. Fritz’s timing with corn cakes was superb. At the precise instant, for example, that one of us finished with his eleventh, here came the twelfth straight from the griddle, and so on.
Chapter 6
I CALLED IT OPERATION Payroll. That name for the preliminary project, the horning-in campaign, was not, I admit, strictly accurate. In addition to the salaries of Fritz Brenner, Charley the cleaning man, Theodore Horstmann the orchid tender, and me, the treasury had to provide for other items too numerous to mention. But on the principle of putting first things first, I called it Operation Payroll.
It was Friday morning before we caught the fish we were after. All that happened Thursday afternoon was a couple of unannounced visits, one from Cramer and one from G. G. Spero, and Wolfe had told me not to let them in, so they went away without crossing the sill. To show how sure I felt that the fish would sooner or later bite. I took the trouble Thursday afternoon and evening to get up a typed report of the Boone case as I knew it, from newspaper accounts and a talk I had had Wednesday with Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I’ve just read that report over again and decided not to copy it all down here but only hit the high spots.
Cheney Boone, Director of the government’s Bureau of Price Regulation, had been invited to make the main speech at a dinner of the National Industrial Association on Tuesday evening at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. He had arrived at ten minutes to seven, before the fourteen hundred guests had gone to their tables, while everyone was still milling around drinking and talking. Taken to the reception room reserved for guests of honor, which as usual was filled with over a hundred people, most of whom weren’t supposed to be there, Boone, after drinking a cocktail and undergoing a quantity of greetings and introductions, had asked for a private spot where he could look over his speech, and had been taken to a small room just off the stage. His wife, who had come with him to the dinner, had stayed in the reception room. His niece, Nina Boone, had gone along to the private spot to help with the speech if required, but he had almost immediately sent her back to the reception room to get herself another cocktail and she had remained there.
Shortly after Boone and his niece had departed for the murder room, as the papers called it, Phoebe Gunther had showed up. Miss Gunther was Boone’s confidential secretary, and she had with her two can openers, two monkey wrenches, two shirts (men’s), two fountain pens, and a baby carriage. These were to be used as exhibits by Boone for illustrating points in his speech, and Miss Gunther wanted to get them to him at once, so she
