“I’m not interested,” he declared. “I have no appetite, and will have no palate. I eat because I must. You know quite well I can’t work on an empty stomach.”
So he was going to work.
I don’t remember a gloomier meal. The food was perfectly edible – oysters, consomme, roast beef, creamed potatoes, broccoli, salad, apple pie with cheese, coffee – and we cleaned it up, but the atmosphere had no sparkle. Though Wolfe never talks business at the table, he likes to talk while eating, about anything and everything but business, and nearly always does. That time he didn’t utter a single word from beginning to end, and I made no effort to start him. Finishing his second cup of coffee, he pushed his chair back and muttered at me, “What time is it?”
I looked. “Twenty after eight.”
“Well.” He pulled air in through his mouth all the way down to the roast beef, and let it out through his nose. “I don’t know if you realize the pickle I’m in.”
“The pickle is split too. Fifty-fifty.”
“Only to a point. The jeopardy, yes, but I have a special difficulty. We’re going to be held here until this case is solved. I can hurry our release only by solving it, but I don’t want to. Certainly people cannot be permitted to murder with impunity, but I would prefer to have no hand in exposing the man who killed that abominable creature. What am I to do?”
I waved a hand. “That’s easy. Sit it out. This room isn’t so bad. You can go to sessions of the state legislature when it meets, and get books from the library, and I can teach Sally Colt things if she’s hung up here too. If it drags on into months, as it probably will if that Groom is the best they’ve got, we can rent a little apartment and send for Fritz -”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir. Or perhaps Sally and I could solve it without you. I don’t feel as grateful to the bird who did it as you seem to. If -”
“Bosh. I am not grateful. I wanted to see him again alive. Very well. As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter. I presume the others are also being held in the jurisdiction.”
“If you mean our confreres, sure they are. Maybe not arrested like us, but held, certainly. Groom’s not sold on us enough to let them go, and anyway Hyatt wants them for his hearing.”
He nodded. “I have to see them. Some of them may be in this hotel. Find them and bring them here.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any suggestions?”
“No. My mind’s not in order. I’ll try to get it arranged by the time you get them.”
That had happened before, many times. He knew that my only alternatives were either to protest that he was biting off more than I could chew, or to take it as a compliment that if he wanted a miracle passed all he had to do was snap his fingers at me; and also he knew which I would pick.
“Okay,” I told him. “Then will you please phone room service to come and get the dishes? And you might as well phone Fritz so he won’t start worrying. I’ve got some thinking to do.”
I went to a window, parted the curtains, put the blind up, and stood looking down at the street by night. It wasn’t the first time I had been given the chore of setting up a party, but it had never been with a gang of private dicks, and they would need something special. Brilliant ideas started coming. Tell them Wolfe thought they would be interested to hear what Hyatt had asked him at the hearing. Tell them Wolfe had an idea for getting all of us released from the jurisdiction and wanted to consult with them. Tell them Wolfe had certain information about the murdered man which he had not given to the police and wanted to discuss it. Tell them that Wolfe thought it was important to fix the time of arrival of each of us at room 42 and wanted us to get together on it. And so on, up to a dozen or so. I rattled them around in my skull. The idea was to get one that would work with all of them.
Suddenly I remembered that Wolfe had once told me that the best way to choose among an assortment of ideas was to take the simplest. I pulled the blind down and turned. He had just finished talking to Fritz and was lowering himself into the chair with arms, which was almost wide enough. I asked him, “You want them together, don’t you?”
He said yes.
“How soon?”
“Oh… twenty minutes. Half an hour.”
I went and sat on the edge of one of the beds, lifted the phone, and told the girl I understood Mr. Harland Ide was registered and would she please ring his room. In two moments his bass, a little hoarse, told me hello.
“Mr. Harland Ide?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Archie Goodwin. I’m calling for Mr. Wolfe. We’re in room nine-oh-two. He would like very much to consult you about something, not on the phone. Right now he’s resting. If you’ll do him the favor of dropping in at room nine-oh-two, say in half an hour, he’ll appreciate it very much. Say nine o’clock. We hope you will.”
A brief silence. “Could you give me an idea?”
“Better not, on the phone.”
A slightly longer silence. “All right, I’ll be there.”
