“So would yours if you had spent the night rolling around on sidewalks. You mean you have private business with Saul? Have you got him working on something?”
“Certainly. Mr. Perrit’s job.”
“Since when?”
“I phoned him last evening while you were taking Miss Page home. Go and wash your face.”
I went. Usually I resented it when Wolfe froze me out of operations with one of the men he used, but now I was too played out to bother, and besides, Saul was different. It was hard to resent anything about a guy as good as Saul Panzer. At the mirror in my bathroom I saw that there was no question about my face, so I attended to it, deciding to postpone shaving until after breakfast, and then went back down one flight to Wolfe’s room. He had finished his private talk with Saul and was sitting in his underwear, putting on his socks. “What do you want to discuss?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
I stared indignantly. “Well, by God.”
He grunted. “At the moment there is nothing to discuss. You’re out of it. I told Mr. Rowcliff that I engaged to make Mr. Perrit’s daughter stop blackmailing him, and that I threatened her with exposure to the police, and that’s all. He’s an imbecile. He intimated that I am liable to prosecution for attempting to blackmail the daughter.” Wolfe straightened up. “By the way, I suppose it would be futile to call that number, Lincoln six-three two three two, now that Mr. Perrit is dead?”
“I’m out of it,” I said through my teeth and went down to the kitchen for breakfast. Out of it! Look who was calling Rowcliff an imbecile! I even forgot to taste the first three pancakes as they went down. My breakfast was interrupted four times by phone calls. Of course that would go on all day. Only one of the four, the last one, required reporting to Wolfe, which suited me fine, since I wished to keep communication with him at the lowest possible minimum. By that time he had finished breakfast and gone up to the plant room, so I gave him a buzz on the house phone. “A man called,” I told him, “and said his name is L. A. Schwartz and he’s Dazy Perrit’s lawyer. He wanted to come to see you immediately. I told him eleven o’clock. I have his number. If you regard him as out of it too, I can ring him and tell him not to come.”
“Eleven will do,” Wolfe said. “Did you try that Lincoln number? Mr. Perrit said between seven and ten.”
“No,” I said and hung up.
For the next hour and three-quarters my main job would have been to stay awake if it hadn’t been for the phone. Stalling journalists had got to be routine with me over the years, but it took time to handle it so they wouldn’t get down on us. One of the calls was a sample of what might be expected from life from then on as long as it lasted. A guy with a hoarse voice, so hoarse I wished he would take time out to clear his throat, said he was a friend of Dazy Perrit’s and he would like to ask me a couple of questions, and would I meet him at the Seven- Eleven Club some time that afternoon? I told him I was tied up at the office but if he would give me his name and number I would ring him if I found I could make it. He said he didn’t know where he would be, so skip it and he would try again. Then he said, “It was too bad you wasn’t tied up at the office last night,” and hung up.
Another call came from Saul Panzer just before eleven. I put it through to Wolfe and was instructed to stay off the line, an instruction I didn’t need since I was out of it. Before they were through talking the doorbell rang again, for about the tenth time since the cops had left, and this time it was not a gate-crasher to be shooed off but a customer with a reserved seat. I allowed L. A. Schwartz to enter, told him Wolfe would soon appear, and herded him to the office and to a chair. I wouldn’t have picked him for Dazy Perrit’s lawyer. For one thing, he wore old-fashioned nose-pinchers for glasses, which didn’t seem to be the thing. He was sixty, skinny, and silent. I thought I might keep myself awake another five minutes by striking up a conversation, but I got a total of not more than ten words out of him. He sat with his briefcase on his lap and every thirty seconds pulled at the lobe of his right ear. I had abandoned him by the time the sound of Wolfe’s elevator came.
On his way across to his desk Wolfe halted to acknowledge the introduction, made by me in spite of being out of it, purely for the sake of appearances. Then he went to his chair, sat and got himself adjusted, leaned back, and took in the visitor with half-closed eyes.
“Well, sir?” he asked.
Schwartz blinked against the light from the window. “I must apologize,” he said, “for being urgent about this appointment, but I felt there should be no delay.”
He sounded formal. “I gathered from Mr. Perrit last evening that you had not explicitly given your assent, and therefore-”
“May I ask, assent to what?”
“To your appointment, in his will, as executor of his estate and in effect the guardian of his daughter. Did you?”
“Utterly”-Wolfe wiggled a finger at him-“preposterous.”
“I was afraid of that,” Schwartz said regretfully. “It will complicate matters. I’m afraid it’s partly my fault, drafting the documents in such haste. There is a question whether the fifty thousand dollars provided for that purpose will go to the executor if the executor is not you but someone appointed by a court.”
Wolfe grunted. His eyes opened and then half closed again. “Tell me about it,” he said.
X
Schwartz opened the flap of his briefcase, then let it drop back again, and kept it on his lap.
“In the past,” he said, “I have attended to a few little matters for Mr. Perrit of a purely legal nature. I know law, but on account of my temperament I am not a successful lawyer. Last evening he came to my home-a modest little apartment on Perry Street-he has never been to my office-and asked me to draw up some papers at once, in his presence. Luckily I have a typewriter at home but it isn’t very good and you’ll have to overlook typographical deficiencies. It took a long while because I am not fast on a typewriter, and also because of the
