“Oh, no. For that I would charge. It was clipped from an ad for a movie called Meeting at Dawn. The movie of the century. I saw the ad last week in the
Wolfe made a noise at me and murmured again at Jensen, “Well, sir?”
“What am I going to do?” Jensen demanded.
“I’m sure I don’t know. Have you any notion who sent it?”
“No. None at all.” Jensen sounded grieved. “Damn it, I don’t like it. It’s not just the usual junk from an anonymous crank. Look at it! It’s direct and to the point. I think someone’s going to try to kill me, and I don’t know who or why or when or how. I suppose tracing it is out of the question, but I want some protection. I want to buy it from you.”
I put up a hand to cover a yawn. I knew there would be nothing doing-no case, no fee, no excitement. In the years I had been living in Nero Wolfe’s house on West Thirty-fifth Street, acting as a goad, prod, lever, irritant, and chief assistant in the detective business, I had heard him tell at least fifty scared people, of all conditions and ages, that if someone had determined to kill them and was going to be stubborn about it he would probably succeed. On occasion, when the bank balance was doing a dive, he had furnished Gather or Durkin or Panzer or Keems as a bodyguard at a hundred percent mark-up, but now they were all fighting Germans or Japs, and anyhow, we had just deposited a five-figure check from a certain client.
Jensen got sore, naturally, but Wolfe only murmured at him that he might succeed in interesting the police or that we would be glad to give him a list of reliable detective agencies which would provide companions for his movements as long as he remained alive-at sixty bucks for twenty-four hours. Jensen said that wasn’t it, he wanted to hire Wolfe’s brains. Wolfe merely made a face and shook his head. Then Jensen wanted to know what about Goodwin? Wolfe said that Major Goodwin was an officer in the United States Army.
“He’s not in uniform,” Jensen growled.
[Missing.]
Wolfe grunted. “He’ll waste his money. I doubt the urgency of his peril. A man planning a murder doesn’t spend his energy clipping pieces out of advertisements of motion pictures.”
That was Tuesday. The next morning, Wednesday, the papers headlined the murder of Ben Jensen on the front page. Eating breakfast in the kitchen with Fritz, as usual, I was only halfway through the report in the
II
Nero Wolfe said, “Not interested, not involved, and not curious.”
He was a sight, as he always was when propped up in bed with his breakfast tray.
The custom was for Fritz to deliver the tray to his room on the second floor at eight o’clock. It was now eight-fifteen, and already down the gullet were the peaches and cream, most of the unrationed bacon, and two-thirds of the eggs, not to mention coffee and the green tomato jam. The black silk coverlet was folded back, and you had to look to tell where the yellow percale sheet ended and the yellow pajamas began. Few people except Fritz and me ever got to see him like that, but he had stretched a point for Inspector Cramer, who knew that from nine to eleven he would be up in the plant rooms with the orchids and unavailable.
“In the past dozen years,” Cramer said in his ordinary growl, without any particular feeling, “you have told me, I suppose, in round figures, ten million lies.” The commas were chews on his unlighted cigar. He looked the way he always did when he had been working all night-peevish and put upon but under control, all except his hair, which had forgotten where the part went.
Wolfe, who was hard to rile at breakfast, swallowed toast and jam and then coffee, ignoring the insult. Cramer said, “He came to see you yesterday morning, twelve hours before he was killed. You don’t deny that.”
“And I have told you what for,” Wolfe said politely. “He had received that threat and said he wanted to hire my brains. I declined to work for him and he went away. That was all.”
“Why did you decline to work for him? What had he done to you?”
“Nothing.” Wolfe poured coffee. “I don’t do that kind of work. A man whose life is threatened anonymously is either in no danger at all, or his danger is so acute and so ubiquitous that his position is hopeless. My only previous association with Mr. Jensen was in connection with an attempt by an Army captain named Peter Root to sell him inside Army information for political purposes. Together we got the necessary evidence and Captain Root was court-martialed. Mr. Jensen was impressed, so he said, by my handling of that case. I suppose that was why he came to me when he wanted help.”
“Did he think the threat came from someone connected with Captain Root?”
“No. Root wasn’t mentioned. He said he had no idea who intended to kill him.”
Cramer humphed. “That’s what he told Tim Cornwall too. Cornwall thinks you passed because you knew or suspected it was too hot to handle. Naturally Cornwall is bitter. He has lost his best man.”
“Indeed,” Wolfe said mildly. “If that was his best man…”
“So Cornwall says,” Cramer insisted, “and he’s dead. Name of Doyle, been in the game twenty years, with a good record. The picture as we’ve got it doesn’t necessarily condemn him. Jensen went to Cornwall and Mayor yesterday about noon, and Cornwall assigned Doyle as a guard. We’ve traced all their movements-nothing special. In the evening Doyle went along to a meeting at a midtown club. They left the dub at eleven-twenty, and apparently went straight home, on the subway or a bus, to the apartment house where Jensen lived on Seventy- third Street near Madison. It was eleven-forty-five when they were found dead on the sidewalk at the entrance to the apartment house. Both shot in the heart with a thirty-eight, Doyle from behind and Jensen from the front. We have the bullets. No powder marks. No nothing.”
Wolfe murmured sarcastically, putting down his coffee cup and indicating that since I was there I might as well remove the tray, “Mr. Cornwall’s test man.”
