'It wasn't a blunder!' Lloyd squawked. 'It could have happened to anyone--'
Whereupon he did blunder. I think what made him lose his head completely was hearing his own voice and realizing it was a hysterical squawk and he couldn't help it. He made a dash for the door. I knocked Judge Arnold down in my rush across the room, which was unnecessary, for by the time I arrived Purley Stebbins had Lloyd by the collar, and Cramer was there too. Hearing a commotion behind me, I turned around. Clara James had made a dive for Peggy Mion, screeching something I didn't catch, but her father and Adele Bosley had stopped her and were getting her under control. Judge Arnold and Rupert the Fat were excitedly telling Wolfe how wonderful he was. Peggy was apparently weeping, from the way her shoulders were shaking, but I couldn't see her face because it was buried on Fred's shoulder, and his arms had her tight.
Nobody wanted me or needed me, so I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
Bullet for One
It was her complexion that made it hard to believe she was as scared as she said she was.
'Maybe I haven't made it clear,' she persisted, twisting her fingers some more though I had asked her to stop. 'I'm not making anything up, really I'm not. If they framed me once, isn't that a good enough-reason to think they are doing it again?'
If her cheek color had been from a drugstore, with the patches showing because the fear in her heart was using extra blood for internal needs, I would probably have been affected more. But at first sight of her I had been reminded of a picture on a calendar hanging on the wall of Sam's Diner on Eleventh Avenue, a picture of a round- faced girl with one hand holding a pail and the other hand resting on the flank of a cow she had just milked or was going to milk. It was her to a T, in skin tint, build, and innocence.
She quit the finger-twisting to make tight little fists and perch them on her thigh fronts. 'Is he really such a puffed-up baboon?' she demanded. 'They'll be here in twenty minutes, and I've got to see him first!'
74 Rex Stout
Suddenly she was out of the chair, on her feet. 'Where is he, upstairs?'
Having suspected she was subject to impulses, I had, instead of crossing to my desk, held a position between her and the door to the hall.
'Give it up,' I advised her. 'When you stand up you tremble, I noticed that when you came in, so sit down. I've tried to explain, Miss Rooney, that while this room is Mr. Wolfe's office, the rest of this building is his home. From nine to eleven in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, he is absolutely at home, up in the plant rooms with his orchids, and bigger men than you have had to like it. But, what I've seen of you, I think possibly you're nice, and I'll do you a favor.'
'What?'
'Sit down and quit trembling.'
She sat down.
'I'll go up and tell him about you.'
'What will you tell him?'
'I'll remind him that a man named Ferdinand Pohl phoned this morning and made a date for himself and four others, to come here to see Mr. Wolfe at six o'clock, which is sixteen minutes from now. I'll tell him your name is Audrey Rooney and you're one of the four others, and you're fairly good-looking and may be nice, and you're scared stiff because, as you tell it, they're pretending they think it was Talbott but actually they're getting set to frame you, and--'
'Not all of them.'
'Anyhow some. I'll tell him that you came ahead of time to see him alone and inform him that you have not murdered anyone, specifically not Sigmund Keyes, and to warn him that he must watch these stinkers like a hawk.'
Curtains for Three 75
'It sounds crazy--like that!'
'I'll put feeling in it.'
She left her chair again, came to me in three swift ff steps, flattened her palms on my coat front, and tilted fipher head back to get my eyes.
'You may be nice too,' she said hopefully.
'That would be too much to expect,' I told her as I Hfcurned and made for the stairs in the hall.
II
pounds Ferdinand Pohl was speaking.
k: Sitting there in the office with my chair swiveled so that my back was to my desk, with Wolfe himself bell hind his desk to my left, I took Pohl in. He was close to sitwice my age. Seated in the red leather chair beyond |sthe end of Wblfe's desk, with his leg-crossing histing ghis pants so that five inches of bare shin showed above I his garterless sock, there was nothing about him to command attention except an unusual assortment of glacial creases, and nothing at all to love.
'What brought us together,' he was saying in a |. thin peevish tone, 'and what brought us here together, <is our unanimous opinion that Sigmund Keyes was ^murdered by Victor Talbott, and also our conviction--' 'Not unanimous,' another voice objected. The voice was soft and good for the ears, and its owner was good for the eyes. Her chin, especially, was the kind you can take from any angle. The only reason I hadn't seated her in the chair nearest mine was that on her arrival she had answered my welcoming smile with nothing but brow-lifting, and I had decided to hell with her until she learned her manners. 'Not unanimous, Ferdy,' she objected.
76 Rex Stout
'You said,' Pohl told her, even more peevish, 'that you were in sympathy with our purpose and wanted to join us and come here with us.'
