Because I didn’t feel like breaking my fast with Rognons aux Montagnes, which is lamb kidneys cooked with broth and red wine, not to mention assorted spices, and because Wolfe would not permit talk of business during a meal, and because I wanted to look at the morning papers and couldn’t if I sat at the table with him, I ate in the kitchen. Fritz, who understands me, had fresh hot oatmeal ready, the chill off my bottle of cream, the eggs waiting for the pan, the ham sliced thin for the broiler, the pancake batter mixed, the griddle hot, and the coffee steaming. I made a pass as if to kiss him on the cheek, he kept me off with a twenty-inch pointed knife, and I sat down and started the campaign against starvation with the Times propped up in front of me.
After lunch, or breakfast, depending on which room you ate in, I went to the office and before long Wolfe joined me. From the expression on his face I gathered that coolness was absent from our relationship until the next one, now that he had surrendered on the typewriter, but if he thought I was going to reciprocate by surrendering on the new car he should have known me better.
However, I decided not to bring it up immediately after his lunch. He got adjusted in his made-to- order chair behind his desk and asked: “What have they decided about Mr. Naylor? Death by misadventure?” “No, sir. They think someone tried to hurt him. At that, Cramer shows signs of having a noodle. He can discover nothing on Thirty-ninth Street, or in that neighborhood, that would account for Naylor being there. Also, he refuses to believe that Naylor obligingly lay on the pavement, and lay still so the driver of the car could make the wheels hit exactly the same spots, his head and legs that had been hit on Moore. He concludes that Naylor was killed somewhere else, probably a blow or blows on the head, that the body was taken to Thirty-ninth Street in the car and deposited on the pavement and the car driven over it, and that the car wheels smashing the head obliterated the mark or marks of the blow or blows that killed him. The scientists are going over the inside of the car with microscopes for evidence that the body was carried in it. Cramer doesn’t say so out loud, but he’s wishing to God he had done likewise with the car that killed Moore.” “Has anyone been arrested?” “Not up to six o’clock, when I left. Deputy Commissioner O’Hara wanted to arrest me, but Cramer needed me. I was very helpful.” “Does Mr. Cramer still think you lied in your report to Mr. Pine?” “No, but O’Hara does. I admit I lied to him. I told him that you’re just a front here and the real brains of this business is a skinny old woman with asthma that we keep locked in the basement.” Wolfe sighed and leaned back. “I suppose you’d better tell me all about it.” I did so. Assuming that he wanted everything, I gave it to him, including not only facts but also a few interpretations and some personal analysis. It was obvious, I explained, that Cramer was now taking my word for gospel, since he had concentrated on the units of personnel I had told him about, though he had also used the police file on the death of Waldo Moore as a reference work, and doubtless they were all in that. I interpreted Gwynne Ferris by remarking that her broadcasting of the news she got from my filing cabinet might have been a highly intelligent cover for intentions and plans of her own, or it might have been merely promiscuous chin pumping, and I refused to commit myself until I had known her much longer-a minimum of five years. Whichever it was, the result was the same: assuming that Naylor had been finished off because of his announcement that he knew who had killed Moore, everyone was eligible. Up to six o’clock, when I had left, neither elimination nor spotlighting had even got a start, although Cramer had his whole army going through the routine-collecting alibis, tracing the movements of people, including Naylor, trying to find witnesses of events on Thirty-ninth Street, Ninety-fifth Street, Forty-eighth Street, and other vital spots, and all the rest of it. They had found no one who would admit seeing Kerr Naylor after he left the building on William Street Friday afternoon, or any knowledge of him. That was interesting, because it left it that Gwynne Ferris and I were the last people who had seen him alive. It had been around half-past five when he had walked in on us in my room at Naylor-Kerr to tell me I was a liar. Everybody else had left for the day, and none of the elevator boys remembered taking him down. One of O’Hara’s strongest convictions had been that Naylor and I had left the building together, and I had merely shrugged it off. It’s a waste of time trying to extract a conviction from an Irishman.
When I was empty, both of facts and of annotations, I observed, “One thing to consider, you know what we were hired for, to establish the manner of Moore’s death. Remember your letter to Pine? Well, that seems to be established, anyhow as far as the cops are concerned. So have we still got a client? If we go on wearing out your muscles and my brains, do we get paid?” Wolfe nodded. “That occurred to me, naturally. I telephoned Mr. Pine this morning, and he seems a little uncertain about it. He says there will be a directors’ meeting Monday morning and he’ll let us know. By the way, his wife came to see me this morning.” “What! Cecily? Up and around before noon? What did she want?” “I haven’t the slightest idea. Possibly she knows, but I don’t. I suspect she’s hysterical but manages somehow to conceal it. Her ostensible purpose was to learn exactly what her brother said to you his last three days. She wanted it verbatim and she wanted to pay for it. How the devil that woman has any money left, with her passion for getting rid of it, is a mystery. She asked me to tell you that the baseball tickets will reach you Thursday or Friday. She also wanted to know if you are taking care of your face.” He wiggled a finger at me.
“Archie. That woman is a wanton maniac. It would be foolhardy to accept baseball tickets-” The doorbell rang.
“If it’s her again,” Wolfe commanded me in quick panic, “don’t let her in!” It wasn’t. I went to the hall, to the front door, and opened up, and was confronted by one of the faces I like best, Saul Panzer’s.
“What the hell,” I asked as he entered and hung his cap on the rack, “did you trip up on Bascom’s forgery and have to solicit?” Saul is always businesslike, never frolicsome, but now he was absolutely glum.
He didn’t even return my grin.
“Mr. Wolfe?” he asked.
“In the office. What bit you?” He went ahead and I followed. Saul never sits in the red leather chair, not on account of any false modesty that he doesn’t rate it, but because he doesn’t like to face a window. Having the best pair of eyes I know of, not even excepting Wolfe, he likes to give them every advantage. He picked his usual perch, a straight-backed yellow chair not far from mine, and spoke to Wolfe in a gloomy tone.
“I believe this is about the worst I’ve ever done for you. Or for anybody.” “That could still be true,” Wolfe said handsomely, “even if you had done well.
You said on the phone that you lost him. Did he know he was being followed? What happened?” “It wasn’t that bad,” Saul asserted. “It isn’t often that a man spots me on his tail, and I’m sure he didn’t. Of course he might have, but we can’t ask him now.
Anyhow, he was walking west on Fifty-third Street, uptown side, between First and Second Avenues-” “Excuse me,” I put in. “Shall I go upstairs and take a nap or would you care to invite me to join you?” “He was following Mr. Naylor,” Wolfe informed me.
It was nothing new for Wolfe to take steps, either on his own or with one or more of the operatives we used, without burdening my mind with it. His stated reason was that I worked better if I thought it all depended on me. His actual reason was that he loved to have a curtain go up revealing him balancing a live seal on his nose. I had long ago abandoned any notion of complaining about it, so I merely asked: “When?” “Yesterday. Last evening. Go ahead, Saul.” Saul resumed. “I was across the street and thirty paces behind. He had been walking, off and on, for two hours, and there was nothing to indicate he was ready to quit. There was no warning, such as keeping an eye to the rear for a taxi coming. He did it as if he got the idea all of a sudden. A taxi rolled past me, and just as it got even with him he yelled at it, and the driver made a quick stop, and he ducked across to it and hopped in, and off it went. I was caught flat-footed. I ran after it to the corner, Second Avenue, but the light was green and it went
