I

That Monday afternoon in October, life indoors was getting to be more than I cared to take. Meaning, by indoors, the office of Nero Wolfe, where I worked, on the ground floor of the house he owned on West Thirty-fifth Street not far from North River. Relief was due soon, since he spent two hours every afternoon, from four to six, with the orchids up in the plant rooms on the roof, but it was still thirty minutes short of four o’clock and I had had all of him I could stand for a while.

I wasn’t blaming him; I was merely fed up with him. It was smack in the middle of the Great Meat Shortage, when millions of pigs and steers, much to the regret of the growers and slaughterers, had sneaked off and hid in order to sell their lives dear, and to Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult. His temper had got so bad that I had offered to let him eat me, and it would be best to skip his retort. By that Monday afternoon he had got so desperate that he had started taking long walks, as, for instance, back and forth between his chair and the bookshelves, and sometimes even through the door into the front room, which faced on Thirty-fifth Street.

So at three-thirty I told him I was going out for an errand down the street, and he was sunk so far in misery and malice that he didn’t even demand to know what the errand was. Then, just as I was reaching for my hat on the rack in the hall, the doorbell rang. I let the hat wait, stepped to the door and opened it, and what I saw jerked my mind loose from the fastenings where it had got glued onto Wolfe’s huff. Standing there on the stoop was one of the most obvious articles I had ever looked at. Though the sun had been shining all day and still was, he had on a raincoat, belted tight. His hat, a glossy black felt number, was too small for him, and it looked out of place for the lids of his light gray eyes to be open because his face was embalmed — or, at least, after he had breathed his last and had been embalmed, his face would look exactly the way it looked now.

“Your name’s Goodwin,” he told me impolitely, without overexerting any muscles.

“Thanks,” I thanked him. “How much do I weigh?”

But he was serious-minded. “Come on out.” He jerked a thumb backwards. “Guy here in a car wants to see you.”

I pause for character identification, wanting to make it clear that I neither scream with fear nor start pulling the trigger every time I see a stranger with an embalmed face reach in his pocket for a cigarette. But in his long career as a private detective Nero Wolfe has aroused many emotions in many people, some of them tenacious, and since I have been employed by him for over ten years my name is undoubtedly on a few lists along with his. So I told the face to hold it a minute, stepped back inside and swung the door shut, went to the office and across to my desk, opened a drawer and took a gun, and put it in my side coat-pocket, leaving my hand there.

As I was heading back for the hall Wolfe demanded peevishly, “What is it? A mouse?”

“No, sir,” I said coldly. “I was asked to descend to the sidewalk to approach a man in a car. The car is at the curb. I recognized the man in it as Dazy Perrit. Since he is one of our most famous citizens I suppose you have heard of him. His latest title is King of the Black Market. He may have formed an opinion, contrary to yours, that I would be good broiled.”

I went. Outdoors on the stoop, after shutting the door and hearing the lock click, I took my hand from my pocket to show the face what was in it, put it back in the pocket, descended the steps to the sidewalk, and crossed to the car, a big black sedan. The man inside cranked the window down.

From behind my right shoulder a voice was saying, “He’s got his hand on a gun in his pocket.”

“Then he’s damn silly,” the man in the car said through the window, “to let you behind him.”

“Huh-uh.” I looked through at Dazy Perrit. It all depended on the conversation. “Mr. Wolfe knows you’re here. What do you want?”

“I want to see Wolfe.”

I shook my head. “Nope.” I was ignoring the hired man. This was the closest I had ever been to Dazy Perrit. To most people he would have seemed a big fat man, but to me, used as I was to the magnitude of Nero Wolfe, he was merely rounded out. His face, smooth and shaved to the pink, was too big for his nose and mouth, but that was unimportant on account of the eyes. Everything he had done and might do was in his black eyes.

“Nope,” I said. “I told you on the phone this morning that Mr. Wolfe is too busy to see you. He’s got more work than he can handle now.”

“I intend to see him. Go in and tell him.”

“Lookit, mister.” I put an elbow on the window sill and leaned in to him. “Don’t think I’m laughing you off. People who laugh you off are apt to show up soon at a funeral, playing the lead. Okay. But neither am I asking any favors. Whatever you have in mind, and you’re being pretty damn stubborn about it, Mr. Wolfe wants no part of it. That may make you sore, which would be a pity and should be avoided if possible, but not half as sore as you would be if you rolled something out in front of him and let him look and then he didn’t like it. That would be really bad, either for him or for you, and don’t be too sure—”

“Archie!”

It was a bellow from my right rear. I straightened and wheeled, and saw the upper half of Wolfe filling the space left by a window he had opened — the rear window of the front room.

He bellowed again, “What does Mr. Perrit want?”

“Nothing,” I called. “He just stopped by—”

“He wants to see you,” the face put in.

“Then confound it, Archie, bring him in here!”

“But I—”

“Bring him in!”

The window banged shut and Wolfe was gone. The face looked searchingly up and down the street, and across, then reached past me to open the door of the car, and Dazy Perrit climbed out.

II

I decided I didn’t know as much about underworld royalty as I thought I did. Surely the thing would have been for the hired man to come along, watching for treachery in all directions at once, but Dazy Perrit told him to stay by the car and entered the house alone with me. Two paces inside the office he stopped to make a survey, probably merely through force of habit, like a veteran general playing golf on a strange course automatically picking out the best spots to place artillery units or hide his tanks. I walked on past him and sat down at my desk, warning myself not to underestimate his potentialities just because he was six inches shorter than me. I was too sore at Wolfe to speak.

“Be seated, sir,” Wolfe said graciously.

Perrit had finished surveying the premises and was surveying Wolfe. After five seconds he spoke as if he were a little irritated. “I don’t like it in here. I’ve got something private for you. Come out and sit in my car.”

I was really on edge because I was sure Wolfe would make himself obnoxious, and getting obnoxious with Dazy Perrit simply had no percentage. But Wolfe said, “My dear sir,” and chuckled in a friendly manner. “I rarely leave my house. I do like it here. I would be an idiot to leave this chair, made to fit me—”

“I know, I know,” Perrit said impatiently. He aimed the black eyes at me. “You go out and sit in my car.”

“No, sir,” Wolfe said emphatically. “Do be seated. That red leather chair is the best one. I do nothing without Mr. Goodwin. If you confided in me, no matter what, under a pledge of confidence, I would tell it all to him as soon as you left.”

“You might make exceptions. I might be a good exception to start with.”

“No, sir.” Wolfe was courteous but firm. “Sit down, Mr. Perrit. Even if you decide against trusting secrets to Mr. Goodwin and me, there’s a little matter I’d like to discuss with you.”

Perrit was no hemmer and hawer. He took three steps to the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk, lowered himself into it, and asked, “What do you want to discuss?”

“Well.” Wolfe’s eyes went half shut. “In my own field I am an expert, and I sell expert information, advice, and services. I am not intimately acquainted with your activities, but I understand that you are also an expert — uh, in a different field. Presumably you know where certain things are and how they may be got. I am on the whole a respectable and virtuous citizen, but like everyone else I have my smudges. Where is some meat?”

“Oh.” Perrit sounded chilly. “Maybe I’ve got you lined up wrong. You want a slice of the meat racket?”

“No. I want slices of beef and pork. I want some meat to eat. Lamb. Veal.”

So that was it. I gazed at my boss in bitter disgust. He had lost all sense of proportion. For the sake of making a wild grab for a rib roast, he had left his chair, walked clear to the front room, opened a window, and invited the most deadly specimen between the Battery and Yonkers into his house.

“Oh,” Perrit said, not so cool, “you’re just hungry.”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s too bad. I’m not a butcher and I’m not a retailer. In fact I’m not in meat at all. But I’ll see—” He broke it off and looked at me as if I was the butler. “Ring Lincoln six-three two three two, between seven and ten in the morning and ask for Tom and use my name.”

“Thank you, sir.” Wolfe was as sweet as stick candy. “I assure you this is appreciated. Now for your own business. Mr. Goodwin told you on the phone this morning that I was too busy to see you. Of course that was flummery. What was in his mind was that while the occupational hazards are relatively high in the detective business, in your business — that is to say, in any activity connected with you — they are substantially higher, and a combination of the two would be inadvisable. I must admit, regretfully, that I agree with him. It would be foolish for you to entrust me with secrets only to be told that I can’t undertake a job for you, so I tell you in advance. I’m sorry.”

“I need help,” Perrit said.

“Doubtless, or you wouldn’t have—”

“I don’t often need help. When I do I get the best there is. I like everything the best. For what I need now, I’ve picked you as the best. I pay for what I get.” Perrit took from his breast pocket a neat little stack of bills, unfolded, held with a rubber band, and tossed it onto Wolfe’s desk. “Fifty C’s. Five grand. That will do for a start. I’m being blackmailed and your job is to stop it.”

I goggled at him. The idea of Dazy Perrit being pestered by a blackmailer was about the same as Billy Sunday being pestered by an evangelist trying to convert him.

“But I’ve told you, Mr. Per—”

“I’m being blackmailed by my daughter. That’s one thing nobody in the world knows except me, and now you and this man of yours. Here’s another thing, and this is even more particular. This is very particular. I wouldn’t tell it to my mother even if I still had one, but I need help. My daughter is—”

“Hold it!”

Dazy Perrit was not easy to stop, but I made it positive enough to stop him. I was out of my chair, standing in front of him. “I want to warn you,” I told his eyes, “that Mr. Wolfe is fully as stubborn as you are. This is damn dangerous for all concerned. He’s told you he doesn’t want to hear it, and neither do I!” I turned savagely to Wolfe. “Good God, what’s wrong with spaghetti and cheese?” I picked up the stack of bills and stuck them out at Perrit.

He ignored it. His eyes hadn’t even shifted to me. He went on to Wolfe, “The particular thing is that my daughter isn’t really my daughter — the one that’s blackmailing me, I mean. Now you know that too, you and this man. I said that nobody else in the world knows it, but she does. I have got a daughter, born in nineteen twenty-five, twenty-one years ago. She’ll be twenty-one next month, November eighth. There’s a job for you to do with her too. What’s up?”

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Perrit.” Wolfe had glanced at the wall clock, pushed his chair back from the desk, and was manipulating his bulk upright. He moved from behind the desk and then stopped, because Perrit, also on his feet, was standing square in his path.

“Where you going?” Perrit asked in a tone which implied that no conceivable answer would be acceptable.

I stood up too, my hand leaving my pocket with the gun in it — that is, in my hand. That may strike some as corny, but it was instinctive and the instinct was sound. I got around town some and was fairly well informed, and so far as I knew no serious argument with Dazy Perrit had ever been settled with any tool but a gun; and up to then Perrit had done all the settling, either personally or by staff work. With what he had already spilled I could see nothing ahead but one fine mess, and I still believe, corn or no corn, that if he had so much as poked a finger at Wolfe’s central bulge I would have dropped him.

But Wolfe said, unperturbed, “I always spend from four to six upstairs with my plants. Always. If you insist on confiding your troubles to me, tell Mr. Goodwin about it. I’ll phone you this evening or in the morning.”

The point was settled, not with words, but with eyes. Wolfe’s eyes won. Perrit moved a step to the right. Wolfe went on by and out, and a moment later the bang of the door on his personal elevator sounded.

Perrit sat down and told me, “You’re crazy. Both of you. What’s that thing in your hand for? Crazy as bedbugs.”

I put the gun on the desk and heaved a sigh. “Okay, tell me about it.”

III

At one point I thought Dazy Perrit was going to break down and cry. That was when he was telling me that his daughter, his real daughter, was up among the top of her class at Columbia. Apparently that made him feel so proud he could hardly bear it.

It wasn’t really very complicated. In his early days in St. Louis Perrit had got married and there was a daughter. Then three things happened in the same week: the daughter had her second birthday, the mother died, and Perrit got three years in the hoosegow for a stick-up. I got only a rough sketch of this and practically nothing of the years that followed, up to 1945; all he gave me was that somewhere along the line, when he had begun to get prosperous, he had got daughter-conscious and had dug her up somewhere in Missouri. He didn’t say where or how he had got her away, but in order to give me the picture he had to explain that she didn’t know she was his daughter. She thought he was merely representing her father, who was very wealthy and couldn’t disclose himself because he was planning to get elected President of the United States or something.

“It was okay,” Dazy Perrit said sourly. “It was working fine. I saw her about every three months and gave her money. Plenty. It was a break for me when she picked a school right here in town. Then Thumbs Meeker bitched it up. He sent a punk to tell me that if there was any little favor he could do for my daughter just to let him know.”

That, of course, from my standpoint, made it even sweeter. Mr. Meeker, called Thumbs on account of his favorite method of getting information from reluctant persons, in which he used both thumbs, was the cave man on the other side of the mountain. If to be associated with Dazy Perrit in anything whatever was a doubtful pleasure, to be yanked in between him and Thumbs Meeker was enough to stall ulcers.

I went on listening to Perrit because there was nothing else to do but shoot him, and I had missed the psychological moment for that. It appeared from developments, he said, that Meeker had not actually tagged his daughter but had merely learned that he had one concealed somewhere. But, he said, the one thing on earth he was afraid of was that someone would find his daughter and tell her the facts. That was what had ruined his life, having a daughter.

“It ruined me,” he said, “because it put water in my guts. Where she’s concerned I can’t think straight and I can’t act straight. You’ve heard I’m tough? You’ve heard that?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard it said.”

“Okay, I’m tough. But there’s plenty of tough ones. The point is I’ve got brains. I’ve got better brains than any man I’ve ever met. If I had got started on another track I could have been anything you care to name. But where she’s concerned my brains don’t work. Look at my coming here and spilling this. Worse yet, look at what I did a year ago April. I rented a penthouse off Fifth Avenue and brought a girl there as my daughter. I knew it was dumb but my brain wouldn’t work and I did it.”

That, he explained, had been for the purpose of drawing Thumbs Meeker off, and also anyone else who might be interested in the Perrit family. With his daughter living there, in the penthouse with him, naturally no one would continue searching for her other places, especially in colleges. It was a very fine arrangement. He had his secret all sewed up.

“Then,” Perrit said, with a sudden change in his tone and a gleam showing in his eyes that I would not have liked at all if he had been talking about me instead of to me, “the little bitch used the pliers on me.”

On that I got details, which he furnished without referring to any notes. The squeeze had started the week before Christmas with a demand for a thousand bucks cash in addition to her weekly allowance of a century. Thereafter she had requested and received:

“Interesting,” I said, “how she went down, then up again, then down, then up again. Interesting psychologically.”

“It strikes you as funny, does it?”

“I didn’t say funny, I said interesting. And by the way, there aren’t many people, I’m not saying I’m not one of them, but there are very few, who would believe a word on it. She has nicked you for nearly twenty-five grand. Why didn’t she happen to have an accident, say about the third nick, like getting in the way of flying pieces of metal or something?”

“That’s all exaggerated,” Perrit said as if he were disappointed in me. “They start rumors and everyone believes them.”

“Nuts.” I grinned at him. “This is off the record, where I hope to God it stays. Why didn’t you handle her or have her handled?”

“My daughter? My own daughter?”

“She wasn’t. She isn’t.”

“As far as anyone knows she is. I would have had to do it myself, and even then it would have been very risky. She has got that all figured. What if she disappears? How would Thumbs Meeker and others dope it? I’d be right back where I started, and they’d be looking for trails again. I’ve looked at it from every angle and it’s no go.”

I shrugged. “Then you’re stuck with an expensive daughter.”

“I’m stuck with a glutton and a damn fool. Last night she hit me for fifty grand. That settles it. I’ve got to have help.”

I whistled. “That takes it beyond psychology. But does she have to disappear? Why don’t you try something short of curtains?”

“I have. Do you think I’ve shelled out with a smile?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Right. I haven’t. But there are limits to that too, since I’ve got her there as my daughter. So I need help. I know lots of people, and I know a lot about lots more. I guess I must know forty or fifty lawyers, and there isn’t one of them I’d spill this to or any part of it. I picked on Nero Wolfe because from what I know of him he’s got brains, and mine won’t work on this. It’s up to Wolfe to dope out a way to handle her.” He pointed at the stack of bills. “That’s just for a start. I’ll pay what it’s worth, and it’s worth plenty.”

“He won’t touch it.”

Perrit ignored that completely. I was beginning to believe that the secret of his success was a gimmick on his eardrums that tuned out all unwanted sounds.

“You’ll need,” he said, “more than you’ve got if you’re going to handle her. You’ll need it all. Her name as my daughter is Violet Perrit. Her real name is Angelina Murphy. How I got onto her doesn’t matter, but she is absolutely covered. She was on the jump in Salt Lake from a rolling and cleaning charge under the name of Sally Smith, and I went out there and got her myself. She’s smooth and no disgrace. When I say my brain wouldn’t work, for instance, I doped it that I’d have her sewed up because Salt Lake would like to have her back if she got tricky, but it didn’t take her long to realize that I couldn’t unload her.”

He told me a lot more that I didn’t want to know, but of course the lions were already loose and more wouldn’t matter. After he finished with Violet Angelina Sally he shifted scenery and the curtain went up on Columbia. His real daughter’s name was Beulah Page, and from the change in his voice when he spoke of her I fully expected him to pull out a wallet and begin showing me snapshots, but he didn’t. To hear him tell it, she had the rest of the students panting along behind in a cloud of dust He gave what seemed to me to be unnecessary details, which I suppose was understandable since there was no one else on earth he could tell about her, except Nero Wolfe, and Wolfe was up with his orchids and paying me to listen — though not near enough. Nothing like enough, if this ended the way I was suspecting it might.

“As I told Wolfe,” Perrit said, “there’s a job for him to do with my daughter too. That’s another danger. There’s a possibility that she might be recognized. She strongly resembles her mother.”

“For God’s sake,” I protested, “whatever Mr. Wolfe may be, he is no plastic surgeon. Try the Red Book.”

“That’s funny, is it?” Perrit asked.

The words weren’t much, but I admit that for the first time his tone hit me in the spine. It put him down on a lower level, and at the same time brought him a lot closer and a lot meaner. Probably members of his staff or the rank and file used it oftener than he did, now that he was at the top. It was the voice of the killer. Apparently cracks about most things might pass without trouble, but no cracks about Beulah.

“Not very,” I said courteously. “Better luck next time. But if you expect Mr. Wolfe to arrange for your daughter to stop resembling her mother—”

“I don’t. You talk too much. She looks like her mother, but what makes it stick out is a trick she has of sitting with her shoulders down, sort of slumped forward, and then straightening up in a certain way, with a little jerk. Her mother did exactly the same thing, and the first time I saw my daughter do it, about a year ago, I saw it was a dead give-away. If anyone who knew her mother happened to see her do that, there’s a good chance they would tumble. I tried to get her to stop it, as well as I could considering who I’m supposed to be, but it didn’t work and I was afraid to emphasize it. I want Wolfe to get her to stop straightening up like that.”

Naturally, five arguments and three or four cracks were on the tip of my tongue, but I set the brake. The only hope was to get him out of there as soon as possible, before he got in an order to tutor Beulah in math, which he had informed me was the only thing she was less than perfect in. But he wasn’t ready to go, though he had spent nearly an hour with me. He had more information about Angelina Violet Sally that he thought might be helpful, suggestions about the best approach to his daughter, remarks regarding the need for immediate and effective action, and various other details. Another secret of his success, I gathered, was that he was good and thorough.

Finally he was on his feet, ready to go. “Violet,” he said, “will still do what I tell her. She thinks she’s going to clean me. You say Wolfe won’t leave the house. If you want her down here, ring me and I’ll see that she comes. You wrote down those phone numbers.”

Answering not his words but his tone, I said, “You saw me put them in the safe.”

“Keep ’em there. Come out and open the door and call Archie.”

I stared at him. “Call who?”

“I said Archie.”

That made the day perfect. The embalmed face’s name was Archie. I took Perrit to the hall, got him his hat and coat, opened the door and stuck my head out for a look, and growled over my shoulder, “All clear. Call him yourself.”

He didn’t have to. My namesake, standing on the alert at the rear corner of the black sedan, had heard the door open and now crossed to the foot of the stoop steps, looked up at his employer, and announced, “Okay.” Dazy Perrit descended the steps and got in the back seat of the car. The face got in front and started the engine, and they rolled off.

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. Fritz Brenner, the chef and groom of the chambers, was there, cutting chives into atoms. He smiled at me.

“Ça va?”

“Boy, does it va,” I told him, and took a gulp of milk. “The only question left is, what color shrouds do we like.”

IV

I made a full and honest report to Wolfe, when he came down to the office from the plant rooms at six o’clock, only because it no longer mattered. Not only did I not want to try to persuade him to lay off, I was even afraid he might. With me crammed to the gills with Dazy Perrit’s closest and fondest secrets, no kind of a brush-off would have been worth a damn. I was, if you want the facts, scared stiff. So nothing was further from my mind than trying to make Wolfe obstinate by riding him.

At seven o’clock I was telling him, “Incidentally, that Lincoln number he gave me is probably the real thing. T-bone. Chateaubriand, as Fritz calls it. Pig’s liver. Fresh pork tenderloin. Of course it will be useless to ring Tom in the morning if we’re not still in good with Dazy — and his five grand in our safe.”

Wolfe muttered at me, “Get Mr. Perrit.”

Then difficulties arose. At the third number on the list I finally got Perrit, and he said we could expect Violet at Wolfe’s office at nine o’clock that evening. It took less than twenty words, discreetly selected at both ends, with no names mentioned, to complete the conversation. Perrit could have been on a party line and no harm done. But in ten minutes he called back to say that previous engagements interfered and the visitor wouldn’t arrive until eleven-thirty. I said that was pretty late and maybe tomorrow would do. No, he said, it would be tonight, between eleven-thirty and midnight.

Wolfe, who had listened in at his desk, grunted and told me, “Get the daughter.”

“Violet? Or Beulah?”

“The daughter. Miss Page.”

“But what the hell. There’s no rush about making her stop straightening up with a jerk. That was just—”

“We don’t even know there is a daughter. All we have is what Mr. Perrit told us. I want to see her. At the very least, I want you to see her.”

“You going to introduce me to her?”

“Pfui. She is twenty-one years old. Flummox her.”

That wasn’t as much of a chore as some he had been known to give me, since Perrit had given me what he thought would be an in. I referred to the list of numbers, dialed one, and after the third buzz there was a voice in my ear.

“Hello, hello, hello?”

It didn’t sound at all like a Phi Beta Kappa, but I reserved judgment and proceeded.

“May I speak to Miss Beulah Page?”

“Sure. Talking. Are you a preacher?”

“No, Miss Page, I’m not. My name is Stevens, Harold Stevens, from Dayton, Ohio. May I have a minute?”

“Sure. Only it’s too bad you’re not a preacher.”

“It certainly is, if you want one. What I want to ask, I would like very much to have a talk with you, this evening, if possible, because I’ll be in the city only a short while. I want to tell you about the Dayton Community Health Center, and, frankly, we thought you might be willing to help us out with a small contribution. You see, the fame of your generosity in matters of community health work has gone pretty far. And I’d like to tell you what we’re doing and planning. I promise not to take much of your time. Perhaps I could run up to see you right now? I could be there in twenty minutes.”

“I don’t—” A pause. “I’m particularly interested in health work.”

“I know you are,” I said warmly.

“The reason I spoke about a preacher, I’m going to be married. We just decided to, just before the phone rang.”

“Well! That’s just fine! I can be there in twenty minutes. Of course I shouldn’t butt in, but I won’t be in the city—”

“That’s all right. Come ahead. Come on and come ahead.”

“Thank you very much.”

I pushed the phone back and told Wolfe, “Lit. Not plastered, but lit.”

He was busy pouring beer, which Fritz had brought, and uttered only a low growl. Nor did he make any comment as he observed me returning the gun, still lying on my desk, to my side coat-pocket, and arranging its little brother, which I got from a drawer, in an armpit holster of my own design.

I did not actually expect ambush and sudden death as I emerged from the house into the early October dark, but I wasn’t kidding myself that any street or any two-legged animal that had become an object of interest to Dazy Perrit was exactly the same street or the same animal it had been before. And though there is absolutely nothing wrong with my nervous system, things looked and felt different as I went to the garage around the corner, got the convertible, and headed uptown.

V

In one way Perrit had given me a false impression of his daughter. I had got the idea that practically all the dough he gave her was dished out for worthy things like textbooks and health work, but it was evident that her apartment on One hundred and twelfth Street had not been furnished with spare change. The big room — and there was nothing like a bed in it, which meant that wasn’t all — was provided with all the articles of comfort and then some. I admit the biggest thing in it was a lacewood desk between two windows, and there was no question about her owning books.

Otherwise Perrit had her right. Her performance on the phone had given me a suspicion that Dazy was just one more male parent with wool over his eyes, but one good look at her was enough. She was no bar heifer. Me not being her father, I could face the reality that she was a little short and overweight, but everything was there that should have been at the age of twenty-one, in its proper place, including a fairly well-arranged face with light-colored eyes totally different from dad’s.

Since she had told me that they had just decided to get married when the phone rang, I was fully expecting to find the lucky man there, and there he was.

“This is Mr. Schane,” Beulah told me, and he came forward for a shake. She went on, “He’s been scolding me. He says I was maudlin on the phone, talking to you about a preacher. Maybe I was, but he shouldn’t have got me drunk.”

“Now wait a minute,” Schane protested with a smile at me and then at her. “Who made the cocktails?”

“I did,” she admitted, and somehow they were next to each other, touching, though neither had deliberately managed it. Evidently they were at the stage where the two organisms naturally float to a junction. She asked me, “Hasn’t a girl got a right to make cocktails when she’s got engaged? By the way, there’s a little left. Won’t you have one?” She went to a table and picked up a shaker. “I’ll get a glass.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I declared, intercepting her. “I ought to be ashamed of myself for busting in on your celebration, and especially right at dinnertime. Why not let me help you go on celebrating, in a mild sort of way? How about a betrothal dinner?” I was giving them my best grin. “With no rooms in hotels, I’m putting up with a friend down on Thirty-fifth Street, and he happens to be a famous man, and also he’s very hospitable. I’ll call him up and tell him we’re coming. All right?”

They looked at each other. “But after all,” Schane objected. “We’re utter strangers, not only to him but to you too.”

“What’s he famous for?” Beulah asked. “Who is he?”

“Nero Wolfe, the detective. I’ve known him for years. He saved my life once — uh, on a murder charge. I was innocent and he proved it.”

“Oh, Morton, let’s go!” Beulah had both her hands on his arm, holding him and looking up at him. “This is my first request as your bride-to-be, to come and eat dinner with Nero Wolfe! You can’t refuse the first one!” She turned her head to me. “We’ll make him go! He has a strong sense of propriety because he’s in his last year at law school and he thinks lawyers are the guardians of everything from social conventions to moral righteousness.”

“Not righteousness,” Schane said firmly. “Right.”

He looked it. He stood, about my height, like a bulwark against something, with a good strong chin, a face that had bones, and, just to round out the picture, dark straight-aiming eyes behind glasses in thick black frames. He said he had intended to go home and do some studying in preparation for a stiff test that was coming. She said, still holding on to his arm, surely not on their engagement evening, and when it ended the way those things always end I got permission to use the phone and crossed over to it.

Fritz’s voice came. “Mr. Wolfe’s residence.”

“Fritz, this is Harold Stevens... No, no, Mr. Wolfe’s guest, Harold Stevens. May I speak to Mr. Wolfe, please?”

VI

My first chance to check on Beulah’s habit that we were supposed to cure her of, sitting with her shoulders slumped and then straightening up with a jerk, came at the dinner table after Fritz had served the broiled chicken and grilled sweet potatoes. It didn’t look particularly noticeable to me, but of course I didn’t have the same background for it as Dazy Perrit. It would have been a cinch to kid her out of it, I thought, if she hadn’t just got herself engaged. A girl who has just collared her man is not likely to be in a frame of mind to be easily persuaded that anything about her needs correcting.

Her man was, in my opinion, a pain in the neck. He seemed to be under the impression that he was already married, with accumulated burdens. The food may not have been red meat but there was nothing wrong with it, as there never is when it has Fritz’s by-line, and the wines were some of the best in Wolfe’s cellar, but he didn’t loosen up once. Law students may think they have a lot on their minds, but my God, this was a celebration of his contract for happiness. I was doing my best to keep it gay and carefree because I was afraid that if the conversation turned serious Beulah would ask me for a detailed account of the activities and plans of the Dayton Community Health Center, and that might have floored me, with her probably up on the lingo. To my surprise, Wolfe helped out by hopping all over the place, asking Beulah about her courses and other concerns, talking about himself and cases he had handled, and even trying to draw Schane out — he actually called him Morton, in a paternal tone — regarding his philosophies and ambitions.

“I don’t really know anything,” Morton told him while Fritz was passing the salad plates, “except law. That’s the worst of a specialized education, it leaves you comparatively ignorant in all other fields. That is certainly regrettable.”

“It is indeed.” Wolfe reached for the bowl of dressing. “But not as regrettable as their ignorance in their own field. I hope, Morton, that you are prepared to face the fact that very few people like lawyers. I don’t. They are inveterate hedgers. They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense. They are insufferable word-stretchers. I had a lawyer draw up a tort for me once, a simple conveyance, and he made it eleven pages! Two would have done it. Have they taught you to draft torts?”

Morton was too well mannered to take offense at his dinner host. “Naturally, sir, that’s in the course. I try not to put in more words than necessary.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, keep it brief. A little more dressing, Harold?”

I nearly muffed that one because my mind was on something else. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, to make a delivery of some kind to Dazy Perrit, and in my opinion we had something to deliver. He certainly didn’t know his daughter was engaged to be married, since it had just happened, and he would probably appreciate being told about it. I decided that as soon as we left the table I would excuse myself, go to my room two flights up, ring Wolfe on the house phone and get his okay, and then call Perrit from the extension in my room.

That worked all right except for the little detail that I couldn’t reach Perrit. I tried all five of the numbers he had given me, following instructions by saying it was Goodyear calling, and got nothing but not in. I left word everywhere for Perrit to call Goodyear and went downstairs to join them in the office, where they were having coffee.

Wolfe and Beulah were singing songs. At least it was as close to singing as I had ever seen him get. She was really pouring it out in words that were strangers to me, apparently songs she had mentioned at dinner that she had learned from a fellow student from Ecuador, and Wolfe was moving a finger to keep time and evidently humming. For him that was drunken revelry, and I would have merely sat and enjoyed it if I had had no worries. But it was past ten o’clock, and the situation called for my driving them home, and I didn’t want to miss Violet, who might beat the gun and arrive before eleven-thirty. So I stayed on my feet.

It wasn’t hard to get them out, because Morton was ready to go anyhow. Wolfe behaved like a gentleman, even getting out of his chair to say good night. I suppose that what was itching Morton was anxiety to get home and study, the wine and song having had no visible effect on him, but I was as wrong as I could be. Out at the curb, as I was opening the door of the convertible, he suddenly put his hand on my shoulder — more intimacy than I had thought him capable of in anything less than a year — and spoke.

“You know, you’re a swell guy, Stevens. That was a swell idea you had. Now I’ve got one, and I don’t think it’s all the wine I drank. Or maybe it is, but so what? Whose car is this?”

“Mr. Wolfe’s. He’s letting me use it.”

“But of course you have a driver’s license?”

The damn lawyer. “Sure,” I said, “I’ve got my license with me.”

“Then, since you wanted to help us celebrate, what do you think of this? You drive us down to Maryland, it will only take four hours, and we’ll get married!” He turned to Beulah, who was there against him. “How’s that for an idea?”

She said promptly and emphatically, “It stinks.”

“What?” He was surprised, “Why?”

“Because it does. I may not have any father or mother, or even aunts or uncles or cousins, but I don’t have to sneak off to Maryland in the dead of night to get a husband. I’m going to have flowers and white things, and sunshine if I get a break. Anyway, I thought you had to study. What about that test?”

“Very well, I do have to study.”

“And in case it might compromise your standing as a future Justice of the Supreme Court to be seen riding through the streets with an orphan, I’ve got an idea myself.” Beulah was on the lope. “You can take the subway, it will get you home to your work just as quick, and Mr. Stevens and I will go somewhere and talk. Or somewhere and dance.” She put a hand on my arm. “I feel guilty, Mr. Stevens, because we haven’t even mentioned your Community Health Center. Couldn’t we discuss that and dance at the same time?”

For a minute it looked as if I would have to crawl from under, but love found a way. The law student filed objections, motions, demurrers, and protestations, and if she had demanded a stipulation that girls with no parents shall be presumed to be descended from Julius Caesar in direct line she would probably have got it. It ended with us all piling in the convertible and heading uptown. Somewhere in the Seventies she mentioned health, and I sidetracked it by saying I’d mail her some literature which would give her the address to send a check to if she felt like it. All was serene and even cordial by the time we stopped at her address, where they both got out, and I declined an invitation to come up for a glass of something, and rolled west toward Broadway.

When I entered the office, Wolfe was seated over by the filing cabinets, with one of the drawers open, looking over plant germination records. I sat down at my desk and asked him, “Did our client call Goodyear?”

“No.”

“He’s missing something. And he narrowly missed already having a son-in-law. Morton wanted me to drive them to Maryland to get tied. Tonight. She pretended that she prefers it another way, but her real reason was that now that she has met me she doesn’t want him at all. She suggested he should take the subway and I should take her places. I’ll have to get out of it somehow. I can’t very well explain to her that I don’t want Dazy Perrit for a father-in-law.”

“Pfui. She’s dumpy.”

“Not so bad. Nothing that couldn’t be adjusted.” Yawning, I glanced at my wristwatch. It said eleven-fourteen. I glanced at the wall clock, a double-take habit I have been trying to get rid of for years, and it said the same.

“I wish Perrit would call,” I remarked. “If we can toss him a few useful items we may get out of this alive. I admit the news that Beulah is engaged is nothing colossal, but at least it’s fresh.”

“We have something for him better than that,” Wolfe declared.

I sent him a sharp glance because his tone had a smirk in it. “Oh? We have?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Something happened while I was out?”

“No. While you were here. In your presence. Evidently you missed it.”

Like that he was unbearable. When he took that attitude I never tried to pry it out of him because (a) I didn’t want to feed his vanity, and (b) I knew he had decided to keep it to himself. So I considered the conversation closed, turned to my desk, elevated the typewriter, and began banging out some routine letters. I was on the fifth one when the doorbell rang.

Wolfe shut the drawer of the cabinet, arose, and started for the only chair he really loved, the one behind his desk.

“Call her Angelina,” I told him as I crossed to the hall. “It’ll upset her.”

VII

Violet Angelina Sally sat in the red leather chair with one knee arranged over the other. Wolfe’s gaze, under half-closed lids, was directed straight at her, and she was meeting it. They had been that way for fully half a minute. Neither of them had spoken a word.

“Like it?” Violet asked with a high-pitched laugh.

“I was trying to decide,” Wolfe muttered, “whether to let you keep the twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars you have got from Mr. Perrit or get that from you too. At least most of it.”

Violet let out a word. Ordinarily I try to report conversations without editing but we’ll let that one go. Wolfe made a face. He never cares for coarse talk, but he can stand it better from men than from women.

Judging from that word, Violet talked coarser than she looked. Of an entirely different design than Beulah, with a nice long flow to her body and a face whose only objectionable characteristics were acquired, she could easily have been made an attractive number by a couple of months on the farm, with fresh eggs and milk and going to bed early. But it was obvious that she hadn’t been on the farm.

“I do not intend,” Wolfe said testily, no longer muttering, “to prolong this. Here’s the situation. You are getting money — having already got the sum I mentioned — from Mr. Perrit by threatening to disclose the existence of his daughter. That, of course, is blackmail—”

“If you think silence gives consent,” Violet put in, “you’re crazy.” Her voice was softer and better handled than might have been expected from her opening word.

“I’ll get along without the consent for the sake of the silence,” Wolfe said dryly. “As I say, that’s blackmail, but I’m not concerned with the legal or criminal aspects. Your position is a little peculiar, which is often the case with blackmailers. Should Mr. Perrit call your hand and should you make the disclosure, you lose your current job and source of income. Also, since he would surely retaliate, the smallest misfortune you might expect would be a jail term in Utah. So, obviously, you are convinced that he won’t call your hand. I agree that it’s highly unlikely. He came to me today to get help. The job is to make you stop demanding money. I took the job.”

“I came down here.” Violet said, “because my father told me to. I simply can’t believe my ears! You say my father told you those lies? Holy Jesus, Dazy Perrit telling anyone I’m not his daughter! Now you think I believe that?”

“I think you find it difficult to believe it, Miss Murphy. Naturally. Because you calculated that Mr. Perrit, desperately anxious to keep his daughter’s identity secret, would under no circumstances tell anyone that you are a counterfeit. But you misjudged his character. You didn’t know, or didn’t stop to consider, that his strongest feeling, stronger even than his feeling for his daughter, is his vanity. Indeed, his feeling for his daughter may be only one aspect of his vanity, but that’s beside the point. He cannot, and will not, tolerate anyone’s ascendancy over him. He can’t stand it to have you diddle him.”

Wolfe shifted to get more comfortable. “But he made the same mistake you did. He misjudged a man’s character. Mine. You have demanded fifty thousand dollars from him. Henceforth, Miss Murphy, whenever you get money from Mr. Perrit, above the hundred dollars a week he allows you, you will give me ninety per cent of it — that’s nine-tenths, ninety dollars from each hundred — within twenty-four hours from the moment you get it, or the Salt Lake City authorities will come and get you.”

Violet stared at him. She took a breath, stared some more, and gulped. “But you—” She stopped and stared some more. Then she broke out, “You goddam fool, you can’t do that to Dazy! He don’t have to let you alone like he does me! All I have to do is tell him—”

She cut it off and started staring again. Suddenly the stare changed, her whole face changed. “Aw, for the love of Christ,” she said contemptuously. “You think I’m that dumb? Dazy thinks I’m that dumb? I give it to you and you hand it to him and he gets off cheap, wouldn’t that be sweet. And he thought I would fall for that?”

She uncrossed her knees and leaned forward. “Listen,” she said earnestly. “I’ve got what it takes, see? You think it don’t take guts to face up to Dazy Perrit and make him fork it over? Wait till I show you.” She began unfastening her dress. “I was at the theater tonight, but you notice I’m wearing sleeves and I’ll show you why.”

She had the fastenings loose and was wriggling it down from her shoulders. Down it came, revealing pink doings, and revealing also a bare arm which she extended. “What do you think of that?” she demanded.

It was quite an exhibit. The black and purple blotches began a few inches below the elbow and continued up to the shoulder curve. Curious as to what he had done it with, I got up and stepped over for a close-up, and she obligingly kept her arm up for me. I couldn’t tell; it might have been fingers or fists, or he might have used something.

“That’s not all,” Violet said on a mixed note of pride and grievance. “There’s other places, but you’d have to pay to see them. And I took it. I told him, listen, I said, if you hurt me enough, don’t think I’ll just go baby. You can’t lock me up, you can’t lock up your daughter, can you? If you hurt me enough I’ll spill it plenty where it will do the most good and I’ll clear out, and try and find me, you or anyone else. So you can let up, see?”

She had the dress back over her shoulders and was starting to fasten it. “He let up. I’ve got Dazy Perrit right, and I’m the only one that ever did that and lived to tell it. And now he thinks he can get most of it back through you with this lousy runaround!” She pronounced the word with which she had declared her position at the start.

Wolfe made another face. “But Miss Murphy.” His tone was even. “You’ll have to think this through. Though my assurance that Mr. Perrit and I didn’t cook this up is worthless to you, I do give that assurance. The point is that even if you are ninety-nine per cent convinced that Mr. Perrit arranged for me to take this line, dare you risk that one per cent? What if I’m acting on my own hook? You would discover it too late. To me you’re no asset at all unless you get money from Mr. Perrit and give most of it to me. I have no stake in you; your fate is of no concern to me. If you get money from Mr. Perrit and don’t give me my share, you’ll never know what minute or where you’ll feel that hand on your shoulder.”

“I wouldn’t be there,” Violet said harshly.

Wolfe sighed. “You’re not thinking straight. Certainly you’d be there. You’ll have to be, if you go on chousing Mr. Perrit. Incidentally, it will be useless for you to repeat this conversation to him. Naturally I have prepared for that, and he won’t believe a word of it.”

“The hell he won’t. He told you to say it.”

“No. He didn’t.” Wolfe pushed his chair back from the desk. “If you knew me better, Miss Murphy, you would believe me when I say that this is strictly my own idea. This is my own scheme, conceived and executed by me alone, and I expect to profit from it. So will you; I’m not trying to freeze you out. Mr. Perrit makes a lot of money. You can keep ten thousand out of every hundred thousand you get.”

Wolfe arose and walked past her to the door. There he turned. “A word of caution, Miss Murphy. Your natural impulse would be to get all you can and disappear. Mr. Perrit might possibly decide not to find you, for obvious reasons. I wouldn’t. I would find you. I am fully as vain as Mr. Perrit. I will not be diddled.”

He went.

Violet had not turned around to see him out. She now sat with her eyes on his chair as if he were still in it. A corner of her lips was screwed around and up. She didn’t seem to be in anything like a panic, merely trying to think straight. Finally she turned her eyes to me and spoke, not as to an enemy:

“My God, he’s fat.”

I nodded at her approvingly. “You’re a brave little woman and I admire you. Luckily you don’t have to toss in or boost the pot now and here. You’ve got time to sleep on it, which is a good idea. Shall I take you home and tuck you in?”

She smiled at me and I grinned back.

“You don’t look like a grifter,” she said. “You look healthy and handsome.”

“Inside,” I said, “I am clean but mean.” I stood up. “I don’t offer to drive you home because I noticed you’ve got your own car. But I can go along just for the air.”

She left her chair, crossed to me, put four fingers carefully and precisely at the top of my forehead, and ran them back over and down my scalp, giving me a comb.

“Air,” she said. “Baby, do I need air!”

“We’ll share it,” I told her. “Ninety per cent for you and ten for me.”

I got my hat and topcoat from the hall, escorted her out, opened the door of her coupé for her, and went around to the other side and climbed in. What I was actually after was not air, nor yet more hair-combing, but insurance against bodily injury. I wasn’t condemning Wolfe for not informing Dazy Perrit before pulling that on her, since he might have thought it up just before she came, or even after she came, but all the same I didn’t care for the sketch as it now stood. If she bounced into the penthouse and blurted it out to Perrit, which she was certainly capable of, there was no way of telling how he might react. Common sense would have told him what Wolfe was up to, trying to get nine out of ten to hand back to him, but the trouble was that there was nothing common about a bird like Perrit, not even sense. Probably he didn’t think there was an honest man on earth. So there I was in her coupe with her.

She was a first-rate driver, fully half as good as me. As she slowed down for a red light at Fortieth Street I said, “Miss Murphy, you’re sunk.”

“Cut out the Murphy,” she snapped. Then she reached to pat me on the knee. “Just call me Angel Food.”

I didn’t have much time, since the penthouse was on Seventy-eighth Street, not more than a few minutes away at that time of night, and I didn’t really intend to go up with her and tuck her in.

“I don’t like angel food,” I told her. “I’ll call you Maple Delight. But you’re absolutely sunk if you try to bull it through. I speak frankly because I admire you in more ways than one, and also because I enjoy life and don’t care to leave it at this point. If you go on putting the bee on Perrit and don’t give Wolfe his nine-tenths, you’re through. Wolfe is a hyena, a vulture, and a jackal. If you do give Wolfe his nine-tenths, Perrit will find it out sooner or later, and then not only will Wolfe get it, which might or might not be a calamity, but I am liable to get it too. Even if I’m not as healthy and handsome as you thought I was there for a minute. I do have my skin on straight and I like it that way.”

“Go on talking.” She didn’t take her eyes from her driving. “You haven’t said anything yet, but your voice goes through me. I won’t even want a drink.”

We were at Fifty-first Street. I went on, “So to show you how selfish I am, I’ve got a suggestion. You haven’t got a chance of cleaning up, not one in a million. You’re squeezed in between Dazy Perrit and Nero Wolfe, and that’s no set-up for a Sherman tank, let alone a lady. The big haul is out for good, and you might as well face it and show you’ve got brains as well as guts.”

I patted her thigh. “So take it, Maple Delight. First, you can keep the screw on Perrit, handing most of it over to Wolfe, but you’d be a sucker if you did. It wouldn’t be worth your measly percentage. Second, you can slide out and away, and my opinion is no good on that because I don’t know how hard you’d find it to make a living. Of course you’d have to travel, which would be a disadvantage if you like New York. Third, and this is my suggestion, you can tell Perrit — or I’ll do it if you want me to — that the gyp is out, you are merely his loving and obedient daughter, but it would be nice to have the weekly handout stepped up to three centuries instead of one.”

She sent me a sharp glance and back again to her driving. I somehow gathered that I was doing fine.

“Wolfe would get no cut,” I said firmly. “I doubt if he would even expect it, and anyhow you can leave that to me. I have — a way of bringing pressure. Almost certainly Perrit would settle for that and no hard feelings. As for you, you don’t have to be a damn pig. That would be fifteen thousand, six hundred bucks a year, no income tax, and I suppose Perrit pays the household expenses, including such items as this car. Six hundred dollars more than a United States Senator gets! You could stay in New York, with no thought of Utah or any other desert, not to mention confined spaces, enjoy your friends, sleep as late as you want, visit the museums and art galleries — what the hell, what if two hundred is as high as he’ll go? That’s twice what a plumber makes! Usually I hate to be driven by a woman, but you’re good. I thought you would be. You’re very good.”

“I can turn corners and back up,” she admitted. “Yeah, art galleries. Are you comic?”

We had made it crosstown and were going north on Fifth Avenue, in the Sixties. “Someday,” I said, “you must drive me up to that roadhouse Perrit owns in Westchester. I just tossed in the art galleries. Forget it. One thing, if my suggestion strikes you at all and you want to think it over, for God’s sake, don’t mention Wolfe’s double-cross to Perrit. Not till you’re sure what you want. That would start, fireworks that nobody could stop.”

“It would?” She was scornful “Or it wouldn’t.”

“If you still think Perrit and Wolfe framed it you’re batty. You don’t know Wolfe.”

“I know Dazy Perrit.” She turned east on Seventy-eighth Street.

“But not Wolfe,” I insisted. “The first chance I get I’ll explain him to you. It’s not only his fat that keeps you from seeing through him. Perrit has met his match twice, first you and now Wolfe.”

She pulled up at the curb on the right, by an awning, and I hopped out and held the door open for her, but she emerged on her own side and came around.

She put a hand on my arm. “We’ll leave the car here. Later I’ll come down and drive you home.”

For the second time that night I was given the job of crawling from under, and this time there was no Morton to give me an assist. I resisted, politely, the pull on my arm and started arranging words, but the words never got spoken. At that instant the question became not whether those words would get spoken, but whether any more words at all would ever get spoken — by me. A car had turned into the street from Fifth Avenue, tearing along in second gear, and slowed down, nearly to a stop, just behind Violet’s coupé. I was aware of it only from noises because my back was to it When Violet’s hold on my arm tightened and her face went stiff and she jerked to the left and tight against me, I reacted fast by whirling around, and the force of my whirl, with her holding my arm, yanked her to one side. The bullets were coming by then. With his gun poked through the open window, the guy in the car had a range of not more than twenty feet.

I think the first bullet got her. Anyhow, the shots came so fast together that that was a minor point. As she went down I went down with her, both because of her drag on my arm, which she held on to, and because my reflexes decided that standing up was a bad idea under the circumstances. Then other reflexes took a hand, and I rolled to the curb and was kneeling behind Violet’s coupé, with the gun from my coat-pocket in my hand, aiming it at the other car, which was on the move again, thirty yards toward Madison Avenue and going fast. I pulled the trigger until the gun was empty. The car was going faster as it crossed Madison.

I was upright by then and I turned to Violet. She was on her hands and knees, trying to get up. As I moved to her she crumpled. I knelt down for a look and saw that one bullet had torn through her cheek, but obviously there were others.

I told her, “Quit moving, kid. Quiet” Then I said, though you won’t believe it and I find it hard to believe myself, “Angel Food.”

She quit moving soon enough. “Uh— uh—” she said. She was gasping, and in between gasps sucking in breath with a hiss. She was trying to talk. “It’s— uh— uh— shame,” she got out. Her chin came up and she screamed at me, “Shame!” Then she gave up and flopped.

I raised up for a glance around. Windows were opening and voices came, and someone was running my way down the sidewalk from Fifth Avenue. The door of the apartment house at the other end of the awning opened, and a man in uniform came out and toward me, a doorman or elevator man. I saw that the one coming down the sidewalk was a cop, so I got upright, called out, “Doctor!” and dived into the apartment house. The lobby was empty, and so was the elevator, with its door standing open. I found the switchboard, plugged in, pushed a button, and dialed a number, trying to remember if I had left it connected to the extension in Wolfe’s room, which I certainly should have done from force of habit.

I had. Finally his voice came. “Nero Wolfe speaking.”

“Archie. I took her home. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house on Seventy-eighth Street. A guy came along in a car and started shooting, and then got away. She is dead. Tell Fritz—”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’ll tell the world I’m hurt, but not with bullets. That bastard Perrit decided to get her and to use us for proof of something, and you can figure out what while I spend the night as a quiz kid. Tell Fritz—”

A voice came at me from behind. “Get offa that phone! Now!”

VIII

Lieutenant Rowcliff of Homicide was one of the reasons why I doubted if the world would ever reach the point of universal brotherhood. It didn’t seem feasible as long as opinions were still loose like mine of Rowcliff.

At ten minutes to three in the morning, in a torture chamber at the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street, where he had established emergency headquarters, Rowcliff said to me, “Very well.” He never used vulgar expressions like okay. “Very well, we’ll lock you up.”

I was yawning, and had to wait till it was finished before answering him. Then I remarked, “You’ve said that four times. I don’t like the idea, and neither will Mr. Wolfe or his lawyer, but I prefer it to more of this. Proceed.”

He merely sat and scowled at me, but no vulgar scowl, a Rowcliff scowl.

“Let me summarize it,” I offered. “Dazy Perrit came to see Mr. Wolfe, to consult him. If I had information for you on that, which I haven’t, it would be only secondhand. The place for you to get that is from Mr. Wolfe.”

“I have told you,” Rowcliff said coldly, “that I have sent a man to see Wolfe, twice, two men, and they were not allowed to enter. The door is bolted, as usual. That man Brenner talked through a crack and said that Wolfe was asleep and he wouldn’t disturb him. That is the impudent and arrogant attitude to be expected.”

“Try him after breakfast,” I suggested. “Say, eleven o’clock.” I was pleased to learn that my undelivered message to Fritz had not been necessary. “Of course I won’t be there to let you in if I’m in a cell. Then, at eleven-forty, twenty minutes before midnight, Perrit’s daughter arrived, apparently to consult Mr. Wolfe about the same thing as her father. You can get that from Mr. Wolfe too. When they were through I escorted Miss Perrit home, with her driving her car. We arrived about twelve-thirty. I glanced at both my wristwatch and the dash clock at Columbus Circle, and it was twelve-twenty-six. We were standing—”

“That’s all down.”

“Okay, and so is this. The man in the car had a handkerchief tied—”

“How do you know it was a handkerchief?”

“Oh, my God, we’re off again. Something white then, possibly torn from his shirt tail, which is why I wouldn’t know him from Adam, because most of his face was behind it. I don’t know whether he was after her or me or both, though I admit it was her he hit. There was a license plate on the car but I couldn’t make it out, or didn’t, which is unimportant since I understand it was hot, having been liberated less than a mile away an hour or so earlier. And found less than six blocks away, near the Eighty-sixth Street subway station. I would like to know if any of my bullets—”

“Where’s Dazy Perrit?”

“You mean now?”

“Now.”

“I have no idea.”

“Is he holed up in Wolfe’s house?”

“Good lord, no. It makes my teeth chatter just to think of it.”

“Did your teeth chatter yesterday, when he was there arranging things with Wolfe?”

“Look, Lieutenant,” I said grimly. “It will soon be dawn. I’ve told it over and over, all I know. I am now going to clam up. I knew a man once who insisted on hunting ducks with a shotgun with a recoil that knocked him flat on his prat every time he pulled the trigger. He seemed to love it. In a way you remind me of him. You know damn well the man to tell you what Perrit and his daughter wanted is Mr. Wolfe. You know damn well I can’t tell you. You also know that if you hold me Mr. Wolfe will resent it and you won’t be able to depend on a thing he says. What do you want to do, get in another jab in a private feud or solve a murder? I warn you I’m going to take a nap, either in a chair, on a cot, or home in bed.”

“Get out of here,” Rowcliff commanded. “Go on, get.”

He pushed a button and passed the word, and a minute later I was on the sidewalk. What had restrained Rowcliff, I was well aware, was nothing said by me, but his uncertainty regarding the amount of co-operation his superior officer, Inspector Cramer, would be wanting from Wolfe.

Anyhow, as I voted against trying to flush a taxi and headed for the subway, it wasn’t Rowcliff I was concentrating on, it was Dazy Perrit. I had come within an ace of spilling it to Rowcliff to give the cops a good start, but knew that wouldn’t do before seeing Wolfe. I also, on my way home to Wolfe’s house, did some useless wondering, like wondering if it was the face named Archie who had done the job.

But mostly I was trying to add it up, and couldn’t even begin. The starting point was this, that Perrit had decided to erase Violet without delay. That much was a cinch. But what was the big idea of dragging Wolfe in, not to mention me? How could he use the Wolfe part as a cover, either for the police or for anyone else, without letting it out that Violet was a phony? And wasn’t that supposed to be the one thing he didn’t want? The reason I particularly wanted those and other questions answered was because I had a certain idea. I am no one-man pestilence; the only times I have shot people it has been purely ad lib, to meet an urgent contingency; but I had decided I would have to shoot Dazy Perrit. It wasn’t merely a hangover from my sensation as I had stood with Violet gripping my arm, watching that gun blaze away at us; it was a realization of where Wolfe and I were sitting and would go on sitting. The risks we took in the cases we worked on, that was all right, that was just part of it. But to be tangled up with the inside affairs of the Perrits and Meekers wasn’t taking a risk, it was simply checking out, with the date of departure the only thing still to be settled.

So as I transferred to the shuttle at Grand Central I was going to shoot Perrit the first chance I got. Four minutes later, when I was transferring again at Times Square, shooting Perrit was obviously the very worst thing I could do. In another four minutes, as I emerged into Thirty-fourth Street, anything and everything was the worst thing I could do. As I felt then, the guy I really wanted to shoot was Wolfe, for having opened that window and yelled to me to bring Perrit in, in a frantic snatch at a pork chop. Turning up Ninth Avenue to Thirty-fifth and then west again, I let the brain float. I was getting close to bed and having a letdown, after all the excitement, followed by two hours of tight feelings at the precinct station with the city employees.

As I neared our stoop I changed my mind again about going to Wolfe’s room for a bedside chat. It could wait till morning. I was getting some satisfaction out of that as I lifted my foot for the first step up to our door, and then instantaneously the satisfaction was gone. What chased it was two men. They came out of the dark corner behind the stone wall of the stoop, and there they were, dose enough to touch.

The one on the right was the face named Archie. The one on the left, and a little back, was Dazy Perrit. The face had a gun showing, in his hand. Perrit’s hands were in his coat-pockets. My guns hadn’t been taken from me, since I had tickets for them, but the one in my coat-pocket wasn’t loaded, and my armpit holster might as well have been up in Yonkers, since my topcoat was buttoned.

“I want to ask you about tonight,” Perrit said. “My car’s around the corner on Eleventh Avenue. Go ahead. We’ll come behind.”

“We can talk here,” I told him. “I’ve often talked to people here.” This was certainly my chance to shoot him, a perfect set-up for self-defense, but I postponed it. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Get going,” he said, in a tone a little different.

It was a cockeyed situation. If I refused to budge I didn’t think they would drill me, because that would have been silly. If that was what they had in mind they wouldn’t have started conversing. If I went up the stoop and put the key in the door I still didn’t think they would drill me, but there were two objections to it. First, they might start operations short of drilling and one thing leads to another, and second, the door was bolted on the inside and I would have to rouse Fritz. Not to mention, third, that with Fritz roused and the door open they would probably decide to come in for a visit.

I decided to stand pat. “I like it—” I started, and stopped, hearing the sound of a car coming. I turned my head to look, because the sound of a car coming got on my nerves after my recent experience with it, and also because it might be a police car if Rowcliff had decided not to wait till eleven o’clock for another try at Wolfe. But it was only a taxicab. They often came through there late at night, on their way to the nest, a company garage around the corner.

I turned back to them. “I like it here. Even if I had ideas, which I haven’t, my gun’s empty, so relax. I emptied it—”

I didn’t duck or dive, I just dropped, flat on the sidewalk, and started rolling. I was thinking I mustn’t bang my head against the stone of the stoop. This time I didn’t see the man in the taxicab at all, even enough of a glimpse to see if he had something white over his face, I was moving too fast, rolling to get around the corner. I had, as I remember it, no sign of an impulse to reach for my gun. If I thought at all I suppose I was thinking that if a man in a taxicab wanted to make holes in Perrit and the face it was nothing to me. I had, and have, no notion what they were doing, but later examination showed that some of the noise I heard was made by them, using their own ammunition.

That noise stopped. The noise of the taxi moving from the scene tapered off. I stuck my head around the corner of the stoop, saw a form as flat as mine had been and much quieter, and scrambled to my feet. There were two forms, the other one around the other corner of the stoop, and it was twitching a little. I saw it still had a gun in its hand, so I stepped over and kicked it out and away. I knelt, first to one and then to the other, for a brief inspection, and finding it likely that no one would ever again consider it dangerous to turn his back on them, mounted the stoop to the front door and pushed the button for Fritz, my private rings. But the rings weren’t needed. Before my finger left the button the door opened for the crack of two inches allowed by the chain of the bolt and a voice came through.

“Archie?”

“Me, Fritz. Open—”

“Do you need help?”

“I need help to get in. Open up.”

He slid the bolt and I pushed and entered.

“Did you kill somebody?” he inquired.

Wolfe’s bellow sounded from the hall one flight up. “Archie! What the devil is it now?”