Wolfe said, “Move closer, Miss Karn, so we won’t have to shout. That red chair is the most comfortable.”
Naomi Karn, without saying anything, got up, crossed to the red chair, recently vacated by May Hawthorne, and sank into it. She was the only one left. Immediately upon the departure of the Hawthornes and Dunns, with entourage, both branches of law and order had deserted us too. Inspector Cramer, noticing the young woman still inconspicuous in her corner, had pampered his curiosity by firing a question at Wolfe, but Wolfe had waved it off and he had abandoned it and hastened after the others.
Wolfe regarded her with half-closed eyes. After a moment he murmured, “Well. Now you’re in a pickle.”
She lifted her brows a trifle and asked, “Me? Not at all.” She wasn’t pasty-faced, as she had been some half an hour before, but she was nothing like as cocky as when she had originally made me sore.
“Oh, yes, you are.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. “Let’s don’t start with caracoles. You know very well you’re in a devil of a pickle. Those policemen are going up there and ask interminable questions. Among others, about Mr. Hawthorne’s will. Even if it’s a political foray, which seems doubtful, they’ll inquire about the will for the sake of appearances. They always do. Then they’ll question you. I expect Inspector Cramer will take that on himself. Mr. Cramer’s weapons are nothing remarkable for penetration, but they can do a lot of bruising.” He pushed a button. “Will you have some beer?”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine any question anyone could ask me that would be difficult or embarrassing to answer.”
“I’ll wager that isn’t true, Miss Karn. I don’t mean merely that there are thousands of questions which I myself would find it difficult or embarrassing to answer, and that doubtless holds for all the members of our race. I mean, specifically, that you were scared half to death when Mr. Skinner announced that Noel Hawthorne was murdered. The confident and defiant intelligence which had flashed from your eyes a moment before, vanished like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Also, specifically, what are you here for now?”
“I’m here because you sent for me and I don’t intend—”
“No no no. We’ve turned that page. Mr. Skinner has. That bomb he lugged in here has started a new chapter. It caused a lull, temporary perhaps but complete, in the hostilities over the will; everyone had forgotten all about it until I asked Mrs. Dunn if she wished me to proceed. Including you. If after the shock of Mr. Skinner’s announcement, you had resumed thinking about the will, your face would have gone on the warpath again, but it didn’t; to this moment it shows only wariness and concern. Your mind isn’t on money, Miss Karn, it’s on murder, and I have nothing to do with that. Why didn’t you get up and go as soon as the others had left? Why did you stay?”
It looked to me as if he had overplayed it, for she wasn’t answering him with words, but with action. She had quietly arisen from her chair and started for the door.
Wolfe spoke, with no change in his tone or tempo, to her receding back:
“When your mind leaves murder for money again, let me know and we’ll talk it over.”
I was feeling disgruntled. Granting that Skinner’s bomb had filled the air with fragments, after all the trouble I had taken to bring her there I saw no sense in his shoving her off like that just to hear himself talk. At least I wasn’t going to aid and abet by opening doors; I sat. Then I saw her feet were dragging, and with her hand on the knob she stopped and stood there with her back to us. After a few seconds of that she turned abruptly, marched back to the red chair, and sat down.
She looked at Wolfe and said, “I stayed because I was sitting there thinking about something.”
He nodded. “Just so,” he said pleasantly. “Did you get anywhere?”
“Yes. I did. I made a decision. I was going to tell you what it was, and before I got a chance you jumped on me, about my being in a pickle and being scared half to death. I’m not scared, Mr. Wolfe.” Her eyes, leveled at him, certainly didn’t look scared, and her voice didn’t sound like it. “You can’t browbeat me. The last time I was in a panic was when I swallowed a live frog at the age of two. I wouldn’t be now, even if I had murdered Mr. Hawthorne myself.”
“That’s fine. I like spunk. What was the decision you made?”
“I’m not sure I’m going to tell you. I’m not sure but what, after all, it would be better to let it be a fight instead of a compromise.”
“Then you haven’t really made a decision.”
“Yes, I have. And I think — I’ll stick to it. I assure you I wasn’t frightened into it, but certainly I made it because of this — this news. I’m not in any pickle now, but I have sense enough to know that with the whole Hawthorne gang for bitter enemies I might be. With their position and influence. They can have half the estate. Half of what was left to me.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe closed his eyes, and after a moment partly opened them again. “So that was your decision.”
“It was.”
“And you think you’ll stick to it.”
“I do.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why is it too bad?”
“Because it’s quite likely that if you had made such an offer, say this morning, when Mr. Stauffer called on you, it would have been accepted. Now, unfortunately, it can’t be considered. Do you want to hear a counterproposal?”
“What is it?”
“That you get a hundred thousand dollars and my clients get the rest.”
Miss Karn got smaller. That was what it looked like, she simply shrank, not back, but in all around. She was smaller. I watched her doing it for ten seconds. But apparently it was only springs coiling tighter inside of her, for all at once she laughed, and it was a pretty good laugh. Then she stopped laughing and said:
“That’s very funny.”
“Oh, no, really, it isn’t a bit funny.”
“But it is.” A sort of chuckle came out of her, like the laugh’s colt trotting along behind. “I mean, it’s funny that Nero Wolfe should be so utterly mistaken. Such an idiotic blunder for you to make! You must even be fool enough to think I killed Hawthorne myself! That would have been quite a trick, since I was in New York all of Tuesday afternoon.”
“I’m not a fool, Miss Karn, and I advise you not to be.”
“I’ll try not.” She arose from her chair and adjusted the blue linen wrap. “Why are you so generous with the hundred thousand? I suppose that’s for me to have a good defense lawyer. It’s sweet of you, simply darling. Will I find a taxi somewhere?”
“Are you going?”
“Yes. I must. Such a nice party.”
“I might be able to persuade my clients to double it. Two hundred thousand. You can reach me here at any time. Taxis are hard to find over here by the river. Mr. Goodwin will take you home. Archie, please stop in the kitchen and tell Saul we’ll dine when you return.”
I headed off a glance of surprise at him. So the son-of-a-gun had taken steps during my absence uptown. Telling the heiress I’d only be a moment, I left her in the hall and proceeded to the kitchen, and sure enough, there was Saul Panzer playing pinochle for matches with Fred Durkin at my breakfast table. His gray eyes, the best eyes for seeing on the face of the globe, looked up at me sharply.
“Where you bound for?” I asked him. “Tail on a woman named Karn?”
“Yes.”
“She’s off. I’m taking her home. 787 Park Avenue, 12D. It’s just possible she’ll ask me to let her out before we get there. You got a car? Good. I’ll take it easy. Across 34th to Park and then uptown. If you get close to her, lash yourself to the mast and count ten. Her middle name is Delilah.”
I went back to the hall and got her and escorted her to the roadster. She made no effort at small talk as I took my time going crosstown on 34th, dawdling until I caught sight, in the driving mirror, of Saul’s coupé only two cars back. I was thinking what a come down. On the trip bringing her to Wolfe’s house I had had seven million bucks there on the seat with me, and now going back apparently all I had was a measly hundred thousand, or at the most twice that. It was no wonder she didn’t feel like talking, after that amount of deflation. She did manage to murmur thanks when I delivered her on the sidewalk in front of her address. Saul had rounded the corner into 73rd, for a parking space. I inspected a wheel until he was in sight again, and then remounted and applied the spur.
I got back home at 8:30, and was touched to find that Wolfe had waited dinner for me, our usual hour being eight o’clock. Fred Durkin was still around at a dollar an hour, which surprised me, since Wolfe wasn’t the kind of man to take expensive precautions when the treasury was plucking at the counterpane. If it had been Saul Panzer or Orrie Cather, he would have eaten with Wolfe and me, but since it was Fred he ate in the kitchen with Fritz. Fred put vinegar on things, and no man who did that ate at Wolfe’s table. Fred did it back in 1932, calling for vinegar and stirring it into brown roux for a squab. Nothing had been said, Wolfe regarding it as immoral to interfere with anybody’s meal until it was down and the digestive processes completed, but the next morning he had fired Fred and kept him fired for over a month.
After dinner we wandered back into the office. Wolfe got himself settled at his desk with the atlas, and I indulged in a grin when I saw that instead of departing for a little journey to Outer Mongolia he had turned to the map of New York Sate and, judging from the slant of his eyes, was freshening up on Rockland County. I had just selected a book for a quiet hour when the phone rang. I got to my instrument and told the transmitter:
“Office of Nero Wolfe.”
Hearing my name in a familiar voice, I told Wolfe it was Saul Panzer, and with a sigh he put the atlas down and took it on his extension, and grunted a green light.
“9:56, sir,” Saul’s voice said. “Subject entered apartment house, delivered by Archie, at 8:14. At 9:12 she came out again, took a taxi to Santoretti’s, Italian restaurant at 833 East 62nd Street, and went in. I went in and ate spaghetti and talked Italian with the waiter. She is there at a table with a man, eating chicken and mushrooms. He has no appetite, but she has. They talk in undertones. I’m phoning from a drugstore at the northwest corner of 62nd and Second Avenue. If they separate after leaving, which one do I take?”
“Describe the man.”
“40 to 45, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds. Drinks. Suit, well-made gray tropical worsted, hat expensive flop-brim gray summer-weight felt. Shaved yesterday. Blue shirt, gray four-in-hand with blue stripe. Medium-square jaw, wide mouth and full lips, long narrow nose, puffy around the eyes, brown eyes with a nervous blink, ears set—”
“That will do. You don’t know him.”
“No, sir.” Saul was apologetic at having to report a man for whom he had no entry in the extensive and accurate card index he carried in his skull.
Wolfe said, “Fred will join you across the street from Santoretti’s as soon as possible. If they separate, give him the man. That woman could be difficult.”
“Yes, sir, I agree.”
Wolfe hung up and tossed me a nod, and I went to the kitchen, where I interrupted Fred in the middle of a yawn that would have held a quart of vinegar. I gave him the picture, told him it was a till further notice, with emphasis on identity, and herded his ungainly bulk through the hall and out the front door. Standing out on the stone stoop for a breath of nice hot July air, watching him hotfoot it for the corner, I observed a taxi zooming along in my direction, heard the brakes screech, and saw it stop with a jerk at the curb below me. A woman got out, paid the driver and dismissed him, crossed the sidewalk and mounted the seven steps, and smiled sweetly at me in the light that came through the open door.
“May I see Mr. Wolfe?”
I nodded hospitably and ushered her into the hall, asked her to wait a minute, and went to the office and told Wolfe that Miss May Hawthorne requested an audience.