No flush or fluster. She even looked a little amused. “I hope,” she said, “this isn’t a new way of asking me if I’m a Communist.”
“It isn’t. I’m plain and simple. I would just say are you?”
“And I would just say no. At first, when people tried to ask me if I was a Communist without really asking it I got indignant, but I soon saw that was silly. I handle it better now. Are you a Birchite, Mr. Goodwin?”
“I refuse to answer. I’m indignant.”
She laughed a little. “You’ll get over it. As for Dunbar Whipple, he’s special. He’s young and he has a lot to learn, but he’ll be the first Negro mayor of New York City.” She turned. “I warn you, Miss Rowan, some day I may ask you for a different kind of contribution — to the Whipple for Mayor campaign fund. Would you vote for a Negro?”
Lily said it would depend, that she voted for Democrats only, in respect to the memory of her father. I arose to pour coffee, but Miss Brooke looked at her watch and said she had an appointment. Lily gestured toward the terrace and said it was a day to ignore appointments, but Miss Brooke said she couldn’t, it was a meeting about a school boycott. She gave Lily a healthy thank-you handshake, but not me, which was proper, since I hadn’t said definitely that I wasn’t a Birchite. As Lily convoyed her to the foyer I filled my cup and took it to the glass doors to admire the weather.
Lily came to join me. “Quite a gal,” she said. “Fighting her way through that to talk school boycott. If she’s fascinating, it’s lucky for me I’m not.”
“It’s one of your best points,” I said, “that you’re not fascinating.” I put the cup on a plant stand.
“And that I’m rather selfish. Look me in the eye, Escamillo. Take that back about making you secure and happy and comfortable.”
“Not me. I merely said a man.”
“Name one.”
“Nero Wolfe.”
“Ha. What will you bet I couldn’t?”
“Not a dime. I know him, but I know you too. No bet.”
“You would have to move out.” She had a look in her eye, I would say the look of a tiger stalking a herd of deer if I had ever seen a tiger stalk deer. “We would fire Fritz, and of course Theodore. He would read aloud to me. We would ditch the orchids and take out the partitions in the plant rooms and have dancing parties, and you wouldn’t be invited. For lunch we would have peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and—”
I clapped a palm over her mouth with my other hand at the back of her head. With no effort to break away, she tried to bite. I said, “When you’re ready to discuss the subject, shut your right eye.”
She shut her right eye, and I took my hands away. “Well?”
“I stand pat,” she said. “She’s fascinating.”
“To you. It’s perfectly simple. She’s a status-seeker. She wants to be the mayor’s wife.”
“Uhuh. I always laugh at your cracks to make you secure and happy and comfortable, but may I skip that one? You’re trying to get something on her that will keep that colored man from marrying her. Right?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Then two things. First, I don’t think you’ll get anything unless you invent it, and I know you wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s anything to get — anything bad enough to count. Second, if there is, I hope you don’t get it through anything you heard here. I couldn’t blame you, but I would blame me. If she and that Negro want to get married they may be darned fools, of course I think they are, but it’s their lookout. So do me a favor. If you stop it, and something you heard here got you started on what stops it, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. That’s me. You know?”
“Sure.” I looked at my wrist: a quarter to three. “If I had any personal feelings about it they would be about the same as yours, but I haven’t. Rights all over the place. She has a right to marry him. He has a right to marry her. The father and mother have a right to butt in, they’ve been doing it for ten thousand years. Nero Wolfe has a right to meet an obligation to a man. I have a right to earn my pay by doing what I’m told, providing it doesn’t clash with my right to stay out of jail. So I’ll run along and drop in at the office of the Parthenon Press, which is only a few blocks from here.”
“There won’t be anyone there. Look at that snow. I can beat you at gin. Don’t they send people home?”
I looked. “They might at that. May I use the phone?”
She was right. I got an answer, but not from the switchboard girl. Some man told me that everybody had gone. When I hung up Lily called through an open door, “I’m in here. Come on. I have a right to win enough to pay for the lunch.”
She did, about.
Chapter 3
That was a new experience. Over the years I have checked on a lot of people — a thousand, two thousand — but always after something specific, anything from an alibi to a motive for murder. With Susan Brooke I was simply checking. Because I am interested in me, I would give two bits to know which I would have preferred, to dig up something that would brand her good, or to find nothing at all worth mentioning. At the time I was just doing a job, and enjoying it carefree because there was nothing at stake for Wolfe or me.
I spent three days, parts of them, and three evenings at it. It didn’t take long to cross off the Parthenon Press lead. She hadn’t done her reading at the office, and only three people, two editors and a stenographer, had known her. One of the editors hadn’t liked her, but I gathered, from a remark by the stenographer, that he had made a pass at her and missed.
The UN lead took longer; it took half a day to find out where she had worked. It would take another half a day for me to write, and you half an hour to read, all the items I collected. According to one source, she had got tight at a farewell luncheon for some Greek. According to another source, she hadn’t. She had been so friendly with a Polish girl that she actually took her to the country for a summer weekend. Three times, or maybe four or five, she had been taken to lunch in the delegates’ dining room by a Frenchman with a reputation. I followed that one up a little, but it fizzled out. She had once been seen leaving the building with a Moroccan girl, a Hungarian, and a Swede. And so forth and so on. It was very educational. The UN is wonderful for broadening a man’s outlook. For instance, Turkish girls have short legs and Indian girls have flat feet.
At ten o’clock Saturday evening I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone, used my key to get in, put my coat and hat on the rack, and went down the hall to the office. Wolfe was behind his desk in the only chair in the world that really suits him, with a book, William Shakespeare, by A. L. Rowse. I stood while he finished a paragraph. He looked up.
I spoke. “You know, I don’t think I have ever known you to take so long with a book.”
He put it down. “I’m reviewing his dating of Cymbeline. I think he’s wrong.”
“Then let’s send it back.” I spun my chair around and sat. “I took a Moroccan girl to dinner at Rusterman’s. On me. She doesn’t dance, so I took her home. Today was merely more of the same, not worth reporting. Tomorrow is Sunday. I don’t mind this caper, I’m enjoying it, but it’s a washout. I suggest that you tell Whipple that if there’s something wrong with Miss Brooke it’s buried deep.”
He grunted. “You like her.”
“Not especially. I told you Wednesday evening that my guess was that she is comparatively clean. It still is.”
“How candid are you?”
“So-so. I’m trying.”
“Where is Racine?”
“Between Chicago and Milwaukee. On the lake.”