“That will do, Archie.” Wolfe put down his empty glass. I had never heard his tone more menacing. “I am not impressed by your failure to understand this abominable outrage. I might bring myself to tolerate it if some frightened or vindictive person shot me to death, but this is insupportable.” He made the growling noise again. “My food. You know my attitude toward food.” He aimed a rigid finger at the jar, and his voice trembled with ferocity. “Whoever put that in there is going to regret it.”
He said no more, and I concentrated on the beans and pickles and milk. When he had finished the cheese he got up and left the room, taking the third bottle of beer along, and when I was through I cleared the table and went to the kitchen and washed up. Then I proceeded to the office. He had his mass deposited in the oversized chair behind his desk, and was leaning back with his eyes closed and a twist to his lips which showed that the beer descending his gullet had washed no wrath down with it. Without opening his eyes he muttered at me, “Where’s that jar?”
“Right here.” I put it on his desk.
“Get Mr. Whipple, at the laboratory.”
I sat at my desk, and looked up the number and dialed it. When I told Wolfe I had Whipple he got himself upright and reached for his phone and spoke to it:
“Mr. Whipple?... This is Nero Wolfe. Good afternoon, sir. Can you do an analysis for me right away?... I don’t know. It’s a glass jar containing a substance which I foolishly presumed to be edible... I have no idea. Mr. Goodwin will take it down to you immediately.”
I was glad to have an errand that would take me away from that den of dejection for an hour or so, but something more immediate intervened. The doorbell rang and, since Fritz was out of commission, I went to answer it. Swinging the front door open, I found myself confronted by something pleasant. While she didn’t reach the spectacular and I’m not saying that I caught my breath, one comprehensive glance at her gave me the feeling that it was foolish to regard the world as an abode of affliction merely because Fritz had the grippe. Her cheeks had soft in-curves and her eyes were a kind of chartreuse, something the color of my bathroom walls upstairs. They looked worried.
“Hello,” I said enthusiastically.
“Mr. Nero Wolfe?” she asked in a nice voice from west of Pittsburgh. “My name is Amy Duncan.”
I knew it was hopeless. With Wolfe in a state of mingled rage and despondency, and with the bank balance in a flourishing condition, if I had gone and told him that a good-looking girl named Duncan wanted to see him, no matter what about, he would only have been churlish. Whereas there was a chance... I invited her in, escorted her down the hall and into the office, and pulled up a chair for her.
“Miss Duncan, Mr. Wolfe,” I said, and sat down. “She wants to ask you something.”
Wolfe, not even glancing at her, glared at me. “Confound you!” he muttered. “I’m engaged. I’m busy.” He transferred it to the visitor: “Miss Duncan, you are the victim of my assistant’s crack-brained impudence. So am I. I see people only by appointment.”
She smiled at him. “I’m sorry, but now that I’m here it won’t take long—”
“No.” His eyes came back to me. “Archie, when you have shown Miss Duncan out, come back here.”
He was obviously completely out of control. As for that, I was somewhat edgy myself, after the three days I had just gone through and it looked to me as if a little cooling off might be advisable before any further interchange of sentiments. So I arose and told him firmly, “I’ll run along down to the laboratory. Maybe I can give Miss Duncan a lift.” I picked up the jar. “Do you want me to wait—?”
“Where did you get that?” Amy Duncan said.
I looked at her in astonishment. “Get it? This jar?”
“Yes. Where did you get it?”
“Bought it. Sixty-five cents.”
“And you’re taking it to a laboratory? Why? Does it taste funny? Oh, I’ll bet it does! Bitter?”
I gawked at her in amazement. Wolfe, upright, his eyes narrowed at her, snapped, “Why do you ask that?”
“Because,” she said, “I recognized the label. And taking it to a laboratory — that’s what I came to see you about! Isn’t that odd? A jar of it right here—”
On any other man Wolfe’s expression would have indicated a state of speechlessness, but I have never yet seen him flabbergasted to a point where he was unable to articulate. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you were actually aware of this infamous plot? That you knew of this unspeakable insult to my palate and my digestion?”
“Oh, no! But I know it has quinine in it.”
“Quinine!” he roared.
She nodded. “I suppose so.” She stretched a hand toward me. “May I look at it?” I handed her the jar. She removed the lid, took a tiny dab of the contents on the tip of her little finger, licked it off with her tongue, and waited for the effect. It didn’t take long. “Br-r-uh!” she said, and swallowed twice. “It sure is bitter. That’s it, all right.” She put the jar on the desk. “How very odd—”
“Not odd,” Wolfe said grimly. “Odd is not the word. You say it has quinine in it. You knew that as soon as you saw it. Who put it in?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I came to see you for, to ask you to find out. You see, it’s my uncle— May I tell you about it?”
“You may.”
She started to wriggle out of her coat, and I helped her with it and got it out of her way so she could settle back in her chair. She thanked me with a friendly little smile containing no trace of quinine, and I returned to my desk and got out a notebook and flipped to a blank page.
“Arthur Tingley,” she said, “is my uncle. My mother’s brother. He owns Tingley’s Tidbits. And he’s such a pigheaded—” She flushed. “Well, he is pigheaded. He actually suspects me of having something to do with that quinine, just because — for no reason at all!”
“Are you saying,” Wolfe demanded incredulously, “that the scoundrel, knowing that his confounded tidbits contain quinine, continues to distribute them?”
“No,” she shook her head, “he’s not a scoundrel. That’s not it. It was only a few weeks ago that they learned about the quinine. Complaints began to come in, and thousands of jars were returned from all over the country. He had them analyzed, and lots of them contained quinine. Of course, it was only a small proportion of the whole output — it’s a pretty big business. He tried to investigate it, and Miss Yates — she’s in charge of production — took all possible precautions, but it’s happened again in recent shipments.”
“Where’s the factory?”
“Not far from here. On West Twenty-sixth Street near the river.”
“Do you work there?”
“No, I did once, when I first came to New York, but I... I quit.”
“Do you know what the investigation has disclosed?”
“Nothing. Not really. My uncle suspects — I guess he suspects everybody, even his son Philip, his adopted son. And me! It’s simply ridiculous! But chiefly he suspects a man — a vice-president of P. & B., the Provisions & Beverages Corporation. Tingley’s Tidbits is an old-established business — my great-grandfather founded it seventy years ago — and P. & B. has been trying to buy it, but my uncle wouldn’t sell. He thinks they bribed someone in the factory to put in the quinine to scare him into letting go. He thinks that Mr. — the vice-president I spoke of — did it.”
“Mr. — ?”