Jensen got sore, naturally, but Wolfe only murmured at him that he might succeed in interesting the police, or that we would be glad to give him a list of reliable detective agencies which would provide companions for his movements as long as he remained alive — at sixty bucks for twenty-four hours. Jensen said that wasn’t it, he wanted to hire Wolfe’s brains. Wolfe merely made a face and shook his head. Then Jensen wanted to know what about Goodwin? Wolfe said that Major Goodwin was an officer in the United States Army.
“He’s not in uniform,” Jensen growled.
Wolfe was patient. “Officers in Military Intelligence on special assignments,” he explained, “have freedoms. Major Goodwin’s special assignment is to assist me in various projects entrusted to me by the Army. For which I am not paid. I have little time now for my private business. I think, Mr. Jensen, you should move and act with reasonable precaution for a while. For example, in licking the flaps of envelopes — such things as that. Examine the strip of mucilage. Nothing is easier than to remove mucilage from an envelope flap and replace it with a mixture containing a deadly poison. Any door you open, anywhere, stand to one side and fling the door wide with a push or a pull before crossing the sill. Things like that.”
“Good God,” Jensen muttered.
Wolfe nodded. “That’s how it is. But keep in mind that this fellow has severely restricted himself, if he’s not a liar. He says he will watch you die. That greatly limits him in method and technique. He or she has to be there when it happens. So I advise prudence and a decent vigilance. Use your brains, but give up the idea of renting mine. No panic is called for... Archie, how many people have threatened to take my life in the past ten years?”
I pursed my lips. “Oh, maybe twenty-two.”
“Pfui.” He scowled at me. “At least a hundred. And I am not dead yet, Mr. Jensen.”
Jensen pocketed his clipping and envelope and departed, no better off than when he came except for the valuable advice about licking envelopes and opening doors. I felt kind of sorry for him and took the trouble to wish him good luck as I escorted him to the front door and let him out to the street, and even used some breath to tell him that if he decided to try an agency, Cornwall & Mayer had the best men.
Then I went back to the office and stood in front of Wolfe’s desk, facing him, and pulled my shoulders back and expanded my chest. I took that attitude because I had some news to break to him and thought it might help to look as much like an army officer as possible.
“I have an appointment,” I said, “at nine o’clock Thursday morning, in Washington, with General Carpenter.”
Wolfe’s brows went up a millimeter. “Indeed?”
“Yes, sir. At my request. I wish to take an ocean trip. I want to get a look at a Jap. I would like to catch one, if it can be done without much risk, and pinch him and make some remarks to him. I have thought up a crushing remark to make to a Jap and would like to use it.”
“Nonsense.” Wolfe was placid. “Your three requests to be sent overseas have been denied.”
“Yeah, I know.” I kept my chest out. “But that was just colonels and old Fife. Carpenter will see my point. I admit you’re a great detective, the best orchid-grower in New York, a champion eater and beer-drinker, and a genius. But I’ve been working for you a hundred years — anyhow, a lot of years — and this is a hell of a way to spend a war. I’m going to see General Carpenter and lay it out. Of course he’ll phone you. I appeal to your love of country, your vanity, your finer instincts what there is of them, and your dislike of Japs. If you tell Carpenter it would be impossible for you to get along without me, I’ll put pieces of gristle in your crabmeat and sugar in your beer.”
Wolfe opened his eyes and glared at me. The mere suggestion of sugar in his beer made him speechless.
That was Tuesday. The next morning, Wednesday, the papers headlined the murder of Ben Jensen on the front page. Eating breakfast in the kitchen with Fritz, as usual, I was only halfway through the report in the Times when the doorbell rang, and when I answered it I found on the stoop our old friend, Inspector Cramer, of the homicide squad.
Nero Wolfe said, “Not interested, not involved, and not curious.”
He was a sight, as he always was when propped up in bed with his breakfast tray. The custom was for Fritz, his chef, to deliver the tray to his room on the second floor at eight o’clock. It was now 8:15, and already down the gullet were the peaches and cream, most of the bacon, and two thirds of the eggs, not to mention coffee and the green tomato jam. The black silk coverlet was folded back, and you had to look to tell where the yellow percale sheet ended and the yellow pajamas began. Few people except Fritz and me ever got to see him like that, but he had stretched a point for Inspector Cramer, who knew that from nine to eleven he would be up in the plant-rooms with the orchids, and unavailable.
“In the past dozen years,” Cramer said in his ordinary growl, without any particular feeling, “you have told me, I suppose, in round figures, ten million lies.”
The commas were chews on his unlighted cigar. He looked the way he always did when he had been working all night — peevish and put upon but under control, all except his hair, which had forgotten where the part went.
Wolfe, who was hard to rile at breakfast, swallowed toast and jam and then coffee, ignoring the insult.
Cramer said, “He came to see you yesterday morning, twelve hours before he was killed. You don’t deny that.”
“And I have told you what for,” Wolfe said politely. “He had received that threat and said he wanted to hire my brains. I declined to work for him and he went away. That was all.”
“Why did you decline to work for him? What had he done to you?”
“Nothing.” Wolfe poured coffee. “I don’t do that kind of work. A man whose life is threatened anonymously is either in no danger at all, or his danger is so acute and so ubiquitous that his position is hopeless. My only previous association with Mr. Jensen was in connection with an attempt by an army captain named Root to sell him inside army information for political purposes. Together we got the necessary evidence, and Captain Root was court-martialed. Mr. Jensen was impressed, so he said, by my handling of that case. I suppose that was why he came to me when he decided that he wanted help.”
“Did he think the threat came from someone connected with Captain Root?”
“No. Root wasn’t mentioned. He said he had no idea who intended to kill him.”
Cramer humphed. “That’s what he told Tim Cornwall, too. Cornwall thinks you passed because you knew or suspected it was too hot to handle. Naturally, Cornwall is bitter. He has lost his best man.”
“Indeed,” Wolfe said mildly. “If that was his best man...”
“So Cornwall says,” Cramer insisted, “and he’s dead. Name of Doyle; been in the game twenty years, with a good record. The picture as we’ve got it doesn’t necessarily condemn him. Jensen went to Cornwall & Mayer yesterday about noon, and Cornwall assigned Doyle as a guard.
“We’ve traced all their movements — nothing special. In the evening Doyle went along to a meeting at a mid town club. They left the club at eleven-twenty, and apparently went straight home, on the subway or bus, to the apartment house where Jensen lived on Seventy-third Street near Madison. It was eleven-forty-five when they were found dead on the sidewalk at the entrance to the apartment house. Both shot in the heart with a thirty-eight, Doyle from behind and Jensen from the front. We have the bullets. No powder marks. No nothing.”
Wolfe murmured sarcastically, “Mr. Cornwall’s best man.”
“Nuts,” Cramer objected to the sarcasm. “He was shot in the back. There’s a narrow passage ten paces away where the guy could have hid. Or the shots could have come from a passing car, Or from across the street. We haven’t found anybody who heard the shots. The doorman was in the basement stoking the water heater, the excuse for that being that they’re short of men like everybody else. The elevator man was on his way to the tenth floor with a passenger, a tenant. The bodies were discovered by two women on their way home from a movie. It must have happened not more than a minute before they came by, but they had just got off a Madison Avenue bus at the corner.”