I went to bed hoping the evening’s performance had been a false alarm, but it didn’t take me long the next morning to learn otherwise. “He is not himself, Archie,” Fritz said glumly when I came down to the kitchen for breakfast. “I can tell.”
“All right, how can you tell?” If I sounded irritated, it was because I didn’t want to believe him.
“He had that look he gets when he...”
“When he what?” I snapped.
I instantly regretted my tone, because Fritz looked like he’d just been slapped. He clenched his fists in frustration. “When he... when he gives up. You know how he is then, you have seen it, too. That’s how he looked when I took his breakfast up to him.”
“Relapse.” There, I said the word, and we nodded to each other.
“Okay, we’ve been through this drill before,” I told him. “There’s not a hell of a lot we can do when he’s like this, and we both know it. He usually goes one of two ways — either he stays in his room like a hermit, or he parks himself here in the kitchen and tells you how to do your work, right down to the sage and the chives and God knows, even the paprika or whatever. Remember the time he camped in the kitchen and ate half a sheep in two days? Cooked God knows how many different ways? For your sake, I hope he does the hermit bit.”
“Twenty different ways. Archie, I don’t want him to do either thing. I just want him to go to work,” Fritz said, cupping his hands and looking at the ceiling.
“Me too. We’ll just have to hope this is one of the shorter spells.”
Wolfe apparently went up to play with the orchids directly from his bedroom at nine as usual, because I heard the drone of the elevator. That part of his schedule at least remained intact. At eleven, as I sat in the office typing some correspondence he had dictated the day before, the elevator whirred again, but it never got to the first floor — a bad sign. Ten minutes later, Fritz was in the office looking even more woebegone than earlier. “He called me on the kitchen phone and said he wants his lunch brought up to him in his room. That is bad... very, very bad.”
“The good news is that he’s not hounding you in the kitchen. The bad news is, he’s definitely, positively in a relapse. And as usual in one of these things, the schedule’s out the window. Man your battle stations and be prepared for anything.”
Fritz didn’t appreciate the attempt at humor, and I wasn’t amused by it myself. As Wolfe’s relapses go, this ended up being medium-long — about one hundred eighteen hours if you count it as beginning after dinner Wednesday. He stayed in his room all of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, except for his twice-daily trips to commune with the orchids.
When these things occur, I make it a point not to let them alter my personal life. As I do once a week, I played poker that night at Saul Panzer’s. I was picked almost clean for most of the evening, but I won the last three pots — one of them on a bluff — and walked away only fifteen bucks in the hole, which was a moral victory, because I had been down more than fifty. Friday I was Lily Rowan’s escort at a fancy dinner party for twelve in a palatial duplex on Sutton Place. The food was almost as good as Fritz’s, and I even knew which forks to use with what courses. And Saturday, Saul and I went to a Rangers-Washington playoff game at the Garden, which the Rangers won in three overtimes. One of the Sunday papers said it was “the most thrilling game in hockey history.” Maybe.
For the next several days, the only event related to the case, other than two “what-have-you-got-for-me?” calls from Lon Cohen, was when Nathaniel Parker phoned on Friday. “How’s Wolfe coming with this thing?” he asked smoothly.
“Working on it,” I lied.
“Well, Durkin’s a basket case wondering what kind of progress is being made. He doesn’t want to call you guys, for fear Wolfe will get angry with him. And he’s not answering his phone, because the press has been all over him the last few days. They’ve staked out his place in Queens, and when his wife went out to pick the morning paper off the front stoop yesterday, a TV crew rushed the house and tried to interview her. She slammed the door in their faces.”
“Good for Fanny. I always did like her style. Next time Fred calls, tell him things are moving along.”
Parker snorted. “Your tone doesn’t exactly instill confidence.”
“Well, you know Wolfe. He plays it pretty close to his oversized vest.”
“We haven’t got forever,” Parker cautioned before signing off. That’s a lawyer for you, always full of cheering observations.
Fritz gave me periodic reports on Wolfe’s condition, given that he took a meal tray up to his room three times a day. “His appetite is excellent, Archie. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?” he told me Friday afternoon.
“Nuts to his appetite. I’m going up.” I took the steps two at a time to the second floor and rapped on his door. “It’s me,” I said. “We need to talk.”
He said something like “Come in,” and I opened the door. He was propped up in bed wearing his yellow pajamas and reading. For some reason, he always seems larger when he’s in bed, maybe because of all that yellow — not only his pajamas, but the sheets and coverlet as well. He gave me a questioning scowl.
“Pardon the interruption, but are you planning to return to work sometime soon? Say, before Fred Durkin is shipped off to Attica to spend the rest of his days making license plates, or whatever it is they do at those places now?”
“I just read something very interesting, Archie,” the resident genius said in a chatty tone, gesturing to the book he was holding. “Did you know that the first English factory to use steam power was that of Josiah Wedgwood, the maker of china?”
“I have to admit that comes as a surprise, and I’m certainly glad to see that you’re enjoying your reading. Just as a matter of curiosity, will you be back in the office in the near future, or should I have it redecorated as a shrine to your past glories? We could probably help with the upkeep of the brownstone by charging admission. It may turn out to be our only income.”
He closed his eyes. “Sarcasm has never been among your strengths, Archie. You would do well to excise it from your repertoire.”
“Yes, sir. My question stands.”
“At the moment, I am immersed in this volume. I would like to complete it in peace. Good day.”
I thought about going to the office, getting my Marley, and finishing him off, but that wouldn’t help Fred any. Instead, I smiled and walked out, closing the door quietly behind me and giving myself an A+ in restraint.
Sixteen
On Sundays, the brownstone’s normal schedule sails out the window. Fritz frequently takes the day off, and if Wolfe visits the plant rooms, it’s usually for just a short time. More often than not, he whiles away the hours in the office with the Sunday papers or a book, occasionally wandering out to the kitchen to whip up some sustenance for himself.
On this Sunday, the fourth full day of the relapse, Wolfe kept to his room and Fritz stayed around because “He may need me, Archie.” I suggested to Fritz that he disappear for a few hours and let his employer fend for himself, but that isn’t his style. And damned if he didn’t wait on the lord and master, bustling up to his bedroom first with a breakfast tray, then with the Times.
I read both the Times and the Gazette at my desk after eating in the kitchen. No mention was made of Meade’s murder — there hadn’t been anything about it in either paper since early in the week. In New York, yesterday’s headline is today’s ancient history. I puttered in the office for a while, straightening things that didn’t need straightening. Finally I got so disgusted with Fritz’s kowtowing to Wolfe — by nine-thirty, he had made four trips to the second floor — that I left for the Silver Spire before I had planned to. Anything to get out of Chez Relapse.