Wolfe, behind his desk, grunted at me. “Back so soon?”
“No, sir,” I told him. “This is just a stopover after leaving the car at the garage. Do you want a report on Paul and Mr. and Mrs. Tuttle before I go on?”
“Yes. Verbatim, please.”
With him verbatim means not only all the words but also all the actions and expressions, and I sat down and gave them to him. He is the best listener I know, usually with his elbow on the chair arm, his chin resting on his fist, and his eyes half closed.
When I had finished he sat a moment and then nodded. “Satisfactory. Proceed with the others. Since you won’t need the car may Saul use it?”
That wasn’t as chummy as it sounds. It had long been understood that the car was his one piece of property on which I had the say.
“For how long?” I inquired.
“Today, tonight, and possibly part of tomorrow.”
I looked at my wrist and saw 6:55. “There’s not much left of today. Okay. Do I ask for what?”
“Not at the moment. It may be to chase a wild goose. What about your dinner?”
“I don’t know.” I arose. “If I find the ice cream I can eat that.” I headed for the door, turned there to suggest, “Saul can eat the goose,” and left.
Flagging a taxi at Tenth Avenue and riding uptown, and across 48th Street to the East Side, a part of the thousand-wheeled worm, I admitted that he must have a glimmer of something, since Saul’s daily rate was now fifty bucks, quite a bite out of a measly grand, but I still couldn’t tie up the ice cream and the hot-water bags. Of course he might be sending Saul on a different trail entirely, and as far as keeping it to himself was concerned, I had long ago stopped letting that get on my nerves, so I just tabled it.
The number, on 48th between Lexington and Third, belonged to an old brick four-story that had been painted yellow. In the vestibule two names were squeezed on the little slip by the button next to the top – “Goren” and “Poletti.” I pushed the button, and, when the clicks came, opened the door and entered, and went up two flights of narrow stairs, which were carpeted and clean for a change. Turning to the front on the landing, I got a surprise. A door had opened, and standing on the sill was one named neither Goren nor Poletti. It was Johnny Arrow, squinting at me.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought maybe it was that Paul Fyfe.”
I advanced. “If it’s convenient,” I said, “I’d like to see Miss Goren.”
“What about?”
He needed taking down a peg. “Really,” I said. “Only yesterday you were bragging about taking her to dinner. Don’t tell me you’ve already been promoted to watchdog. I want to ask her a question.”
For a second I thought he was going to demand to know the question, and so did he, but he decided to chuckle instead. He invited me in, ushered me through an arch into a living room that was well cluttered with the feminine touch, disappeared, and in a minute was back.
“She’s changing,” he informed me. He sat. “I guess you called me about bragging.” His drawl was friendly. “We just got back from the ball game a little while ago, and now we’re going out for a feed. I was going to phone you this morning.”
“You mean phone Nero Wolfe?”
“No, you. I was going to ask you where you bought that suit you had on last night. Now I’d like to ask you where you bought the one you’ve got on now, but I guess that’s a little personal.”
I was sympathetic. Realizing that a guy who had spent five years in the bush, and who, in New York, found himself suddenly faced with the problem of togging up for a ladylove, was in a tough spot, especially if he could scrape up only ten million bucks, I gave him the lowdown from socks to shirts. We were on ornamental vests, pro and con, when Anne Goren came floating in, and at sight of her I regretted the steer I had given him. I would have been perfectly willing to feed her myself if I hadn’t been working.
“Sorry I made you wait,” she told me politely. “What is it?” She didn’t sit, and we were up.
“A couple of little points,” I said. “I saw Doctor Buhl this afternoon, and expected he would phone you, but since you were out he couldn’t. First about the morphine he gave you Saturday to be given to Bertram Fyfe. He says he took two quarter-grain tablets from a bottle he had, and gave them to you, with directions. Is that correct?”
“Wait a minute, Anne.” Arrow was squinting at me. “What’s the idea of this?”
“No special idea.” I met the brown eyes through the squint. “Mr. Wolfe needs the information to clear this thing up, that’s all. – Do you object to giving it, Miss Goren? I asked Doctor Buhl where you kept the tablets until the time came to administer them, and he told me to ask you.”
“I put them in a saucer and put the saucer on top of the bureau in the patient’s room. That is standard procedure.”
“Sure. Would you mind going right through it? From the time Doctor Buhl gave you the tablets?”
“He handed them to me just before he left, and after he left I went to the bureau and put them in the saucer. The instructions were to give one as soon as the guests had gone, and one an hour later if it seemed desirable, and that’s what I did.” She was being cool and professional. “At ten minutes past eight I put one of the tablets in my hypo syringe with one c.c. of sterile water, and injected it in the patient’s arm. An hour later he was asleep but a little restless, and I did the same with the other tablet. That quieted him completely.”
“Have you any reason to suspect that the tablets in the saucer had been changed by someone? That the ones you gave the patient were not the ones Doctor Buhl gave you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Look here,” Johnny Arrow drawled, “that’s a kind of a nasty question. I guess that’s enough.”
I grinned at him. “You’re too touchy. If the cops ever got started on this they’d hammer away at her for hours. Five people have admitted they were in the patient’s room after Doctor Buhl left, including you, and the cops would go over that with her forward, backward, sideways, and up and down. I don’t want to spoil her appetite for dinner, so I merely ask her if she saw anything suspicious. Or heard anything. You didn’t, Miss Goren?”
“I did not.”
“Then that’s that. Now the other point. You may or may not know that Paul Fyfe brought some ice cream to the apartment and put it in the refrigerator. It was mentioned at the dinner table, but you weren’t there. Do you know what happened to the ice cream?”
“No.” Her voice sharpened. “This seems pretty silly. Ice cream?”
“I often seem silly. Just ignore it. Mr. Wolfe wants to know about the ice cream. You know nothing at all about it?”
“No. I never heard of it.”
“Okay.” I turned to Arrow. “This one is for you too. What do you know about the ice cream?”
“Nothing.” He chuckled. “You can get as nasty as you want to with me, after that squeeze you put on me last night, but don’t try getting behind me. I’m going to keep you right in front.”
“From the front I use something else. You remember Paul Fyfe mentioned the ice cream at the dinner table?”
“I guess I do. I had forgotten about it.”
“But you never saw it or touched it?”