Wolfe shook his head. “I accept pay only from clients, as arranged in advance. If you send me a check I’ll have to return it. If you have to send one in order to sleep, send it to the National War Fund.” I managed to keep my face straight. As for Wolfe’s renunciation, his income for the year had already reached a point where out of an additional five grand he would have been able to keep about one-fifth. As for Jensen’s generosity, if it is okay for males at one age to climb trees and turn somersaults in the presence of females, why isn’t it okay for them at another age to wave checkbooks? The way Jane was looking at him reminded me of the way a fifth-grade girl looked at me once, out in Ohio, when I chinned myself fourteen times.
So they settled it on a basis of reciprocal nobility, and the pair turned to go.
Not caring to appear churlish, I went to open the front door for them. As they were passing through, Jane suddenly realized I was there and stopped and impulsively extended her hand. “I take it back, Archie. You’re not a rat. Shake on it. Is he, Emil?”
“He certainly is not,” Emil baritoned heartily.
“Gee,” I stammered with moist eyes, “this is the happiest day of my life. This will make a new rat of me.” I closed the door.
Back in the office, Wolfe, in his own chair with only one bullet hole that could easily be repaired, and with three bottles of beer on a tray in front of him, was leaning back with his hands resting on the chair arms and his eyes open only to slits, the picture of a man at peace.
He murmured at me, “Archie. Don’t forget to remind me in the morning to telephone Mr. Viscardi about that tarragon.”
“Yes, sir.” I sat down. “And if I may, sir, I would like to offer a suggestion.”
“What?”
“Only a suggestion. Let’s advertise for a man-eating tiger weighing around two hundred and sixty pounds capable of easy and normal movement. We could station him behind the big cabinet and when you enter he would lay on you from the rear.”
It didn’t faze him. He was enjoying the feel of his chair and I doubt if he heard me.
3. Instead of Evidence
I
Among the kinds of men I have a prejudice against are the ones named Eugene.
There’s no use asking me why, because I admit it’s a prejudice. It may be that when I was in kindergarten out in Ohio a man named Eugene stole candy from me, but if so I have forgotten all about it. For all practical purposes, it is merely one facet of my complex character that I do not like men named Eugene.
That and that alone accounted for my [garbled] attitude when Mr. and Mrs. Eugene R. Poor called at Nero Wolfe’s office that Tuesday afternoon in October, because I had never seen or heard of the guy before, and neither had Wolfe. The appointment had been made by phone that morning, so I was prejudiced before I ever got a look at him. The look hadn’t swayed me much one way or the other. He wasn’t too old to remember what his wife had given him on his fortieth birthday, but neither was he young enough to be still looking forward to it. Nothing about him stood out. His face was taken at random out of stock, with no alterations.
Gray herringbone suits like his were that afternoon being bought in stores from San Diego to Bangor. Really his only distinction was that they had named him Eugene.
In spite of which I was regarding him with polite curiosity, for he had just told Nero Wolfe that he was going: to be murdered by a man named Conroy Blaney.
I was sitting at my desk in the room Nero Wolfe used for an office in his home on West Thirty-fifth Street, and Wolfe was behind his desk, arranged in a chair that had been specially constructed to support up to a quarter of a ton, which was not utterly beyond the limits of possibility. Eugene R. Poor was in the red leather chair a short distance beyond Wolfe’s desk, with a little table smack against its right arm for the convenience of clients in writing checks. Mrs. Poor was on a spare between her husband and me.
I might mention that I was not aware of any prejudice against Mrs. Poor. For one thing, there was no reason to suppose that her name was Eugene. For another, there were several reasons to suppose that her fortieth birthday would not come before mine, though she was good and mature. She had by no means struck me dumb, but there are people who seem to improve a room just by being in it.
Naturally Wolfe was scowling. He shook his head, moving it a full half-inch right and left, which was for him a frenzy of negation.
“No, sir,” he said emphatically. “I suppose two hundred men and women have sat in that chair, Mr. Poor, and tried to hire me to keep someone from killing them.”
His eyes twitched to me. “How many, Archie?”
I said, to oblige him, “Two hundred and nine.”
“Have I taken the jobs?”
“No, sir. Never.”
He wiggled a finger at Eugene. “For two million dollars a year you can make it fairly difficult for a man to kill you. That’s about what it costs to protect a president or a king, and even so consider the record. Of course, if you give up all other activity it can be done more cheaply, say forty thousand a year. A cave in a mountainside, never emerging, with six guards you can trust and a staff to suit-”
Eugene was trying to get something in. He finally did. “I don’t expect you to keep him from killing me. That’s not what I came for.”
“Then-what the deuce did you come for?”
“To keep him from getting away with it.” Eugene cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you. I agree that you can’t stop him, I don’t see how anybody can. Sooner or later. He’s a clever man.” His voice took on bitterness. “Too damn clever for me and I wish I’d never met him. Sure, I know a man can kill a man if he once decides to, but Con Blaney is so damn clever that it isn’t a question whether he can kill me or not, the question is whether he can manage it so that he is in the clear. I’m afraid he can. I would bet he can. And I don’t want him to.”
His wife made a little noise and he stopped to look at her. Then he shook his head at her as if she had said something, took a cigar from his vest pocket, removed the band, inspected first one end and then the other to decide which was which, got a gadget from another vest pocket and snipped one of the ends, and lit up. He no sooner had it lit than it slipped out of his mouth, bounced on his thigh, and landed on the rug. He retrieved it and got his teeth sunk in it. So, I thought to myself, you’re not so doggone calm about getting murdered as you were making out to be.
“So I came,” he told Wolfe, “to give you the facts, to get the facts down, and to pay you five thousand dollars to see that he doesn’t manage it that way.” The cigar between his teeth interfered with his talking, and he removed it. “If he kills me I’ll be dead. I want someone to know about it.”
Wolfe’s eyes had gone half shut. “But why pay me five thousand dollars in advance? Wouldn’t someone know about it? Your wife, for instance?”
Eugene nodded. “I’ve thought about that. I’ve thought it all out. What if he kills her too? I have no idea how he’ll try to work it, or when, and who is there besides my wife I can absolutely trust? I’m not taking any chances. Of course I thought of the police, but judging from my own experience, a couple of burglaries down at the shop, and you know, the experiences of a businessman, I’m not sure they’d even remember I’d been there if it happened in a year or maybe two years.” He stuck his cigar in his mouth, puffed twice, and took it out again. “What’s the matter, don’t you want five thousand dollars?”