I’m surprised that I was able to speak at all. He had of course insulted me a million times, as I had him, but this was worse than an insult, there was no word for it. Coming on top of the turndown I had got in Washington, which had reduced my buoyancy to a record low, it made me so mad that I knew I’d better get out of there. But I did not intend to let him go to bed feeling noble, so I grinned at him and controlled my voice.
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll think it over. Sure, Cramer has a lot of good men. Let you know in the morning. I’ll remember to turn the gong on.”
I went up to my room.
The gong was a dingus under my bed. The custom was that when I retired at night I turned a switch, and if anyone put his foot down in the hall within ten feet of Wolfe’s door the gong gonged. It had been installed on account of a certain occurrence some years previously, when Wolfe had got a knife stuck in him. The thing had never gone off except when we tested it, and in my opinion never would, but I never failed to switch it on because if Wolfe had stepped into the hall some night and the gong hadn’t sounded it would have caused discussion.
This night, with a stranger in the house, I was glad it was there. I learned from Fritz that H. H. Hackett was sleeping in the south room, on the same floor as me, and on the basis of my brief acquaintance and my one look at him it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had undertaken to sneak into Wolfe’s room during the night and kill him, dispose of the body down in the furnace, and expect Fritz and me to take him for Wolfe and never catch on. Women and girls of appropriate age and configuration may call me Archie and welcome. With the rest of my fellow beings I am particular. The Hackett person would have had to know me seven years to get the privilege, and I neither desired nor intended that he should know me seven weeks.
In the morning, breakfast was all over the place, with Wolfe in his room, Hackett in the dining-room, and me in the kitchen with Fritz. Afterwards I spent an hour up in the plant rooms with Wolfe, on the matters we usually attended to in the office, together with consideration of the current problem. Wolfe asked if I had decided whether we should get a chauffeur for Hackett from the Homicide Squad.
I looked judicious. “I have,” I told him, “thought it over from all angles. Unquestionably Cramer could give us a man who would be my superior in courage, wit, integrity, reflex time, and purity of morals. But here’s the trouble—not one anything like as handsome as me. Not a chance. So I’ll do it myself.”
Wolfe cocked an eye at me. “I meant no offense. My intentions—”
“Forget it. You’re under a strain. Mr. Hackett’s life is in jeopardy and it makes you nervous.”
We got to details. Jane Geer was making a nuisance of herself. I understood now, of course, why Wolfe had refused to see her Wednesday evening. After sending me to get her he had conceived the strategy of hiring a double, and he didn’t want her to get a look at the real Nero Wolfe because if she did she would be less likely to be deceived by the counterfeit and go to work on him. That meant she was seriously on his list, but I didn’t take the trouble to inform him that in my opinion he could cross her off, since he would only have grunted. She had phoned several times, insisting on seeing him, and had come to the house Friday morning and argued for five minutes with Fritz through the three-inch crack which the chain bolt permitted the door to open to. Now Wolfe had an idea for one of his elaborate charades. I was to phone her to come to see Wolfe at six o’clock that afternoon. When she came I was to take her in to Hackett. Wolfe would coach Hackett for the interview.
I looked skeptical. Wolfe said, “It will give her a chance to kill Mr. Hackett.”
I snorted. “With me right there to tell her when to cease firing.”
“I admit it is unlikely. Also, it will convince her that Mr. Hackett is me.”
“Which still will not shorten his life or lengthen yours.”
“Possibly not. Also, it will give me an opportunity to see her and hear her. I shall be at the hole.”
So that was really the idea. He would be in the passage, a sort of an alcove, at the kitchen end of the downstairs hall, looking through into the office by means of the square hole in the wall. The hole was camouflaged on the office side by a picture that was transparent one way. He loved to have an excuse to use it, and it actually had been a help now and then.
“That’s different,” I told him. “If you see her and hear her you’ll know she has a heart of platinum.”
Major Jensen had phoned once and been told that Wolfe was engaged; apparently he wasn’t as persistent as Jane. He had told Cramer that he had come to see Wolfe on Wednesday because on Tuesday morning his father had shown him the threat he had received in the mail and had announced that he was going to consult Nero Wolfe about it; and the major, wishing his father’s murderer to be caught and punished, had wanted to talk with Wolfe. It was Wolfe’s veto of my suggestion that Major Jensen be invited to call, not on Hackett but on Wolfe himself, that showed me the state he was in. Ordinarily it would have needed no suggestion from me, since the major, in his present situation, was a natural for a fat fee.
When I got down to the office Hackett was there in Wolfe’s chair, eating cookies and getting crumbs on the desk. I had told him good morning previously, and having nothing else to tell him, ignored him. From the phone on my desk I got Jane Geer at her office.
“Archie,” I told her.
She snapped, “Archie who?”
“Oh, come, come. We haven’t sicked the police onto you, have we? Let’s gossip a while.”
“I am ringing off.”
“Then I am too. In a moment. Nero Wolfe wants to see you.”
“He does? Ha, ha. He doesn’t act like it.”
“He has reformed. I showed him a lock of your hair. I showed him a picture of Elsa Maxwell and told him it was you. This time he won’t let me come after you.”
“Neither will I.”
“Okay. Be here at six o’clock and you will be received. Six o’clock today, P.M. Will you?”
She admitted that she would. I made a couple of other calls and did some miscellaneous chores. But I found that my jaw was getting clamped tighter and tighter on account of an irritating noise. Finally I spoke to the occupant of Wolfe’s chair. “What kind of cookies are those?”
“Ginger snaps.” Evidently the husky croak was his normal voice.
“I didn’t know we had any.”
“We didn’t. I asked Fritz. He doesn’t seem to know about ginger snaps, so I walked over to Ninth Avenue and got some.”
“When? This morning?”
“Just a little while ago.”
I turned to my phone, buzzed the plant rooms, got Wolfe, and told him, “Mr. Hackett is sitting in your chair eating ginger snaps. Just a little while ago he walked to Ninth Avenue and bought them. If he pops in and out of the house whenever he sees fit, what are we getting for our hundred bucks?”
Wolfe spoke to the point. I hung up and turned to Hackett and spoke to the point. He was not to leave the house except as instructed by Wolfe or me. He seemed unimpressed and unconcerned, but nodded good-naturedly.
“All right,” he said, “if that’s the bargain I’ll keep it. But there’s two sides to a bargain. I was to be paid daily in advance, and I haven’t been paid for today. A hundred dollars net.”
Wolfe had told me the same, so I took five twenties from the expense wallet and forked it over.
“I must say,” he commented, folding the bills neatly and stuffing them in his waistband pocket, “this is a large return for a small effort. I am aware that I may earn it—ah, suddenly and unexpectedly.” He leaned toward me. “Though I may tell you confidentially, Archie, that I expect nothing to happen. I am sanguine by nature.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “me too.” I opened the drawer of my desk, the middle one on the right, where I kept armament, got out the shoulder holster and put it on, and selected the gun that was my property—the other two belonged to Wolfe. There were only three cartridges in it, so
I pulled the drawer open farther to get to the ammunition compartment and filled the cylinder.
As I shoved the gun into the holster I happened to glance at Hackett and saw that he had a new face. The line of his lips was tight, and his eyes looked startled, wary, and concentrated.
“It hadn’t occurred to me before,” he said, and his voice had changed too. “This Mr. Wolfe is quite an article, and you’re his man. I am doing this with the understanding that someone may mistake me for Mr. Wolfe and try to kill me, but I have only his word for it that that is actually the situation. If it’s more complicated than that, and the intention is for you to shoot me yourself, I want to say emphatically that that would not be fair.”
I grinned at him sympathetically, trying to make up for my blunder, realizing that I should not have dressed for the occasion in his presence. The sight of the gun, a real gun and real cartridges, had scared him stiff. If he ran out on us now and we had to advertise again to find a new one—my God, I had just handed him a hundred bucks!
“Listen,” I told him earnestly, “you said a minute ago that you expect nothing to happen. You may be right. I’m inclined to agree with you. But in case somebody does undertake to perform, I am wearing this little number”—I patted under my arm where the gun was—“for two purposes: first, to keep you from getting hurt; and second, if you do get hurt, to hurt him worse.”
It seemed to satisfy him, for his eyes got less concentrated, but he didn’t resume with the ginger snaps. At least I had accomplished that much. Using a matter-of-fact tone, which I thought would reassure him, I explained that he was to go to Wolfe’s room at eleven-thirty for instructions, which would include our afternoon outing.
To tell the truth, by the time the afternoon was over and I had him back in the house again, a little after five-thirty, I had to maintain a firm hold on such details as ginger snaps and his calling me Archie to keep from admiring him. During that extended expedition we made stops at Brooks Brothers, Rusterman’s, the Churchill, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and three or four others. He occupied the rear seat, of course, because Wolfe always did, and the mirror showed me that he sat back comfortably, taking in the sights, a lot more imperturbable than Wolfe himself would have been, since Wolfe disliked motion, detested bumps, and had a settled notion that all the other cars had turned out for the express purpose of colliding with his.
When we made one of our stops and Hackett got out to cross the sidewalk, he was okay. He didn’t hurry or dodge or jerk or weave, but just walked. In Wolfe’s hat and coat and stick, he might even have fooled me. I had to hand it to him, in spite of the fact that the whole show struck me as the biggest bust Wolfe had ever concocted. At night it might be different, but here in broad daylight, and with no discernible evidence that anyone was on our trail, I felt foolish, futile, and fatuous, and still I had to keep alert, covering all directions, with the gun in my hand resting on the seat.
Nothing happened. Not a damn thing.
Back at the house, I left Hackett in the office and went to the kitchen, where Wolfe was sitting at the big table drinking beer and watching Fritz make tomato juice. His daily routine was of course all shot.
I reported, “They tried to get him from the top of the Palisades with a howitzer, but missed him. He has a little bruise on his left elbow from the revolving door at Rusterman’s, but otherwise unhurt.”
Wolfe grunted. “How did he behave?”
“Okay.”
Wolfe grunted again. “After dark we may more reasonably expect results. I repeat what I told you at noon: you will take an active part in the interview with Miss Geer, but you will restrain yourself. If you permit yourself to get fanciful, there is no telling what the effect may be on Mr. Hackett. As you know, his instructions are precise, but his discipline is questionable. See that she speaks up, so I can hear her. Seat her at the corner of my desk farthest from you so I will have a good view of her. The view through that hole is restricted.”
“Yes, sir.”
But as it turned out, I wasn’t able to obey orders. It was then nearly six o’clock. When the doorbell rang a few minutes later and I went to answer it, glancing in at the office on my way down the hall to make sure that Hackett didn’t have his feet up on the desk, I opened the door to find that Miss Geer hadn’t ventured alone on the streets of the great city after all. Major Emil Jensen was there with her.
VI
I had the door open. It wouldn’t have been courteous to slam it shut again and leave them on the stoop while I considered matters, so I dallied on the doorsill.
“Well,” I said brightly, “two on one hook?”
Jensen said hello. Jane said, “You couldn’t have had that thought up, because Major Jensen decided to come on the spur of the moment. We were having cocktails.” She looked me up and down; it was true that I was sort of blocking the way and not moving. “May we come in?”
Certainly I could have told Jensen we only had one extra chair so he had better go for a walk, but if there was going to be anything accomplished by having either of those two get the idea that Hackett was Nero Wolfe, I would have picked him for the experiment rather than her. On the other hand, with Hackett primed only for her it would have been crowding our luck to confront him with both of them; and anyway, I couldn’t take such a chance on my own hook. I needed advice from headquarters. So I decided to herd them into the front room, and ask them to wait, and go to consult Wolfe.
“Sure,” I said hospitably, “enter.” I gave them gangway, and when they were in, shut the door and opened the door to the front room. “In there, please. Find seats. If you don’t mind waiting a minute—”
I had got myself headed back for the hall before noticing an unfortunate fact: the door from the front room to the office was standing open. That was careless of me, but I hadn’t expected complications. If they moved across, as they naturally would, Hackett sitting in the office would be in plain sight. But what the hell, that was what he was there for. So I kept going, down the hall to the turn into the alcove at the far end, found Wolfe there ready to take position at the peep-hole, and muttered to him:
“She brought an outrider along. Major Jensen. I put them in the front room. The door into the office is open. Well?”
He scowled at me. He whispered, “Confound it. Return to the front room by way of the office, closing that door as you go. Tell Major Jensen to wait, that I wish to speak with Miss Geer privately. Take her to the office by way of the hall, and when you—”
Somebody fired a gun.
At least that’s what it sounded like, and the sound didn’t come from outdoors. The walls and the air vibrated. Judging by the noise, I might have fired it myself, but I hadn’t. I moved. In three jumps I was at the door to the office. Hackett was sitting there, looking startled and speechless. I dashed through to the front room. Jensen and Jane were there, on their feet, she off to the right and he to the left, both also startled and speechless, staring at each other. Their hands were empty, except for Jane’s bag. I might have been inclined to let it go for Hackett biting a ginger snap if it hadn’t been for the smell. I knew that smell.
I snapped at Jensen, “Well?”
“Well yourself.” He had transferred the stare to me. “What the hell was it?”
“Did you fire a gun?”
“No. Did you?”
I pivoted to Jane. “Did you?”
“You—you idiot,” she stammered. She was trying not to tremble. “Why would I fire a gun?”
“Let me see that one in your hand,” Jensen demanded.
I looked at my hand and was surprised to see a gun in it. I must have snatched it from the holster automatically en route. “Not it,” I said. I poked the muzzle to within an inch of Jensen’s nose. “Was it?”
He sniffed. “No.” He felt the barrel, found it cold, and shook his head.
I said, “But a gun was fired inside here. Do you smell it?”
“Certainly I smell it.”
&
nbsp; “Okay. Let’s join Mr. Wolfe and discuss it. Through there.” I indicated the door to the office with a flourish of the gun.
Jane started jabbering, but I paid no attention. She was merely jabbering, something indignant about a put-up job and so on. She was disinclined to enter the office, but when Jensen went she followed him and I brought up the rear.
“This is Mr. Nero Wolfe,” I said. “Sit down.” I was using my best judgment and figured I was playing it right because Wolfe was nowhere in sight. I had to decide what to do with them while I found the gun and maybe the bullet. Jane was still trying to jabber, but she stopped when Jensen blurted, “Wolfe has blood on his head!”
I stared at Hackett. He was standing up behind the desk, leaning forward with his hand resting on the desk, looking the three of us over with an expression that left it open whether he was dazed, scared, or angry, or all three. He didn’t seem to hear Jensen’s words. When I did I saw the blood on Hackett’s left ear and dribbling down the side of his neck.
I took in a breath and yelled, “Fritz!”
He appeared instantly, probably having been standing by in the hall by Wolfe’s direction. I told him to come here, and when he came handed him my gun. “If anybody reaches for a handkerchief, shoot.”
“Those instructions,” Jensen said sharply, “are dangerous if he—”
“He’s all right.”
“I would like you to search me.” Jensen stuck his hands toward the ceiling.
“That,” I said, “is more like it,” and crossed to him and explored him from neck to ankles, invited him to relax in a chair, and turned to Jane. She darted me a look of pure and lofty disgust and backed away as from a noxious miasma.
I remarked, “If you refuse to stand inspection and then you happen to make a gesture and Fritz shoots you in the tummy, don’t blame me.”
She darted more looks, but took it. I felt her over not quite as comprehensively as I had Jensen, took her bag and glanced in it and returned it to her, and then stepped around Wolfe’s desk to examine Hackett’s blood. He wasn’t screaming or moaning, but the expression on his face was something. After Jensen had announced the blood, he had put his hand up to feel, and he was staring at the red on his fingers with his big jaw hanging open.
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