Like that he was unbearable. When he took that attitude I never tried to pry it out of him because (a) I didn’t want to feed his vanity, and (b) I knew he had decided to keep it to himself. So I considered the conversation closed, turned to my desk, elevated the typewriter, and began banging out some routine letters. I was on the fifth one when the doorbell rang.
Wolfe shut the drawer of the cabinet, arose, and started for the only chair he really loved, the one behind his desk.
“Call her Angelina,” I told him as I crossed to the hall. “It’ll upset her.”
VII
Violet Angelina Sally sat in the red leather chair with one knee arranged over the other. Wolfe’s gaze, under half-closed lids, was directed straight at her, and she was meeting it. They had been that way for fully half a minute. Neither of them had spoken a word.
“Like it?” Violet asked with a high-pitched laugh.
“I was trying to decide,” Wolfe muttered, “whether to let you keep the twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars you have got from Mr. Perrit or get that from you too. At least most of it.”
Violet let out a word. Ordinarily I try to report conversations without editing but we’ll let that one go. Wolfe made a face. He never cares for coarse talk, but he can stand it better from men than from women.
Judging from that word, Violet talked coarser than she looked. Of an entirely different design than Beulah, with a nice long flow to her body and a face whose only objectionable characteristics were acquired, she could easily have been made an attractive number by a couple of months on the farm, with fresh eggs and milk and going to bed early. But it was obvious that she hadn’t been on the farm.
“I do not intend,” Wolfe said testily, no longer muttering, “to prolong this. Here’s the situation. You are getting money — having already got the sum I mentioned — from Mr. Perrit by threatening to disclose the existence of his daughter. That, of course, is blackmail—”