“Cut out the Murphy,” she snapped. Then she reached to pat me on the knee. “Just call me Angel Food.”
I didn’t have much time, since the penthouse was on Seventy-eighth Street, not more than a few minutes away at that time of night, and I didn’t really intend to go up with her and tuck her in.
“I don’t like angel food,” I told her. “I’ll call you Maple Delight. But you’re absolutely sunk if you try to bull it through. I speak frankly because I admire you in more ways than one, and also because I enjoy life and don’t care to leave it at this point. If you go on putting the bee on Perrit and don’t give Wolfe his nine-tenths, you’re through. Wolfe is a hyena, a vulture, and a jackal. If you do give Wolfe his nine-tenths, Perrit will find it out sooner or later, and then not only will Wolfe get it, which might or might not be a calamity, but I am liable to get it too. Even if I’m not as healthy and handsome as you thought I was there for a minute. I do have my skin on straight and I like it that way.”
“Go on talking.” She didn’t take her eyes from her driving. “You haven’t said anything yet, but your voice goes through me. I won’t even want a drink.”
We were at Fifty-first Street. I went on, “So to show you how selfish I am, I’ve got a suggestion. You haven’t got a chance of cleaning up, not one in a million. You’re squeezed in between Dazy Perrit and Nero Wolfe, and that’s no set-up for a Sherman tank, let alone a lady. The big haul is out for good, and you might as well face it and show you’ve got brains as well as guts.”
I patted her thigh. “So take it, Maple Delight. First, you can keep the screw on Perrit, handing most of it over to Wolfe, but you’d be a sucker if you did. It wouldn’t be worth your measly percentage. Second, you can slide out and away, and my opinion is no good on that because I don’t know how hard you’d find it to make a living. Of course you’d have to travel, which would be a disadvantage if you like New York. Third, and this is my suggestion, you can tell Perrit — or I’ll do it if you want me to — that the gyp is out, you are merely his loving and obedient daughter, but it would be nice to have the weekly handout stepped up to three centuries instead of one.”
She sent me a sharp glance and back again to her driving. I somehow gathered that I was doing fine.
“Wolfe would get no cut,” I said firmly. “I doubt if he would even expect it, and anyhow you can leave that to me. I have — a way of bringing pressure. Almost certainly Perrit would settle for that and no hard feelings. As for you, you don’t have to be a damn pig. That would be fifteen thousand, six hundred bucks a year, no income tax, and I suppose Perrit pays the household expenses, including such items as this car. Six hundred dollars more than a United States Senator gets! You could stay in New York, with no thought of Utah or any other desert, not to mention confined spaces, enjoy your friends, sleep as late as you want, visit the museums and art galleries — what the hell, what if two hundred is as high as he’ll go? That’s twice what a plumber makes! Usually I hate to be driven by a woman, but you’re good. I thought you would be. You’re very good.”
“I can turn corners and back up,” she admitted. “Yeah, art galleries. Are you comic?”
We had made it crosstown and were going north on Fifth Avenue, in the Sixties. “Someday,” I said, “you must drive me up to that roadhouse Perrit owns in Westchester. I just tossed in the art galleries. Forget it. One thing, if my suggestion strikes you at all and you want to think it over, for God’s sake, don’t mention Wolfe’s double-cross to Perrit. Not till you’re sure what you want. That would start, fireworks that nobody could stop.”