“Wait a minute. Collect yourself and start at the beginning. What have you seen, heard, and done?”
“I’ve seen pictures, just now in the Gazette. One is of a man named Dazy Perrit, and I know him — I don’t really know him well, but I know him in a certain way, and he has been killed, and for a certain reason that’s bad news for me. Another picture is of you, it’s a very good likeness, and it says your name is Archie Goodwin and you work for Nero Wolfe — it calls you his legman — and it says you were with Dazy Perrit when he was killed. So I want to know—”
“Excuse me,” I cut her off, “but the kind of things you want to know are not a good kind for a telephone. I would like to come up there for a talk but I have things to do. Why don’t you hop on the subway and come down here? Will you do that?”
“I certainly will! I will be there—”
“Excuse me again. The sidewalk in front of our house is the scene of two murders and therefore temporarily conspicuous. Get this. From Thirty-fourth Street and Eleventh Avenue go east on Thirty-fourth Street. It’s ninety-two paces for me, so it will be about a hundred and twenty for you. At that point there is a narrow passage between two buildings — a loading platform on the left of it and a wholesale paper products place on the right. Go in along the passageway and I’ll meet you at the far end of it and let you in at our back door. Have you got it?”
“Certainly. It ought to take me about half an hour.”
“Okay. I’ll be there, but if I’m not, wait for me.”
“All right. Tell me just one thing, was Dazy Perrit’s daughter—”
I told her nothing doing and ended it. A glance at my wristwatch, on the fly as I headed for the stairs, showed me eleven-fifty-two. At the bottom I slowed to a normal pace, to enter the office with an attitude of indifference, but that proved unnecessary because L. A. Schwartz was gone. Wolfe sat at his desk pouring beer.
“She saw pictures of Perrit and me in the Gazette” I reported. “She’ll come the back way and be here in half an hour.”