“I don’t often need help. When I do I get the best there is. I like everything the best. For what I need now, I’ve picked you as the best. I pay for what I get.” Perrit took from his breast pocket a neat little stack of bills, unfolded, held with a rubber band, and tossed it onto Wolfe’s desk. “Fifty C’s. Five grand. That will do for a start. I’m being blackmailed and your job is to stop it.”
I goggled at him. The idea of Dazy Perrit being pestered by a blackmailer was about the same as Billy Sunday being pestered by an evangelist trying to convert him.
“But I’ve told you, Mr. Per—”
“I’m being blackmailed by my daughter. That’s one thing nobody in the world knows except me, and now you and this man of yours. Here’s another thing, and this is even more particular. This is very particular. I wouldn’t tell it to my mother even if I still had one, but I need help. My daughter is—”
“Hold it!”
Dazy Perrit was not easy to stop, but I made it positive enough to stop him. I was out of my chair, standing in front of him. “I want to warn you,” I told his eyes, “that Mr. Wolfe is fully as stubborn as you are. This is damn dangerous for all concerned. He’s told you he doesn’t want to hear it, and neither do I!” I turned savagely to Wolfe. “Good God, what’s wrong with spaghetti and cheese?” I picked up the stack of bills and stuck them out at Perrit.
He ignored it. His eyes hadn’t even shifted to me. He went on to Wolfe, “The particular thing is that my daughter isn’t really my daughter — the one that’s blackmailing me, I mean. Now you know that too, you and this man. I said that nobody else in the world knows it, but she does. I have got a daughter, born in nineteen twenty-five, twenty-one years ago. She’ll be twenty-one next month, November eighth. There’s a job for you to do with her too. What’s up?”
“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Perrit.” Wolfe had glanced at the wall clock, pushed his chair back from the desk, and was manipulating his bulk upright. He moved from behind the desk and then stopped, because Perrit, also on his feet, was standing square in his path.
“Where you going?” Perrit asked in a tone which implied that no conceivable answer would be acceptable.
I stood up too, my hand leaving my pocket with the gun in it — that is, in my hand. That may strike some as corny, but it was instinctive and the instinct was sound. I got around town some and was fairly well informed, and so far as I knew no serious argument with Dazy Perrit had ever been settled with any tool but a gun; and up to then Perrit had done all the settling, either personally or by staff work. With what he had already spilled I could see nothing ahead but one fine mess, and I still believe, corn or no corn, that if he had so much as poked a finger at Wolfe’s central bulge I would have dropped him.