“By what process?” She was scornful. “I suppose he asks me if I ever committed murder, and I smile and say no, and he apologizes and gives me an orchid.”
“Not quite. He’s a genius. He asks you questions like do you bait your own hook when you go fishing, and you reveal yourself without knowing it.”
“It sounds fascinating.” Her eyes suddenly changed, and the line of her lips. She had been struck with an idea. “I wonder,” she said.
“What is it, and we’ll both wonder.”
“Sure.” Her eyes had changed more. “This wouldn’t by any chance be a climax you’ve been working up to? You with a thousand girls and women so that you have to issue ration books so many minutes to a coupon, and yet finding so much time for me? Leading up, heaven knows why, and I don’t care to go to heaven to find out, to this idiotic frame—”
“Turn that one off,” I broke in, “or I’ll begin to get suspicious myself. You know darned well why I have found time for you, having a mirror as you do. I have been experimenting to test my emotional reaction to form, color, touch, and various perfumes, and I have been deeply grateful for your co-operation. For you to pretend to imagine that the experiment we have been carrying on was on my part preparation for a frame-up for murder is an insult both to my intelligence and my emotional integrity.”
“Ha, ha.” She stood up, her eyes not softening nor her tone melting. “I am going to see Nero Wolfe. I welcome an opportunity to reveal myself to Nero Wolfe. Do I go or are you taking me?”
I took her. I paid the check and we went out and got a taxi.
During the brief ride downtown and crosstown she got more realistic. She said, among other things, “I was taken in by Peter Root. I thought he was innocent and was being made the goat. So I expressed myself accordingly, and why shouldn’t I? But I am over all that, as you know unless you are a two-faced subhuman Pithecanthropus, and this business about the murder of that Jensen, which I read about in the morning paper, is utter poppycock. I’m a working girl. After my experience with the charming, irresistible Peter I wouldn’t marry a combination of Winston Churchill and Victor Mature. I wouldn’t even marry you. I have a future. I intend to become the first female vice-president of the biggest advertising agency in the country. I never will, or anyway not for years, if my name is made public as a suspect in a murder case. The publicity about me in the Peter Root business didn’t help me any, and this would about finish me.”
“Don’t,” I advised her, “take that line with Nero Wolfe. His attitude toward women as business executives is a little peculiar, not to mention his attitude toward women.”