I’ll be damned if he didn’t say, “Two hundred. I was shot at. I came within an inch of getting killed.”
I told him he’d have to talk the second hundred out of Wolfe and opened the door to the office and followed him through. He detoured around Jane Geer and went and sat in the chair he had just escaped being a corpse in. I swiveled my own chair to face it out and sat down too.
Jensen demanded sharply, “What have you got there?”
“This,” I said cheerfully, “is a veteran revolver, a Granville thirty-eight, which has been fired not too long ago.” I lowered it gently onto my desk. “Fritz, give me back my gun.” He brought it. I kept it in my hand. “Thank you. I found this other affair in the vase on the table in there, dressed in a handkerchief. Five unused cartridges and one used. It’s a stranger here. Never saw it before. It appears to put the finishing touch on a critical situation.”
Jane exploded. She called me an unspeakable rat. She said she wanted a lawyer and intended to go to one immediately. She called Hackett three or four things. She said it was the dirtiest frame-up in history. “Now,” she told Hackett, “I know damned well you framed Peter Root. I let that skunk Goodwin talk me out of it!” She was out of her chair, spitting fire. It was spectacular. “You won’t get away with it this time! You incredible louse!”
Hackett was trying to talk back to her, making his voice louder and louder, and when she stopped for breath he could be heard.
“... will not tolerate it! You come here and try to kill me! You nearly do kill me! Then you abuse me about a Peter Root and I have never heard of Peter Root!” He was putting real feeling into it; apparently he had either forgotten that he was supposed to be Nero Wolfe, or had got the notion, in all the excitement, that he really was Nero Wolfe. He was proceeding, “Young lady, listen to me! I will not—”
She turned and made for the door. I was immediately on my feet and after her, but halfway across the room I put on the brake, because the doorway had suddenly filled up with a self-propelled massive substance and she couldn’t get through. She stopped, goggle-eyed, and then fell back a couple of paces. The massive substance advanced, halted, and used its mouth.
“How do you do. I am Nero Wolfe.”