I left them. My immediate and urgent objective was Madison Avenue for a coke-and-lime, but I went a block north to Seventieth Street. Sixty-ninth Street now belonged to Saul and his squad.
VI
At eleven o’clock the next morning, Friday, I sat in the office listening to the clank of Wolfe’s elevator as it brought him down from the plant rooms.
There had been no cheep from Delia Devlin, but we hadn’t wanted one anyway. What we wanted we had got, at least the first installment. At 12:42 Thursday night Saul had phoned that Heath had checked in at Sixty-ninth Street, arriving in a taxi, alone. That was all for the night. At 6:20 in the morning he had phoned that Fred Durkin and his two men had taken over and had been briefed on the terrain. And at 10:23 Fred had phoned that Heath had left his tenement and taken a taxi to 719 East Fifty-first Street and entered the building. That was the gray brick house I had visited the day before. Fred said they had seen no sign of an official tail. They were deployed. I told him he was my favorite mick and still would be if he hung on, and buzzed Wolfe in the plant rooms to inform him.
Wolfe entered, got at his desk, looked over the morning mail, signed a couple of checks, dictated a letter of inquiry about sausage to a man in Wisconsin, and settled down with the crossword puzzle in the London Times. I carried on my routine neatly and normally, making it perfectly plain that I could be just as placid as him, no matter how tense and ticklish it got. I had just finished typing the envelope for the letter and was twirling it out of the machine when the doorbell rang. I went to the hall to answer it, took one look through the one-way glass panel, wheeled and returned to the office, and spoke.
“I guess I’m through as a bookie. I said forty to one she wouldn’t spill it. Wengert and Cramer want in. We can sneak out the back way and head for Mexico.”
He finished putting in a letter, with precision, before he looked up. “Is this flummery?”
“No, sir. It’s them.”
“Indeed.” His brows went up a trifle. “Bring them in.”
I went out and to the door, turned the knob, and pulled it open. “Hello hello,” I said brightly. “Mr. Wolfe was saying only a minute ago that he would like to see Mr. Cramer and Mr. Wengert, and here you are.”