“I’ve had enough advice,” he said as if he meant it. “My mind is made up.”
“Okay.” I got the notebook in position. “Give me everything you think we’ll need. First, basic facts. Home and business addresses?”
It took close to an hour, so it was nearly five o’clock when they left. I found him irritating and therefore kept my prejudice intact. I wondered later what difference it would have made in my attitude if I had known that in a few hours he would be dead. Even if you take the line that he had it coming to him, which would be easy to justify, at least it would have made the situation more interesting. But during that hour, as far as I knew, they were just a couple of white-livers, scared stiff by a false alarm named Blaney, so it was merely another job.
I was still typing from my notes when at six o’clock, after the regulation two hours in the plant rooms, Wolfe came down to the office. He got fixed in his chair, rang for Fritz to bring beer, and demanded, “Did you take that man’s money?”
I grinned at him. Up to his old tricks. I had been a civilian again for only a week, and here he was already treating me like a hireling just as he had for years, acting as if I had never been a colonel, as in fact I hadn’t, but anyway I had been a major.
I asked him, “What do you think? If I say I took it, you’ll claim that your attitude as you left plainly indicated that he had insulted you and you wouldn’t play. If I say I refused it, you’ll claim I’ve done you out of a fee. Which do you prefer?”
He abandoned it. “Did you word the receipt properly?”
“No, sir. I worded it the way you told me to. The loot is in the safe and I’ll deposit it tomorrow. I told him you’d prefer a check, but he said there it was, he had taken the trouble to get it, why not take it? He still thinks you’ll forget to report it to your hundred and forty million fellow citizens. By the way, if Blaney does perform I’m going to marry the widow. Something unforeseen has happened. I have an ironclad rule that if the ankles are more than half as big around as the calves that settles it, I am absolutely not interested. But you saw her legs, and in spite of them I would rate her—”
“I did not see her legs. Do your typing. I like to hear you typing. If you are typing you can’t talk.”
To humor him I typed, which as it turned out was just as well, since that neat list of facts was going to be needed before bedtime. It was finished when Fritz entered at eight o’clock to announce dinner, the main item of which was a dish called by Wolfe and Fritz “Cassoulettes Castelnaudary,” but by me boiled beans. I admit they were my favorite beans, which is saying something. The only thing that restrained me at all was my advance knowledge of the pumpkin pie to come.