“When I left the dinner table and went upstairs,” I declared, “I fully intended to glance in at the corpse and call the cops. But as I stood looking down at him I realized that I would have to call you first to tell you what I was going to do, and I didn’t want to call you from here. I needed instructions. When the cops came, if I told them what Lewent had hired us to do, and the inmates here told them what I had said he had hired us to do, I would be in the middle of another of those goddam tangles that have been known to keep me on a straight-backed-chair in the DA’s office for ten hours running. You would be in it too. I had to ask you to consider that and decide it, and I didn’t want to leave here to go out to phone.”
He grunted, not sympathetically.
“After all,” I submitted, “no bones are broken, except Lewent’s skull. You can tell me what to do and say, and go back home and have your salad and cheese and coffee. After you’re safely outside I’ll go up to our client’s room to ask him something and will be horrified to find him dead, and will rush to notify the household and call the police. As for the thousand bucks he paid you, surely he would admit that you have earned it by coming up here to tell me how to manage things so that his death will cause us as little inconvenience as possible.”
He eyed me. It was precisely the kind of situation that would normally have called for an outraged roar, in the privacy of his office, but here he had to hold it.
“Poppycock,” he muttered bitterly. “You know quite well what you have done and are doing, and so do I. The police, and especially Mr. Cramer, would never believe that you would dare to trick me into coming here for anything less than murder, and they know that without a trick I wouldn’t come at all. So I’ll have to discuss murder with these people. Is there a decent chair in Mr. Huck’s room?”
“Yeah, one that will do, but don’t expect to like it.”
“I won’t.” He stood up. “Very well. Let’s go.”
6
The chair problem in Huck’s room required a little handling. After Wolfe had been introduced to Huck and Dorothy Riff, and Huck assented, without enthusiasm, to Wolfe’s desire to discuss the affairs of his client Herman Lewent, there remained the fact that Paul Thayer was occupying the only chair that could take Wolfe without squeezing, and Thayer, who was still sulking, paid no attention to my polite hint. When I asked him to move and even said please, he gave me a dirty look as he complied.
As Wolfe sat and turned his head from left to right and back again, taking them in, and they focused on him, I was not utterly at ease because I had slid out from under the responsibility. He had said he would have to discuss murder with them, and in the heat of his resentment at my having foxed him into taking a two-mile taxi ride he might regard it as funny to manage it so that I would have not less to explain to the cops, but more.