“Dr. Frederick M. Cutler,” I said. “Please phone up.”
“Name?”
“Tell him a private detective named Goodwin has an important question to ask him about the patient he was visiting forty minutes ago.”
I thought that would do. If that got me to him my hunch would already have an attractive fuzz on its bare pink skin. So when, after finishing at the phone, he crossed to the elevator with me and told his colleague I was to be conveyed to 12C, my heart had accelerated a good ten per cent.
At 12C I was admitted by the man I had seen leaving the Whitten house with his black case. Here, with a better view of him, I could note such details as the gray in his hair, his impatient gray-blue eyes, and the sag at the corners of his wide full mouth. Also I could see, through an arch, men and women at a couple of card tables in the large room beyond.
“Come this way, please,” my victim said gruffly, and I followed him down a hall and through a door. This was a small room, its walls solid with books, and a couch, a desk, and three chairs, leaving no space at all. He closed the door, confronted me, and was even gruffer.
“What do you want?”
The poor guy had already given me at least half of what I wanted, but of course he would have had to be very nifty on the draw not to.
“My name,” I said, “is Archie Goodwin, and I work for Nero Wolfe.”
“So that’s who you are. What do you want?”