“Oh! I remember!” Janet cried. She was pointing a finger. “You remember, Jimmie? This morning I was standing here, and you came by with a hot towel and you had that magazine and you tossed it under there, and I asked if you had been steaming it, and you said—”
Jimmie leaped. I thought his prey was Janet and in spite of everything I was willing to save her life, but Wolfe and the chair were in my way and cost me a fifth of a second. And it wasn’t Janet he was after, it was the magazine. He went for it in a hurtling dive and got his hands on it, but then the three dicks, not to mention Cramer and Purley, were on his neck and various other parts of him. It was a handsome pile-up. Janet, except for pulling her feet back under her chair out of harm’s way, did not move, nor did she make a sound. I suppose she was considering what to say to the reporters.
“Confound it,” Wolfe grumbled savagely behind me. “ My barber.”
Anyhow that haircut was practically done.
VII
As stubborn as Cramer was, he never did learn why Wolfe went to get a haircut that day. Eventually he stopped trying.
He learned plenty about Jimmie Kirk. Kirk was wanted as a bail-jumper, under another name, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on an old charge as a car stealer, with various fancy complications such as slugging a respected citizen who had surprised him in the act. Apparently he had gone straight in New York for a couple of years and had then resumed his former avocation. Unquestionably he had been fortified with liquids that Monday evening. Driving a stolen car while drunk is a risky operation, especially with a stolen magazine in your pocket.
As for Carl and Tina, I took a strong position on them Tuesday evening in the office after they had been sent up to the south room to bed.
“You know damn well what will happen,” I told Wolfe. “They won’t go to Ohio or anywhere else, they’ll stay here. Some day, maybe next week, maybe next year, they’ll be confronted and they’ll be in trouble. Being in trouble, they will come to me, because Carl likes me and because I rescued them this time—”
Wolfe snorted. “You did!”