“Who wants to eat?” Fred demanded fiercely. “We want to know what you’re going to do!”
“I’ve got to brush my teeth,” Peggy stated. I shot her a glance of admiration and affection. Women’s saying things like that at times like that is one of the reasons I enjoy their company. No man alive, under those circumstances, would have felt that he had to brush his teeth and said so.
Besides, it made it easier to get rid of them without being rude. Fred tried to insist that they had a right to know what the program was, and to help consider the prospects, but was finally compelled to accept Wolfe’s mandate that when a man hired an expert the only authority he kept was the right to fire. That, combined with Peggy’s longing for a toothbrush and Wolfe’s assurance that he would keep them informed, got them on their way without a ruckus.
When, after letting them out, I returned to the office, Wolfe was drumming on his desk blotter with a paperknife, scowling at it, though I had told him a hundred times that it ruined the blotter. I went and got the checkbook and replaced it in the safe, having put nothing on the stub but the date, so no harm was done.
“Twenty minutes till lunch,” I announced, swiveling my chair and sitting. “Will that be enough to hogtie the second detail?”
No reply.
I refused to be sensitive. “If you don’t mind,” I inquired pleasantly, “what is the second detail?”
Again no reply, but after a moment he dropped the paperknife, leaned back, and sighed clear down.
“That confounded gun,” he growled. “How did it get from the floor to the bust? Who moved it?”
I stared at him. “My God,” I complained, “you’re hard to satisfy. You’ve just had two clients arrested and worked like a dog, getting the gun from the bust to the floor. Now you want to get it from the floor to the bust again? What the hell!”