“But that’s it! They wouldn’t be satisfied if we had told the truth!”
“Oh.” Wolfe’s brows went up. “You lied to them?”
“Yes. Or if we didn’t lie, anyhow we didn’t tell them the truth. We didn’t tell them that when we first went in together and saw him, there was no gun lying there. There was no gun in sight.”
“Indeed. How sure are you?”
“Absolutely positive. I never saw anything clearer than I saw that — that sight — all of it. There was no gun.”
Wolfe snapped at Weppler, “You agree, sir?”
“Yes. She’s right.”
Wolfe sighed. “Well,” he conceded, “I can see that you’re really in trouble. Spanking wouldn’t help.”
I shifted in my chair on account of a tingle at the lower part of my spine. Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street was an interesting place to live and work — for Fritz Brenner, the chef and housekeeper, for Theodore Horstmann, who fed and nursed the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms up on the roof, and for me, Archie Goodwin, whose main field of operations was the big office on the ground floor. Naturally I thought my job the most interesting, since a confidential assistant to a famous private detective is constantly getting an earful of all kinds of troubles and problems — everything from a missing necklace to a new blackmail gimmick. Very few clients actually bored me. But only one kind of case gave me that tingle in the spine: murder. And if this pair of lovebirds were talking straight, this was it.