I went across to open the door, and they followed.
Chapter 5
By dinner time Monday we were all set, so we enjoyed the meal in leisure. Fritz was always happy and put on a little extra effort when he knew things were moving in the office. That night I passed him a wink when I saw how full the soup was of mushrooms, and when I tasted the tarragon in the salad dressing I threw him a kiss. He blushed. Wolfe frequently had compliments for his dishes and expressed them appropriately, and Fritz always blushed; and whenever I found occasion to toss him a tribute he blushed likewise, I’d swear to heaven, just to please me, not to let me down. I often wondered if Wolfe noticed it. His attention to food was so alert and comprehensive that I would have said off hand he didn’t, but in making any kind of a guess about Wolfe off hand wasn’t good enough.
As soon as dinner was over Wolfe went up to his room, as he had explained he would do; he was staging it. I conferred with Fritz in the kitchen a few minutes and then went upstairs and changed my clothes. I put on the gray suit with pin checks, one of the best fits I ever had, and a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. On my way back down I stopped in at Wolfe’s room, on the same floor, to ask him a question. He was in the tapestry chair by the reading lamp with one of Paul Chapin’s novels, and I stood waiting while he marked a paragraph in it with a lead pencil.
I said, “What if one of them brings along some foreign object, like a lawyer for instance? Shall I let it in?”
Without looking up, he nodded. I went down to the office.
The first one was early. I hadn’t looked for the line to start forming until around nine, but it lacked twenty minutes of that when I heard Fritz going down the hall and the front door opening. Then the knob of the office door turned, and Fritz ushered in the first victim. He almost needed a shave, his pants were baggy, and his hair wasn’t combed. His pale blue eyes darted around and landed on me.
“Hell,” he said, “you ain’t Nero Wolfe.”
I admitted it. I exposed my identity. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He said:
“I know I’m early for the party. I’m Mike Ayers, I’m in the city room at the Tribune. I told Oggie Reid I had to have the evening off to get my life saved. I stopped off somewhere to get a pair of drinks, and after a while it occurred to me I was a damn fool, there was no reason why there shouldn’t be a drink here. I am not referring to beer.”