“Could you make it Saturday?”
He shook his head and smiled, still sad. I got up from my chair and picked up my hat, and thanked him. But before I started for the door I said:
“By the way, you know that second warning Paul Chapin wrote — anyhow, somebody else wrote it. Is nitroglycerin oily and sweet-burning?”
“I am a surgeon, not a pharmacologist.”
“Well, try one guess.”
He smiled. “Nitroglycerin is unquestionably oily. It is said to have a sweet, burning taste. I have never tried it.”
I thanked him again and went out, and down to the street, and got in the roadster and stepped on the starter. As I rolled off downtown I was thinking that Dr. Leopold Elkus was exactly the kind of man that so often makes life a damn nuisance. I never yet have had any serious trouble with an out-and-out liar, but a man that might be telling the truth is an unqualified pain in the rumpus. And what with the Harrison line-up, and now this, I suspected that I began to perceive dimly that the memorandum Wolfe had concocted was going to turn out to be just a sheet of paper to be used for any purpose that might occur to you, unless we managed somehow to bust Elkus’s story wide open.
I had intended to stop off again at Fifty-sixth Street for another look at the Dreyer gallery, but after listening to Elkus I decided it would be a waste of time, considering how the place had been done over. I kept on downtown, headed for home. The best bet I could think of at the moment was a try at Santini. The police had only questioned him once on account of his sailing for Italy that Thursday night, and of course the warnings hadn’t been received yet and they had no particular suspicions. Wolfe had connections in several cities in Europe, and there was a smart guy in Rome who had turned in a good one on the Whittemore bonds. We could cable him and set him on Santini and maybe get a wedge started. I’d have to persuade Wolfe it was worth about ninety-nine dollars in transatlantic words.
It was a quarter to eleven when I got there. In the office the phone was ringing, so I went on in with my hat and coat on. I knew Wolfe would eventually answer it from upstairs, but I thought I might as well get it. It was Saul Panzer. I asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted to report. I asked him what, and he said, nothing, just report. I was sore at everything anyway, so I got sarcastic. I said if he couldn’t find Hibbard alive or dead, maybe he could rig up a dummy that would do. I said I had just got a smack in the eye on another angle of the case, and if he was no better than I was he’d better come on down to the office with a pinochle deck, and I hung up on him, which alone is enough to aggravate a nun.
It took me five minutes to dig the address of the Roman snoop out of the file. Wolfe came down on time, right at eleven. He said good morning, sniffed at the air, and got seated at his desk. I was impatient, but I knew I’d have to wait until he had glanced through the mail, fixed the orchids in the vase, tried his pen to see if it was working, and rung for beer. After that was all over he murmured at me: