“His niece. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”
“Good for her. God bless her.” He laughed. “It is an incontrovertible fact that five thousand dollars is a hell of a lot of more money than a nickel. How do you account for that? I want a cigarette.”
I got a packet out and lit us both up. His fingers weren’t steady at all, and I began to feel sorry for him. So I said, “Just figure it out. Hibbard’s home is up at University Heights. If you drove downtown somewhere — say around the Perry Street neighborhood, I don’t know just where — and from there to One Hundred Sixteenth Street, ordinarily what would you get for it? Let’s see — two, eight miles — that’d be around a dollar and a half. But if going uptown you happened to have your old classmate Andrew Hibbard with you — or just his corpse, maybe even only a piece of it, say, his head and a couple of arms — instead of a dollar-fifty you’d get five grand. As you see, it all depends on your cargo.” So as not to take my eyes off him, I blew cigarette smoke out of the corner of my mouth. Of course, riding a guy who needed a drink bad and wouldn’t take it was like knocking a cripple’s crutch from under him, but I didn’t need to remind myself that all’s fair in love and business. Basic truths like that are either born right in a man or they’re not.
At that he had enough grip on himself to keep his mouth shut. He looked at his fingers trembling holding the cigarette, so long that I finally looked at them too. Finally he let his hand fall to his knee, and looked at me and began to laugh. He demanded, “Didn’t I say you were going to be funny?” His voice went harsh again. “Listen, you. Beat it. Come on, now, beat it. Go back in the house or you’ll catch cold.”
I said, “All right, how about that drink?”
But he was through. I prodded at him a little, but he had gone completely dumb and unfriendly. I thought of bringing out some rye and letting him smell it, but decided that would just screw him down tighter. I said to myself, anon, and passed him up.
Before going in the house I went around back of the taxi and got the license number.
I went to the kitchen. Wolfe was still there, in the wooden chair with arms where he always sat to direct Fritz and to eat when he was on a relapse.
I said, “Pitney Scott’s out front. The taxi-driver. He brought her. He paid me a nickel for his share, and he says that’s all it’s worth. He knows something about Andrew Hibbard.”
“What?”