Her shoulders lifted daintily, and fell. “I very seldom eat candy.”
“We don’t want you to eat it. Just take it. Please.”
She reached in without looking and snared a chocolate cream and held it up in her fingers and looked at me. I said, “Okay. Put it back, please. That’s all. Thank you. Good day, Mrs. Ballin.”
She glanced around at us, said, “Dear me,” in a tone of mild and friendly astonishment, and went.
I bent to the table and marked an X on a corner of her paper, and the figure 6 beneath her name. Cramer growled, “Wolfe said three pieces.”
“Yeah. He said to use our judgment too. In my judgment, if that dame was mixed up in anything, even Nero Wolfe would never find it out. What did you think of her, Captain?”
Dixon made a noise something between a hartebeest and a three-toed sloth. The door opened and in came a tall slender woman in a tight-fitting long black coat and a silver fox that must have had giantism. She kept her lips tight and gazed at us with deepest concentrated eyes. I took her slips and gave one to Dixon.
“Now, Miss Claymore, please do what I ask, naturally, as you would under ordinary circumstances, without any hesitation or nervousness. Will you?”
She shrank back a little, but nodded. I extended the box.
“Take a piece of candy.”