“I... I’m not hungry. I can see you’re funny. A month ago I would have thought you were a scream.”
I nodded. “I’m a knockout.” I beckoned to a waitress and consulted the card. “What will you have, Miss Frost?”
She ordered some kind of goo, and hot tea, and I favored the pork and beans, with a glass of milk.
With the waitress gone, I said, “There are lots of ways I could do this. I could scare you. Don’t think I couldn’t. Or I could try to persuade you that since your cousin is our client, and since Nero Wolfe is as square with a client as you would be with your twin if you had one, it’s to your own interest to go and see him. But there’s a better reason for your going than either of those. Ordinary decency. Whether Wolfe was right or wrong about what you said yesterday at McNair’s doesn’t matter. The point is that we’ve kept it to ourselves. You saw this morning what terms we’re on with the police; they had me handling that test for them. But have they been ragging you on what you said yesterday? They have not. On the other hand, are you going to have to discuss it with someone — sooner or later? You’re darned tooting you are, there’s no way out of it. Who do you want to discuss it with? If you take my advice, Nero Wolfe, and the sooner the better. Don’t forget that Miss Mitchell heard you say it too, and although she may be a good friend of yours—”
“Please don’t talk any more.” She was looking at her fork, which she was sliding back and forth on the tablecloth, and I saw how tight her fingers gripped it. I sat back and looked somewhere else.
The waitress came and began depositing food in front of us. Helen Frost waited until she was through, and gone, and then said more to herself than to me, “I can’t eat.”
“You ought to.” I didn’t pick up my tools. “You always ought to eat. Try it, anyhow. I’ve already eaten, I was only keeping you company.” I fished for a dime and a nickel and laid them on the table. “My car is parked on 52nd, halfway to Park Avenue, on the downtown side. I’ll expect you there at a quarter to two.”
She didn’t say anything. I beat it and found the waitress and got my check from her, paid at the desk, and went out. Across the street and down a little I found a drug store with a lunch counter, entered, and consumed two ham sandwiches and a couple of glasses of milk. I wondered what they would do with the beans, whether they would put them back in the pot, and thought it would be a crime to waste them. I didn’t wonder much about Helen Frost, because it looked to me like a pipe, all sealed up. There wasn’t anything else for her to do.
There wasn’t. She came up to me at ten minutes to two, as I stood on the sidewalk alongside the roadster. I opened the door and she got in, and I climbed in and stepped on the starter.
As we rolled off I asked her, “Did you eat anything?”