Chapter 1
I didn’t mind it at all,” our visitor said gruffly but affably. “It’s a pleasure.” He glanced around. “I like rooms that men work in. This is a good one.”
I was still swallowing my surprise that he actually looked like a miner, at least my idea of one, with his big bones and rough weathered skin and hands that would have been right at home around a pick handle. Certainly swinging a pick was not what he got paid for as chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corporation, which had its own building down on Nassau Street not far from Wall.
I was also surprised at the tone he was using. When, the day before, a masculine voice had given a name on the phone and asked when Nero Wolfe could call at his office, and I had explained why I had to say never, and it had ended by arranging an appointment at Wolfe’s office for eleven the next morning, I had followed up with a routine check on a prospective client by calling Lon Cohen at the Gazette, Lon had told me that the only reason James U. Sperling didn’t bite ears off was because he took whole heads and ate them bones and all. But there he was, slouching in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk like a big friendly roughneck, and I’ve just told you what he said when Wolfe started the conversation by explaining that he never left the office on business and expressing a regret that Sperling had had to come all the way to our place on West Thirty-fifth Street nearly to Eleventh Avenue. He said it was a pleasure!
“It will do,” Wolfe murmured in a gratified tone. He was behind his desk, leaning back in his custom-made chair, which was warranted safe for a quarter of a ton and which might some day really be put to the test if its owner didn’t level off. He added, “If you’ll tell me what your problem is perhaps I can make your trip a good investment.”
Seated at my own desk, at a right angle to Wolfe’s and not far away, I allowed myself a mild private grin. Since the condition of his bank balance did not require the use of sales pressure to snare a client, I knew why he was spreading the sugar. He was merely being sociable because Sperling had said he liked the office. Wolfe didn’t like the office, which was on the first floor of the old brownstone house he owned. He didn’t like it, he loved it, and it was a good thing he did, since he was spending his life in it — except when he was in the kitchen with Fritz, or in the dining room across the hall at mealtime, or upstairs asleep, or in the plant rooms up on the roof, enjoying the orchids and pretending he was helping Theodore with the work.
My private grin was interrupted by Sperling firing a question at me: “Your name’s Goodwin, isn’t it? Archie Goodwin?”
I admitted it. He went to Wolfe.
“It’s a confidential matter.”
Wolfe nodded. “Most matters discussed in this office are. That’s commonplace in the detective business. Mr. Goodwin and I are used to it.”