“Your driving license?”
I shook my head. “Detective license.”
“That’s right, you’re a detective, aren’t you? All right, come on.” She moved. “We’ll take the same route. What does it look like?”
Having her along wasn’t part of my plan. “You’re an angel,” I told her. “You’re a little cabbage. In that dress you remind me of a girl I knew in the fifth grade. I’m not going to let you ruin it scrambling around hunting that damn card case. Leave me but don’t forget me. If and when I find it I’ll let you know.”
“Not a chance.” She was smiling with a corner of her mouth up. “I’ve always wanted to help a detective find something, especially you. Come on!”
She was either onto me or she wasn’t, but in any case it was plain that she had decided to stay with me. I might as well pretend that nothing would please me better, so I did.
“What does it look like?” she asked as we circled the house and started to cross the lawn toward the border.
Since the card case was at that moment in my breast pocket, the simplest way would have been to show it to her, but under the circumstances I preferred to describe it. I told her it was pigskin, darkened by age, and four inches by six. It wasn’t to be seen on the lawn. We argued about where we had gone through the shrubbery, and I let her win. It wasn’t there either, and a twig whipped my wounded cheek as I searched beneath the branches. After we had passed through the gate into the field we had to go slower because the grass was tall enough to hide a small object like a card case. Naturally I felt foolish, kicking around three or four blocks away from where I wanted to be, but I had told my story and was stuck with it.
We finally finished with the field, including the route around the back of the outbuildings, and the inside of the barn. As we neared the vicinity of the house from the other direction, the southwest, I kept bearing left, and Madeline objected that we hadn’t gone that way. I replied that I had been outdoors on other occasions than our joint night expedition, and went still further left. At last I was in bounds. Thirty paces off was a clump of trees, and just the other side of it was the graveled plaza where my car was parked. If someone had batted Rony on the head, for instance with a piece of a branch of a tree with stubs of twigs on it, before running the car over him, and if he had then put the branch in the car and it was still there when he drove back to the house to park, and if he had been in a hurry and the best he could do was give the branch a toss, it might have landed in the clump of trees or near by. That cluster of ifs will indicate the kind of errand Wolfe had picked for me. Searching the grounds for a likely weapon was a perfectly sound routine idea, but it needed ten trained men with no inhibitions, not a pretty girl in a cotton print looking for a card case and a born hero pretending he was doing likewise.
Somebody growled something that resembled “Good morning.”