Archer turned to the table, found a pad of paper, got a pen from his pocket, and offered them to me. “Here. Write it down and sign it, and let’s get it over with. You’ll never regret it, Goodwin, you have my word for that.”
I smiled at him, “Now I am sorry, Mr. Archer, I really am.”
“Don’t be sorry! Just write it down and sign it.”
I shook my head. “I guess you’ll have to get the warrant, but you’d better count ten. I’m glad you weren’t peddling a vacuum cleaner or you’d have sold me. But I won’t buy signing such a statement. If all it had to have in it was what you said — hitting him and dragging him off the road, and going on to make the phone call, and coming back and helping Miss Sperling hunt her sister, and getting the cops notified but not mentioning the fact that it was me that ran over him — if that was all there was to it I might possibly oblige you, in spite of the fact that it wouldn’t be true, just to save trouble all around. But one detail that you didn’t include would be too much for me.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The car. I’m in the detective business. I’m supposed to know things. I’m certainly supposed to know that if you run over a man and squash him the way Rony was squashed, the car will have so much evidence on it that a blindfolded Boy Scout could get enough to cinch it. Yet I drove the car back here and parked it, and played innocent all night and all morning, so Ben Dykes could walk in on us at noon and announce aha, it was Nero Wolfe’s car! That I will not buy. It would get me a horse laugh from the Battery to Spuyten Duyvil. I would never live it down. And speaking of a warrant, I don’t think any judge or jury would buy it either.”
“We could make it—”
“You couldn’t make it anything but what it is. I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t believe Ben Dykes has bought it, and I doubt very much if you have. Ben may not like me much, I don’t know, but he knows damn well I’m not a sap. He went after me as well as he could because you told him to and you’re the boss. As for you, I can’t say, except that I don’t blame you a bit for not liking to start fires under people like the Sperlings. If nothing else, they hire only the best lawyers. As for this bird in uniform named Noonan, you may be a church member and I’d better keep within bounds.”
“You see what he’s like, sir,” Noonan said under restraint. “I told you he thinks he’s tough. If you had let me take him to the barracks—”
“Shut up!” Archer squeaked.