“Bring her up here. We’ll do a pentathlon and the winner gets you. What would you advise me to do?”
Her eyes, opened from force of habit, blinked in the sun and went shut again. I asked, “You mean to train for the pentathlon?”
“Certainly not. I won’t have to. I mean when the District Attorney comes to ask more questions. You know he’s coming?”
“Yeah, I heard about it.”
“All right, what shall I do? Shall I tell him that I may have a suspicion that I might have an idea about someone using your car?”
“You might take a notion that you might try it. Shall we make it up together? Who shall we pick on?”
“I don’t want to pick on anybody. That’s the trouble. Why should anyone pay a penalty for accidentally killing Louis Rony?”
“Maybe they shouldn’t.” I patted her round brown soft firm shoulder to see if it was dry yet. “There I’m right with you, ma’am. But the hell of it—”
“Why do you keep on calling me ma’am?”
“To make you want me to call you something else. Watch and see if it don’t work. It always does. The hell of it is that both the DA and Nero Wolfe insist on knowing, and the sooner they find out the sooner we can go on to other things like pentathlons. Knowing how good you are at dare-base, I suppose you do have an idea about someone using my car. What gave it to you?”