“I am. It’s good, isn’t it?”
The connection went.
I hung up, told Fritz he could answer calls now, and hot-footed it to the stairs and up a flight. Saul was there on the landing.
“Whose voice was that?” I demanded.
“Search me. You heard all I did.” His eyes had a gleam in them, and I suppose mine did too.
“Whoever it was,” I said, “I’ve got a date. Let’s go up and tell the genius. I’ve got to admit he saved a lot of postage.”
We mounted the other two flights and found Wolfe in the cool room, inspecting a bench of dendrobiums for damage from the invasion of the day before. When I told him about the call he merely nodded, not even taking the trouble to smirk, as if picking a murderer first crack out of ten dozen men was the sort of thing he did between yawns.
“That call,” he said, “validates our assumptions and verifies our calculation, but that’s all. If it had done more than that it wouldn’t have been made. Has anyone come to take those seals off?”
I told him no. “I asked Stebbins about it and he said he’d ask Cramer.”
“Don’t ask again,” he snapped. “We’ll go down to my room.”