“No good,” I told him. “They only went down one flight. I heard ’em. It’s no good anyway. I’ve got another note for you — from Nero Wolfe — here in my breast pocket. Help yourself, but stay in front of me.”
His eyes stayed glassy on me.
“Don’t you want to know what it says?” I demanded. “Get it!”
He was only two steps from me, but it took him four small slow ones. His gloved hand went inside my coat to the breast pocket, and came out with a folded slip of yellow paper — a sheet from one of Wolfe’s memo pads. From the way his eyes looked, I doubted if he would be able to read, but apparently he was. I watched his face as he took it in, in Wolfe’s straight precise handwriting:
If Mr. Goodwin is not home by midnight the information given him by Cynthia Brown will be communicated to the police and I shall see that they act immediately. Nero Wolfe
He looked at me, and slowly his eyes changed. No longer glassy, they began to let light in. Before he had just been going to kill me. Now he hated me.
I got voluble. “So it’s no good, see? He did it this way because if you had known I had told him you would have sat tight. He figured that you would think you could handle me, and I admit you tried your best. He wants fifty thousand dollars by tomorrow at six o’clock, no later. You say it can’t be arranged so you’ll get what you pay for, but we say it can and it’s up to you. You say we have no evidence, but we can get it — don’t you think we can’t. As for me, I wouldn’t advise you even to pull my hair. It would make him sore at you, and he’s not sore now, he just wants fifty thousand bucks.”
He had started to tremble and knew it, and was trying to stop.
“Maybe,” I conceded, “you can’t get that much that quick. In that case he’ll take your IOU. You can write it on the back of that note he sent you. My pen’s here in my vest pocket. He’ll be reasonable about it.”
“I’m not such a fool,” he said harshly. He had stopped trembling.