I turned, prompt but dignified, and went. If he had thrown the seedling at me I would of course have dodged, and the fairly heavy pot would have sailed on by and crashed into a cluster of Calanthes in full bloom, and God only knew what Wolfe would have done then.
On my way back down to the office I was wearing a grin. Even without the thrips, Wolfe’s reaction to my message would have been substantially the same, which was why I had been prepared to yap. The thrips had merely keyed it up. Leo Heller had been tagged by fame, with articles about him in magazines and Sunday newspapers. While making a living as a professor of mathematics at Underhill College, he had begun, for amusement, to apply the laws of probability, through highly complicated mathematical formulas, to various current events, ranging from ball games and horse races to farm crops and elections. Checking back on his records after a couple of years, he had been startled and pleased to find that the answers he had got from his formulas had been 86.3 per cent correct, and he had written a piece about it for a magazine. Naturally requests had started coming from all kinds of people for all kinds of calculations, and he had granted some of them to be obliging, but when he had tried telling a woman in Yonkers where to look for thirty-one thousand dollars in currency she had lost, and she had followed instructions and found it and had insisted on giving him two grand, he side-stepped to a fresh slant on the laws of probability as applied to human problems and resigned his professorship.
That had been three years ago, and now he was sitting pretty. It was said that his annual take was in six figures, that he returned all his mail unanswered, accepting only clients who called in person, and that there was nothing on earth he wouldn’t try to dope a formula for, provided he was furnished with enough factors to make it feasible. It had been suggested that he should be hauled in for fortunetelling, but the cops and the DA’s office let it lay, as well they might, since he had a college degree and there were at least a thousand fortunetellers operating in New York who had never made it through high school.
It wasn’t known whether Heller was keeping his percentage up to 86.3, but I happened to know it wasn’t goose eggs. Some months earlier a president of a big corporation had hired Wolfe to find out which member of his staff was giving trade secrets to a competitor. I had been busy on another case at the time, and Wolfe had put Orrie Cather on the collection of details. Orrie had made a long job of it, and the first we knew we were told by the corporation president that he had got impatient and gone to Leo Heller with the problem, and Heller had cooked up a formula and come out with an answer, the name of one of the junior vice-presidents, and the junior VP had confessed! Our client freely admitted that most of the facts he had given Heller for the ingredients of his formula had been supplied by us, gathered by Orrie Cather, and he offered no objection to paying our bill, but Wolfe was so sore he actually told me to send no bill — an instruction I disregarded, knowing how he would regret it after he had cooled off. However, as I was aware through occasional mutterings from him, he still had it in for Leo Heller, and taking on any kind of job for him would have been absolutely off the program that day or any other day, even if there had been no thrips within a mile of Thirty-fifth Street.
Back downstairs in the office, I phoned Heller and told him nothing doing. “He’s extremely sensitive,” I explained, “and this is an insult. As you know, he’s the greatest detective that ever lived, and — do you know that?”
“I’m willing to postulate it,” Heller conceded in a thin voice that tended to squeak. “Why an insult?”
“Because you want to hire Nero Wolfe — meaning me, really — to collect facts on which you can base a decision whether your suspicion about your client is justified. You might as well try to hire Stan Musial as bat boy. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t sell the raw material for answers; he sells answers.”
“I’m quite willing to pay him for an answer, any amount short of exorbitance, and in cash. I’m gravely concerned about this client, this situation, and my data is insufficient. I shall be delighted if with the data I get an answer from Mr. Wolfe, and—”
“And,” I put in, “if his answer is that your client has committed a serious crime, as you suspect, he decides whether and when to call a cop, not you. Yes?”
“Certainly.” Heller was eager to oblige. “I do not intend or desire to shield a criminal — on the contrary.”