She stopped. Wolfe and Cramer exchanged glances. “I would like,” Wolfe said, “to have the name of the six female tigers who are after your job.”
She turned white. I have never seen the color leave a face faster or more completely. “Damn you,” she said in bitter fury. “So you’re a rat like everybody else!”
Wolfe showed her a palm. “Please, madam. Mr. Cramer will speak for himself, but I have no desire to betray you to your enemies. I merely want—”
He saved his breath, because his audience was leaving. She got up, retrieved her mink from the other chair, draped it over her arm, turned, and headed for the door. Stebbins looked at Wolfe, Wolfe shook his head, and Stebbins trailed after her.
As he left the room at her heels, Cramer called to him, “Bring Busch!” Then he turned on Wolfe to protest. “What the hell, you had her open. Why give her a breath?”
Wolfe made a face. “The wretch. The miserable wretch. Her misogyny was already in her bones; now her misandry is too. She was dumb with rage, and it would have been futile to keep at her. But you’re keeping her?”
“You’re right we are. For what?” He was out of his chair, glaring down at Wolfe. “Tell me for what! Except for dragging that out of that woman, there’s not one single ...”
He was off again. I miss no opportunity of resenting Inspector Cramer — I enjoy it, and it’s good for my appetite — but I must admit that on that occasion he seemed to me to have a point. I still had seen or heard no indication whatever that Wolfe’s statement that he had a lead was anything but a stall, and it was half-past two in the morning, and five of them had been processed, with only one to go. So as Cramer yapped at my employer I did not cheer him on or offer him an orchid, but I had a private feeling that some of the sentiments he expressed were not positively preposterous. He was still at it when the door opened to admit Stebbins with the sixth customer.
The sergeant, after conducting this one to the seat the others had occupied, facing Wolfe and Cramer, did not go to the chair against the wall, which he had favored throughout the evening. Instead, he lowered his bulk onto one at Cramer’s left, only two arms’ lengths from the subject. That was interesting because it meant that he was voting for Karl Busch as his pick of the lot, and while Stebbins had often been wrong I had known him, more than once, to be right.
Karl Busch was the slick, sly, swarthy little article with his hair pasted to his scalp. In the specifications on his transcript I had noted the key NVMS, meaning No Visible Means of Support, but that was just a nod to routine. The details of the report on him left no real doubt as to the sources he tapped for jack. He was a Broadway smoothie, third grade. He was not in the theater or sports or the flicks or any of the tough rackets, but he knew everyone who was, and as the engraved lettuce swirled around the midtown corners and got trapped in the nets of the collectors, legitimate and otherwise, he had a hundred little dodges for fastening onto a specimen for himself.