1
At the end of the sixth inning the score was Boston 11, New York 1.
I would not have believed that the day would ever come when, seated in a lower box between home and first, at the seventh and deciding game of the World Series between the Giants and Red Sox, I would find myself glomming a girl, no matter who. I am by no means above glomming a girl if she is worthy, but not at the Polo Grounds, where my mind is otherwise occupied. That awful day, though, I did.
The situation was complex and will have to be explained. It was a mess even before the game started. Pierre Mondor, owner of the famous Mondor’s Restaurant in Paris, was visiting New York and was our house guest. He got the notion, God knows how or why, that Wolfe had to take him to a baseball game, and Wolfe’s conception of the obligations of a host wouldn’t let him use his power of veto. Tickets were no problem, since Emil Chisholm, oil millionaire and part-owner of the Giants, considered himself deeply in Wolfe’s debt on account of a case we had handled for him a few years back.
So that October afternoon, a Wednesday, I got the pair of them, the noted private detective and the noted chef, up to the Polo Grounds in a taxi, steered them through the mob into the entrance, along the concrete ramps, and down the aisle to our box. It was twenty past one — only ten minutes to game time — and the stands were jammed. I motioned to Mondor, and he slid in and sat. Wolfe stood and glared down at the wooden slats and metal arms. Then he lifted his head and glared at me.
“Are you out of your senses?” he demanded.
“I warned you,” I said coldly. “It was designed for men, not mammoths. Let’s go home.”
He tightened his lips, moved his massivity, lowered it, and tried to squeeze between the arms. No. He grasped the rail in front with both hands, wriggled loose, and got what he could of his fanny hooked on the edge of the seat.
Mondor called to me across the great expanse of Wolfe’s back, “I depend with confidence on you, Arshee! You must make clear as it develops! What are the little white things?”
I love baseball and I love the Giants, and I had fifty bucks up on that game, but I would have got up and gone but for one thing. It was working hours, and Wolfe pays my salary, and there were too many people, some of them alive and loose, who felt strongly that he had already lived too long. He is seldom out in the open, easy to get at, and when he is I like to be nearby. So I gritted my teeth and stuck.