I went to the hall for my hat and beat it.
III
Since I wasn’t itching to oblige Homicide, and it was a pleasant evening for a walk, I decided to hoof it the fifteen blocks to Twentieth Street, and also to do a little chore on the way. If I had done it in the office Wolfe would have pulled his dignity on me and pretended to be outraged, though he knew as well as I did that it’s always desirable to get your name in the paper, provided it’s not in the obituary column. So I went to a phone booth in a drugstore on Tenth Avenue, dialed the Gazette number, asked for Lon Cohen, and got him.
“Scrap the front page,” I told him, “and start over. If you don’t want it I’ll sell it to the Times. Did you happen to know that Paul Aubry and his wife, Mrs. Sidney Karnow to you, called on Nero Wolfe this afternoon, and I went somewhere with them, and brought them back to Mr. Wolfe’s office, and fifteen minutes ago Sergeant Purley Stebbins came and got them? Or maybe you don’t even know that Karnow was murd—”
“Yeah, I know that. What’s the rest of it? Molasses you licked off your fingers?”
“Nope. Guaranteed straight as delivered. I just want to get my employer’s name in the paper. Mine is spelled, A-R-C-H—”
“I know that too. Who else has got this?”
“From me, nobody. Only you, son.”
“What did they want Wolfe to do?”
Of course that was to be expected. Give a newspaperman an inch and he wants a column. I finally convinced him that that was all for now and resumed my way downtown.