“I don’t mind squaring it. I am called Goodwin, Archie Goodwin.”
“Goodwin?” she frowned a little. She brightened. “Of course! You’re in the paper too — if you’re that one. You work for Nero Wolfe?”
“I practically am Nero Wolfe, when it comes to work. Where were you yesterday afternoon from eleven minutes past two until eighteen minutes to six?”
“Let’s see. I was walking in the park with my pet flamingo. If you think that’s no alibi, you’re wrong. My flamingo can talk. Ask me some more.”
“Can your flamingo tell time?”
“Certainly. It wears a wristwatch on its neck.”
“How can it see it?”
She nodded. “I knew you’d ask that. It has been trained to tie its neck in a knot, just a plain single knot, and when it does that the watch is on a bend so that — well, Mother?” She was suddenly out of her chair and moving. “What, no handcuffs on anybody?”
Mother, Sidney Karnow’s Aunt Margaret, leading a procession emerging from the corridor, would have made two of her daughter Ann and more than half of Nero Wolfe. She was large not only in bulk but also in facial detail, each and all of her features being so big that space above her chin was at a premium. Besides her was a thin young man, runty by comparison, wearing black-rimmed glasses, and behind them were two other males, one, obviously, from his resemblance to Mother, Ann’s brother Richard, and the other a tall loose-jointed specimen who would have been called distinguished-looking by any woman between sixteen and sixty.
As I made my swift survey the flamingo trainer was going on. “Mother, this is Mr. Goodwin — the Archie Goodwin who was at the Churchill yesterday with Caroline and Paul. He’s grilling me. Mr. Goodwin, my mother, my brother Dick, my husband, Norman Horne — no, not the one with the cheaters, that’s Jim Beebe, the lawyer to end all laws. This is my husband.” The distinguished-looking one had pushed by and was beside her. She was flowing on. “You know how disappointed I was at the District Attorney being so godawful polite to us, but Mr. Goodwin is different. He’s going to give me the third degree — physically, I mean; he’s built for it, and I expect I’ll go to pieces and confess—”