“How interesting. When is he coming to see me?”
“He never goes to see anybody. He dislikes motion. He passed a law making it a criminal offense for his feet to remove him from his house except on rare occasions, and never on business. He hires me to run around inviting people to come to see him.”
Her brows lifted. “Do you mean you came to invite me?”
“That’s right. There’s no hurry. It’s only 4:30, and he doesn’t expect you until ten minutes to six.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It would be interesting to discuss something with Nero Wolfe.”
“Then come ahead.”
“No.” It sounded final. In fact, it sounded as near irrevocable as any “no” I ever heard.
I looked at her. There was no indication whatever of any strain of baby doll in her that I could see. She was close to something new in my experience. She wasn’t homely and she wasn’t pretty. She was dark rather than light, but she wouldn’t have been listed as brunette. None of her features would have classified for star billing, but somehow you didn’t see her features, you just saw her. As a matter of fact, after exchanging only a couple of sentences with her, I was sore. During nine years of detective work I had polished up my brass so that I regarded a rude stare at any human face nature’s fancy could devise merely as a matter of routine, but there was something in Naomi Karn’s eyes, or back of them, or somewhere, that made me want to meet them and shy away from them at the same time. It wasn’t the good old come-hither, the “welcome” on the door mat that biology uses for tanglefoot; I can slide through that like molasses through a tin horn. It was something as feminine as that, it was a woman letting a man have her eyes, but it was also a good deal more — like a cocky challenge from a cocky brain. I knew I had looked away from it, and I knew she knew I had, and I was sore.
“The truth is,” I said, “this thing has been handled incompetently. I understand that fellow Stauffer came to see you this morning and said if you didn’t divvy us, Hawthorne’s widow was going to contest it.”
She smiled. “Yes, Ossie tried to say something like that.”