“Yes.”
“She’s off. I’m taking her home. 787 Park Avenue, 12D. It’s just possible she’ll ask me to let her out before we get there. You got a car? Good. I’ll take it easy. Across 34th to Park and then uptown. If you get close to her, lash yourself to the mast and count ten. Her middle name is Delilah.”
I went back to the hall and got her and escorted her to the roadster. She made no effort at small talk as I took my time going crosstown on 34th, dawdling until I caught sight, in the driving mirror, of Saul’s coupé only two cars back. I was thinking what a come down. On the trip bringing her to Wolfe’s house I had had seven million bucks there on the seat with me, and now going back apparently all I had was a measly hundred thousand, or at the most twice that. It was no wonder she didn’t feel like talking, after that amount of deflation. She did manage to murmur thanks when I delivered her on the sidewalk in front of her address. Saul had rounded the corner into 73rd, for a parking space. I inspected a wheel until he was in sight again, and then remounted and applied the spur.
I got back home at 8:30, and was touched to find that Wolfe had waited dinner for me, our usual hour being eight o’clock. Fred Durkin was still around at a dollar an hour, which surprised me, since Wolfe wasn’t the kind of man to take expensive precautions when the treasury was plucking at the counterpane. If it had been Saul Panzer or Orrie Cather, he would have eaten with Wolfe and me, but since it was Fred he ate in the kitchen with Fritz. Fred put vinegar on things, and no man who did that ate at Wolfe’s table. Fred did it back in 1932, calling for vinegar and stirring it into brown roux for a squab. Nothing had been said, Wolfe regarding it as immoral to interfere with anybody’s meal until it was down and the digestive processes completed, but the next morning he had fired Fred and kept him fired for over a month.
After dinner we wandered back into the office. Wolfe got himself settled at his desk with the atlas, and I indulged in a grin when I saw that instead of departing for a little journey to Outer Mongolia he had turned to the map of New York Sate and, judging from the slant of his eyes, was freshening up on Rockland County. I had just selected a book for a quiet hour when the phone rang. I got to my instrument and told the transmitter:
“Office of Nero Wolfe.”
Hearing my name in a familiar voice, I told Wolfe it was Saul Panzer, and with a sigh he put the atlas down and took it on his extension, and grunted a green light.
“9:56, sir,” Saul’s voice said. “Subject entered apartment house, delivered by Archie, at 8:14. At 9:12 she came out again, took a taxi to Santoretti’s, Italian restaurant at 833 East 62nd Street, and went in. I went in and ate spaghetti and talked Italian with the waiter. She is there at a table with a man, eating chicken and mushrooms. He has no appetite, but she has. They talk in undertones. I’m phoning from a drugstore at the northwest corner of 62nd and Second Avenue. If they separate after leaving, which one do I take?”
“Describe the man.”
“40 to 45, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds. Drinks. Suit, well-made gray tropical worsted, hat expensive flop-brim gray summer-weight felt. Shaved yesterday. Blue shirt, gray four-in-hand with blue stripe. Medium-square jaw, wide mouth and full lips, long narrow nose, puffy around the eyes, brown eyes with a nervous blink, ears set—”