Back home, I went to the kitchen and snared a glass of milk before proceeding to the office. Wolfe had just finished number two of a pair of beer bottles. I stood sipping milk and looking down at him approvingly. The milk was a little too cold and I took my time sipping.
“Stop smirking!” he yapped.
“Hell, I’m not smirking.” I lowered the back of my lap to the edge of a chair. “I think you’re wonderful. The things you put up with to keep Fritz and Theodore and me off of relief! What do you think of the famous Hawthrone girls?”
He grunted.
“The murder part of it,” I declared, “is a cinch. Titus Ames did it because he wants to dress up like a girl himself and go to Varney College and study science, and on account of loyalty to the alma mater he’s going to have he killed Noel so the science fund would get the million. Now May’s furious because the million has shrunk to a tithe of its former self, and with a daring imagination she sells you a fairy tale about a secret will hid in a hollow tree and that kind of crap—”
“She sold me nothing. Go to bed.”
“Do you give credence to her theory about the second will?”
He put his hands on the rim of the desk, getting ready to push his chair back, and seeing that I beat him to it by arising and striding from the scene. I kept on going, up two flights of stairs, to my own room. There, after finishing the milk, I undraped my form, shaved my legs and removed my eyelashes, and dropped languorously into the arms of the sandman.
When I rolled out at eight in the morning it was tuning up for another hot one. The air coming in at the window made you gasp for more when what you really wanted was less. So I kept the shower moderately cool and selected a palm beach for the day’s apparel. Down in the kitchen Fritz was puffing, having just returned from delivering Wolfe’s breakfast tray to his room on the second floor. Glancing over the Times as I sat negotiating with my orange juice and eggs and rolls, I found no indication that Skinner, Cramer & Co., had opened the big bag of news regarding the death of Noel Hawthorne; there wasn’t any hint of it. Apparently they realized it was going to be a busy intersection and were taking no chances. I poured my second cup of coffee and turned to the sports page, and the phone rang.
I took it there in the kitchen, on Fritz’s extension, and got Fred Durkin’s voice in my ear, in an urgent kind of a whisper that gave me the idea he had stepped on somebody’s foot and got arrested again.