Before Midnight

Hansen, on his feet, said, "We must go, well be half an hour late. We'll get them later."

But Wolfe kept them for one more thing, information about the five contestants. They only had enough to fill one page of my notebook, which wasn't much to go on. I went to the hall with them to see that nobody took my topcoat by mistake, let them out, and returned to the office. Wolfe was sitting with his eyes closed and his palms flattened on the desk. I went to my desk and wheeled the machine to me and got out paper, to type the meager dope on the suspects. At the sound of footsteps I turned to see Fritz enter with beer on a tray.

"No," I said firmly. "Take it back, Fritz."

"A woman is coming!" Wolfe bellowed.

"That's only an excuse. The real trouble is that you hate a job with a deadline, especially when you stand about one chance in four thousand. I admit that before midnight April twentieth is one hell of an order, but on January nineteenth at three-twenty-seven p.m. you told me that if you ever rang for beer before lunch I should cancel it and disregard your protests, if any. I don't blame you for losing control, since we're almost certainly going to get our noses bumped, but no beer until after lunch. However, we don't want to embarrass Mr. Brenner."

I went and took the tray from Fritz and convoyed it to the kitchen.

Chapter 4

If I had known what was on the way to him in the shape of Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles, founder and president of the Women's Nature League, I wouldn't have had the heart to hijack the beer. And if Wolfe had known, he probably would have refused the case and sent LBA and their counselor on their way.

I should try to describe her outfit, but I won't; I will only say she had swiped it from a museum. As for describing her, it's hard to believe. The inside corners of her eyes were trying to touch above a long thin nose, and nearly made it. Only an inch of brow was visible because straggles of gray hair flopped down over the rest. The left half of her mouth slanted up and the right half slanted down, and that made you think her chin was lower on one side than on the other, though maybe it wasn't. She was exactly my height, five feet eleven, and she strode.

She sat halfway back in the red leather chair, with both hands on her bag in her lap and her back straight and stiff. "I fail to see," she told Wolfe, "that the death of that man has any effect on the contest. Murder or not. There was nothing in the rules about anybody dying."