Before Midnight

According to the information she was a housewife, but if so her house was nearly out of wife. She looked as if she hadn't eaten for a week and hadn't slept for a month. Properly fed and rested for a good long stretch, filled in from her hundred pounds to around a hundred and twenty, she might have been a pleasant sight and a very satisfactory wife for a man who was sold on the wife idea, but it took some imagination to realize it. The only thing was her eyes. They were dark, set in deep, and there was fire back of them.

"I ought to tell you," she said in a low even voice, "that I didn't want to come here, but Mr. O'Garro said it was absolutely necessary. I have decided I shouldn't say anything to anybody. But if you have something to tell me --go ahead."

Wolfe was glowering at her, and I would have liked to tell her that it meant nothing personal, it was only that the sight of a hungry human was painful to him, and the sight of one who must have been hungry for months was intolerable. He spoke. "You understand, Mrs. Wheelock, that I am acting for the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, which is handling the contest for Heery Products, Incorporated."

"Yes, Mr. O'Garro told me."

"I do have a little to tell you, but not much. For one item, I have had a talk with one of the contestants, Miss Gertrude Frazee. You may know that she is the founder and president of an organization called the Women's Nature League. She says that some three hundred of its members have helped her in the contest, which is not an infraction of the rules. She does not say that she has telephoned to them the verses that were distributed last evening, and that they are now working on them, but it wouldn't be fanciful to assume that she has and they are. Have you any comment?"

She was staring at him, her mouth working.

"Three hundred," she said.

Wolfe nodded.

"That's cheating. That's--she can't do that. You can't let her get away with it."

"We may be helpless. If she has violated no rule and nothing that was agreed upon last evening, what then? This is one aspect of the grotesque situation created by the murder of Louis Dahlmann."

"I'll see the others." The fire behind her eyes was showing through. "We won't permit it. We'll refuse to go ahead with those verses. We'll insist on new ones when we're allowed to go home."