Before Midnight

"I couldn't. I'm going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee--I think I am--I'll think about it on the bus. That's cheating." She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.

Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn't break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it: When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.

"You put the answers in the safe," he stated.

"Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O'Garro and Talbott Heery were there, but I didn't report that Heery brought me downtown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him--"

"Verbatim, please."

I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon's interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, "For a footnote, Heery couldn't knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?"

He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn't been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.

I was in the middle of the Frazee notes when the phone interrupted me, and when I told it, "Nero Wolfe's office, Archie Goodwin speaking," a male voice said, "I want to speak to Mr. Wolfe. This is Patrick O'Garro."

They were certainly popping the precedents. He should have told his secretary, and she should have got me and spent five minutes trying to lobby me into putting Wolfe on. The best explanation was that they were playing it so close to their chins they were even keeping it from the staff that they had hired Nero Wolfe.