Before Midnight

"Oh well," I said cheerfully, "there's no rush. April twentieth is a week off. You can read twenty books in a week."

He grunted. "Get Saul and ask him to breakfast with me in my room at eight o'clock. Give me two hundred dollars for him--no, make it three hundred--and lock the safe and go to bed. I want some quiet."

I obeyed, of course, but I wondered. Could he be tossing a couple of C's--no, three--of LBA money to the breeze just to make me think he had hatched something? Saul Panzer was the best man in the city of New York for any kind of a job, but what was it? Tailing five people, hardly. If tailing one, who and why? If not tailing, then what? For me, nothing we had heard or seen had pointed in anyone's direction. For him, I didn't believe it. He wanted company for breakfast, and not me. Okay.

I got Saul at his apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, signed him up for the morning, got the money from the cash drawer in the safe and locked the safe, gave Wolfe the dough, and asked him, "Then I don't do the typing tonight?"

"No. Go to bed. I have work to do."

I went. Up one flight I stopped on the landing, thinking it might help if I tiptoed back down and went in and caught him with his book up, but decided it would only make him so stubborn he'd read all night.

Chapter 11

My morning paper is usually the Times, with the Gazette for a side dish, but that Thursday I gave the Gazette a bigger play because it has a keener sense of the importance of homicide. Its by-line piece on the career and personality of the brilliant young advertising genius who had been shot in the back did not say that there were at least a hundred beautiful and glamorous females in the metropolitan area who might have had reason to erase him, but it gave that impression without naming names.

However, that was only a tactful little bone tossed to the sex hounds for them to gnaw on. The main story was the contest, and they did it proud, with their main source of information Miss Gertrude Frazee of Los Angeles. There was a picture of her on page three which made her unique combination of rare features more picturesque than in the flesh, and harder to believe. She had briefed the reporter thoroughly on the Women's Nature League, told him all about the dinner meeting Tuesday evening, including Dahlmann's display of the paper and what he said, and spoken at length of her rights as a contestant under the rules and the agreement.