Before Midnight

I gave Wolfe the scuttlebutt, but apparently he wasn't listening. It was Sunday evening, when he especially enjoys turning the television off. Of course he has to turn it on first, intermittently throughout the evening, and that takes a lot of exertion, but he has provided for it by installing a remote control panel at his desk. That way he can turn off as many as twenty programs in an evening without overdoing. Ordinarily I am not there, since I spend most of my Sunday evenings trying to give pleasure to some fellow being, no matter who she is provided she meets certain specifications, but that Sunday I stuck around. If something did snap on account of the extremely severe tension, as Wolfe had claimed he thought it might, I was going to be there. When I went up to bed, early, he was turning off Silver Linings.

The snap, if that's the right word for it, came a little after ten o'clock Monday morning, in the shape of a phone call, not for Wolfe but for me.

"You don't sound like Archie Goodwin," a male voice said.

"Well, I am. You do sound like Philip Younger."

"I ought to. You're Goodwin?"

"Yes. The one who turned down your Scotch."

"That sounds better. I want to see you right away. I'm in my room at the Churchill. Get here as fast as you can."

"Comeing. Hold everything."

That shows the condition I was in. I should have asked him what was up. I should at least have learned if a gun was being leveled at him. Speaking of guns, I should have followed my rule to take one along. But I was so damn sick and tired of nothing I was in favor of anything, and quick. I dived into the kitchen to tell Fritz to tell Wolfe where I was going, grabbed my hat and coat as I passed the rack, ran down the stoop steps, and hoofed it double quick to Tenth Avenue for a taxi, through the scattered drops of the beginning of an April shower.

As we were crawling uptown with the thousand-wheeled worm I muttered to the hackie, "Try the sidewalk."

"It's only Monday," he said gloomily. "Got a whole week."

We finally made it to the Churchill, and I went in and took an elevator, ignored the floor clerk on the eighteenth, went to the door of eighteen-twenty-six, knocked, and was told to come in. Younger, looking a little less like Old King Cole when up and dressed, wanted to shake hands and I had no objection.

"It took you long enough," he complained. "I know, I know, I live in Chicago. Sit down. I want to ask you something."