If Death Ever Slept

I went and stood in the doorway and considered the situation. I started with a basic fact: she was a little female squirt. Okay. She hadn’t fed me a potion. She hadn’t stuck a needle in me. She hadn’t used any magic words, far from it. She hadn’t touched me. But I had come to that room with the idea of opening her up for inspection, and had ended by springing up automatically to follow her out of the room like a lapdog, and the worst of it was I didn’t know why. I am perfectly willing to be attracted by a woman and to enjoy the consequences, but I want to know what’s going on. I am not willing to be pulled by a string without seeing the string. Not only that; my interest in this particular specimen was supposed to be strictly professional.

I had an impulse to go to the library and tell Jarrell he was absolutely right, she was a snake. I had another impulse to go find her and tell her something. I didn’t know what, but tell her. I had another one, to pack up and go home and tell Wolfe we were up against a witch and what we needed was a stake to burn her at. None of them seemed to be what the situation called for, so I found the stairs and went up to bed.

Chapter 4

BY WEDNESDAY NIGHT, forty-eight hours later, various things had happened, but if I had made any progress I didn’t know it.

Tuesday I took Trella to lunch at Rusterman’s. That was a little risky, since I was well known there, but I phoned Felix that I was working on a case incognito and told him to pass the word that I mustn’t be recognized. When we arrived, though, I was sorry I hadn’t picked another restaurant. Evidently everybody, from the doorman on up to Felix, knew Mrs. Jarrell too, and I couldn’t blame them for being curious when, working on a case incognito, I turned up with an old and valued customer. They handled it pretty well, except that when Bruno brought my check he put a pencil down beside it. A waiter supplies a pencil only when he knows the check is going to be signed and that your credit is good. I ignored it, hoping that Trella was ignoring it too, and when Bruno brought the change from my twenty I waved it away, hoping he wouldn’t think I was setting a precedent.