If Death Ever Slept

He hung up and glared at me as if I had done the provoking.

I hung up and glared back. “License my eye,” I told him. “We’re risking eating on the State of New York for one to ten years with time off for good behavior.”

“Do you challenge me?” he demanded. “You were present. You have a tongue, heaven knows. Would you have loosened it if I hadn’t been here?”

“No,” I admitted. “He goes against the grain. He has bad manners. He lacks polish. Look at you for contrast. You are courteous, gracious, tactful, eager to please. What now? I left up there to be out of the way when company came, but now they’re on to me. Do I go back?”

He said no, not until we heard further from Jarrell, and I went to the front room to tell Orrie to come and get on with the day’s work, and then returned to the couch and the Times.

Chapter 10

THE OTHER DAY I looked up “moot” in the dictionary. The murderer of James L. Eber had just been convicted, and, discussing it, Wolfe and I had got onto the question of whether or not a life would have been saved if he had told Cramer that Saturday morning about Jarrell’s gun, and he had said it was moot, and, though I thought I knew the word well enough, I went to the dictionary to check. In spite of the fact that I had taken a position just to give the discussion some spirit, I had to agree with him on that. It was moot all right, and it still is.

The thirty hours from noon Saturday until six o’clock Sunday afternoon were not without events, since even a yawn is an event, but nobody seemed to be getting anywhere, least of all me. Soon after lunch Saturday, at Wolfe’s table with him and Orrie, Jarrell phoned to tell us the score. Cramer had gone straight there from our place to join the gathering in the library. Presumably he hadn’t started barking, since even an inspector doesn’t bark at an Otis Jarrell unless he has to, but he had had questions to which he intended to get answers. Actually he had got only one answered: had Jarrell hired Nero Wolfe to do something? Yes. Plus its rider: had Archie Goodwin, alias Alan Green, come as Jarrell’s secretary to do the something Wolfe had been hired for, or to help do it? Yes. That was all. Jarrell had told them that the something was a personal and confidential matter, with no bearing on their investigation, and that therefore they could forget it.