If Death Ever Slept

I was glad he was glad I had come, but I wasn’t glad, if I make myself clear. I might as well have stayed up there and twisted Rowcliff’s ear.

Chapter 11

I SLEPT IN MY own bed that night for the first time in nearly a week.

That was a very interesting period, Sunday evening and part of Monday. I suppose you noticed what Wolfe said, that he would see no one and hear no one until he had more facts. Exactly how he thought he would get facts, under the conditions he imposed, seeing or hearing no one, I couldn’t say. Maybe by ESP or holding a seance. However, by noon on Monday it had become evident that he hadn’t meant it that way. What he had really meant was that he wanted no facts. If he had seen a fact coming he would have shut his eyes, and if he had heard one coming he would have stuck fingers in his ears.

So it was a very interesting period. There he was, a practicing private detective with no other source of income except selling a few orchid plants now and then, with a retainer of ten grand in cash in the safe, with a multi-millionaire client with a bad itch, with a fine fat fee in prospect if he got a move on and did some first-class detecting; and he was afraid to stay in the same room with me for fear I would tell him something. He wouldn’t talk with Jarrell on the phone. He wouldn’t turn on the radio or television. I even suspected that he didn’t read the Times Monday morning, though I can’t swear to that because he reads the Times at breakfast, which is taken up to his room by Fritz on a tray. He was a human ostrich with his head stuck in the sand, in spite of the fact that he resembles an ostrich in physique less than any other human I know of with the possible exception of Jackie Gleason.

All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn’t rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or putting horseradish on oysters.