Might as Well Be Dead

He protested, but he moved. “It’s a bad way to start a day, Archie, cramming your breakfast down.”

I told him I was well aware of it and buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to tell Wolfe.

Chapter 4

I WASN’T EXACTLY ALONE. Ten feet to my right a woman sat on a wooden chair just like mine, staring through the holes of the steel lattice at a man on the other side. By bending an ear I could have caught what the man was saying, but I didn’t try because I assumed she was as much in favor of privacy as I was. Ten feet to my left a man on another chair like mine was also staring through the lattice, at a lad who wasn’t as old as Paul Herold had been when the picture was taken. I couldn’t help hearing what he was saying, and apparently he didn’t give a damn. The boy across the lattice from him was looking bored. There were three or four cops around, and the one who had brought me in was standing back near the wall, also looking bored.

During the formalities of getting passed in, which had been handled by Freyer, I had been told that I would be allowed fifteen minutes, and I was about to leave my chair to tell the cop that I hoped he wouldn’t start timing me until the prisoner arrived, when a door opened in the wall on the other side of the lattice and there he was, with a guard behind his elbow. The guard steered him across to a chair opposite me and then backed up to the wall, some five paces. The convict sat on the edge of the chair and blinked through the holes at me.

“I don’t know you,” he said. “Who are you?”

At that moment, with his pale hollow cheeks and his dead eyes and his lips so thin he almost didn’t have any, he looked a lot more than eleven years away from the kid in the flattop.

I hadn’t decided how to open up because I do better if I wait until I have a man’s face to choose words. I had a captive audience, of course, but that wouldn’t help if he clammed up on me. I tried to get his eyes, but the damn lattice was in the way.

“My name is Goodwin,” I told him. “Archie Goodwin. Have you ever heard of a private detective named Nero Wolfe?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of him. What do you want?” His voice was hollower than his cheeks and deader than his eyes.

“I work for Mr. Wolfe. Day before yesterday your father, James R. Herold, came to his office and hired him to find you. He said he had learned that you didn’t steal that money eleven years ago, and he wanted to make it square with you. The way things stand that may not mean much to you, but there it is.”