Plot It Yourself

Mr W. R. Pratt of the Owl Press was strictly business. When I said that Nero Wolfe had been hired to make an investigation by the Joint Committee on Plag-he cut in to say he knew that and what did I want; and when I said that Mr Wolfe wanted a copy of Barrage at Dawn as soon as possible and would be obliged if he would kindly-he cut in again to say that if I would give the address to his secretary she would send it at once by messenger. He asked no questions, but his secretary did. Her first words were, “Whom do we bill?” That outfit was right on its toes.

Barrage at Dawn arrived first, which didn’t surprise me, with an invoice enclosed which included an item of a dollar, fifty for messenger service. Wolfe had come down from the plant rooms and was looking through the morning’s mail. When I handed him the book he made a face at it and dropped it on his desk, but in a couple of minutes he picked it up, frowned at the cover, and opened it. He was well into it when The Moth That Ate Peanuts arrived, and since, as I said, my function is whatever an occasion calls for, I tackled that one, looking for “aver” or “not for nothing” or something like “Barely had the moth swallowed the ten-thousandth peanut when it got a stomach-ache.” Also, of course, semicolons and paragraphing. I was more than halfway through when Wolfe asked for it, and I got up and handed it to him and took Barrage at Dawn.

A little after one, with lunchtime approaching, Wolfe shut The Moth That Ate Peanuts, tossed it onto his desk, and growled, “Pfui. Neither one. Confound it.”

I closed Barrage at Dawn and put it down. “I can see,” I said, “that you might cross Simon Jacobs off, but Alice Porter’s is a children’s book. You wouldn’t expect a moth to aver, even if it was a peanut addict. I would hate to give up Alice Porter. She started it and she’s repeating.”

He glared at me. “No. She didn’t write those stories.”

“If you say so. Why glare at me? I didn’t write them. Is this final or are you just sore because he or she was smart enough to wear gloves?”

“It’s final. No one is that smart. Those two are eliminated.”

“Then that leaves Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert.”