The Doorbell Rang (The Rex Stout Library)

He laughed to be polite and said he guessed they'd have to do all their talking in code. The elevator door opened, and I entered and the door slid shut. It certainly wasn't my day. Not that it mattered much, since I had got nowhere with Evers, but it's always bad to have the breaks going wrong, and God knows if we ever needed the breaks we did then. I was walking on hard pavement, not air, as I emerged to the sidewalk and turned uptown.

It had been more than twenty minutes, and Al had gone. There are plenty of taxis on First Avenue at that hour, and I flagged one and gave the backie an address.

4

At a quarter to eleven that Wednesday night, pessimistic and pooped, I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and pushed the button. With the chain bolt on I had to be let in. When Fritz came he asked if I wanted some warmed-up curried duck, and I growled the no. I shed my hat and coat and went to the office, and there was the oversized genius at his desk, in the chair made to order for his seventh of a ton, with a bottle of beer and a glass on the tray, comfortably reading his current book, The Treasure of Our Tongue, by Lincoln Barnett. I went to my desk and whirled my chair and sat. He would look up when he finished a paragraph.

He did. He even inserted his bookmark, a thin strip of gold given him years before by a client who couldn't afford it, and put the book down. "You have dined, of course," he said.

"Dined, no." I crossed my legs. "Excuse me for waving my legs around. I ate something greasy, I forget what, in a dump in the Bronx. It has been-"

"Fritz will warm the duck, and-"

"No he won't. I told him not to. It has been by far the lousiest day I have ever had and I'll finish it up right. I'll report in full and go to bed tasting grease. First, the-"

"Confound it, you must eat!"

"I say no. First, the client."

I gave it to him verbatim, and the action, including the two men in the parked car of which I had the license number. At the end I added some opinions: that [a] it would be wasting a dime to bother to check the license number, [b] Sarah Dacos could probably be crossed off, or at least filed for future reference, and [c] whatever dirt there might be under cover in the Bruner family, the lid was still on as far as the client knew. When I got up to hand him the paper Mrs Bruner had signed he merely glanced at it and said to put it in the safe.