Too Many Cooks

He looked and sounded very final. The sheriff started to growl something, but I was called away by a knock on the door. I went to the foyer, telling myself that if it was anyone who was likely to postpone the refreshment of sleep any longer, I would lay him out with a healthy sock on the button and just leave him there.

Which might have done for Vukcic, big as he was, but I wouldn’t strike a woman merely because I was sleepy, and he was accompanied by Constanza Berin. I flung the door the rest of the way and she crossed the threshold. Vukcic began a verbal request, but she wasn’t bothering with amenities, she was going right ahead.

I reached for her and missed her. “Hey, wait a minute! We have company. Your friend Barry Tolman is in there.”

She wheeled on me. “Who?”

“You heard me. Tolman.”

She wheeled again and opened the door to Wolfe’s room and breezed on through. Vukcic looked at me and shrugged, and followed her, and I went along, thinking that if I needed a broom and dustpan I could get them later.

Tolman had jumped to his feet at sight of her. For two seconds he was white, then a nice pink, and then he started for her:

“Miss Berin! Thank God—”

An icy blast hit him and stopped him in his tracks with his mouth open. It wasn’t vocal; her look didn’t need any accompaniment. With him frozen, she turned a different look, practically as devastating, on Nero Wolfe:

“And you said you would help us! You said you would make them free my father!” Nothing but a superworm could deserve such scorn as that. “And it was you who suggested that about his list—about the sauces! I suppose you thought no one would know—”

“My dear Miss Berin—”

“Now everybody knows! It was you who brought the evidence against him! That evidence! And you pretending to Mr. Servan and Mr. Vukcic and me—”

I got Wolfe’s look and saw his lips moving at me, though I couldn’t hear him. I stepped across and gripped her arm and turned her. “Listen, give somebody a chance—”

She was pulling, but I held on. Wolfe said sharply, “She’s hysterical. Take her out of here.”

I felt her arm relax, and turned her loose, and she moved to face Wolfe again.

She told him quietly, “I’m not hysterical.”

“Of course you are. All women are. Their moments of calm are merely recuperative periods between outbursts. I want to tell you something. Will you listen?”

She stood and looked at him.

He nodded. “Thank you. I make this explanation because I don’t want unfriendliness from your father. I made the suggestion that the lists be compared with the correct list, not dreaming that it would result in implicating your father—in fact, thinking that it would help to clear him. Unfortunately it happened differently, and it became necessary to undo the mischief I had unwittingly caused. The only way to do that was to discover other evidence which would establish his innocence. I have done so. Your father will be released within an hour.”

Constanza stared at him, and went nearly as white as Tolman had on seeing her, and then her blood came back as his had done. She stammered, “But—but—I don’t believe it. I’ve just been over to that place—and they wouldn’t even let me see him—”

“You won’t have to go again. He will rejoin you here this morning. I undertook with you and Mr. Servan and Mr. Vukcic to clear your father of this ridiculous charge, and I have done that. The evidence has been give to Mr. Tolman. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

Apparently she was beginning to, and it was causing drastic internal adjustments. Her eyes were drawing together, diagonal creases were appearing from the corners of her nose to the corners of her mouth, her cheeks were slowly puffing up, and her chin began to move. She was going to cry, and it looked as if it might be a good one. For half a minute, evidently, she thought she was going to be able to stave it off; then all of a sudden she realized that she wasn’t. She turned and ran for the door. She got it open and disappeared. That galvanized Tolman. Without stopping for farewells he jumped for the door she had left open—and he was gone too.

Vukcic and I looked at each other. Wolfe sighed.

The sheriff made a move. “Admitting you’re smart,” he drawled at Wolfe, “and all that, if I was Barry Tolman you wouldn’t take the midnight or any other train out of here until certain details had been attended to.”

Wolfe nodded and murmured, “Good day, sir.”

He went, and banged the foyer door so hard behind him that I jumped. I sat down and observed, “My nerves are like fishing worms on hooks.” Vukcic sat down too.

Wolfe looked at him and inquired, “Well, Marko? I suppose we might as well say good morning. Is that what you came for?”