Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 25 by Before Midnight Page A

following me?”
    “Right.”
    Her eyes left me for Wolfe. “Isn’t that what they do?” But her left hand had started to tremble, and she had to grasp it with the other one and squeeze it. Wolfe shut his eyes, probably expecting some more tongue control. Instead, she arose abruptly and asked, “May I have—a bathroom?”
    I told her certainly, and went and opened the door of the one partitioned off in the far corner, to the left of my desk, and she came and passed through, closing the door behind her.
    She was in there a good quarter of an hour without making a sound. The partitions, like all the inner walls on the ground floor, are soundproofed, but I have sharp ears and heard nothing whatever. I saidsomething to Wolfe, but he only grunted. After a little he looked up at the clock: twenty to four. Thereafter he looked at it every two minutes; at four sharp he would leave for the plant rooms. There were just nine minutes to go when the door in the partition opened and she was back with us.
    She came and stood at Wolfe’s desk, across from him. “I beg your pardon,” she said in her low even voice. “I had to take some pills. The food at the hotel is quite good, but I simply can’t eat. I haven’t eaten much for quite a while. Do you want to tell me anything else?”
    “Milk toast,” Wolfe said gruffly. “My cook, Fritz Brenner, makes it superbly. Sit down.”
    “I couldn’t swallow it. Really.”
    “Then hot bouillon. Our own. It can be ready in eight minutes. I have to leave you, but Mr. Goodwin—”
    “I couldn’t. I’m going back to the hotel and see the others about Miss Frazee—I think I am—I’ll think about it on the bus. That’s cheating.” She had moved to get her coat from the back of the chair, and I went and held it for her.
    Knowing what bus crowds were at that time of day, and thinking it wouldn’t break LBA, I made her take a buck for taxi fare, but had to explain it would go on the expense list before she would take it. When, in the hall, I had let her out and bolted the door and turned, Wolfe was there, opening the door of his elevator.
    “You put the answers in the safe,” he stated.
    “Yes, sir, inner compartment. I told you on the phone that Buff and O’Garro and Talbott Heery were there, but I didn’t report that Heery brought medowntown in a taxi so he could offer me twenty bucks to get him in to see you right away. I told him—”
    “Verbatim, please.”
    I gave it to him, which was nothing, considering that he will ask for a whole afternoon’s interviews with five or six people verbatim, and get it. At the end I added, “For a footnote, Heery couldn’t knock my block off unless he got someone to hold me. Do you want to squeeze him in somewhere?”
    He said no, Heery could wait, and entered the elevator and shut the door, and I went to the office. There were a few daily chores which hadn’t been attended to, and also my notes of the talks with Miss Frazee and Mrs. Wheelock had to be typed. Not that it seemed to me there was anything in them that would make history. I admitted that Wolfe was only going fishing, hoping to scare up a word or fact that would give him a start, and that he had got some spectacular results from that method more than once before, but in this case genius might have been expected to find a short cut. There were five of them, which would take a lot of time, and the time was strictly rationed. Before midnight April twentieth.
    I was in the middle of the Frazee notes when the phone interrupted me, and when I told it, “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking,” a male voice said, “I want to speak to Mr. Wolfe. This is Patrick O’Garro.”
    They were certainly popping the precedents. He should have told his secretary, and she should have got me and spent five minutes trying to lobby me into putting Wolfe on. The best explanation was that they were playing it so close to their chins they were even keeping it from the staff that they