Immune to Murder

I

I stood with my arms folded, glaring down at Nero Wolfe, who had his 278 pounds planted in a massive armchair which was made of heavy pine slats, with thick rainbow rugs draped over the back and on the seat for a cushion. It went with the rest of the furniture, including the bed, in that room of River Bend, the sixteen-room mountain lodge belonging to O. V. Bragan, the oil tycoon.

“A fine way to serve your country,” I told him. “Not. In spite of a late start I get you here in time to be shown to your room and unpack and wash up for dinner, and now you tell me to go tell your host you want dinner in your room. Nothing doing. I decline.”

He was glaring back. “Confound it, I have lumbago!” he roared.

“You have not got lumbago. Naturally your back’s tired, since all the way from Thirty-fifth Street, Manhattan, to the Adirondacks, three hundred and twenty-eight miles, you kept stiff on the back seat, ready to jump, even with me at the wheel. What you need is exercise, like a good long walk to the dining room.”

“I say it’s lumbago.”

“No. It’s acute mooditis, which is a medical term for an inflamed whim.” I unfolded my arms to gesture. “Here’s the situation. We were getting nowhere on that insurance case for Lamb and McCullough, which I admit was a little annoying for the greatest detective alive, and you were plenty annoyed, when a phone call came from the State Department. A new ambassador from a foreign country with which our country wanted to make a deal had been asked if he had any special personal desires, and he had said yes, he wanted to catch an American brook trout, and, what was more, he wanted it cooked fresh from the brook by Nero Wolfe. Would you be willing to oblige? Arrangements had been made for the ambassador and a small party to spend a week at a lodge in the Adirondacks, with three miles of private trout water on the Crooked River. If a week was too much for you, two days would do, or even one, or even in a pinch just long enough to cook some trout.”

I gestured again. “Okay. You asked me what I thought. I said we had to stay on the Lamb and McCullough job. You said our country wanted that ambassador softened up and you must answer our country’s call to duty. I said nuts. I said if you wanted to cook for our country you could enlist in the Army and work your way up to mess sergeant, but I would admit that the Lamb and McCullough thing was probably too tough for you. Days passed. It got tougher. The outcome was that we left the house at eleven-fourteen this morning and I drove three hundred and twenty-eight miles in a little under seven hours, and here we are. The setup is marvelous and very democratic. You’re just here as a cook, and look at this room you’ve got.” I swept a hand around. “Not a hardship in sight. Private bath. Mine is somewhat smaller, but I’m only cook’s assistant, I suppose I might call it culinary attaché. We were told dinner at six-thirty because they have to get up early to go fishing, and it is now six-thirty-four, and I am instructed to go tell Bragan you’ll eat in your room. Where would that leave me? They wouldn’t want me at the table without you, and when will I get another chance to watch an ambassador eat? If you’ve got lumbago it’s not in your back, it’s in your psyche. It is called psychic lumbago. The best treatment—”

“Archie. Stop gibbering. ‘Lumbago’ denotes locality. From the Latin lumbus, meaning ‘loin.’ The psyche is not in the loin.”

“No? Prove it. I’ll concede that yours may not be, but I have known cases — for example, remember that guy, I forget his name, that wanted to hire you to arrange a meeting of his first four wives and persuade them—”

“Shut up!” He put his hands on the chair arms.

“Yes, sir.”

“There are degrees of discomfort, and some of them stop short of torment, thank heaven. Very well.” He levered himself upright, making some faces, assorted, on the way. “It is lumbago. And with it I am to sit at a strange table with a jumble of strangers. Are you coming?”

He headed for the door.