Please Pass the Guilt

13

It worked.

Driving downtown and across to the garage on Tenth Avenue, I considered the approach. Over the years I suppose I have told Wolfe 10,000 barefaced lies, or, if you prefer in-between figures, make it 8,392, either on personal matters that were none of his business or on business details that couldn’t hurt and might help, but I have no desire to break a world record, and anyway the point was to make it stick if possible. I decided on a flank attack and then to play it by ear.

When I entered the office at 6:22, he was at his desk working on the Double-Crostic in the Times, and of course I didn’t interrupt. I took my jacket off and draped it on the back of my chair, loosened my tie, went to the safe and got the checkbook and took it to my desk, and got interested in the stubs for the month of June. That was a flank attack all right. In a few minutes, maybe eight, he looked up and frowned at me and asked, “What’s the balance now?”

“It depends,” I said. I twisted around to get Exhibit A from my jacket pocket and rose and handed it across. He read it, taking his time, dropped it on the desk, narrowed his eyes at me, and said, “Grrr.”

“She changed the fifty to sixty-five herself,” I said. “That heading could have been Archie Goodwin has sixty-five thousand instead of Nero Wolfe. She didn’t actually suggest it, but she thinks I’m pretty good. She said so. When I told her you were quitting and handed her the check, she said. ‘How much did Browning pay him?’ I told her that if I talked for five hours I might be able to convince her that you wouldn’t double-cross a client, but actually I doubt it. You may not give a damn what she thinks of my employer, but I do. I brought her to you. She said things and I said things, and when it became evident that nothing else would convince her, I went to a typewriter and wrote that. I don’t claim the wording is perfect. I am not Norman Mailer.”

“Bah. That peacock? That blowhard?”

“All right, make it Hemingway.”

“There was a typewriter there?”

“Sure. It was the big room on the fourth floor where apparently she does everything but eat and sleep. As you see, the paper is a twenty-pound bond at least half rag. Yours is only twenty percent rag.”

He gave it a look, a good look, and I made a note to pat myself on the back for not doing it on my typewriter. “I admit,” I said, “that I didn’t try to talk her out of it. I certainly did not. In discussing it I told her that I thought it would work, that it’s ten to one that someone knows something that would crack it open, and that fifty grand is a lot of bait. That was before she changed it to sixty-five. This is a long answer to your question, What’s the balance? As I said, it depends. I brought the check back, but it would only cost eight cents to mail it. If we do, the balance will be a little under six thousand dollars. There was the June fifteenth income tax payment. I’m not badgering you, I’m just answering your question. But I’ll permit myself to mention that this way it would not be a frantic squawk for someone to pull you out of a mudhole. I will also mention that if I phone her that the ad — correction, advertisement — has been placed, she will mail another check. For sixty-five thousand. She would make it a million if it would help. As of now nothing else on earth matters to her.”

What he did was typical, absolutely him. He didn’t say “Very well” or “Tear the check up” or even “Confound it.” He picked the thing up, read it slowly, scowling at it, put it to one side under a paper weight, said “I’m doing some smoked sturgeon Muscovite. Please bring a bottle of Madeira from the cellar,” and picked up the Double-Crostic.