Gambit Read Online Free

disposed of it, and had advised her to tell Kalmus to hire a detective to try to find it. It was that advice from Dr Avery that had given Sally the idea of coming to Nero Wolfe.
    One item not in the notebook. At the end Wolfe told her that it was absurd to suppose that he could act without the knowledge of Kalmus and her father. He would have to see people. At the very least he would have to see the four men who had been messengers, and, since he never left the house on business, they would have to come to him, and Sally would have to bring them or send them.
    Inevitably Kalmus would hear about it and would tell Blount. Sally didn’t like that. For a couple of minutes it had looked as if there was going to be an exchange, me handing her the wad and her giving me back the receipt, but after chewing on her lip for twenty seconds she decided to stick. She asked Wolfe who he wanted to see first, and he said we would let her know. She asked when, and he said he had no idea, he had to consider it.
    At a quarter past one, when I returned to the office, not chipper, after letting her out, and put the wad in the safe, he was sitting straight, his mouth pressed so tight he had no lips, his palms flat on the desk pad, scowling at the door to the front room. It could have been either his farewell to the subversive dictionary or his greeting to a hopeless job, and it wouldn’t help matters any to ask him which. As I swung the safe door shut, Fritz appeared to announce lunch, saw Wolfe’s pose and expression, looked at me, found my face no better,
    said, “All right, you tell him,” and went.
    Of course business was out at the table, but Wolfe refuses to let anything whatever spoil a meal if the food is good, as it always is in that house, and he managed to pretend that life was sweet and the goose hung high. But when we finished the coffee, got up, and crossed the hall back to the office, he went to his desk, sat, rested fists on the chair arms, and demanded, “Did he do it?”
    I raised a brow. If Sally herself had been suspected of murder I would have humored him, since I am supposed, by him, after an hour or so in the company of an attractive young woman, to be able to answer any question he wants to ask about her. But it was stretching it too far to assume that my insight extended to relatives I had never seen, even a father.
    “Well,” I said. “I admit that if there is anything to the idea of guilt by association there can also be innocence by association, but I recall that you once remarked to Lewis Hewitt that the transference -“
    “Shut up!”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Why didn’t you intervene'Why didn’t you stop me?”
    “My job is starting you, not stopping you.”
    “Pfui. Why in heaven’s name did I consent'The money'Confound it, I’ll take to a cave and eat roots and berries. Money!”
    “Nuts are good too, and the bark of some trees, and for meat you could try bats.
    It was only partly the money. She said you can do things no one else on earth can do, so when it developed that prying Blount loose is obviously something that no one on earth can do you were stuck. Whether Blount did it or not is beside the point. You have to prove he didn’t even if he did. Marvelous. By far your best case.”
    “Yours too. Ours. You didn’t stop me.” He reached to put a finger on the button and pressed it, two short and one long, the beer signal. That was bad. He never rings for beer until an hour after lunch, giving him half an hour or so before he is to leave for his four-to-six afternoon session with Theodore in the plant rooms. I went to my desk. Seated there, my back is to the door to the hall, but in the mirror before me I saw Fritz enter with the beer and stop two paces in to aim his eyes at me with a question in them. One of my two million functions, as Fritz knows, is to keep Wolfe from breaking his beer rules. So I swiveled and said, “Okay. He’s taking to a cave, and I’m going along. This is a farewell