The Rubber Band/The Red Box 2-In-1 Read Online Free Page B

The phone rang. I turned to my desk and plucked the receiver, a female voice asked me to hold the wire, and then another voice came at me:
    “Goodwin? Anthony D. Perry. I just got back to my office, and you must come here at once. Any appointments you have, cancel them, if there’s any damage I’ll pay it. The situation here has developed. A taxi will get you here in five minutes.”
    I love these guys that think the clock stops every time they sneeze. But by the tone of his voice it was a case either of aye, aye, sir, or a plain go to hell, and by nature I’m a courteous man. So I told him okay.
    “You’ll come at once?”
    “I said okay.”
    I shoved the phone back and turned to the caller.
    “I’ve got to leave you, Mr. Scovil. Urgent business. But if I heard you right, you’ve been invited here to the six o’clock party, so I’ll see you again. Correct?”
    He nodded. “But look here, sonny, I wanted to ask you—”
    “Sorry, I’ve got to run.” I was on my way. I looked back from the door. “Don’t nurse any suspicions about any kind of a man named Nero Wolfe. He’s as straight as he is fat. So-long.”
    I went to the kitchen, where Fritz had about nine kinds of herbs spread out on the shredding board all at once, and told him:
    “I’m going out. Back at six. Leave the door open so you can see the hall. There’s an object in the office waiting for a six o’clock appointment, and if you have any good deeds to spare like offering a man a drink and a plate of cookies, I assure you he is worthy. If Wolfe comes down before I get back, tell him he’s there.”
    Fritz, nibbling a morsel of tarragon, nodded. I went to the hall and snared my hat and beat it.

I didn’t fool with a taxi, and it wasn’t worth while to take the roadster, which as usual was at the curb, and fight to park it. From Wolfe’s house in West 35th Street, not far from the Hudson, where he had lived for over twenty years, and I had slept on the same floor with him for eight, it was only a hop, skip and jump to the new Seaboard Building, in the twenties, also near the river. I hoofed it, considering meanwhile the oddities of my errand. Why had Anthony D. Perry, president of the Seaboard Products Corporation, taken the trouble to come to our office to tell us about an ordinary good clean theft? As the Tel & Tel say in their ads, why not telephone? And if he felt so confident that Clara Fox hadn’t done it, did he suspect she was being framed or what? And so on.
    Having been in the Seaboard Building before, and even, if you would believe it, in the office of the president himself, I knew my way around. I remembered what the executive reception clerk on the 32nd floor looked like, and so was expecting no treat in that quarter, and got none. I now knew also that she was called Miss Vawter, and so addressed her, noting that her ears stuck out at about the same angle as three years previously. She was expecting me, and without bothering to pry her thin lips open she waved me to the end of the corridor.
    In Perry’s office, which was an enormous room furnished in The Office Beautiful style with four big windows giving a sweeping view of the river, there was a gathering waiting for me. I went in and shut the door behind me and looked them over. Perry was seated at his desk with his back to the windows, frowning at his cigar smoke. A bony-looking medium-sized man, with hair somewhat grayer than Perry’s, brown eyes too close together, and pointed ears, sat near-by.A woman something over thirty, with a flat nose, who could have got a job as schoolteacher just on her looks, stood at a corner of Perry’s desk. She looked as if she might have been doing some crying. In another chair, out a little, another woman sat with her back to me as I entered. On my way approaching Perry I caught a glimpse of her face as I went by, and saw that additional glimpses probably wouldn’t hurt me any.
    Perry grunted at me. He spoke to the others: “This is