And Be a Villain Read Free Page B

all it was quite possible to look at her face without having to resist an impulse to look somewhere else, which was darned good for a woman certainly close to forty and probably a little past it, especially since I personally can see no point in spending eyesight on females over thirty.
    “You know,” she said, “I have often been tempted—bring chairs up, Bill—to ask Nero Wolfe to be a guest on my program.”
    She said it like a trained broadcaster, breaking it up so it would sound natural but arranging the inflections so that listeners of any mental age whatever would get it.
    “I’m afraid,” I told her with a grin, “that he wouldn’t accept unless you ran wires to his office and broadcast from there. He never leaves home on business, and rarely for anything at all.” I lowered myself onto one of the chairs Bill had brought up, and he and Deborah Koppel took the other two.
    Madeline Fraser nodded. “Yes, I know.” She had turned on her side to see me without twisting her neck, and the hip curving up under the thin yellow gown made her seem not quite so slender. “Is that just a publicity trick or does he really like it?”
    “I guess both. He’s very lazy, and he’s scared to death of moving objects, especially things on wheels.”
    “Wonderful! Tell me all about him.”
    “Some other time, Lina,” Deborah Koppel put in. “Mr. Goodwin has a suggestion for you, and you have a broadcast tomorrow and haven’t even looked at the script.”
    “My God, is it Monday already?”
    “Monday and half past three,” Deborah said patiently.
    The radio prima donna’s torso propped up to perpendicular as if someone had given her a violent jerk. “What’s the suggestion?” she demanded, and flopped back again.
    “What made him think of it,” I said, “was something that happened to him Saturday. This great nation took him for a ride. Two rides. The Rides of March.”
    “Income tax? Me too. But what—”
    “That’s good!” Bill Meadows exclaimed. “Where did you get it? Has it been on the air?”
    “Not that I know of. I created it yesterday morning while I was brushing my teeth.”
    “We’ll give you ten bucks for it—no, wait a minute.” He turned to Deborah. “What percentage of our audience ever heard of the Ides of March?”
    “One-half of one,” she said as if she were quoting a published statistic. “Cut.”
    “You can have it for a dollar,” I offered generously. “Mr. Wolfe’s suggestion will cost you a lot more. Like everyone in the upper brackets, he’s broke.” My eyes were meeting the gray-green gaze of Madeline Fraser. “He suggests that you hire him to investigate the murder of Cyril Orchard.”
    “Oh, Lord,” Bill Meadows protested, and brought his hands up to press the heels of his palms against his eyes. Deborah Koppel looked at him, then at Madeline Fraser, and took in air for a deep sigh. Miss Fraser shook her head, and suddenly looked older and more in need of makeup.
    “We have decided,” she said, “that the only thing we can do about that is forget it as soon as possible. We have ruled it out of conversation.”
    “That would be fine and sensible,” I conceded, “if you could make everyone, including the cops and the papers, obey the rule. But aside from the difficulty of shutting people up about any old kind of a murder, even a dull one, it was simply too good a show. Maybe you don’t realize how good. Your program has an eight million audience, twice a week. Your guests were a horse-race tipster and a professor of mathematics from a big university. And smack in the middle of the program one of them makes terrible noises right into the microphone, and keels over, and pretty soon he’s dead, and he got the poison right there on the broadcast, in the product of one of your sponsors.”
    I darted glances at the other two and then back to the woman on the bed. “I knew I might meet any one of a dozen attitudes here, but I sure didn’t expect this one. If