Corpus Corpus Read Free

Dinner, and the Black Orchid Banquet in December.

    Now, suddenly, shortly before that event, Wiggins found himself talking on the telephone with the man who was to receive the Pack's most prestigious award.
    "Wiggins, I need your assistance with something I must take care of right away," Janus declared. "I appreciate your aversion to leaving your store, not to mention journeying out of the city, but I hope you will set all that aside in this case and come up to see me at my ranch on Sunday."
    Thinking that only Theodore Janus would refer to his small horse farm in Stone County, only forty-five minutes by car from the city, as a ranch, Wiggins answered, "I trust this isn't going to require my getting into a saddle."
    The attempt at levity was greeted as mirthlessly as if Janus were summing up for a jury in one of his famous murder trials. "I assure you this is strictly business," he said, brusquely. "I'll have my driver pick you up at your door in the Rolls Sunday morning at eight and take you back as soon as we're through."
    With a mournful sigh that lifted his great shoulders and swelled his massive chest, Wiggins found himself in the back of a marvelous automobile offering the comfort of plush seating, a bot-de of champagne in a silver ice bucket, and a bowl of chilled strawberries with heavy cream. Sunday's New York Times had been carefully culled of the sections that nobody ever read, unless the object was finding employment through the classified ads, a rental apartment, condominium, or co-op in the real estate section, or exotic vacation ideas in the travel pages.
    By the time the Rolls had glided across the George Washington Bridge and with the silence of a cat turned northward on the Palisades Parkway, he had skimmed the Book Review and found, as usual, page after page of tiresome critics whose reviews always seemed to be longer than the books they were assessing. Once at a literary cocktail party he had marshaled the temerity to suggest to an editor of the review that if less space were given over to windy critics about books that few would read, more authors might also be reviewed. He had been answered with the amazed glare one would expect if one showed up at a black-tie affair in a pair of faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots-except, of course, if one happened to be Theodore Roosevelt Janus.
    Presently, the Rolls-Royce left the highway for the narrow, winding country roads of Stone County. Peering through the window at the idyllic landscape, he imagined himself in the role of Dr. John H. Watson in "The Copper Beeches," listening intently while Sherlock Holmes mused that the lowest and vilest of the alleys in London did not represent a more dreadful record of sin than the smiling and beautiful countryside.
    While Holmes's cases frequently drew him to the countryside, the mere thought of leaving his town house on West Thirty-fifth Street had been anathema to Nero Wolfe. On the rare occasion when the great detective did exit his abode he traveled by automobile, but grudgingly. Even with his trusted aide Archie Goodwin at the steering wheel, Wolfe would clam up and sit anxiously on the edge of the seat, gripping the strap in case he might have to leap for his life.
    To ride in a taxi was invariably "a frantic dash." He had done so to visit Archie in a hospital and another time for the purpose of saving his capable assistant's life. And he had called at police headquarters when Archie happened to be locked up in a jail, prompting Wolfe to direct his considerable outrage in the direction of Inspector Cramer, along with a threat to have the police force abolished.
    Like himself, Wiggins mused as the Rolls proceeded, only the most extraordinary occasions not connected to a case could entice Wolfe out-of-doors. Once a year he went to the Metropolitan Orchid Show. In 1934 he had left his residence to dine at the same table as Albert Einstein. And rarely did he go to the scene of a crime. He expected Archie Goodwin to do