Gambit Read Free Page A

has told the police about it. I suppose the cook and steward have, but maybe they haven’t. But I had to tell you, I have to tell you everything I know, so you can decide what to do. Don’t I?”
    “Yes. I commend you. People seldom tell me everything they know. The cook and steward have of course told the police; no wonder your father has been charged with murder.” Wolfe shut his eyes and tried leaning back, but it was no go in that chair. In the made-to-order oversized chair at his desk that was automatic when he wanted to consider something, leaning back and closing his eyes, and,
    finding that it wouldn’t work, he let out a growl. He straightened up and demanded, “You have money in that bag?”
    She opened it and took out a fat wad of bills with rubber bands around them.
    “Twenty-two thousand dollars,” she said, and held it out to him.
    He didn’t take it. “You said you sold some things. What things'Yours?”
    “Yes. I had some in my bank account, and I sold some jewelry.”
    “Your own jewelry?”
    “Yes. Of course. How could I sell someone else’s?”
    “It has been done. Archie. Count it.”
    I extended a hand and she gave me the wad. As I removed the rubber bands and started counting, Wolfe tore out pages and dropped them on the fire. There wasn’t much of the dictionary left, and, while I counted, five-hundreds and then C’s, he tore and dropped. I counted it twice to make sure, and when I finished there was no more dictionary except the binding.
    “Twenty-two grand,” I said.
    “Will this burn?’ he asked.
    “Sure; it’s buckram. It may smell a little. You knew you were going to burn it when you bought it. Otherwise you would have ordered leather.”
    No response. He was bending forward, getting the binding satisfactorily placed.
    There was still enough fire, since Fritz had used wood as well as kindling.
    Watching the binding starting to curl, he spoke. “Take Miss Blount to the office and give her a receipt. I’ll join you shortly.”

Nero Wolfe 37 - Gambit
    CHAPTER TWO
    Twenty-two thousand dollars is not hay. Even after expenses and taxes it would make a healthy contribution to the upkeep of the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, owned by Wolfe, lived in and worked in by him, by Fritz Brenner, chef and house-keeper, and by me, and worked in by Theodore Horstmann,
    who spent ten hours a day, and sometimes more, nursing the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms at the top of the house. I once calculated the outgo per hour for a period of six months, but I won’t mention the figure because the District Director of Internal Revenue might read this and tell one of his sniffers to compare it with the income tax report. As for the twenty-two grand, received in cash, he would find it included in income.
    But when, at a quarter past one, I returned to the office after letting Sally Blount out and put the wad in the safe, I was by no means chipper. We had the wad with no strings attached; Wolfe had made it clear that his only commitment was to give it a try, but it seemed more than likely that we were licked before we started, and that’s hard to take for the ego of a wizard, not to mention a dog.
    I had filled a dozen pages of my notebook with such items as: 1. As far as Sally knew, none of the four messengers, the only ones besides her father and the cook and steward who had been in reaching distance of the chocolate, had ever seen Paul Jerin before or had any connection with him; and if they had she would almost certainly have known because they were all in the Blounts’ circle, one way or another, and she saw them fairly frequently. Ditto for Bernard Nash and Tony Laghi, the steward and cook, though she had never seen them.
    2. The messengers. Charles W. Yerkes, the banker, had occasional social contacts with the Blounts. Blount was on the Board of Directors of Yerkes’s bank. Yerkes enjoyed being in the same room with Mrs. Blount, Sally’s mother, but so did lots of men.