Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families Read Free Page B

couldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t go to anyone I knew, I went about it very carefully. I found out all about you, and no one knows I did, or at least why I did. If my husband is doing something that will hurt me that will be the end; but I don’t want to expose him, I just have to know. You are the greatest detective on earth, and you’re an honest man. I just want to pay you for finding out where and how my husband is getting money, that’s all. You can’t possibly say you won’t do it. Not possibly!”
    She left her chair and went to put the check on his desk in front of him. “It’s for ten thousand dollars, but that doesn’t mean I think that’s enough. Whatever you say. But don’t you dare say I want to expose him! My God—expose him?”
    She had my sympathy up to a point, but what stuck out was her basic assumption that rich people can always get anything they want just by putting up the dough. That’s enough to give an honest workingman, like a private detective for instance, a painin three places. The assumption is of course sound in some cases, but what rich people are apt not to understand is that there are important exceptions.
    This, however, was not one of them, and I hoped Wolfe would see that it wasn’t. He did. He didn’t want to, but the bank account had by no means fully recovered from the awful blow of March fifteenth, only three weeks back, and he knew it. He came forward in his chair for a glance at the check, caught my eye and saw how I felt about it, heaved a sigh, and spoke.
    “Your notebook, Archie. Confound it.”

Chapter 2
    T he following morning, Saturday, I was in the office typing the final report on a case which I will not identify by name because it was never allowed to get within a mile of a newspaper or a microphone. We were committed on Mrs. Rackham’s job, since I had deposited her check Friday afternoon, but no move had been made yet, not even a phone call to any of the names she had given us, because it was Wolfe’s idea that first of all we must have a look at him. With Wolfe’s settled policy of never leaving his house on business, and with no plausible excuse for getting Barry Rackham to the office, I would have to do the looking, and that had been arranged for.
    Mrs. Rackham had insisted that her husband must positively not know or even suspect that he was being investigated, and neither must anyone else, so the arrangements for the look were a little complicated. She vetoed my suggestion that I should be invited to join a small week-end gathering at her country home in Westchester, on the ground that someone would probably recognize the Archie Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe. It was Calvin Leedswho offered an amendment that was adopted. He had a little place of his own at the edge of her estate, where he raised dogs, called Hillside Kennels. A month ago one of his valuable dogs had been poisoned, and I was to go there Saturday afternoon as myself, a detective named Archie Goodwin, to investigate the poisoning. His cousin would invite him to her place, Birchvale, for dinner, and I would go along.
    It was a quiet Saturday morning in the office, with Wolfe up in the plant rooms as usual from nine to eleven, and I finished typing the report of a certain case with no interruptions except a couple of phone calls which I handled myself, and one for which I had to give Wolfe a buzz—from somebody at Mummiani’s on Fulton Street to say that they had just got eight pounds of fresh sausage from Bill Darst at Hackettstown, and Wolfe could have half of it. Since Wolfe regards Darst as the best sausage maker west of Cherbourg, he asked that it be sent immediately by messenger, and for heaven’s sake not with dry ice.
    When, at 11:01, the sound of Wolfe’s elevator came, I got the big dictionary in front of me on my desk, opened to H, and was bent over it as he entered the office, crossed to his oversized custom-built chair, and sat. He didn’t bite at once because his