The Doorbell Rang Read Free Page A

considering it'No. Impossible. He had merely been passing the time, and of course trying to get a rise out of me. The question was how to handle it. He would be expecting me to blow my top. So I walked in and to my desk, grinned at him, said, “That was fun,” yanked the five pages from the notebook, tore them in half, and was going to tear again but he bellowed, “Stop that!”
    I raised one eyebrow, something he can’t do. “Sorry,” I said, perfectly friendly. “A souvenir?”
    “No. Please sit down.”
    I sat. “Have I missed something?”
    “I doubt it. You seldom do. A hypothetical question: If I told you that I have decided to keep that hundred thousand dollars, what would you say?”
    “What you said. Preposterous.”
    “That’s understood. But go on.”
    “In full?”
    “Yes.”
    “I would say that you should sell the house and contents and go live in a nursing home, since you’re obviously cracked. Unless you intend to gyp her, just sit on it.”
    “No.”
    “Then you’re cracked. You’ve read that book. We couldn’t even get started. The idea would be to work it so you could say to the FBI, ‘Lay off,’ and make it stick. Nuts. Merely raising a stink wouldn’t do it. They would have to be actually cornered, the whole damn outfit. Out on a limb. All right, say we try to start. We pick one of these affairs”-I tapped the torn sheets from the notebook-“and make some kind of a stab at it. From then on, whenever I left the house I’d spend all my time ditching tails, and good ones. Everyone connected with that affair would be pegged. Our phone would be tapped. So would other phones-for instance, Miss Rowan’s, and Saul’s and Fred’s and Orrie’s, whether we got them in or not. And of course Parker’s. They might or might not try a frame, probably they wouldn’t have to, but if they did it would be good. I’d have to sleep here in the office. Windows and doors, even one with a chain bolt, are pie for them. They could monitor our mail. I am not piling it on. How many of those things they would do would depend, but they can do all of them. They have all the gimmicks there are, including some I have never heard of.”
    I crossed my legs. “We’d never get to first base. But say we did, say we actually got a wedge started in some kind of a crack, then they would really operate. They have six thousand trained men, some of them as good as they come, and three hundred million dollars a year. I would like to borrow the dictionary to look up a stronger word than ‘preposterous.’ “
    I uncrossed my legs. “Also, what about her'I do not believe that she is merely being annoyed. One will get you twenty that she’s scared stiff. She knows there’s some dirt somewhere, if not on her then on her son or daughter or brother, or even on her dead husband, and she’s afraid they’ll find it. She knows they’re not just riding her; they’re after something that would really hurt, and that would take a lot of sting out of the book. As for the hundred grand, for her that’s peanuts, and anyway she’s in a tax bracket that makes it petty cash.”
    I crossed my legs. “That’s what I would say.”
    Wolfe grunted. “The last part was irrelevant.”
    “I’m often irrelevant. It confuses people.”
    “You keep waving your legs around.”
    “That confuses them too.”
    “Pfui. You’re fidgety, and no wonder. I thought I knew you, Archie, but this is a new facet.”
    “It’s not new at all. It’s merely horse sense.”
    “No. Dog sense. You are moving your legs around because your tail is between them. This is what you said, in effect: I am offered a job with the largest retainer in my experience and no limit on expenses or fee, but I should decline it. I should decline it, not because it would be difficult and perhaps impossible-I have taken many jobs that seemed impossible-but because it would give offense to a certain man and his organization and he would retaliate. I decline it