Why don’t you bring this Fox woman down here, or up here, and call it a trick?
It’d save a lot of messing around.”
I said, coldly,
“Pish-tush. Which isn’t for you, lieutenant; I know you’ve got orders.
It’s for Inspector Cramer, and you can take it to him.
The horse laugh he’ll get over this will be heard at Bath Beach.
Does he think Nero Wolfe is simp enough to try to hide a woman under his bed?
Go on and finish your button-button-who’s-got-the-button and get the hell out of here.”
He grunted and started off with his army toward the door of the basement stairs.
I followed.
I wanted to keep an eye on them anyway, on general principles, but, besides that, I had decided to ride him.
Wolfe had told me to use my judgment, and I knew that was the best way to put a bird Bke Rowcliff in the frame of mind we wanted him in.
So I was right behind them going down, and while they poked around all over the basement, pulling the curtains back from the shelves, opening trunks and looking into empty packing cartons, I exercised the tongue.
Rowcliff tried to pass it back once or twice and then pretended not to hear me.
I opened the door to the insulated bottle department, and kept jerking my head around at them as if I expected to catch them in a snatch at a quart of rye.
They finished up down there by taking a look at the court out of the back door, and after I got the door locked again I followed them back up to the first floor.
Rowcliff stationed a man at the door to the basement stairs and then began at the kitchen and worked forward.
I hung on his tail.
I said,
“Up here, now, you’ve got to take soundings.
The place is lousy with trapdoors,” and when he involuntarily looked down at his feet I turned loose a hawhaw.
In the office I asked him,
‘Want me to open the safe?
There’s a piece of her in there.
That’s the way we worked it, cut her up and scattered her around.”
By the time we started for the second floor he was boiling and trying not to show it, and about ninety-seven per cent convinced.
He left a man at the head of the stairs and tackled Wolfe’s room.
Fritz had come along to see that nothing got hurt, thinking maybe that my mind was on something else, for there was a lot of stuff in there.
I’ll admit they didn’t get rough, though they were thorough.
Wolfe’s double mattress looked pretty thick under its black silk coverlet, and one of them wiggled under it to have a look.
Rowcliff went around the rows of bookshelves taking measurements with his eyes for a concealed closet, and where the pokerdart board was hanging on a screen he pulled the screen around to look behind it.
All the time I was making remarks as they occurred to me.
In my room, as Rowcliff was looking back of the clothes in the closet, I said,
“Listen, I’ve got a suggestion.
I’ll put on an old mother hubbard I won once at a raffle and you take me to Cramer and tell him I’m Clara Fox.
After this performance there’s no question but what he’s too damn dumb to know the difference.”
He backed out of the closet, straightened up, and glared at me.
He bellowed,
“You shut your trap, see?
Or I will take you somewhere, and it won’t be to Cramer!”
I grinned at him.
“That’s childish, lieutenant.
Make saps out of yourselves and then try to take it out on citizens.
Oh, wait!
Baby, wait till this gets out!”
He tramped to the hall and started up the next flight with his army behind.
I’ll admit I was a little squeamish as they entered the south room; it’s hard for anyone to stay in a room ten hours and not leave a trace; but they weren’t looking for traces, they were looking for a live woman.
Anyway, she had followed Wolfe’s instructions to the letter and it looked all right.
That only took a couple of minutes, and the same for the north room, where Saul Panzer had slept.
When they came out to the hall again I opened the door to the narrow stairs going up, and held it for them.