Gebert took a couple of steps toward her and stopped.
She said,
“You can depend on me, mother.
But so can Uncle Boyd.
That's all right, isn't it? Oh, isn't it?”
She looked at me and said in a funny tone like a child,
“Don't insult my mother, Mr… Goodwin.”
Then she turned abruptly and ran out on us, skipped the shebang.
She left by a door on the right, not toward the hall, and closed it behind her.
Perren Gebert shrugged his shoulders and thrust his hands into his pockets, then pulled one out to rub the side of his thin nose with his forefinger.
Mrs. Frost, with a couple of teeth clamped on her lower lip, looked at him and then back at the door where her daughter had gone.
I said brightly,
“I don't think she fired me.
I didn't understand it that way.
What do you think?”
Gebert showed me a thin smile.
“You leave now. No?”
“Maybe.” I still had my notebook open in my hand. “But you folks might as well understand that we mean business.
We're not just having fun, we do this for a living.
I don't believe you can talk her out of it.
This place belongs to her.
I'm willing to have a showdown right now; say we go to her bedroom or wherever she went, and ask if I'm kicked out.” I directed my gaze at Mrs. Frost. “Or have a little chat right here.
You know, they might find that red box at Dudley Frost's, at that.
How would that set with you?”
She said,
“Stupid senseless tricks.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.
Even Stephen.
If you bounced me, Inspector Cramer would send me right back here with a man if Wolfe asked him to, and you're in no position to ritz the cops, because they're sensitive and they would only get suspicious.
At present they're not actually suspicious, they just think you're hiding something because people like you don't want any publicity except in society columns and cigarette ads.
For instance, they believe you know where the red box is.
You know, of course, it's Nero Wolfe's property; McNair left it to him.
We really would like to have it, just for curiosity.”
Gebert, after listening to me politely, cocked his head at Mrs. Frost. He smiled at her:
“You see, Calida, this fellow really believes we could tell him something. He's perfectly sincere about it.
The police, too.
The only way to get rid of them is to humor them.
Why not tell them something?”
He waved a hand inclusively.
“All sorts of things.”
She looked at him without approval.
“This is nothing to be playful about.
Certainly not your kind of playfulness.” He lifted his brows.
“I don't mean to be playful.
They want information about Boyd, and unquestionably we have it, quantities of it.” He looked at me. “You do shorthand in that book?
Good. Put this down: McNair was an inveterate eater of snails, and he preferred calvados to cognac.
His wife died in childbirth because he was insisting on being an artist and was too poor and incompetent to provide proper care for her. – What, Calida?
But the fellow wants factsl -Edwin Frost once paid McNair two thousand francs-at that time four hundred dollars-for one of his pictures, and the next day traded it to a flower girl for a violet-not a bunch, a violet. McNair named his daughter Glenna because it means valley, and she came out of the valley of death, since her mother died at her birth-just a morsel of Calvinistic merriment. A light-hearted man, Boyd was! Mrs. Frost here was his oldest friend and she once rescued him from despair and penury; yet, when he became the foremost living designer and manufacturer of women's woolen garments, he invariably charged her top prices for everything she bought.
And he never-”
“Perren!