Corpus Corpus by Harry Paul Jeffers Page B

with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.' "

    Suddenly braking the car to avoid slamming into a cluster of giggling, boisterous, and obviously inebriated young men surging out of a corner bar and into the street against the light, Bogdanovic growled, "Look at those damn fools. They should watch out where they're going. They could've been killed."

    "You're right, John," Goldstein said, reaching forward and clapping him on the shoulder as the young men zigzagged to the opposite corner. "They are certainly drunk and disorderly. Will our youth never learn to behave properly?"

    'Jaywalking, too! And on the morning of the Sabbath," Dane added. "What is this old world coming to? Somebody should call the police."

    "You're absolutely right, Maggie," Goldstein exclaimed as he sat back. "But we all know that you can never find a cop when you really need one."

    "And even if they were arrested," said Dane, "some smart-assed lawyer and a bleeding-heart judge would have them out on bail. Before the arresting officer finished filling out the report those kids would be hitting the bars again."

    "Gilbert and Sullivan were right on the money,"

    Goldstein said. "A policeman's lot is not a happy one."

    Dane turned slightly. "Name a cop in a Nero Wolfe story who claimed to have once arrested a man who turned out to be guilty."

    "Too easy, Maggie. It was L. T. Cramer. That's how he got to be an inspector."

    With hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and eyes on a red light he could have avoided if the drunks had not forced him to brake, Bogdanovic let out a forlorn sigh. As he waited for the light to go green again, he resigned himself to the inevitable as Goldstein and his amenable passenger engaged in Goldstein's favorite pastime of detective story trivia.
    For thirty-two blocks heading downtown to Goldstein's apartment on Fifty-sixth Street just east of Second Avenue, he listened in silence while they traded rapid-fire questions and answers, each drawn from a seemingly bottomless well of Nero Wolfe minutiae.

    By Eighty-second Street he had learned that any spoke will lead an ant to the hub, frogs can't fly, a hole in the ice was a peril only to those who go skating, you can not pick plums in a desert, and Nero Wolfe did not like being pestered, bullied, riled, badgered, or hounded.

    Were any of these to occur, he heard from Dane as the car dashed across Seventy-ninth Street, Wolfe was likely to protest with expletives from a quaint thesaurus: "Egad!"

    "Pfui" 

    "Confound it!" 

    "Great hounds and Cerebus!" 

    And the occasional "Bah."

    The great detective had resolved cases recorded under the names "Bullet for One," "Omit Flowers," "Black Orchids," "Booby Trap," "The Father Hunt," and "Death of a Doxy," whatever the hell a doxy was.

    Brought to a halt at Sixty-fifth Street by a traffic light he was regaled by domestic arrangements of the house on Thirty-fifth Street. An orchid nursery on the roof watched over by a man named Horstmann. A basement with a pool table and a cubbyhole with a couch, as well as the quarters of a majordomo called Fritz and an insulated room for storage of bottled beer. The ground floor had an office for Wolfe, a front room, a dining room, a kitchen, and an amply stocked pantry.

    Finally, as he turned the car into East Fifty-sixth Street, he learned that there was an unresolved question concerning where Wolfe had been born. Although he claimed to have come into the world in the United States, he was on record saying he had been born on the border of Montenegro and Albania in the shadow of the Black Mountain, from which he claimed the name Nero was taken.

    "All in all, it's been an interesting evening," Goldstein said as he left the car. "A fine dinner, the camaraderie of the Wolfe Pack, two extremely pleasant companions, the sdmuladon of literary conversation, and a challenging case of murder. Could we ask for anything more? Good night to you both."

    Bogdanovic smiled