Gambit by Rex Stout

you before he goes, probably to straighten out a kink or two, and if you would like -“
    “What does he say about Dan Kalmus?”
    “That’s one of your kinks. Your idea about Kalmus is pure crap. You may even -“
    She moved. I had to either sidestep or get bumped, so I made room for her to get by, and had another look at the nice shoulders and the neck curve as I followed her down. As we entered the office Farrow twisted around in his chair and then arose, and apparently he intended to give her a cousinly kiss, but the look on her face stopped him. It certainly would have stopped me. He was starting, “Now look here, Sal, you - ‘, but she stopped that also.
    “You too,” she said, with more scorch than I would have thought she had in her.
    “You would like it too, wouldn’t you'You think she would have it all, she would own everything, and she would let you run it. You would think that, but you’re wrong. You’re always wrong. She would let him run it; that’s what he’s after,
    besides her. You’re just a fool, a complete fool, you always have been.”
    She turned and went, to the door and on out. Farrow stood and gawked at her back, then wheeled to Wolfe, extended his hands, palms up, and waggled his head.
    “By God,” he said, “there you are. Calling me a fool. What did I tell you'
    Calling me a fool!”

Nero Wolfe 37 - Gambit
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    At the dinner table, and with coffee in the office afterwards, Wolfe resumed on the subject he had started at lunch - Voltaire. The big question was, could a man be called great on account of the way he used words, even though he was a toady, a trimmer, a forger, and an intellectual fop. That had been dealt with at lunch, and Voltaire had come out fairly well except on the toady count. How could you call a man great who sought the company and the favors of dukes and duchesses, of Richelieu, of Frederick of Prussia'But it was at dinner and in the office that Voltaire really got it. What finally ruled him out was something that hadn’t been mentioned at lunch at all: he had no palate and not much appetite. He was indifferent to food; he might even eat only once a day; and he drank next to nothing. All his life he was extremely skinny, and in his later years he was merely a skeleton. To call him a great man was absurd; strictly speaking, he wasn’t a man at all, since he had no palate and a dried-up stomach.
    He was a remarkable word-assembly plant, but he wasn’t a man, let alone a great one.
    I suppose I shouldn’t do this. I should either report Wolfe’s table talk verbatim, and you could either enjoy it or skip it, or I shouldn’t mention it.
    Usually I leave it out, but that evening I had a suspicion that I want to put in. Reporting to him on my visit to the Blount apartment, I had of course included a description of Kalmus: mostly bones and skin. I suspected that that was why Wolfe picked on Voltaire for both lunch and dinner, leading up to the climax. It wasn’t much of a connection, but it was a connection, and it showed that he couldn’t forget the fix he was in even at meals. That was my suspicion,
    and, if I was right, I didn’t like it. It had never happened before. It had to mean that he was afraid that sooner or later he was going to have to eat something highly unpleasant for both his palate and his stomach - the assumption that Matthew Blount was innocent.
    The coffee things were still there and he was still on Voltaire when Charles W.
    Yerkes came a little before nine-thirty. Another indication of Wolfe’s state of mind was when the doorbell rang and Sally asked him if she should leave, and he raised his shoulders an eighth of an inch and said, “As you please.” That wasn’t him at all, and, as I went to the front to admit the caller, I had to arrange my face not to give him the impression that what we needed was sympathy and plenty of it.
    Sally had stood when I went to answer the bell, and she met Yerkes at the office door. He took