Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 by Champagne for One Page A

that.”
    “Yeah, but then I was asking a favor. Now I’m making a deal.”
    His neck itched again. “I might stretch a point. I might, if I knew what you want with her. What’s the idea?”
    “Greed. Desire for dough. I’ve been offered five hundred dollars for an eye-witness story on last night, and I want to decorate it with some background. Don’t tell Mrs. Irwin that, though. She’s probably down on journalists by now. Just tell her I’m your friend and a good loyal citizen and have only been in jail five times.”
    He laughed. “That’ll do it all right. Wait till you see her.” He sobered. “So that’s it. It’s a funny world, Archie. A girl gets herself in a fix she sees only one way out of, to kill herself, and you’re there to see her do it just because I had had all I wanted of those affairs, and here you’re going to collect five hundred dollars just because you were there. It’s a funny world. So I didn’t do you such a bad turn after all.”
    I had to admit that was one way of looking at it.He said he felt like saluting the funny world with a drink, and wouldn’t I join him, and I said I’d be glad to. When he had gone and brought the requirements, a scotch and water for me and bourbon on the rocks for him, and we had performed the salute, he got at the phone and made a person-to-person call to Mrs. Irwin at Grantham House. Apparently there was nothing at all wrong with his position; he merely told her he would appreciate it if she would see a friend of his, and that was all there was to it. She said morning would be better than afternoon. After he hung up we discussed the funny world while finishing the drinks, and when I left one more step had been taken toward the brotherhood of man.
    Back home, the conference was over, the trio had gone, and Wolfe was at his desk with his current book, one he had said I must read,
World Peace Through World Law
, by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn. He finished a paragraph, lowered it, and told me to enter expense advances to Saul and Fred and Orrie, two hundred dollars each. I went to the safe for the book and made the entries, returned the book, locked the safe, and asked him if I needed to know anything about their assignments. He said that could wait, meaning that he wanted to get on with his reading, and asked about mine. I told him it was all set, that he wouldn’t see me in the morning because I would be leaving for Grantham House before nine.
    “I now call Austin Byne ‘Dinky,’” I told him. “I suppose because he’s an inch over six feet, but I didn’t ask. I should report that he balked and I had to apply a little pressure. When he phoned yesterday he tried to sound as if his tubes were clogged, but he boggled it. He had no cold. He now says that he had been tothree of those affairs and had had enough, and he rang me only after he had tried five others and they weren’t available. So we made a deal. He gets me in at Grantham House, and I won’t tell his aunt on him. He seems to feel that his aunt might bite.”
    Wolfe grunted. “Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman. Is he guileless?”
    “I would reserve it. He is not a dope. He might be capable of knowing that someone was going to kill Faith Usher so that it would pass for suicide, and he wanted somebody there alert and brainy and observant to spot it, so he got me, and he is now counting on me, with your help, to nail him. Or her. Or he may be on the level and merely pitiable.”
    “You and he have not been familiar?”
    “No, sir. Just acquaintances. I have only seen him at parties.”
    “Then his selecting you is suggestive
per se.
”
    “Certainly. That’s why I took the trouble to go to see him. To observe. There were other ways of getting to Mrs. Irwin of Grantham House.”
    “But you have formed no conclusion.”
    “No, sir. Question mark.”
    “Very well. Pfui. Afraid of a woman.” He lifted his book, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
    At