Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families Read Online Free PDF Page B

involuntary backward jerk.
    I grinned at her. “Showing off. Okay? Want to try it? Get him and send him out from behind that same bush, with orders to take me, and any amount up to two bits, even, that he won’t reach me.” I returned the gun to the holster. “Ready?”
    She blinked. “You mean you
would?”
    Hammond giggled. He was a full-sized middle-aged man and he looked like a banker, and I want to be fair to him, but he giggled. “Look out, Annabel,” he said warningly. “He might.”
    “Of course,” I told her, “you would be in the line of fire, and I’ve never shot a fast-moving dog, so we would both be taking a risk. Only I don’t like you being skeptical. Stick around and you’ll see.”
    That was a mistake, caused by my temperament. It is natural and wholesome for a man of my age to enjoy association with a woman of her age, maid, wife, or widow, but I should have had sense enough to stop to realize what I was getting in for. She had said that she had come to watch me work, and there I was asking for it. As a result, I had to spend a solid hour pretending that I was hell bent to find out who had poisoned one of Leeds’ dogs when I didn’t care ahang. Not that I love dog-poisoners, but that wasn’t what was on my mind.
    When Calvin Leeds showed up, as he did soon in an old station wagon with its rear taken up with a big wire cage, the four of us made a tour of the kennels and the runs, with Leeds briefing me, and me asking questions and making notes, and then we went in the house and extended the inquiry to aspects such as the poison used, the method employed, the known suspects, and so on. It was a strain. I had to make it good, because that was what I was supposed to be there for, and also because Annabel was too good-looking to let her be skeptical about me. And the dog hadn’t even died! He was alive and well. But I went to it as if it were the biggest case of the year for Nero Wolfe and me, and Leeds got a good fifty bucks’ worth of detection for nothing. Of course nobody got detected, but I asked damn good questions.
    After Annabel and Hammond left to return to Birchvale next door, I asked Leeds about Hammond, and sure enough he was a banker. He was a vice-president of the Metropolitan Trust Company, who handled affairs for Mrs. Rackham—had done so ever since the death of her first husband. When I remarked that Hammond seemed to have it in mind to handle Mrs. Rackham’s daughter-in-law also, Leeds said he hadn’t noticed. I asked who else would be there at dinner.
    “You and me,” Leeds said. He was sipping a highball, taking his time with it. We were in the little living room of his little house, about which there was nothing remarkable except the dozens of pictures of dogs on the walls. Moving around outside, there had been more spring to him than to lots of guys half hisage; now he was sprawled on a couch, all loose. I was reminded of one of the dogs we had come upon during our tour, lying in the sun at the door of its kennel.
    “You and me,” he said, “and my cousin and her husband, and Mrs. Frey, whom you have met, and Hammond, and the statesman, that’s seven—”
    “Who’s the statesman?”
    “Oliver A. Pierce.”
    “I’m intimate with lots of statesmen, but I never heard of him.”
    “Don’t let him know it.” Leeds chuckled. “It’s true that at thirty-four he has only got as far as state assemblyman, but the war made a gap for him the same as for other young men. Give him a chance. One will be enough.”
    “What is he, a friend of the family?”
    “No, and that’s one on him.” He chuckled again. “When he was first seen here, last summer, he came as a guest of Mrs. Frey—that is, invited by her—but before long either she had seen enough of him or he had seen enough of her. Meanwhile, however, he had seen Lina Darrow, and he was caught anyhow.”
    “Who’s Lina Darrow?”
    “My cousin’s secretary—by the way, she’ll be at dinner too, that’ll