Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 46 Read Online Free PDF Page A

rest, also nothing, except that you were armed when you came, with that club, and that you told me you supposed I had to. It’s all there, what was said and what happened, but I didn’t include a guess I made. I saved that for Stebbins. When I left Pierre there, he felt something in his topcoat pocket and took it out. It was an aluminum tube, the kind Don Pedro cigars come in. When he unscrewed the cap, he was holding it only a few inches from his face. You saw his face. There were pieces of aluminum on the floor, and I recognized the printing on them. Of course they had been collected and Stebbins had seen them. Also of course, they would soon make the same guess, so I thought I might as well give it to Stebbins.”
    He shook his head, either at Purley or at me, I didn’t know which. “What else did you give him?”
    “Nothing. There was nothing else to give. Nothing to anybody, including the medical examiner and Lieutenant Burnham, whom you have never met. I didn’t count, but Fritz says there were nineteen of them altogether.The door of the South Room is sealed. A bomb specialist is coming to get clues, probably this afternoon.”
    When he wants to give something a good look and is in the office at his desk, in the one chair that he thoroughly approves, he leans back and shuts his eyes, but the back of that chair isn’t the right angle for it, so he just squinted and pulled at his ear lobe. A full two minutes.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing whatever.”
    “Right. Because you’re the greatest detective in the world. Stebbins doesn’t believe it. He thinks he told me something, maybe not a name but something, and I left it out because we want to get him ourselves. Of course we do, at least I do. I might have unscrewed the cap of that tube myself. So I owe him something.”
    “So do I. In my own house, asleep in my own bed, and that. That—that …”
    I raised my brows at him. That was a first. The first time in my long experience that he had ever been at a loss for words.
    He hit the chair arm with a fist. “So. Call Felix. Tell him we’ll be there for lunch.” He looked at the wall clock. “In half an hour. If no upstairs room is available, perhaps on the top floor, if that’s convenient. Do you know of any source of information about Pierre other than the restaurant?”
    I said no, got up, went to the phone on the bedstand, switched it on, and dialed.

Chapter 3
    T he top floor at Rusterman’s restaurant was once the living quarters of Marko Vukcic, its owner, who had been Wolfe’s boyhood friend in Montenegro and one of the only three men I knew who called him by his first name. For a year or so after Marko’s death it had been unoccupied, and then Felix, who had been left a one-third share and ran the restaurant under Wolfe’s supervision as trustee, had moved in with his wife and two children. Soon the children had got married and left.
    At twenty-five minutes to one, Wolfe and I were seated at a table near a window on that floor which looked down on Madison Avenue. Felix, slim and trim, elegant in blue-black and white for the lunch customers, standing at Wolfe’s left and my right, said, “Then the scallops. Fresh from the bay, I never saw finer ones, and the shallots were perfect. They’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
    Wolfe nodded. “And the rice fritters. I’ll tell—his name is Philip?”
    “Philip Correla. Of course everyone knew Pierre, but Philip knew him best. As I said, I don’t think I ever saw Pierre except here. We’ll miss him, Mr. Wolfe. Hewas a good man. It’s hard to believe, there in your house.” He looked at his watch. “You’ll excuse me—I’ll send Philip.” He went. The early ones would be coming down below.
    “Uhuh,” I said. “A million people will be saying that, it’s hard to believe, there in Nero Wolfe’s house. Or some of them will say it’s easy to believe. I don’t know which is worse.”
    He glared at me.
    Of the seventy-some at