The Black Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

thinks he is. Last time he paid our bill for twelve grand without a squeak. You’re to call him.
    He shoved the paper-weight off with such enthusiasm that it rolled across the desk and off to the floor. Then he picked up the pile of mail, squeezed it into a ball between his hands, and dropped it into his wastebasket. Of course it was childish, since he knew darned well I would retrieve it later, but it was a nice gesture, and I fully appreciated it. The humor he was in, it wouldn’t have surprised me any if he had taken the other paperweight, a hunk of carved ebony that had once been used by a man named Mortimer to crack his wife’s skull, and fired it at me. And the humor I was in, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to dodge.
    There had been plenty of activity during those 512 hours. Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Gather had all been summoned the first morning and given errands, and had been paid a total of $3,143.87, including expenses. I had put in a good sixteen hours a day, part in the office and part on the go. Wolfe had worked on thirty-one different people, mostly at his desk, but for five of them who couldn’t be wrangled in he had gone outdoors and traveled, something he had never done for a fee. Among the hours he had spent on the phone had been time for six calls to London, five to Paris, and three to Bari in Italy. Of course all that had been only a dab compared to the capers of the cops. As the days went by and lead after lead petered out, things would have simmered down if it hadn’t been for the papers. They kept hot on it for two reasons: first, they had a suspicion there were international complications and wanted to smoke them out;
    and second, they thought it was the joke of the year that Nero Wolfe’s best friend had been croaked, and Wolfe was supposed to be working on it, but apparently no one had even been nominated for a charge, let alone elected. So the papers kept it going, and the law couldn’t relax a little even if it wanted to. Cramer had called on Wolfe five times, and Stebbins more than that, and Wolfe had been downtown twice to conferences at the DA’s office. We had dined nine times at Rusterman’s, and Wolfe had insisted on paying the check, which probably broke another precedent - for an executor of an estate.
    Wolfe went early to spend an hour in the kitchen, and twice he raised hell -
    once about a Mornay sauce and once about a dish which the menu called Supremes de Volatile en Papillate. I would have suspected he was merely being peevish if the look on the chefs’ faces hadn’t indicated that he was absolutely right. Of course Cramer and his army had covered all the routine. The car the shots had been fired from had been hot, stolen an hour earlier from where it had been parked on West Fifty-sixth Street, and abandoned soon after the shooting, on Second Avenue. The scientists, from fingerprint-lifters and bullet-gazers on up,
    had supplied a lot of dope but no answers, and the same goes for the three or four dozen who went after the woman angle, which after a couple of weeks was spread to include several more, going back four years instead of one, in addition to the original seven. One day Cramer told Wolfe he could go over the whole file if he wanted to, some three hundred reports of sessions with eighty-four people, and Wolfe took him up. He spent eleven hours at it, at the DA’s office. The only result was that he made nine suggestions, all of which were followed, and none of which opened a crack. He left the women and the feelings they had aroused to the cops, and kept Saul and Fred and Orrie, not to mention me, on the international angle. A great deal was accomplished. We learned a lot about the ten organizations listed in the Manhattan phone directory whose names began with Yugoslav. Also that Serbs don’t care much for Bosnians, and less for Croats. Also that the overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs in New York are anti-Tito, and practically all of them are