The Doorbell Rang Read Online Free PDF Page B

client-is it a newspaper?”
    “No.”
    “A magazine'Time?”
    “No.” I decided to stretch my instructions a little. “I can only tell you it’s a private citizen who thinks the FBI is getting too big for its britches.”
    “I don’t believe it. And I damn well don’t like it.” He pushed a button on a slab. “Are you FBI?”
    I said no and was going on, but the door opened and a woman was there, the one who had led me in, and Evers snapped at her, “See this man out, Miss Bailey. Into the elevator.”
    I objected. I said that if he discussed it with Nero Wolfe the worst that could happen would be losing his contract, and evidently it was lost anyway, and if there was any chance of saving it- But the look on his face showed me it was no good, as he reached for the slab to push another button. No sale and no hope for one. I got up and walked out, with the woman tagging, and found, out in the ante-room, that it just wasn’t my day. As I entered, the elevator door opened and a man came out, and it wasn’t a stranger. Working on a case about a year ago I had had dealings with a G-man named Morrison, and there he was. Our eyes met, and then we met. As he offered a hand he spoke. “Well, well. Is Nero Wolfe using electronics now?”
    I gave him a friendly grip and a grin. “Oh,” I said, “we try to keep up. We’re going to bug a certain building on Sixty-ninth Street.” I stepped to the elevator and pushed the button. “I’m getting the latest angles.”
    He laughed to be polite and said he guessed they’d have to do all their talking in code. The elevator door opened, and I entered and the door slid shut. It certainly wasn’t my day. Not that it mattered much, since I had got nowhere with Evers, but it’s always bad to have the breaks going wrong, and God knows if we ever needed the breaks we did then. I was walking on hard pavement, not air, as I emerged to the sidewalk and turned uptown.
    It had been more than twenty minutes, and Al had gone. There are plenty of taxis on First Avenue at that hour, and I flagged one and gave the backie an address.

Nero Wolfe 41 - The Doorbell Rnd
    4
    At a quarter to eleven that Wednesday night, pessimistic and pooped, I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and pushed the button. With the chain bolt on I had to be let in. When Fritz came he asked if I wanted some warmed-up curried duck, and I growled the no. I shed my hat and coat and went to the office, and there was the oversized genius at his desk, in the chair made to order for his seventh of a ton, with a bottle of beer and a glass on the tray, comfortably reading his current book, The Treasure of Our Tongue, by Lincoln Barnett. I went to my desk and whirled my chair and sat. He would look up when he finished a paragraph.
    He did. He even inserted his bookmark, a thin strip of gold given him years before by a client who couldn’t afford it, and put the book down. “You have dined, of course,” he said.
    “Dined, no.” I crossed my legs. “Excuse me for waving my legs around. I ate something greasy, I forget what, in a dump in the Bronx. It has been-“
    “Fritz will warm the duck, and-“
    “No he won’t. I told him not to. It has been by far the lousiest day I have ever had and I’ll finish it up right. I’ll report in full and go to bed tasting grease. First, the-“
    “Confound it, you must eat!”
    “I say no. First, the client.”
    I gave it to him verbatim, and the action, including the two men in the parked car of which I had the license number. At the end I added some opinions: that [a] it would be wasting a dime to bother to check the license number, [b] Sarah Dacos could probably be crossed off, or at least filed for future reference, and [c] whatever dirt there might be under cover in the Bruner family, the lid was still on as far as the client knew. When I got up to hand him the paper Mrs Bruner had signed he merely glanced at it and said to put it in the safe.
    I also gave him the Evers