Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One Read Online Free PDF Page B

drawn its protecting veil; let us draw ours!”
    Okay by me.

2
    I said, “I wouldn’t have thought this was a job for a house dick, watching for a kid to throw stones. Especially a ritzy house dick like you.”
    Gershom Odell spit through his teeth at a big fern ten feet away from where we sat on a patch of grass. “It isn’t. But I told you. These birds pay from fifteen to fifty bucks a day to stay at this caravansary and to write letters on Kanawha Spa stationery, and they don’t like to have niggers throwing stones at them when they go horseback riding. I didn’t say a kid, I said a nigger. They suspect it was one that got fired from the garage about a month ago.”
    The warm sun was on me through a hole in the trees, and I yawned. I asked, to show I wasn’t bored, “You say it happened about here?”
    He pointed. “Over yonder, from the other side of the path. It was old Crisler that got it both times, you know, the fountain pen Crisler, his daughter married Ambassador Willetts.”
    There were sounds from down the way. Soon the hoofbeats were plainer, and in a minute a couple of genteel but good-looking horses came down the path from around a curve, and trotted by, close enough so that I could have tripped them with a fishing pole. On one of them was a dashing chap in a loud-checked jacket, and on the other a dame plenty old and fat enough to start on service to others any time the spirit moved her.
    Odell said, “That was Mrs. James Frank Osborn, the Baltimore Osborn, ships and steel, and Dale Chatwin, a good bridge player on the make. See him worry his horse? He can’t ride worth a damn.”
    “Yeah? I didn’t notice. You sure are right there on the social list.”
    “Got to be, on this job.” He spit at the fern again, scratched the back of his head, and plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth. “I guess nine out of ten that come to this joint, I know ’em without being told. Of course sometimes there’s strangers. For instance, take your crowd. Who the hell are they? I understand they’re a bunch of good cooks that the chef invited. Looks funny to me. Since when was Kanawha Spa a domestic science school?”
    I shook my head. “Not my crowd, mister.”
    “You’re with ’em.”
    “I’m with Nero Wolfe.”
    “He’s with em.”
    I grinned. “Not this minute, he ain’t. He’s in Suite 60, on the bed fast asleep. I think I’ll have to chloroform him Thursday to get him on the train home.” I stretched in the sun. “At that, there’s worse things than cooks.”
    “I suppose so,” he admitted. “Where do they all come from, anyway?”
    I pulled a paper from my pocket—a page I had clipped from the magazine section of the
Times
—and unfolded it and glanced at the list again before passing it across to him:
    LES QUINZE MAITRES
    Jerome Berin, the Corridona, San Remo.
    Leon Blanc, the Willow Club, Boston.
    Ramsey Keith, Hotel Hastings, Calcutta.
    Phillip Laszio, Hotel Churchill, New York.
    Domenico Rossi, Empire Café, London.
    Pierre Mondor, Mondor’s, Paris.
    Marko Vukcic, Rusterman’s Restaurant, New York.
    Sergei Vallenko, Chateau Montcalm, Quebec.
    Lawrence Coyne, The Rattan, San Francisco.
    Louis Servan, Kanawha Spa, West Virginia.
    Ferid Khaldah, Café de l’Europe, Istanbul.
    Henri Tassone, Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.
    D ECEASED:
    Armand Fleury, Fleury’s, Paris.
    Pasquale Donofrio, the Eldorado, Madrid.
    Jacques Baleine, Emerald Hotel, Dublin.
    Odell took a look at the extent of the article, made no offer to read it, and then went over the names and addresses with his head moving slowly back and forth. He grunted. “Some bunch of names. You might think it was a Notre Dame football team. How’d they get all the press? What does that mean at the top, less quinzy something?”
    “Oh, that’s French.” I pronounced it adequately. “It means ‘The Fifteen Masters.’ These babies are famous. One of them cooks sausages that people fight duels over. You ought to see