Fer-De-Lance

She invited me to lunch. She said her brother would be present, and since I would want to see him anyway that would be convenient. I thanked her. I said, "You’re a good sport, Miss Barstow. A real one. Thank the Lord, Nero Wolfe is the cleverest man on earth and thought up that agreement with you, because if you’re in for trouble that’s the only thing that will help you out of it."

"If I’m in trouble," she said.

I nodded. "Sure, I know you’ve got plenty, but the one that bothers you most is your fear that there’s worse ahead. I just wanted to say that you’re a good sport."

As it turned out, I not only met her brother at lunch, I met Manuel Kimball too. I was glad of that, for it seemed to me that what I had learned that morning made the members of that foursome more important than they had been before.

The preceding afternoon after about two hours of telephoning, I had finally found a hook-up with the professional of the Green Meadow Club and he had accepted Wolfe’s invitation to dinner. He had never had any dealings with Barstow, had only known him by sight, but Wolfe had got out of him twenty bushels of facts regarding the general set-up at the club and around the links. By the time the professional left to go home around midnight he had a bottle of Wolfe’s best port inside of him, and Wolfe knew as much about a golf club as if he had been a professional himself. Among other things he learned that the members kept their bags in their lockers, that some of them left their lockers unlocked, and that even with the locked ones an ingenious and determined man could have got a duplicate without any great difficulty. With such a key, of course, it would have been simple to await a propitious moment to open the locker, take the driver from the bag and substitute another one. So Barstow’s companions in the foursome that Sunday were of no more importance than any of the members or attendants or visitors who had access to the locker rooms.

But now that was out, since Barstow’s bag had not been in his locker since the September before. He had brought it down with him from the university. That changed the picture and made the members of the foursome a little more interesting than lots of other people.