Fer-De-Lance

"Wait a minute, Miss Barstow." I was flipping back the pages of my notebook. "Maybe your brother ought to hear it. I’ll find it in a minute." I found the page. "Here it is." I read it just as Wolfe had said it, not too fast. Then I closed the notebook. "That’s the agreement, Mr. Barstow. I might as well say that my employer, Mr. Nero Wolfe, keeps his temper pretty well under control, but every once in a while I blow up. If you call him a blackmailer once more the result will probably be bad all around. If you don’t know a favor when you see it handed to you I suppose you’d think a sock on the jaw was a compliment."

He said, "Sis, you’d better go in the house."

"She can go in a minute," I said. "If the agreement is to go overboard she ought to see it sink. If you don’t like it, why did you let her come to Wolfe’s office alone to make it? He would have been glad to see you. He said to your sister, we shall proceed with the inquiry in any event. That’s our business, not such a rotten one either, a few people think who have dealt with us. I say the same to you: agreement or no agreement, we’re going to find out who murdered Peter Oliver Barstow. If you ask me, I think your sister made a swell bargain. If you don’t think so there must be some reason, and that’s one of the things we’ll find out on the way.

"Larry," Miss Barstow said. Her voice was full of things. She repeated it. "Larry." She was telling him and asking him and reminding him all at the same time.

"Come on," I said. "You’re all worked up and looking at me all through lunch didn’t help you any, but if something goes wrong with your airplane you don’t just kick and scream, do you? You pull your coat off and help fix it."

He sat looking not at me but his sister, with his lower lip stuck up and pushed out so that he looked half like a baby about ready to cry and half like a man set to tell the world to go to hell.

"All right, Sis," he said finally. He showed no signs of apologizing to me, but I thought that could wait for a rainy day.