In the Best Families

“You damn' faker, I said indulgently. “You know perfectly well that I would rather eat soap than have you think I would knuckle under to that son of a bitch, and I know that you would rather put horse-radish on oysters than have me think you would. I might if you didn't know about it, and you might if I didn't know about it, but as it is we're stuck.

Wolfe sighed again, deeper. “I take it that you're going? “I am. But under one condition, that the trepidant vigilance begins as of now. That you call Fritz in, and Theodore down from the plant rooms, and tell them what we're up against, and the chain bolts are to be kept constantly on both doors, and you keep away from windows, and nothing and no one is to be allowed to enter when I'm not here. “Good heavens, he objected sourly, “that's no way to live.

“You can't tell till you try it. In ten years you may like it fine. I buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to get Theodore.

Wolfe sat scowling at me.

Chapter Three

When, swinging the car off Taconic State Parkway to hit Route 100, my dash clock said only 2.40,1 decided to make a little detour. It would be only a couple of miles out of my way. So at Pines Bridge I turned right, instead of left across the bridge. It wouldn't serve my purpose to make for the entrance to the estate where EASTCREST was carved on the great stone pillar, since all I would see there was a driveway curving up through the woods, and I turned off a mile short of that to climb a bumpy road up a hill. At the top the road went straight for a stretch between meadows, and I eased the car off on to the grass, stopped, and took the binoculars and aimed them at the summit of the next hill, somewhat higher than the one I was on, where the roof and upper walls of a stone mansion showed above the trees. Now, in early April, with no leaves yet, and with the binoculars, I could see most of the mansion and even something of the surrounding grounds, and a couple of men moving about.

That was Eastcrest, the legal residence of the illegal Arnold Zeck-but of course there are many ways of being illegal. One is to drive through a red light.

Another is to break laws by proxy only, for money only, get your cut so it can't be traced, and never try to buy a man too cheap. That was what Zeck had been doing for more than twenty years-and there was Eastcrest.