In the Best Families

Pierce was a smooth article. His manner was of course based on the law of nature regulating the attitude of an elected person towards everybody old enough to vote, but his timing and variations were so good that it was hard to recognise it, although he was only about my age. He was also about my size, with broad shoulders and a homely honest face, and a draw on his smile as swift as a flash bulb. I made a note to look up whether I lived in his assembly district. If he got the breaks the only question about him as how far and how soon.

If in addition to his own equipment and talents he acquired Lina Darrow asa pa, it would probably be farther and sooner. She was, I would have guessed, slightly younger than Annabel Frey-twenty-six maybe-and I never saw a finer pair of eyes.

She was obviously underplaying them, or rather what was back of them. When I was questioning her she pretended I had her in a corner, while her eyes gave it away that she could have waltzed all around me if she wanted to. I didn't know whether she thought she was kidding somebody, or was just practising, or had some serious reason for passing herself off as a flub.

Barry Rackham had me stumped and also annoyed. Either I was dumber than Nero

Wolfe thought I was, and twice as dumb as I thought I was, or he was smarter than he looked. New York was full of him, and he was full of New York. Go into and Madison Avenue bar between five and six-thirty and there would be six or eight of him there: not quite young but miles from being old; masculine all over except the fingernails; some tired and some fresh and ready, depending on the current status; and all slightly puffy below the eyes. I knew him from A to Z, or thought I did, but I couldn't make up my mind whether he knew what I was there for, and that was the one concrete thing I had hoped to get done. If he knew, the question whether he was on Zeck's payroll was answered; if he didn't, that question was still open.