In the Best Families

The following morning, Saturday, I was in the office typing the final report on a case which I will not identify by name because it was never allowed to get within a mile of a newspaper or a microphone. We were committed on Mrs Rackham's job, since I had deposited her cheque Friday afternoon, but no move had been made yet, not even a phone call to any of the names she had given us, because it was Wolfe's idea that first of all we must have a look at him. With Wolfe's settled policy of never leaving his house on business, and with no plausible excuse for getting Barry Rackham to the office, I would have to do the looking, and that had been arranged for.

Mrs Rackham had insisted that her husband must positively not know or even suspect that he was being investigated, and neither must anyone else, so the arrangements for the look were a little complicated. She vetoed my suggestion that I should be invited to join a small week-end gathering at her country home in Westchester, on the ground that someone would probably recognise the Archie

Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe. It was Calvin Leeds who offered an amendment that was adopted. He had a little place of his own at the edge of her estate, where he raised dogs, called Hillside Kennels. A month ago one of his valuable dogs had been poisoned, and I was to go there Saturday afternoon as myself, a detective named Archie Goodwin, to investigate the poisoning. His cousin would invite him to her place, Birchvale, for dinner, and I would go along.

It was a quiet Saturday morning in the office, with Wolfe up in the plant rooms as usual from nine to eleven, and I finished typing the report of a certain case with no interruptions except a couple of phone calls which! handled myself, and one for which I had to give Wolfe a buzz-from somebody at Mummiani's on Fulton

Street to say that they had just got eight pounds of fresh sausage from Bill

Darst at Hackettstown, and Wolfe could have half of it. Since Wolfe regards

Darst as the best sausage-maker west of Cherbourg, he asked that it be sent immediately by messenger, and for heaven's sake not with dry ice.

When at 11.1, the sound of Wolfe's elevator came, I got the big dictionary in front of me on my desk, opened to H, and was bent over it as he entered the office, crossed to his over-sized custom-built chair, and sat. He didn't bite at once because his mind was elsewhere. Even before he rang for beer he asked, “Has the sausage come?

Without looking up I told him no.