Over My Dead Body

He got busy with the glass again. I swung my legs. After a while the phone rang. Theodore went to his desk to answer it and told Cramer it was for him. The inspector went and grunted into it for three or four minutes, then hung up and returned to the stool. I knew he was glaring at me, but I was interested in the tips of my number nines swinging back and forth.

He said, and I knew what it must be costing him to restrain himself like that, "You, Goodwin." There was even a suggestion of a tremble in his voice. "When did they move the Washington Market to the Maidstone Building?"

"Why," I said in a friendly tone, "that must have been Sergeant Stebbins on the phone! How's that for deduction?"

"Fine." Cramer threw his cigar at the trash basket, missed, went and picked it up and dropped it in, and returned to the stool. "Don't think I'm going to blow up, because I'm not. I'm beyond that. Ten minutes after you left I told Wolfe that Carla Lovchen was trailed to the Maidstone Building this morning and was holed up there, but that was after you left, as I say. All I'm going to do is ask a simple question: Why did you go to the Maidstone Building?"

I grinned at him. "Here's the first answer that occurs to me: There was a phone call here at noon from a certain party, and it was traced to a public phone at that building. All right?"

"No."

I shrugged. "Get Mr Wolfe to tell you one."

Wolfe, going on with his work, paid no attention. Cramer said, "I still am not going to blow up. I have planted myself here on two assumptions: The first is that Wolfe has got something on this case that I stand damn little chance of getting unless and until the break comes and he loosens up. The second is, inasmuch as I have never yet found him picking up pieces for a murderer, that he's not doing that now. If my first assumption is wrong, I'm just out of luck. If my second one is, you are. Both of you. That's all. Now you can take the Maidstone Building and stick it up your chimney. But in case you don't already know it, Carla Lovchen went in that place on 38th Street at eleven o'clock this morning and came out again in ten minutes. I want her, and I want her plenty. I'm telling you. So if it turns out that she has actually pulled a getaway and you helped her do it…"

"The man's mad," I declared.

"Shut up. That's all."

I continued to admire my feet.