Over My Dead Body

"Excuse me for walking right in, Mr Wolfe, but the door was standing open. I was on my way uptown and I dropped in to say that we may expect a ruling from the attorney general on that point in about a week-the matter of registration as the agent of a foreign principal when the…"

I raised myself up enough to see the face of Stahl the G-man looking polite but stern. Then I sat back on my heels and howled with laughter.

Chapter Nineteen

Wolfe said in a tone of exasperation, "Fritz tells me nothing on your tray was touched. Confound it, you have to eat something!"

Carla shook her head. "I can't. I'm sorry. I can't."

I had brought her down to the office. The clock on the wall said 11.20. The chairs were back in place.

Wolfe sighed. "It's nearly midnight. Mr Goodwin is yawning. You may go now whenever you want to. Or I'll ask one or two questions if you feel like telling the truth."

"I can tell the truth-now."

"It would have been just as well…" His massive shoulders went up a sixteenth of an inch and down again. "I would like to know if you were aware that that woman was a maniac."

"But she wasn't…" Carla stopped for repairs to her voice. "I never had any idea…" Her hand fluttered and dropped again to her lap.

"Were you, in fact, her friend?"

"Not-no, not her friend. It wasn't like that. When Mrs Campbell died I was left dependent on the Donevitch family. Then Prince Stefan married her and she came there, and in no time she was the head of things. She treated me as well as I could expect, since I was not a Donevitch. I didn't dislike her. I was a little afraid of her, and so was everybody else, even Prince Stefan. When she decided to come to America she selected me to come with her, and I thought then that the reason she did that was because she knew about you and she thought she might need to use you. One reason I thought that was because she told me to bring that adoption paper along-"

"Yes. Excuse me. Get it, Archie."

I went to the safe and dug it out and handed it to him. He unfolded it to glance at it, folded it up again, and passed it over to her. She looked at it a second as if she was afraid it might bite, and then reached out and took it.