Prisoner's Base

Not with any high expectations. My main hope had been to escort Sarah Jaffee to Thirty-fifth Street for a session with Wolfe and Nathaniel Parker, the only lawyer Wolfe has ever sent orchids to, arranging details about the injunction. Having flubbed that one, this stab at Fomos, as instructed by Wolfe, struck me as a damn poor substitute motion. So it was not with any enthusiasm for the errand, but merely as routine through long training, that as I approached the number on East Twenty-ninth Street I cased the area with a sharp and thorough eye, and, focusing on a spot across the street, recognized something. Crossing over, I entered a dingy and cluttered shoe-repair shop, and confronted a man seated there who, at my approach, had lifted a newspaper so as to hide his face from view.

I addressed the newspaper distinctly. "Get Lieutenant Rowcliff. I think I'm going to impersonate an officer of the law. I feel it coming."

The newspaper came down, disclosing the plump features, not quite puffy yet, of a city employee named Halloran. "You got good eyes," he said, just stating a fact. "If you mean disrespect for the lieutenant you mentioned, go right ahead."

"Some other time. Right now I'm working. I was glad to see you because I may be walking into a trap. If I don't come out in three days, phone Rowcliff. Is this a really serious tail, or are you on him alone?"

"I came in here for a pair of shoestrings."

I apologized for interrupting, left him, and headed across the street. Apparently Homicide had by no means wrapped it up, since they thought it necessary to keep an eye on Fomos, who, so far as I knew from what I had read in the papers, was involved only in that he had been bereaved; but surely Fomos wasn't really hot or I would have got a very different reaction from Halloran.

It was a five-story old red brick building. In the row of names under the mailboxes at the right of the vestibule, Fomos was next to the end. I pressed the button, waited half a minute for the click to come, pushed the door open, entered, and made for the stairs. There were three doors on each landing, one at each end and one in the middle. Three flights up, the one at the far end was sporting a big rosette of black ribbon with streamers hanging nearly to the floor. I went to it and pressed the button, and in a moment a gruff deep voice came at me through the wood. "Who is it?"