The Doorbell Rang (The Rex Stout Library)

At nine o'clock we were back in the office, Lon in the red leather chair and Wolfe and I at our desks, and Fritz was serving coffee and brandy. The hour and a half in the dining room across the hall had been quite sociable, what with the clam cakes with chili sauce, the beef braised in red wine, the squash with sour cream and chopped dill, the avocado with watercress and black walnut kernels, and the Liederkranz. The talk had covered the state of the Union, the state of the feminine mind, whether any cooked oyster can be fit to eat, structural linguistics, and the prices of books. It had got hot only on the feminine mind, and Lon had done that purposely to see how sharp Wolfe could get. Lon took a sip of brandy and looked at his wristwatch. "If you don't mind," he said, "let's get at it. I have to be somewhere at ten o'clock. I know you don't expect me to pay for my dinner, but I also know that ordinarily, when there's something you want to get or give, Archie just phones or drops in, so this must besomething special. It will have to be fantastic to be as special as this cognac."

Wolfe picked up a slip of paper that was there on his desk, frowned at it, and put it down. I had put it there half an hour before. My dinner had been interrupted by a phone call from the city employee with the information I had wanted, and before returning to the dining room I had written "FBI" on a sheet from the scratch pad and put it on Wolfe's desk. It hadn't improved my appetite any. If she had been wrong about the tail it could have had great possibilities, including a fat raise for me in the form of a check for me, personally.

Wolfe sipped coffee, put the cup down, and said, "I have fourteen bottles left."

"My God," Lon said, and sniffed the brandy. It was funny about him. With his slicked-back hair and his neat little tight-skinned face he looked like nobody in particular, but somehow he always seemed to fit, whatever he was doing-in his room on the twentieth floor in the Gazette building, two doors down from the publisher's corner room, or dancing with a doll at the Flamingo, or at the table with us in Saul Panzer's apartment where we played poker. Or sniffing a fifty-year-old cognac.

He took a sip. "Anything you want," he said. "Barring nothing."

"Actually," Wolfe said, "it isn't very special. Certainly not fantastic. First a question: Do you know of any connection, however remote, between Mrs Lloyd Bruner and the Federal Bureau of Investigation?"