The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

Having played poker with him a lot of nights, I had had plenty of practice handling my face in his presence. If you had a trained mind like me, I said, you wouldn't do that. We ran that ad, and now we want to know about Ellen Tenzer, so you assume there's a connection. None at all. Wolfe likes white horsehair buttons on his pants.

I raise.

For his suspenders, I said, and went.

The phone call from Nicholas Losseff came Saturday afternoon. I had been expecting it, since of course Anne Tenzer would have told the cops that Archie Goodwin was from the Exclusive Novelty Button Company, and they would see him, and no one enjoys talking with homicide dicks. So he would be sore. But he wasn't. He only wanted to know if I had found out where the buttons came from. I asked him if he had had official callers, and he said yes, that was why he thought I might have news for him. I told him I was afraid I never would have, and then he was sore. If I ever get as hipped on one thing as he was, it won't be buttons.

Anne Tenzer phoned Sunday morning. I was expecting that too, since my name had been in the papers' accounts of the developments in what the News called the baby-sitter murder. One paper said I was Nero Wolfe's assistant and another said I was his legman. I don't know which one Anne Tenzer had seen. She was sore, but she didn't seem to know exactly why. Not that she resented my pretending to be a button man, and not that she blamed me for what had happened to her aunt. When we hung up I took a minute to consider it and decided that she was sore because she was phoning me. It might give me the false impression that she wanted to hear my voice again. Which it did. Granting it was false, she should have settled on exactly what she was sore about before she dialed.

Nobody is ever as famous as he thinks he is, including me. When, keeping an appointment I had made on the phone, I pushed the button in the vestibule on West EleventhStreet, Sunday morning, and was admitted by Marie Foltz, there was no sign that she had seen my name in the paper. I was just an interruption to what she had been doing. And when I entered the big room one flight up and approached the client, who was at the piano, she finished a run before she turned on the bench and said politely, Good morning. I suppose you have news?

My tongue wanted to ask if she had ever finished the martini, but I vetoed it. Of a sort, I said. If you have seen the morning paper I've seen it but I haven't read it. I never do.