The Rubber Band

I went to the kitchen, where Fritz had about nine kinds of herbs spread out on the shredding board all at once, and told him, "I'm going out. Back at six. Leave the door open so you can see the hall. There's an object in the office waiting for a six-o'clock appointment, and if you have any good deeds to spare like offering a man a drink and a plate of cookies, I assure you he is worthy. If Wolfe comes down before I get back, tell him he's there."

Fritz, nibbling a morsel of tarragon, nodded. I went to the hall and snared my hat and beat it.

III

I DIDN'T fool with a taxi, and it wasn't worth while to take the roadster, which as usual was at the curb, and fight to park it. From Wolfe's house in West 35th Street, not far from the Hudson, where he had lived for over twenty years, and I had slept on the same floor with him for eight, it was only a hop, skip, and jump to the new Seaboard Building, in the twenties, also near the river. I hoofed it, considering meanwhile the oddities of my errand. Why had Anthony D. Perry, president of the Seaboard Products Corporation, taken the trouble to come to our office to tell us about an ordinary good clean theft? As the Tel & Tel say in their ads, why not telephone? And if he felt so confident that Clara Fox hadn't done it, did he suspect she was being framed or what? And so on.

Having been in the Seaboard Building before, and even, if you would believe it, in the office of the president himself, I knew my way around. I remembered what the executive reception clerk on the thirty-second floor looked like, and so was expecting no treat in that quarter, and got none. I now knew also that she was called Miss Vawter, and so addressed her, noting that her ears stuck out at about the same angle as three years previously. She was expecting me, and without bothering to pry her thin lips open she waved me to the end of the corridor.