The Rubber Band

"I have a little car. Nothing else whatever."

"Did you come here in it?"

"No. It's in a garage on Sixtieth Street."

Wolfe turned to me. "Archie. What two can you get here at once?"

I glanced at the clock. "Saul Panzer in ten minutes. If Fred Durkin's not at the movies, him in twenty minutes. If he is, Orrie Gather in half an hour."

"Get them. Miss Fox will give you the key to her apartment and a note of authority, and also a note to the garage. Saul Panzer will search the apartment thoroughly. Tell him what he's looking for, and if he finds it bring it here. Fred will get the automobile and drive it to our garage, and when he gets it there go through it, and leave it there. This alone will cost us twenty dollars, twenty times the amount of Miss Fox's retainer. Everything we undertake nowadays seems to be a speculation."

I got at the telephone. Wolfe opened his eyes on Clara Fox. "You might learn if Miss Lindquist and Mr. Walsh will care to wash before dinner. It will be ready in five minutes."

She shook her head. "We don't need to eat. Or we can go out for a bite."

"Great hounds and Cerberus!" He was about as dose to a tantrum as he ever got. "Don't need to eat! In heaven's name, are you camels, or bears in for the winter?"

She got up and went to the front room to get them.

VI

MY DINNER was interrupted twice. Saul Panzer came before I had finished my soup, and Fred Durkin arrived while we were in the middle of the beet and vegetables. I went to the office both times and gave them their instructions and told them some hurry would do.

Wolfe made it a rule never to talk business at table, but we got a little forward at that, because he steered Hilda Lindquist and Mike Walsh into the talk and we found out things about them. She was the daughter of Victor Lindquist, now nearly eighty years old and in no shape to travel, and she lived with him on their wheat farm in Nebraska. Apparently it wasn't coffee cups she snapped in her fingers, it was threshing machines. Clara Fox had finally found her, or rather her father, through Harlan Scovil, and she had come east for the clean-up on the chance that she might get enough to pay off a few dozen mortgages and perhaps get something extra for a new tractor, or at least a mule.