The Rubber Band

With my pancakes I went over the stories of Scovil's murder in the morning papers. They didn't play it up much, but the accounts were fairly complete. The tip-off was that he was a Chicago gangster, which gave me a grin, since he looked about as much like a gangster as a prima donna. The essentials were there, provided they were straight: no gun had been found. The car had been stolen from where some innocent perfume salesman had parked it on 29th Street. The closest eyewitness had been a man who had been walking along about thirty feet behind Harlan Scovil, and it was he who had got the license number before he dived for cover when the bullets started flying. In the dim light he hadn't got a good view of the man in the car, but he was sure it was a man, with his hat pulled down and a dark overcoat collar turned up, and he was sure he had been alone in the car. The car had speeded off across 3ist Street and turned at the comer. No one had been found who had noticed it stopping on Ninth Avenue, where it had later been found. No fingerprints… and so forth and so forth.

I finished my second cup of coffee and got up and stretched and from then on I was as busy as a pickpocket on New Year's Eve. When Fred and Orrie came I let them in, and after they had got their instructions from Wolfe I distributed expense money to all four oЈ them and let them out again. The siege was still on. There were two dicks out there now, one of them about the size of Charles Laughton before he heard beauty calling, and every time anyone passed in or out he got the kind of scrutiny you read about. I got the long-distance call through to London, and Wolfe talked from his room to Ethelbert Hitchcock, which I consider the all-time low for a name for a snoop, even in England. I phoned Murger's for the copies of Metropolitan Biographies, and they delivered them within a quarter of an hour and I took them up to the plant rooms, as Wolfe had said he would glance at them after nine o'clock. As I was going out I stopped where Theodore Horstmann was turning out some old Cattleyas trianae and growled at him, "You're going to get shot in the gizzard."

I swear to God he looked pale.