Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 29 - Three for the Chair by Rex Stout

Author:Rex Stout [Stout, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75624-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

VI

Wolfe sat in the rainbow chair in his room, leaning back, his eyes closed, his lips compressed, his fingers folded at the apex of his middle mound. I stood at a window, looking out. Fifty paces away, at the edge of the woods, a trooper was standing, gazing up at a tree. I focused on it, thinking a journalist might be perched on an upper branch, but it must have been a squirrel or a bird.

Wolfe’s voice sounded behind me. “What time is it?”

“Twenty after five.” I turned.

“Where would we be if we had left at two o’clock?”

“On Route Twenty-two four miles south of Hoosick Falls.”

“Bosh. You can’t know that.”

“That’s what I do know. What I don’t know is why you didn’t let the ambassador eat his trout.”

“Thirty-four were caught. I cooked twenty. That’s all.”

“Okay, save it. What I don’t know won’t hurt me. I’ll tell you what I think. I think the guy that sent us here to kill Leeson was sending you messages by putting them inside trout and tossing the trout in the river, and some of them were in the ones Kelefy caught, and you had to wait for a chance to get them out when the cook wasn’t looking, and when—”

There was a knock at the door and I went and opened it, and O. V. Bragan, our host, stepped in. No manners. When I shut the door and turned he was already across to Wolfe and talking. “I want to ask you about something.”

Wolfe opened his eyes. “Yes, Mr. Bragan? Don’t stand on ceremony. Indeed, don’t stand at all. Looking up at people disconcerts me. Archie?”

I moved a chair up for the burly six-footer, expecting no thanks and getting none. There are two kinds of executives, thankers and non-thankers, and I already had Bragan tagged. But since Wolfe had taken a crack at him about ceremony I thought I might as well too, and told him not to mention it. He didn’t hear me.

His cold and sharp gray eyes were leveled at Wolfe. “I liked the way you handled Colvin,” he stated.

Wolfe grunted. “I didn’t. I want to go home. When I talk with a man who is in a position to give me something I want, and I don’t get it, I have blundered. I should have toadied him. Vanity comes high.”

“He’s a fool.”

“I don’t agree.” Obviously Wolfe was in no mood to agree with anyone or anything. “I thought he did moderately well. For an obscure official in a remote community his stand with Mr. Ferris and you was almost intrepid.”

“Bah. He’s a fool. The idea that anyone here would deliberately murder Leeson is so damned absurd that only a fool would take it seriously.”

“Not as absurd as the idea that a poacher, with a club from your woodpile as a cane, was struck with the fancy of using it as a deadly weapon. Discovered poachers don’t kill; they run.”

“All right, it wasn’t a poacher.” Bragan was brusque. “And it wasn’t anyone here.

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