Gambit (A Nero Wolfe Mystery Book 37) by Rex Stout

Author:Rex Stout [Stout, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307768056
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-02T12:00:00+00:00

9

Daniel Kalmus, counselor at law, arrived a little after noon Wednesday. It was a good thing he didn’t put it off until after lunch, as some extra fine lamb kidneys, skewered to keep them open, doused in olive oil seasoned with salt, pepper, thyme, dry mustard, and mace, broiled five-and-three—five minutes on the skin side and three minutes on the cut side—and brushed twice with deviled butter, would have been practically wasted. I have said that Wolfe refuses to let anything whatever spoil a meal if the food is good, but that day, if there had been no reaction whatever, not even a phone call, to Sally’s ultimatum to Kalmus, the kidneys would of course have been chewed and swallowed, but they wouldn’t have been appreciated. They might as well have been served to Voltaire.

That was the first and only time Wolfe has given me instructions and then canceled them, without anything having happened to change his mind. While Sally and I were having breakfast, fresh-baked croissants and eggs poached in red wine and bouillon, he buzzed me on the house phone from his room and told me to call Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather—the three good men he had mentioned to Yerkes—and ask them to come at six o’clock. That improved my appetite for breakfast. I hadn’t the dimmest notion what he was going to have them do, but it couldn’t be just to ask their opinion of Dr. Avery’s suggestion, since together they came to twenty-five bucks an hour. Then only ten minutes later he buzzed me again and told me to skip it. Absolutely unheard of. If there’s one thing he never does it’s toss and turn. A hell of a way to start a day.

When he came down to the office at eleven o’clock and saw the client there, in a chair over by the filing cabinet, with the Times, he paused on the way to his desk to scowl at her for a couple of seconds, acknowledged her good morning with a curt nod, switched the scowl to me, went and put orchids in the vase, sat, removed the paperweight, a chunk of petrified wood, from the little pile of morning mail, and picked up the first item, a letter from the president of a women’s club in Montclair asking if and when about a hundred of the members could come and look at the orchids. I had considered withholding it and answering it myself, in view of his current acute feeling about club members, but had decided that if I could take it he could.

He looked through the mail, put the paperweight back on it, and looked at me. “Any phone calls?”

He never asked that, knowing as he did that if there had been a call which he would want or need to know about I would report it without being asked. So I said, “Yes, sir. Lon Cohen wants to send a man to interview Miss Blount.”

“Why did you tell him she’s here?”

“I didn’t.

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