Comfortably filling his own outsized chair behind the desk, Wolfe was scowling at the would-be client, Mr. Herman Lewent of New York and Paris. I, at my desk with notebook and pen, was neutral, because it was Friday and I had a weekend date, and if Lewent's job was urgent and we took it, good-by weekend. Wolfe, as usual when solicited, was torn. He hated to work, but he loved to eat and drink, and his domestic and professional establishment in the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, including the orchids in the plant rooms on the roof, had an awful appetite for dollars. The only source of dollars was his income as a private detective, and at that moment, there on his desk near the edge, was a little stack of lettuce with a rubber band around it. Herman Lewent, who had put it there, had stated that it was a thousand dollars. Nevertheless Wolfe, who hated to work and was torn, demanded, "Why is it legitimate?"

Lewent was small all over. He was slim and short, his hands and feet were tiny, and his features were in scale, with a pinched little mouth that had no room at all for lips. Also he was old enough to have started to shrink some and show creases. Still I would not have called him a squirt. When his quick little gray eyes met yours straight, as they did, you had the feeling that he knew a lot of the answers and could supply good guesses on the ones he hadn't worked out. He was still resenting Wolfe but holding it in. "I came to you," he said, "because this is a very delicate matter, and the combination you have here, you and Mr. Goodwin, may be able to handle it. So I'm prepared to suffer your rudeness. The inquiry is legiti- 4 mate because it was my father who made the fortune--in mining, mostly copper mining. My mother died when I was a child, and I never learned how to behave myself. I have never learned, and I am now too old to. A few months ago I had three mistresses, one in Paris, one in Toulouse, and one in Rome, and one of them tried to poison me." I gave him an eye and decided to believe nothing he said.