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Home to Roost

The Cop-Killer

57

The Squirt and the Monkey

121

My nephew Arthur was the romantic type," said Mrs. Benjamin Rackell with the least possible movement of her thin tight lips. "He thought being a Communist was romantic." Nero Wolfe, behind his desk in his outsized chair that thought nothing of his seventh of a ton, scowled at her. I, at my own desk with a notebook and pen, permitted myself a private grin, not unsympathetic. Wolfe was controlling himself under severe provocation. The appointment for Mr. Rackell to call at Wolfe's office on the ground floor of his old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, at six p.m., had been made by phone by a secretary in the office of the Rackell Importing Company, and nothing had been said about a wife coming along. And the wife, no treat as a spectacle to begin with, was an interrupter and a cliche" tosser, enough to make Wolfe scowl at any man, let alone a woman. "But," he objected, not too caustic, "you say that he was not a Communist, that, on the contrary, he was acting for the FBI when he joined the Communist party." He would have loved to tell her to get lost. But his house had five stories, counting the basement and the plant rooms full of orchids on the roof, and there was Fritz the chef and Theodore the botanist and me, Archie Goodwin, the fairly confidential assistant, with nothing to carry the load but his income as a private detective; and the Rackell check for three thousand bucks, offered as a retainer, was under a paperweight on his desk. // "That's just it," Mrs. Rackell said impatiently. "Isn't it romantic to work for the FBI? But that wasn't why he did it; he did it to serve his country, and that's why they killed him. His being the romantic type had nothing to do with it." Wolfe made a face and undertook to bypass her.