“So you're Archie Goodwin? This is a real pleasure! The next best thing to meeting the great Nero Wolfe himself!” A rich contralto voice broke in: “This is my rest period, Mr Goodwin, and they won't let me get up. I'm not even supposed to talk, but when the time conies that I don't talk-!” I stepped across to the bed, and as I took the hand Madeline Fraser offered she smiled. It wasn't a shrewd smile like Deborah KoppePs, or a synthetic one like Bill Meadows's, but just a smile from her to me. Her grey-green eyes didn't give the impression that she was measuring me, though she probably was, and I sure was measuring her. She was slender but not skinny and she looked quite long, stretched out on the bed. With no makeup on it at all it was quite possible to look at her face without having to resist an impulse to look somewhere else, which was darned good for a woman certainly close to forty and probably a little past it, especially since I personally can see no point in spending eyesight on females over thirty.

“You know,” she said, “I have often been tempted-bring chairs up, Bill-to ask Nero Wolfe to be a guest on my programme.” She said it like a trained broadcaster, breaking it up so it would sound natural but arranging the inflections so that listeners of any mental age whatever would get it.

“I'm afraid,” I told her with a grin, “that he wouldn't accept unless you ran wires to his office and broadcast from there. He never leaves home on business, and rarely for anything at all.” I lowered myself on to one of the chairs Bill had brought up, and he and Deborah Koppel took the other two.

Madeline Fraser nodded. “Yes, I know.” She had turned on her side to see me without twisting her neck, and the hip curving up under the thin yellow gown made her seem not quite so slender.