In the Best Families

This was quite a chamber. The walls were panelled in a light grey wood with pink in it, from the tiled floor to the ceiling, and the rugs were the same light grey with pink borders. Light came from a concealed trough continuous around the ceiling. The six or seven chairs and the couch were covered in pinkish-grey leather, and the same leather had been used for the frames of the pictures, a couple of big ones on each wall. All that, collected in my first swift survey, made a real impression.

“Archie Goodwin, the sentinel said.

The man at the desk said, “Sit down, Goodwin. All right, Schwartz, and the sentinel left us and closed the door.

I would have been surprised to find that Pete Roeder rated all this splash so soon after hitting this territory, and he didn't. The man at the desk was not

Roeder. I had never seen this bozo, but no introduction was needed. Much as he disliked publicity, his picture had been in the paper a few times, as for instance the occasion of his presenting his yacht to the United States Coast

Guard during the war. Also I had heard him described.

I had a good view of him at ten feet when I sat in one of the pinkish-grey leather chairs near his desk. Actually there was nothing to him but his forehead and eyes. It wasn't a forehead, it was a dome, sloping up and up to the line of his faded thin hair. The eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line.

They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless. They did not now look the same as shark eyes because Arnold Zeck's brain had been using them to see with for fifty years, and that had had an effect.

“I've spoken with you on the phone, he said.

I nodded. “When I was with Nero Wolfe. Three times altogether-no, I guess it was four.

“Four. Where is he? What has happened to him?

“I'm not sure, but I suspect he's in Florida, training with an air hose, preparing to lay for you in your swimming pool and get you when you dive.

There was no flicker of response, of any kind, in the shark eyes. “I have been told of your habits of speech, Goodwin, he said. “I make no objection. I take men for what they are or not at all. It pleases me that, impressed as you must be by this meeting, you insist on being yourself. But it does waste time and words. Do you know where Wolfe is?

“No.

“Have you a surmise?