The Golden Spiders (Crime Line)

“I try to be. As I said, I’ve had some bad luck. All I’m doing, I’m offering to sell you something, and you can take it or leave it. It depends on how much you would like to know exactly what Mrs. Fromm told Mr. Wolfe. At five thousand dollars it might be a swell bargain for you, or it might not. You would be a better judge of that than I am, but of course you can’t know until after you hear it.”

She regarded me. “So that’s it,” she said.

“That’s it,” I concurred.

Her brown eyes were harder to meet than Jean Estey’s had been, or Claire Horan’s. My problem was to have the look of a man with a broad streak of rat in him, but also one who could be depended on to deliver as specified. Her straight hard gaze gave me a feeling that I wasn’t dressed right for the part, and I was trying to give orders to my face not to show it. The face felt as if it might help to be doing something, so I used my mouth. “You understand, Miss Wright, this is a bona fide offer. I can and will tell you everything they said.”

“But you would want the money first.” Her voice was as hard as her eyes.

I turned a hand over. “I’m afraid that’s the only way we could do it. You could tell me to go soak my head.”

“So I could.” Her mind was working. “Perhaps we can arrange a compromise.” She got a pad of paper from a drawer and pushed her desk pen across. “Pull up a chair, or use the other desk, and put your offer in writing, briefly. Put it like this: ‘Upon payment to me by Angela Wright of five thousand dollars in cash, I will relate to her, in full and promptly, the conversation that took place between Laura Fromm and Nero Wolfe last Friday afternoon.’ And date it and sign it, that’s all.”

“And give it to you?”

“Yes. I’ll return it as soon as you have kept your side of the bargain. Isn’t that fair?”

I smiled down at her. “Now really, Miss Wright. If I were as big a sap as that how long do you think I would have lasted with Nero Wolfe?”

She smiled back. “Would you like to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“I think that if you were capable of selling secrets you learned in Wolfe’s office he would have known it long ago and would have thrown you out.”

“I said I had some bad luck.”

“Not that bad. I’m not a sap either. Of course you’re right about one thing-that is, Mr. Wolfe is-I would like very much to know what Mrs. Fromm consulted him about. Naturally. I wonder what would actually happen if I scraped up the money and handed it over?”

“There’s an easy way of finding out.”