Rex Stout - Some Buried Caesar

"Not much." I controlled myself. "Only his expression was suggestive. He spoke of wringing your neck. I gathered that you and his son Clyde had once been friends. I suppose he told the police and sheriff that, or maybe they knew it already, and that's why they asked if Clyde came to see you last night."

"Well, he didn't. He would have been more apt to come to see Caroline than me."

That was turning a new page for me, but I covered my surprise and inquired idly, "You mean Miss Pratt? Why, did they have dealings?"

"They used to have." She opened the mirror of her compact to study nature with an eye to improvement. "I guess they were engaged, or about to be. Of course you don't know about the Osgood-Pratt situation. The Osgoods have been rich for generations, they go back to a revolutionary general I think it was-their relatives in New York think the Social Register is vulgar. To me that's all a bore… my mother was a waitress and my father was an immigrant and made his money building sewers."

"Yet look at you. I heard Pratt say yesterday that he was bom in an old shack on the spot where his new house stands."

"Yes. His father worked as a stablehand for Osgood's father. Clyde told me about it. A farmer had a beautiful daughter named Marcia and young Pratt got himself engaged to her and Frederick Osgood came back from college and saw her and married her. So she became Clyde Osgood's mother, and Nancy's. Pratt went to New York and soon began to make money; He didn't marry, and as soon as he had time to spare he started to find ways to annoy Osgood. When he bought land up here and started to build, it looked as if the annoyance might become really serious."

"And Clyde read up on family feuds and found that the best way to cure it would be for him to marry Pratt's niece. A daughter is better in such cases, but a niece will do."

"No, it wasn't Clyde's idea, it was his sister's. Nancy's." Lily closed her compact. "She was staying in New York for the winter, studying rhythm at the best night clubs, and met Jimmy and Caroline, and thought it might be helpful for the four of them to know each other, and when Clyde came down for a visit she arranged it. It made a sort of a situation, and she and Jimmy got really friendly, and so did Clyde and Caro- line. Then Clyde happened to get interested in me, and I guess that reacted on Nancy and Jimmy.''

"Did you and Clyde -get engaged?"

"No." She looked at me, and the comer of her mouth turned up, and I saw her breasts gently putting the weave of the jersey to more strain as she breathed a deep one. "No, Escamillo." She peeled her potato again, "I don't suppose I'll marry. Because marriage is really nothing but an economic arrangement, and I'm lucky because I don't have to let the economic part enter into it. The man would be lucky too-I mean if a man attracted me and I attracted him."

"He sure would." I was wondering which would be more satisfactory, to slap her and then kiss her, or to kiss her and then slap her. "Did Clyde attract you much?"

"He did for a while." She shivered delicately. "You know how tiresome it is when someone you found exciting gets to be nothing but a nuisance? He wanted me to marry him, too. You mustn't think I'm heartless, because I'm not. Caroline would have been a swell wife for him, and I told him so. I rather thought they would make it up, and I hoped they would, and that's why I said he would have been more apt to come to see Caroline than me last night." "Maybe he did. Have you asked her?" "Good lord no. Me ask Caroline anything about Clyde? I wouldn't dare mention his name to her. She hates me." "She invited you up for the barbecue, didn't she?" "Yes, but that was because she was being clever. Her brother Jimmy and I were beginning to be friendly, and she thought if he saw me out here in the country, a lot of me, he would realize how superficial and unhealthy I am." "Oh. So you're unhealthy?"

"Terribly." The comer of her mouth went up another sixteenth of an inch. "Because I'm frank and simple. Because I never offer anything I don't give, and I never give any- thing and then expect to get paid for it. I'm frightfully un- healthy. But I guess I was wrong to say superficial. I doubt if Caroline thinks I'm superficial."

"Excuse me a minute," I said, and stood up. Even in the midst of being ruined I had had Wolfe's table across the tent in the corner of my eye, partly to note his reaction to the fricassee, which had appeared to be satis- factory since he had ordered a second portion, and my in- terrupting my despoiler was on account of a sign from him. A man was standing by Wolfe's chair talking to him, and Wolfe had glanced in my direction with a lift to his brow which I considered significant. So I excused myself to Lily and got up and ambled over. As I arrived the man turned his head and I saw it was Lew Bennett, the secretary of the National Guernsey League.

"Archie, I must thank you." Wolfe put his napkin down. "For suggesting the fricassee. It is superb. Only female Americans can make good dumplings, and not many of them."

"Yes, sir."

"You have met Mr. Bennett."

"Yes, sir."

"Can you conveniently extricate yourself from that…" He turned a thumb in the direction I had come from.

"You mean right now?"

"As soon as may be. Now if you are not too involved. Mr. Bennett has been looking for me at the request of Mr. Osgood, who is waiting in the exposition office and wishes to see me. Mr. Shanks and I shall have finished our lunch in ten minutes."

"Okay. I'm badly involved but I'll manage it."

I went back to my table and told Lily we must part, and summoned the Methodist to give me a check. The damage proved to be $1.60, and, having relinquished a pair of dimes for the missionaries, I reflected with pride that the firm had cleaned up 20 cents net on the deal.

Lily said in a tone of real disappointment without any petulance that I could detect, "I had supposed we would spend the afternoon together, watching the races and riding on the merry-go-round and throwing balls at things…"

"Not ever," I said firmly. "Not the afternoon. Whatever the future may have in store for us, whatever may betide, I work afternoons. Understand once and for all that I am a workingman and I only play with toys at odd moments. I am working when you would least expect it. Throughout this delightful lunch with you, I have been working and earning money."

"I suppose while you were paying me all those charming compliments one part of your brain, the most important part, was busy on some difficult problem."

"That's the idea."

"Dear Escamillo. Darling Escamillo. But the afternoon comes to an end, doesn't it? What will you be doing this evening?"

"God knows. I work for Nero Wolfe."

7

THE BOOM in die exposition offices, to which Bennett led us, on a kind of mezzanine in the' Administration Building, was large and lofty, with two dusty windows in the board wall and plain board partitions for the other three sides. The only furniture were three big rough tables and a dozen wooden chairs. On one table were a pile of faded bunting and a bushel basket half-full of apples; the other two were bare. Three of the chairs were occupied. Sidney Darth, Chairman of the North Atlantic Exposition Board, was on the edge of one but jumped up as we entered;