Free Curtains For Three by Rex Stout Page A

reason I’ve got to have it, Mr.
    Wolfe knows how beautiful girls appeal to me, especially sophisticated girls like you, and if I take that thing back to him unsigned he’ll think I didn’t even try. He might even fire me. Just write your name there at the bottom.”
    She read it over again and took the pen. She smiled at me, glistening. “You’re not kidding me any,” she said, not unfriendly. “I know when I appeal to a man.
    You think I’m cold and calculating.”
    “Yeah?” I made it a little bitter, but not too bitter. “Anyhow it’s not the point whether you appeal to me, but what Mr. Wolfe will think. It’ll help a lot to have that. Much obliged.” I took the paper from her and blew on her signature to dry it.
    “I know when I appeal to a man,” she stated.
    There wasn’t another thing there I wanted, but I had practically promised to buy her another drink, so I did so.
    It was after six when I got back to West Thirty-fifth Street, so Wolfe had finished in the plant rooms and was down in the office. I marched in and put the unsigned statement on his desk in front of him.
    He grunted. “Well?”
    I sat down and told him exactly how it had gone, up to the point where she had offered to take the document home and show it to her father.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, “but some of her outstanding qualities didn’t show much in that crowd the other evening. I give this not as an excuse but merely a fact.
    Her mental operations could easily be carried on inside a hollowed-out pea.
    Knowing what you think of unsupported statements, and wanting to convince you of the truth of that one. I got evidence to back it up. Here’s a paper she did sign.”
    I handed him the page I had torn from my notebook. He took a look at it and then cocked an eye at me.
    “She signed this?”
    “Yes, sir. In my presence.”
    “Indeed. Good. Satisfactory.”
    I acknowledged the tribute with a careless nod. It does not hurt my feelings when he says, “Satisfactory,” like that.
    “A bold, easy hand,” he said. “She used your pen?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “May I have it, please?”
    I arose and handed it to him, together with a couple of sheets of typewriter paper, and stood and watched with interested approval as he wrote “Clara James”
    over and over again, comparing each attempt with the sample I had secured.
    Meanwhile, at intervals, he spoke.
    “It’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever see it - except our clients …
    That’s better … There’s time to phone all of them before dinner - first Mrs.
    Mion and Mr. Weppler - then the others … Tell them my opinion is ready on Mrs.
    Mion’s claim against Mr. James … If they can come at nine this evening - If that’s impossible tomorrow morning at eleven will do … Then get Mr. Cramer …
    Tell him it might be well to bring one of his men along …”
    He flattened the typed statement on his desk blotter, forged Clara James’ name at the bottom, and compared it with the true signature which I had provided.
    “Faulty, to an expert,” he muttered, “but no expert will ever see it. For our clients, even if they know her writing, it will do nicely.”
    VIII It took a solid hour on the phone to get it fixed for that evening, but I finally managed it. I never did catch up with Gifford James, but his daughter agreed to find him and deliver him, and made good on it. The others I tracked down myself.
    The only ones that gave me an argument were the clients, especially Peggy Mion.
    She balked hard at sitting in at a meeting for the ostensible purpose of collecting from Gifford James, and I had to appeal to Wolfe. Fred and Peggy were invited to come ahead of the others for a private briefing and then decide whether to stay or not. She bought that.
    They got there in time to help out with the after-dinner coffee. Peggy had presumably brushed her teeth and had a nap and a bath, and manifestly she had changed her clothes, but even so she did not sparkle. She was wary,