Free The Rubber Band/The Red Box 2-In-1 by Rex Stout

put it anywhere he wanted to, with due circumspection?”
    “Put it …” She stared at him. “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “That would be too low. A man would have to be a dirty scoundrel to do that.”
    “Well? Who should know better than you, an ex-adventuress, that the race of dirty scoundrels has not yet been exterminated? By the eternal, Miss Fox, you should be tied in your cradle! Where do you live?”
    “But, Mr. Wolfe … you could never persuade me …”
    “I wouldn’t waste time trying. Where do you live?”
    “I have a little flat on East 61st Street.”
    “And what other items? We can disregard your desk at the office, that would not be conclusive enough. Do you have a cottage in the country? A trunk in storage? An automobile?”
    “I have a little car. Nothing else whatever.”
    “Did you come here in it?”
    “No. It’s in a garage on 60th Street.”
    Wolfe turned to me. “Archie. What two can you get here at once?”
    I glanced at the clock. “Saul Panzer in ten minutes. If Fred Durkin’s not at the movies, him in twenty minutes. If he is, Orrie Cather in half an hour.”
    “Get them. Miss Fox will give you the key to her apartment and a note of authority, and also a note to the garage. Saul Panzer will search the apartment thoroughly. Tell him what he’s looking for, and if he finds it bring it here. Fred will getthe automobile and drive it to our garage, and when he gets it there go through it, and leave it there. This alone will cost us twenty dollars, twenty times the amount of Miss Fox’s retainer. Everything we undertake nowadays seems to be a speculation.”
    I got at the telephone. Wolfe opened his eyes on Clara Fox:
    “You might learn if Miss Lindquist and Mr. Walsh will care to wash before dinner. It will be ready in five minutes.”
    She shook her head. “We don’t need to eat. Or we can go out for a bite.”
    “Great hounds and Cerberus!” He was about as close to a tantrum as he ever got. “Don’t need to eat! In heaven’s name, are you camels, or bears in for the winter?”
    She got up and went to the front room to get them.

My dinner was interrupted twice. Saul Panzer came before I had finished my soup, and Fred Durkin arrived while we were in the middle of the beef and vegetables. I went to the office both times and gave them their instructions and told them some hurry would do.
    Wolfe made it a rule never to talk business at table, but we got a little forward at that, because he steered Hilda Lindquist and Mike Walsh into the talk and we found out things about them. She was the daughter of Victor Lindquist, now nearly 80 years old and in no shape to travel, and she lived with him on their wheat farm in Nebraska. Apparently it wasn’t coffee cups she snapped in her fingers, it was threshing-machines. Clara Fox had finally found her, or rather her father, through Harlan Scovil, and she had come east for the clean-up on the chance that she might get enough to pay off a few dozen mortgages and perhaps get something extra for a new tractor, or at least a mule.
    Walsh had gone through several colors before fading out to his present dim obscurity. He had made three good stakes in Nevada and California and had lost all of them. He had tried his hand as a building contractor in Colorado early in the century, made a pile, and dropped it when a sixty-foot dam had gone down the canyon three days after he had finished it. He had come back east and made a pass at this and that, but apparently had used up all his luck. At present he was night watchman on a construction job up at 55th and Madison, and he was inclined to be sore on account of the three dollars he was losing by paying a substitute in order to keep this appointment with Clara Fox. She had found him a year ago through an ad in the paper.
    Wolfe was the gracious host. He saw that Mike Walsh gottwo rye highballs and the women a bottle of claret, and like a gentleman he gave Walsh two extra slices of the beef,