Free Corpus Corpus by Harry Paul Jeffers

give you Chief Goldstein."
    With balding head barely visible above the podium, he said, "Except in the category of beauty, I detect nothing of Lily Rowan in the woman who represents her here this evening. Lily is lazy. Very lazy. She is, to use Nero Wolfe's adjectives, 'rich, intemperate, and notorious.' She once lived at the Ritz and now owns a posh penthouse on an exclusive block of East Sixty-third Street with a Kashan carpet that set her back fourteen thousand dollars. She spends summers at her place near Katonah and owns a ranch in Montana. But she doesn't have a clue as to how to get somebody indicted nor how to try capital cases, whereas in that department the woman I am honored to toast in her role of Lily Rowan is without par."

    Beaming as he stood beside Dane with a glass of club soda in his hand, Bogdanovic said softly, "Here's to you, Maggie."
    When the toasters resumed seats, she rose. "As Lily Rowan, I thank you from the bottom of my lazy, rich, intemperate, and notorious heart. As myself, I simply can't avoid comparing this evening to one in the Wolfe case entitled 'The Silent Speaker.' "
    Her eyes turned down to Bogdanovic.
    "For benefit of Chief Goldstein's aide-de-camp," she said, lighdy touching his shoulder, "who informed me during the meal that regarding Nero Wolfe he is an ignoramus . . ."
    Titters of amusement rippled around the room.
    "For Sergeant Bogdanovic's enlightenment, then," she went on, looking round the room, "in 'The Silent Speaker' Cheney Boone had been invited to make the main speech at a dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. Of the fourteen hundred guests, a hundred were invited to a private reception. To go over notes for the speech, Boone left the group to shut himself up in a small room off the stage. It was there that Alger Kates would discover him dead on the floor. Murdered."
    With a sidelong look, she saw Janus clutch his throat as if he were straining for breath, then pitch forward so that his head struck the table with a thud. Amid gasps of alarm, he jerked upright with a broadening grin and bellowed in a feigned western drawl. "I'se here to git my award and no damn murderer's gonna keep me from it. So git on with it, darlin'. Time's a wastin'."
    "Theo, I can't imagine who'd wish to kill you," she replied with a litde laugh. "Except everyone who saw you at work on TV in a certain recent murder trial."
    Shoulders twitching with laughter, Janus grumbled, "The verdict's in, Maggie, and you cannot try the case over. Or file an appeal. Dem's da rules."
    "Indeed they are, Theo. And nobody wants to change them. I thank God that ours is a system that believes it is better that a thousand guilty men go free than an innocent one go off to prison."

A THUNDERCLAP OF applause and a rain of cheers left no doubt that the Wolfe Pack wholeheartedly agreed with Maggie Dane and that nothing Theodore Janus might say during his speech could change their minds. They had not gathered to honor him for his work as America's most famous defense lawyer. It was because he had compiled an encyclopedia that he clutched their Nero Wolfe Award, in the form of a small bust of the immense detective they so revered and who in their minds and hearts existed not in the imagination of Rex Stout and his readers but actually, along with Archie Goodwin and the others, in an elegant brownstone somewhere on West Thirty-fifth Street.
    Taking Dane's arm as they followed Goldstein and Wiggins into a more intimate room for a private reception arranged by Janus for members of the steering committee, Bogdanovic said, "I don't want to disillusion you, Maggie, but I worked for a time in the Tenth Precinct, which covers West Thirty-fifth Street. There are no residences. It's all industrial property."
    'Just because you stayed awake on Christmas Eve and never saw a bearded fat man in a red suit doesn't mean there's no Santa Claus, Detective."
    "Right. And if I staked out Baker Street in London and didn't see a tall