The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout Read Free Book Online Page A

concerned, but I urge you to be discreet.”
    She sat frowning, “I am discreet, Mr. Wolfe.”
    “Not today, with that silly sham.”
    “Oh, you’re wrong! I was being discreet! Or trying to.” She got the leather fold and pen from the table, returned them to her bag, and closed it. She stood up. “Thank you for the gin, but I wish I hadn’t asked for it. I shouldn’t have.” She offered a hand.
    Wolfe doesn’t usually rise when a woman enters or leaves the office. That time he did, but it was no special tribute to Laura Fromm or even to the check she had put on his desk. It was lunchtime, and he would have had to manipulate his bulk in a minute anyway. So he was on his feet to take her hand. Of course I was up, ready to take her to the door, and I thought it was darned gracious of her to give me a hand too, after the way I had repulsed her with my incorruptible look. I nearly bumped into her when, preceding me to the door, she suddenly turned to say to Wolfe, “I forgot to ask. The boy, Peter Drossos, was he a displaced person?”
    Wolfe said he didn’t know.
    “Could you find out? And tell me tomorrow?”
    He said he could.
    There was no car waiting for her in front. Apparently the parking situation had compelled even Mrs. Damon Fromm to resort to taxis. When I returned to the office Wolfe wasn’t there, and I found him in the kitchen, lifting the lid from a steaming casserole of lamb cutlets with gammon and tomatoes. It smelled good enough to eat.
    “One thing I admit,” I said generously. “You have damn good eyes. But of course pretty women’s faces are so irresistible to you that you resented the scratch and so you focused on it.”
    He ignored it. “Are you going to the bank after lunch to deposit Mr. Corliss’s check?”
    “You know I am.”
    “Go also to Mrs. Fromm’s bank and have her check certified. That will verify her signature. Fritz, this is even better than last time. Satisfactory.”

Chapter 5
    Before noon the next day, Saturday, I had plenty of dope on our prospective client. To begin with, five minutes spent in the Gazette morgue, by courtesy of my friend Lon Cohen, settled it that she was Mrs. Damon Fromm. She was good for somewhere between five million and twenty million, and since it was unlikely that we would ever want to bill her for more than a million or two, I didn’t go any further into that. Her husband, who had been about twice her age, had died two years ago of a heart attack, leaving her the works. No children. She was born Laura Atherton, of a Philadelphia family of solid citizens, and had been married to Fromm seven years when he died.
    Fromm had inherited a small pile and had built it into a mountain, chiefly in the chemical industry. His contributions to various organizations had caused an assortment of chairmen and chairladies and executive secretaries, upon news of his death, to have a deep and decent interest in the terms of his will, but except for a few modest bequests everything had gone to his widow. However, she had carried on with the contributions, and had also been generous with her time and energy, with special attention to Assadip, which was the cable code for the Association for the Aid of Displaced Persons, and the way it was usually spoken of by people who were thrifty with their breath.
    If I give the impression that I had spent many hours on a thorough job of research, I should correct it. A quarter of an hour with Lon Cohen, after consulting the Gazette’s morgue, gave me all of the above except one item, which I got at our bank. There was no danger of Lon blatting around that Nero Wolfe was getting briefed on Mrs. Damon Fromm, since we had given him at least as many breaks on stories as he had given us on scuttlebutt.
    At a quarter to twelve Saturday morning Wolfe was at his desk and I was standing at his elbow, rechecking with him the expense account of the job for Corliss (not his name), the hardware manufacturer (not his line). Wolfe thought