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the times he asks my opinion about a young woman, particularly if she’s a key figure in a case we’re working on. He thinks I’m an expert on women, and I go on letting him believe that.
    “I told you before that I’m playing a hunch here,” I said. “I know you think I’m trying to drum up business, and I have to plead guilty to doing that more than once in the past. But I’ve got this feeling that little guy is on to something. Don’t ask me to explain it—I can’t. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”
    “Or is it my money?”
    “No, sir, I mean it. I’d like to go up to Prescott. I’ll even pay all the expenses myself, including the gas in your car. And for every hour I’m gone, I’ll work an extra hour in the office for you on my own time. Fair enough?”
    Wolfe raised his eyebrows. “What do you expect to accomplish there?”
    “For one thing, I want to see the school, and the site of the so-called accident. For another, I’d like to meet those characters Cortland talked about today. Also, there must be others on the campus who knew Markham, probably knew him well. What about it? You’ve got nothing to lose.”
    Wolfe scowled. “How far is this place?” Despite his encyclopedic knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, he’d flunk a course in the geography of the New York metropolitan area, to say nothing of more distant precincts.
    “About seventy-five miles north, an hour and a half at most,” I said. “I know a lot of the country up that way, and it’s a nice drive.”
    He shuddered at the idea of anybody willingly riding in an automobile for ninety minutes, let alone driving one. To Wolfe, people who use cars regularly have forfeited the right to be termed sane. I should mention here that he does own a car, a two-year-old Mercedes sedan that I had picked out. He can’t drive it, and will only ride—in the back seat at that—when I’m behind the wheel. Even then, his trips out are rare, such as to the annual Metropolitan Orchid Show, which is all of twenty-five blocks from the brownstone. And even then, he keeps his eyes closed most of the way.
    “When will you go?” he asked stiffly.
    “I was thinking about tomorrow. I figure Cortland can show me around, and I’ll use some kind of cover. Maybe I can be the father of a prospective student, there to take a look at the campus.”
    Wolfe frowned, maybe at the notion of me as somebody’s father. “We’re having spareribs for lunch tomorrow.” It was a formidable objection.
    “I’ll have Fritz save me some,” I said, but I didn’t get a reply because he was behind his book, which meant he’d given up trying to talk me out of the expedition.
    For the next hour or so, I entered orchid germination records into the PC, but at four o’clock, when Wolfe went up to the plant rooms for his afternoon playtime, I turned to my phone and dialed Lon Cohen’s number at the Gazette . Lon doesn’t carry a title at the paper, but he’s got an office next to the publisher’s on the twentieth floor, and when anything from a minor gang war to a bribery scandal in the mayor’s office occurs, Lon seems to know more about it sooner than anyone else in the five boroughs. He answered in his usual world-weary tone.
    “Nice to hear you sounding so chipper,” I said. “Got a minute?”
    “Of course not. What kind of trouble are you manufacturing today?”
    “Hey, this is me you’re talking to, remember? Archie, the newspaperman’s best friend.”
    “Okay, friend, what’s up?”
    “What can you tell me about Prescott University?”
    “What’s to tell?” Lon said. “It’s a private school, as I’m sure you know. Pretty campus. About halfway between West Point and Poughkeepsie, and they say the Prescott women prefer Military Academy cadets to Prescott men, while the men on campus would far rather go out with Vassar women than the ones at their own school. Enrollment’s somewhere around six thousand, and the place has