Read Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families for Free Online Page A

slightly younger than Annabel Frey—twenty-six maybe—and I never saw a finer pair of eyes. She was obviously underplaying them, or rather what was back of them. When I was questioningher she pretended I had her in a corner, while her eyes gave it away that she could have waltzed all around me if she wanted to. I didn’t know whether she thought she was kidding somebody, or was just practicing, or had some serious reason for passing herself off as a flub.
    Barry Rackham had me stumped and also annoyed. Either I was dumber than Nero Wolfe thought I was, and twice as dumb as I thought I was, or he was smarter than he looked. New York was full of him, and he was full of New York. Go into any Madison Avenue bar between five and six-thirty and there would be six or eight of him there: not quite young but miles from being old; masculine all over except the fingernails; some tired and some fresh and ready, depending on the current status; and all slightly puffy below the eyes. I knew him from A to Z, or thought I did, but I couldn’t make up my mind whether he knew what I was there for, and that was the one concrete thing I had hoped to get done. If he knew, the question whether he was on Zeck’s payroll was answered; if he didn’t, that question was still open.
    And I still hadn’t been able to decide when, at the dinner table, we had finished the dessert and got up to go elsewhere for coffee. At first I had thought he couldn’t possibly be wise, when I had him sized up for a dummy who had had the good luck to catch Mrs. Rackham’s eye somewhere and then had happened to take the only line she would fall for, but further observation had made me reconsider. His handling of his wife had character in it; it wasn’t just yes or no. At the dinner table he had an exchange with Pierce about rent control, and without seeming to try he got the statesman so tangled up he couldn’twiggle loose. Then he had a good laugh, took the other side of the argument, and made a monkey out of Dana Hammond.
    I decided I’d better start all over.
    On the way back to the living room for coffee, Lina Darrow joined me. “Why did you take it out on me?” she demanded.
    I said I didn’t know I had.
    “Certainly you did. Trying to indict me for dog poisoning. You went after me much harder than you did the others.” Her fingers were on the inside of my arm, lightly.
    “Certainly,” I conceded. “Nothing new to you, was it? A man going after you harder than the others?”
    “Thanks. But I mean it. Of course you know I’m just a working girl.”
    “Sure. That’s why I was tougher with you. That, and because I wondered why you were playing dumb.”
    The statesman Pierce broke us up then, as we entered the living room, and I didn’t fight for her. We collected in the neighborhood of the fireplace for coffee, and there was a good deal of talk about nothing, and after a while somebody suggested television, and Barry Rackham went and turned it on. He and Annabel turned out lights. As the rest of us got settled in favorably placed seats, Mrs. Rackham left us. A little later, as I sat in the semi-darkness scowling at a cosmetic commercial, some obscure sense told me that danger was approaching and I jerked my head around. It was right there at my elbow: a Doberman pinscher, looking larger than normal in that light, staring intently past me at the screen.
    Mrs. Rackham, just behind it, apparently misinterpretingmy quick movement, spoke hastily and loudly above the noise of the broadcast. “Don’t try to pat him!”
    “I won’t,” I said emphatically.
    “He’ll behave,” she assured me. “He loves television.” She went on with him, farther forward. As they passed Calvin Leeds the affectionate pet halted for a brief sniff, and got a stroke on the head in response. No one else was honored.
    Ninety minutes of video got us to half-past ten, and got us nothing else, especially me. I was still on the fence about Barry Rackham. Television is