It was lunchtime Tuesday. Wolfe and I were at the dining table. I was doing all right with a can of beans I had got at the delicatessen. Wolfe, his broad face dour and dismal, took a spoonful of stuff from a little glass jar that had just been opened, dabbed it onto the end of a roll, bit it off, and chewed. All of a sudden, with nothing to warn me, there was an explosion like the bursting of a ten-inch shell. Instinctively I dropped my sandwich and put up my hands to protect my face, but too late. Little gobs of the stuff, and particles of masticated roll, peppered me like shrapnel.

  I glared at him. “Well,” I said witheringly. I removed something from my eyelid with the corner of my napkin. “If you think for one moment you can get away—”

  I left it hanging. With as black a fury on his face as any I had ever seen there, he was on his feet and heading for the kitchen. I stayed in my chair. After I had done what I could with the napkin, hearing meanwhile the garglings and splashings of Wolfe at the kitchen sink, I reached for the jar, took a look at the contents, and sniffed it. I inspected the label. It was small and to the point:

  TINGLEY’S TIDBITS—Since 1881—

  The Best Liver Pâté No. 3

  I was sniffing at it again when Wolfe marched in with a tray containing three bottles of beer, a chunk of cheese, and a roll of salami. He sat down without a word and started slicing salami.

  “The last man who spat at me,” I said casually, “got three bullets in his heart before he hit the floor.”

  “Pfui,” Wolfe said coldly.

  “And at least,” I continued, “he really meant it. Whereas you were merely being childish and trying to show what a supersensitive gourmet you are—”

  “Shut up. Did you taste it?”

  “No.”

  “Do so. It’s full of poison.”

  I regarded him suspiciously. It was ten to one he was stringing me, but, after all, there were a good many people who would have regarded the death of Nero Wolfe as a ray of sunshine in a dark world, and a few of them had made efforts to bring it about. I picked up the jar and a spoon, procured a morsel about the size of a pea, and put it in my mouth. A moment later I discreetly but hastily ejected it into my napkin, went to the kitchen and did some rinsing, returned to the dining-room and took a good large bite from a dill pickle. After the pickle’s pungency had to some extent quieted the turmoil in my taste buds, I reached for the jar and smelled it again.

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  Wolfe made a growling noise.

  “I mean,” I continued hastily, “that I don’t understand it. How could it be some fiend trying to poison you? I bought it at Bruegel’s and brought it home myself, and I opened it, and I’d swear the lid hadn’t been tampered with. But I don’t blame you for spitting, even though I happened to be in the line of fire. If that’s Tingley’s idea of a rare, exotic flavor to tempt the jaded appetite—”

  “That will do, Archie.” Wolfe put down his empty glass. I had never heard his tone more menacing. “I am not impressed by your failure to understand this abominable outrage. I might bring myself to tolerate it if some frightened or vindictive person shot me to death, but this is insupportable.” He made the growling noise again. “My food. You know my attitude toward food.” He aimed a rigid finger at the jar, and his voice trembled with ferocity. “Whoever put that in there is going to regret it.”

  He said no more, and I concentrated on the beans and pickles and milk. When he had finished the cheese he got up and left the room, taking the third bottle of beer along, and when I was through I cleared the table and went to the kitchen and washed up. Then I proceeded to the office. He had his mass deposited in the oversized chair behind his desk, and was leaning back with his eyes closed and a twist to his lips which showed that the beer descending his gullet had washed no wrath down with it. Without opening his eyes he muttered at me, “Where’s that jar?”

  “Right here.” I put it on his desk.

  “Get Mr. Whipple, at the laboratory.”

  I sat at my desk, and looked up the number and dialed it. When I told Wolfe I had Whipple he got himself upright and reached for his phone and spoke to it:

  “Mr. Whipple? … This is Nero Wolfe. Good afternoon, sir. Can you do an analysis for me right away? … I don’t know. It’s a glass jar containing a substance which I foolishly presumed to be edible…. I have no idea. Mr. Goodwin will take it down to you immediately.”

  I was glad to have an errand that would take me away from that den of dejection for an hour or so, but something more immediate intervened. The doorbell rang and, since Fritz was out of commission, I went to answer it. Swinging the front door open, I found myself confronted by something pleasant. While she didn’t reach the spectacular and I’m not saying that I caught my breath, one comprehensive glance at her gave me the feeling that it was foolish to regard the world as an abode of affliction merely because Fritz had the grippe. Her cheeks had soft in-curves and her eyes were a kind of chartreuse, something the color of my bathroom walls upstairs. They looked worried.

  “Hello,” I said enthusiastically.

  “Mr. Nero Wolfe?” she asked in a nice voice from west of Pittsburgh. “My name is Amy Duncan.”

  I knew it was hopeless. With Wolfe in a state of mingled rage and despondency, and with the bank balance in a flourishing condition, if I had gone and told him that a good-looking girl named Duncan wanted to see him, no matter what about, he would only have been churlish. Whereas there was a chance … I invited her in, escorted her down the hall and into the office, and pulled up a chair for her.

  “Miss Duncan, Mr. Wolfe,” I said, and sat down. “She wants to ask you something.”

  Wolfe, not even glancing at her, glared at me. “Confound you!” he muttered. “I’m engaged. I’m busy.” He transferred it to the visitor: “Miss Duncan, you are the victim of my assistant’s crack-brained impudence. So am I. I see people only by appointment.”

  She smiled at him. “I’m sorry, but now that I’m here it won’t take long—”

  “No.” His eyes came back to me. “Archie, when you have shown Miss Duncan out, come back here.”

  He was obviously completely out of control. As for that, I was somewhat edgy myself, after the three days I had just gone through and it looked to me as if a little cooling off might be advisable before any further interchange of sentiments. So I arose and told him firmly, “I’ll run along down to the laboratory. Maybe I can give Miss Duncan a lift.” I picked up the jar. “Do you want me to wait—?”

  “Where did you get that?” Amy Duncan said.

  I looked at her in astonishment. “Get it? This jar?”

  “Yes. Where did you get it?”

  “Bought it. Sixty-five cents.”

  “And you’re taking it to a laboratory? Why? Does it taste funny? Oh, I’ll bet it does! Bitter?”

  I gawked at her in amazement. Wolfe, upright, his eyes narrowed at her, snapped, “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because,” she said, “I recognized the label. And taking it to a laboratory—that’s what I came to see you about! Isn’t that odd? A jar of it right here—”

  On any other man Wolfe’s expression would have indicated a state of speechlessness, but I have never yet seen him flabbergasted to a point where he was unable to articulate. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you were actually aware of this infamous plot? That you knew of this unspeakable insult to my palate and my digestion?”

  “Oh, no! But I know it has quinine in it.”

  “Quinine!” he roared.

  She nodded. “I suppose so.” She stretched a hand toward me. “May I look at it?” I handed her the jar. She removed the lid, took a tiny dab of the contents on the tip of her little finger, licked it off with her tongue, and waited for the effect. It didn’t take long. “Br-r-uh!” she said, and swallowed twice. “It sure is bitter. That’s it, all right.” She put the jar on the desk. “How very odd—”

  “Not odd,” Wolfe said grimly. “Odd is not the word. You say it has quinine in it. You knew that as soon as you saw it. Who put it in?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I came to see you for, to ask you to find out. You see, it’s my uncle—May I tell you about it?”

  “You may.”

  She started to wriggle out of her coat, and I helped her with it and got it out of her way so she could settle back in her chair. She thanked me with a friendly little smile containing no trace of quinine, and I returned to my desk and got out a notebook and flipped to a blank page.

  “Arthur Tingley,” she said, “is my uncle. My mother’s brother. He owns Tingley’s Tidbits. And he’s such a pigheaded—” She flushed. “Well, he is pigheaded. He actually suspects me of having something to do with that quinine, just because—for no reason at all!”

  “Are you saying,” Wolfe demanded incredulously, “that the scoundrel, knowing that his confounded tidbits contain quinine, continues to distribute them?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “he’s not a scoundrel. That’s not it. It was only a few weeks ago that they learned about the quinine. Complaints began to come in, and thousands of jars were returned from all over the country. He had them analyzed, and lots of them contained quinine. Of course, it was only a small proportion of the whole output—it’s a pretty big business. He tried to investigate it, and Miss Yates—she’s in charge of production—took all possible precautions, but it’s happened again in recent shipments.”

  “Where’s the factory?”

  “Not far from here. On West Twenty-sixth Street near the river.”

  “Do you work there?”

  “No, I did once, when I first came to New York, but I—I quit.”

  “Do you know what the investigation has disclosed?”

  “Nothing. Not really. My uncle suspects—I guess he suspects everybody, even his son Philip, his adopted son. And me! It’s simply ridiculous! But chiefly he suspects a man—a vice-president of P. & B., the Provisions & Beverages Corporation. Tingley’s Tidbits is an old-established business—my great-grandfather founded it seventy years ago—and P. & B. has been trying to buy it, but my uncle wouldn’t sell. He thinks they bribed someone in the factory to put in the quinine to scare him into letting go. He thinks that Mr.—the vice-president I spoke of—did it.”

  “Mr.—?”

  “Mr. Cliff. Leonard Cliff.”

  I glanced up from my notebook on account of a slight change in the key of her voice.

  Wolfe inquired, “Do you know Mr. Cliff?”

  “Oh, yes.” She shifted in her chair. “That is, I—I’m his secretary.”

  “Indeed.” Wolfe’s eyes went shut and then opened again halfway. “When you left your uncle’s employ you came to terms with the enemy?”

  She flared up. “Of course not!” she said indignantly. “You sound like my uncle! I had to have a job, didn’t I? I was born and brought up in Nebraska. Three years ago my mother died, and I came to New York and started to work in my uncle’s office. I stuck it out for two years, but it got—unpleasant, and either I quit or he fired me, it would be hard to say which. I got a job as a stenographer with P. & B., and six weeks ago I was promoted and I’m now Mr. Cliff’s secretary. If you want to know why it got so unpleasant in my uncle’s office—”

  “I don’t. Unless it has a bearing on this quinine business.”

  “It hasn’t. None whatever.”

  “But you are sufficiently concerned about the quinine to come to me about it. Why?”

  “Because my uncle is such a—” She stopped, biting her lip. “You don’t know him. He writes to my father, things about me that aren’t so, and my father writes and threatens to come to New York—it’s such a mess! I certainly didn’t put quinine in his darned Tidbits! I suppose I’m prejudiced, but I don’t believe any investigating he does will ever get anywhere, and the only way to stop it is for someone to investigate who knows how.” She flashed a smile at him. “Which brings me to the embarrassing part of it. I haven’t got much money—”

  “You have something better,” Wolfe grunted.

  “Better?”

  “Yes. Luck. The thing you want to know is the thing I had determined to find out before I knew you existed. I had already told Mr. Goodwin that the blackguard who poisoned that pâté is going to regret it.” He grimaced. “I can still taste it. Can you go now with Mr. Goodwin to your uncle’s factory and introduce him?”

  “I—” She glanced at her watch and hesitated. “I’ll be awfully late getting back to the office. I only asked for an hour—”

  “Very well. Archie, show Miss Duncan out and return for instructions.” …

  It was barely three o’clock when I reached the base of operations, and the jar in my pocket was only half full, for I had first gone downtown to the laboratory and left a sample for analysis.

  The three-story brick building on West 26th Street was old and grimy-looking, with a cobbled driveway for trucks tunneled through its middle. Next to the driveway were three stone steps leading up to a door with an inscription in cracked and faded paint:

  TINGLEY’S TIDBITS OFFICE

  As I parked the roadster and got out, I cocked an admiring eye at a Crosby town car, battleship gray, with license GJ88, standing at the curb. “Comes the revolution,” I thought, “I’ll take that first.” I had my foot on the first stone step leading up to the office when the door opened and a man emerged. I had the way blocked. At a glance, it was hard to imagine anyone calling him Uncle Arthur, with his hard, clamped jaw and his thin, hard mouth, but, not wanting to miss my quarry, I held the path and addressed him: “Mr. Arthur Tingley?”

  “No,” he said in a totalitarian tone, shooting a haughty glance at me as he brushed by, with cold, keen eyes of the same battleship gray as his car. I remembered, just in time, that I had in my pocket a piece of yellow chalk which I had been marking orchid pots with that morning. Circling around him, I beat him to the car door which the liveried chauffeur was holding open and with two swift swipes chalked a big X on the elegant enamel.

  “Don’t monkey with that,” I said sternly, and, before either of them could produce words or actions, beat it up the stone steps and entered the building.

  It sure was a ramshackle joint. From a dingy hall a dilapidated stair went up. I mounted to the floor above, heard noises, including machinery humming, off somewhere, and through a rickety door penetrated a partition and was in an anteroom. From behind a grilled window somebody’s grandpa peered out at me, and by shouting I managed to convey to him that I wanted to see Mr. Arthur Tingley. After a wait I was told that Mr. Tingley was busy, and would be indefinitely. On a leaf of my notebook I wrote, “Quinine urgent,” and sent it in. That did it. After another wait a cross-eyed young man came and guided me through a labyrinth of partitions and down a hall into a room.

  Seated at an old, battered rolltop desk was a man talking into a phone, and in a chair facing him was a woman older than him with the physique and facial equipment of a top sergeant. Since the phone conversation was none of my business, I stood and listened to it, and gathered that someone named Philip had better put in an appearance by five o’clock or else. Meanwhile I surveyed the room, which had apparently been thrown in by the Indians when they sold the island. By the door, partly concealed by a screen, was an old, veteran marble-topped washstand. A massive, old-fashioned safe was against the wall across from Tingley’s desk. Wooden cupboards, and shelves loaded down with the accumulation of centuries, occupied most of the remaining wall space.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  I whirled and advanced. “A man by the name of Goodwin. Archie. The question is, do you want the Gazette to run a feature article about quinine in Tidbits, or do you want to discuss it first?”

  His mouth fell open. “The Gazette?”

  “Right. Circulation over a million.”

  “Good God!” he said in a hollow and helpless tone. The woman glared at me.

  I was stirred by compassion. He may have merited his niece’s opinion of him, expressed and implied, but he was certainly a pathetic object at that moment.

  I sat down. “Be of good cheer,” I said encouragingly. “The Gazette hasn’t got it yet. That’s merely one of the possibilities I offer in case you start shoving. I represent Nero Wolfe.”

  “Nero Wolfe, the detective?”

  “Yes. He started to eat—”

  The woman snorted. “I’ve been expecting this. Didn’t I warn you, Arthur? Blackmail.” She squared her jaw at me. “Who are you working for? P. & B.? Consolidated Cereals?”

  “Neither one. Are you Miss Yates?”

  “I am. And you can take—”

  “Pardon me.” I grinned at her. “Pleased to meet you. I’m working for Nero Wolfe. He took a mouthful of Liver Pâté Number Three, with painful consequences. He’s very fussy about his food. He wants to speak to the person who put in the quinine.”

  “So do I,” Tingley said grimly.

  “You don’t know. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “But you’d like to know?”

  “You’re damn’ right I would.”

  “Okay. I come bearing gifts. If you hired Wolfe for this job, granting he’d take it, it would cost you a fortune. But he’s vindictive. He wishes to do things to this quinine jobber. I was sent here to look around and ask questions.”

  Tingley wearily shook his head. He looked at Miss Yates. She looked at him. “Do you believe him?” Tingley asked her.

 

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