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know about hotels, don’t you?”
    “Yeah. But… haven’t you any friends with an extra bed?”
    “Of course I have. I was going to phone one, but then I thought what would I say'All of a sudden like this, eleven o’clock at night… I’d have to give some reason, and what could I say'With all the talk…” She shook her head. “I’m going to a hotel.”
    “Well.” I gave it a look. “That might be even worse. You could use another name,
    but if someone spots you and the papers get onto it, talk about talk. Good headlines. BLOUNT’S DAUGHTER FLEES HOME IN MIDDLE OF NIGHT. Also possibly that I escorted you. The hallman. I showed the cab driver my license.”
    “Oh. That would be awful.” she eyed me. Silence. My hand was there on the seat between us, and she touched it. “It was your suggestion,” she said.
    “Ouch,” I said. “But so it was. Okay. As you may know, I live where I work, in Nero Wolfe’s house. There’s a room above his on the third floor which we call the south room. It has a good bed, two windows, its own bath, hot and cold running water, a Kashan rug fifteen by eleven, and a bolt on the door. The best cook in New York, Fritz Brenner, would get your breakfast, which you could eat either from a tray in your room or in the kitchen with me. His sour milk griddlecakes are beyond any -“
    “But I couldn’t,” she blurted. “I might have to stay … I don’t know how long…”
    “It’s cheaper by the month. We’ll take it out of the twenty-two grand. Anyway,
    you couldn’t pay a hotel bill, you’ve even sold your jewelry. Of course you’ll never live it down, shacking up with three unmarried men, and one of them a Frenchman, but you can’t sleep in the park.”
    “You’re making a joke of it, Archie. It’s no joke.”
    The hell it isn’t. That a girl wearing a ten-thousand-dollar coat, with her own bed in a sixteen-room Fifth Avenue apartment, with a flock of friends so-called,
    with credit in any hotel in town, needs a safe place to sleep'Certainly it’s a joke.”
    She tried to smile and nearly made it. “All right,” she said. “Some day maybe I can laugh at it. All right.”
    I got out and headed for the drugstore to get the hackie.

Nero Wolfe 37 - Gambit
    CHAPTER SIX
    At a quarter past nine Tuesday morning, seated with Sally at the side table in the kitchen, I passed her the guava butter for her third griddlecake. I had told her the household morning routine when I had taken her and the suitcase up to the south room an hour after midnight - Wolfe, breakfast in his room at 8:15 from a tray taken up by Fritz, and to the plant rooms at nine o’clock for two hours with the orchids; and me, breakfast in the kitchen whenever I got down for it, no set time, and then, unless there was an outside errand, to the office for dusting, putting fresh water in the vase on Wolfe’s desk, opening the mail,
    finishing with the morning Times if I hadn’t done so at breakfast, and performing whatever chores were called for.
    Wolfe had done pretty well, for him. He had been at his desk with African Genesis when I had entered with Sally at eleven-thirty, and at least he hadn’t got up and marched out when I announced that we had a house guest. After a growl and a couple of deep breaths he had put his book down, and when I asked if he wanted just a summary or the whole crop, verbatim, he said verbatim. It’s more satisfactory to report a lot of conversation in the presence of someone who was in on it, just as a kid named Archie, years ago out in Ohio, got a bigger kick climbing to the top of the tree if a girl was there watching. Or fifteen or twenty girls. When I was through and he had asked a few questions, he told the client about the caller we had had earlier in the evening, Ernst Hausman, her godfather - not verbatim, but the gist of it. The end of that was for me too,
    since the phone call from Sally had come just as Wolfe was conjecturing that Hausman had put the arsenic in the