In my opinion Inspector Cramer made a mistake. Opinion, hell, of course he did. It is true that in a room where a murder has occurred the city scientists — measurers, sniffers, print-takers, specialists, photographers — may shoot the works, and they do. But except in rare circumstances the job shouldn’t take all week, and in the case of our office a couple of hours should have been ample. In fact, it was. By eight o’clock the scientists were through. But Cramer, like a sap, gave the order to seal it up until further notice, in Wolfe’s hearing. He knew damn well that Wolfe spent as least three hundred evenings a year in there, in the only chair and under the only light that he really liked, and that was why he did it. It was a mistake. If he hadn’t made it, Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as Wolfe saw it himself, and Cramer would have been saved a lot of trouble.
The two of them got the fact at the same time, from me. We were in the dining room — this was shortly after the scientists had got busy in the office, and the guests, under guard, had been shunted to the front room — and I was relating my conversation with Cynthia Brown. They wanted all of it, or Cramer did rather, and they got it. Whatever else my years as Wolfe’s assistant may have done for me or to me, they have practically turned me into a tape recorder, and Wolfe and Cramer didn’t get a rewrite of that conversation, they got the real thing, word for word. They also got the rest of my afternoon, complete. When I finished, Cramer had a slew of questions, but Wolfe not a one. Maybe he had already focused on the fact above referred to, but neither Cramer nor I had. The shorthand dick seated at one end of the dining table had the fact too, in his notebook along with the rest of it, but he wasn’t supposed to focus.
Cramer called a recess on the questions to take steps. He called men in and gave orders. Colonel Brown was to be photographed and fingerprinted and headquarters records were to be checked for him and Cynthia. The file on the murder of Doris Hatten was to be brought to him at once. The lab reports were to be rushed. Saul Panzer and Fritz Brenner were to be brought in.
They came. Fritz stood like a soldier at attention, grim and grave. Saul, only five feet seven, with the sharpest eyes and one of the biggest noses I have ever seen, in his unpressed brown suit, and his necktie crooked — he stood like Saul, not slouching and not stiff. He would stand like that if he were being awarded the Medal of Honor or if he were in front of a firing squad.
Of course Cramer knew both of them. He picked on Saul. “You and Fritz were in the hall all afternoon?”
Saul nodded. “The hall and the front room, yes.”
“Who did you see enter or leave the office?”
“I saw Archie go in about four o’clock — I was just coming out of the front room with someone’s hat and coat. I saw Mrs. Carlisle come out just after she screamed. In between those two I saw no one either enter or leave. We were busy most of the time, either in the hall or the front room.”
Cramer grunted. “How about you, Fritz?”
“I saw no one.” Fritz spoke louder than usual. “I didn’t even see Archie go in.” He took a step forward, still like a soldier. “I would like to say something.”
“Go ahead.”
“I think a great deal of all this disturbance is unnecessary. My duties here are of the household and not professional, but I cannot help hearing what reaches my ears, and I am aware of the many times that Mr. Wolfe has found the answer to problems that were too much for you. This happened here in his own house, and I think it should be left entirely to him.”
I yooped, “Fritz, I didn’t know you had it in you!”
“All this disturbance,” he insisted firmly.
“I’ll be goddamned.” Cramer was goggling at him. “Wolfe told you to say that, huh?”
“Bah.” Wolfe was contemptuous. “It can’t be helped, Fritz. Have we plenty of ham?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sturgeon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Later, probably. For the guests in the front room, but not the police. Are you through with them, Mr. Cramer?”
“No.” Cramer went back to Saul. “You checked the guests in?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I had a list of the members of the Manhattan Flower Club. They had to show their membership cards. I checked on the list those who came. If they brought a wife or husband, or any other guest, I took the names.”
“Then you have a record of everybody?”
“Yes.”
“How complete is it?”
“It’s complete and it’s accurate.”
“About how many names?”
“Two hundred and nineteen.”
“This place wouldn’t hold that many.”
Saul nodded. “They came and went. There wasn’t more than a hundred or so at any one time.”
“That’s a help.” Cramer was getting more and more disgusted, and I didn’t blame him. “Goodwin says he was there at the door with you when that woman screamed and came running out of the office, but that you hadn’t seen her enter the office. Why not?”
“We had our backs turned. We were watching a man who had just left go down the steps. Archie had asked him for his name and he had said that was ridiculous. If you want it, his name is Malcolm Vedder.”
“The hell it is. How do you know?”
“I had checked him in along with the rest.”
Cramer stared. “Are you telling me that you could fit that many names to that many faces after seeing them just once?”
Saul’s shoulders went slightly up and down. “There’s more to people than faces. I might go wrong on a few, but not many. I was at that door to do a job and I did it.”
“You should know by this time,” Wolfe rumbled, “that Mr. Panzer is an exceptional man.”
Cramer spoke to a dick standing by the door. “You heard that name, Levy — Malcolm Vedder. Tell Stebbins to check it on that list and send a man to bring him in.”
The dick went. Cramer returned to Saul. “Put it this way. Say I sit you here with that list, and a man or woman is brought in, and I point to a name on the list and ask you if that person came this afternoon under that name. Could you tell me positively?”
“I could tell you positively whether the person had been here or not, especially if he was wearing the same clothes and hadn’t been disguised. On fitting him to his name I might go wrong in a few cases, but I doubt it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Mr. Wolfe does,” Saul said complacently. “Archie does. I have developed my faculties.”
“You sure have. All right, that’s all for now. Stick around.”
Saul and Fritz went. Wolfe, in his own chair at the end of the dining table, where ordinarily, at this hour, he sat for a quite different purpose than the one at hand, heaved a deep sigh and closed his eyes. I, seated beside Cramer at the side of the table that put us facing the door to the hall, was beginning to appreciate the kind of problem we were up against. The look on Cramer’s face indicated that he was appreciating it too. The look was crossing my bow, direct at Wolfe.
“Goodwin’s story,” Cramer growled. “I mean her story. What do you think?”
Wolfe’s eyes came open a little. “What followed seems to support it. I doubt if she would have arranged for that” — he flipped a hand in the direction of the office across the hall — “just to corroborate a tale. I accept it. I credit it.”
“Yeah. I don’t need to remind you that I know you well and I know Goodwin well. So I wonder how much chance there is that in a day or so you’ll suddenly remember that she had been here before today, or one or more of the others had, and you’ve got a client, and there was something leading up to this.”
“Bosh,” Wolfe said dryly. “Even if it were like that, and it isn’t, you would be wasting time. Since you know us, you know we wouldn’t remember until we got ready to.”
Cramer glowered. Two scientists came in from across the hall to report. Stebbins came to announce the arrival of an assistant district attorney. A dick came to relay a phone call from a deputy commissioner. Another dick came in to say that Homer Carlisle was raising hell in the front room. Meanwhile Wolfe sat with his eyes shut, but I got an idea of his state of mind from the fact that intermittently his forefinger was making little circles on the polished top of the table.
Cramer looked at him. “What do you know,” he asked abruptly, “about the killing of that Doris Hatten?”
“Newspaper accounts,” Wolfe muttered. “And what Mr. Stebbins has told Mr. Goodwin, casually.”
“Casual is right.” Cramer got out a cigar, conveyed it to his mouth, and sank his teeth in it. He never lit one. “Those damn houses with self-service elevators are worse than walk-ups for a checking job. No one ever sees anyone coming or going. If you’re not interested, I’m talking to hear myself.”
“I am interested.” Wolfe’s eyes stayed shut.
“Good. I appreciate it. Even so, self-service elevator or not, the man who paid the rent for that apartment was lucky. He may have been clever and careful, but also he was lucky. Never to have anybody see him enough to give a description of him — that took luck.”
“Possibly Miss Hatten paid the rent herself.”
“Sure,” Cramer conceded, “she paid it all right, but where did she get it from? No visible means of support — he sure wasn’t visible, and three good men spent a month trying to start a trail, and one of them is still at it. There was no doubt about its being that kind of a setup; we did get that far. She had only been living there two months, and when we found out how well the man who paid for it had kept himself covered, as tight as a drum, we decided that maybe he had installed her there just for the purpose. That was why we gave it all we had. Another reason was that the papers started hinting that we knew who he was and that he was such a big shot we were sitting on the lid.”
Cramer shifted his cigar one tooth over to the left. “That kind of thing used to get me sore, but what the hell, for newspapers that’s just routine. Big shot or not, he didn’t need us to do any covering for him — he had done too good a job himself. Now, if we’re to take it the way this Cynthia Brown gave it to Goodwin, it might have been the man who paid the rent and it might not. That makes it pie. I would hate to tell you what I think of the fact that Goodwin sat there in your office and was told right here on these premises and all he did was go upstairs and watch to see if anybody squeezed a flowerpot!”
“You’re irritated,” I said charitably. “Not that he was on the premises, that he had been. Also I was taking it with salt. Also she was saving specifications for Mr. Wolfe. Also—”
“Also I know you. How many of those two hundred and nineteen people were men?”
“I would say a little over half.”
“Then how do you like it?”
“I hate it.”
Wolfe grunted. “Judging from your attitude, Mr. Cramer, something that has occurred to me has not occurred to you.”
“Naturally. You’re a genius. What is it?”
“Something that Mr. Goodwin told us. I want to consider it a little.”
“We could consider it together.”
“Later. Those people in the front room are my guests. Can’t you dispose of them?”
“One of your guests,” Cramer rasped, “was a beaut, all right.” He spoke to the dick by the door. “Bring in that woman — what’s her name? Carlisle.”