“I hope you’re satisfied,” Inspector Cramer said sourly. “You and Goodwin have got your pictures in the paper again. You got no fee, but a lot of free publicity. I got my nose wiped.”
Wolfe grunted comfortably.
It was seven o’clock the next evening, and the three of us were in the office, me at the desk with my arm in a sling, Cramer in the red leather chair, and Wolfe on his throne back of his desk, with a glass of beer in his hand and a second unopened bottle on the tray in front of him. The seals had been removed by Sergeant Stebbins a little before noon, in between other chores. The whole squad had been busy with chores: visiting W-J at the hospital, conversing with Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle at the D.A.’s office, starting to round up circumstantial evidence to show that Mr. Carlisle had furnished the necessary for Doris Hatten’s rent and Mrs. Carlisle knew it, pestering Skinny, and other items. I had been glad to testify that Skinny, whose name was Herbert Marvel and who ran a little agency in a mid-town one-room office, was one hundred proof and that, as soon as I had convinced him that his well-dressed male client was a female public enemy, he had been simply splendid. Of course, when Skinny had returned to the room after going to phone, he and I had had a full three minutes for a meeting of minds before the cops came. I had used twenty seconds of the three minutes satisfying my curiosity. In Mrs. Carlisle’s right-hand coat pocket was a slip noose made of strong cord. So that was her idea when she had moved to get behind me. Someday, when the trial is over and Cramer has cooled off, I’ll try getting it for a souvenir.
Cramer had refused the beer Wolfe had courteously offered. “What I chiefly came for,” he went on, “was to let you know that I realize there’s nothing I can do. I know damn well Cynthia Brown described her to Goodwin, and probably gave him her name too, and Goodwin told you. And you wanted to hog it. I suppose you thought you could pry a fee out of somebody. Both of you suppressed evidence.”
He gestured. “Okay, I can’t prove it. But I know it, and I want you to know I know it. And I’m not going to forget it.”
Wolfe drank, wiped his lips, and put the glass down. “The trouble is,” he murmured, “that if you can’t prove you’re right, and of course you can’t, neither can I prove you’re wrong.”
“Oh, yes, you can. But you haven’t and you won’t!”
“I would gladly try. How?”
Cramer leaned forward. “Like this. If she hadn’t been described to Goodwin, how did you pick her for him to send that blackmail note to?”
Wolfe shrugged. “It was a calculation, as I told you. I concluded that the murderer was among those who remained until the body had been discovered. It was worth testing. If there had been no phone call in response to Mr. Goodwin’s note the calculation would have been discredited, and I would—”
“Yeah, but why her?”
“There were only two women who remained. Obviously it couldn’t have been Mrs. Orwin; with her physique she would be hard put to pass as a man. Besides, she is a widow, and it was a sound presumption that Doris Hatten had been killed by a jealous wife, who—”
“But why a woman? Why not a man?”
“Oh, that.” Wolfe picked up the glass and drained it with more deliberation than usual, wiped his lips with extra care, and put the glass down. He was having a swell time. “I told you in my dining room” — he pointed a finger — “that something had occurred to me and I wanted to consider it. Later I would have been glad to tell you about it if you had not acted so irresponsibly and spitefully in sealing up this office. That made me doubt if you were capable of proceeding properly on any suggestion from me, so I decided to proceed myself. What had occurred to me was simply this: that Miss Brown had told Mr. Goodwin that she wouldn’t have recognized ‘him’ if he hadn’t had a hat on. She used the masculine pronoun, naturally, throughout that conversation, because it had been a man who had called at Doris Hatten’s apartment that October day, and he was fixed in her mind as a man. But it was in my plant rooms that she had seen him that afternoon, and no man wore his hat up there. The men left their hats downstairs. Besides, I was there and saw them. But nearly all the women had hats on.” Wolfe upturned a palm. “So it was a woman.”
Cramer eyed him. “I don’t believe it,” he said flatly.
“You have a record of Mr. Goodwin’s report of that conversation. Consult it.”
“I still wouldn’t believe it.”
“There were other little items.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “For example: the strangler of Doris Hatten had a key to the door. But surely the provider, who had so carefully avoided revealment, would not have marched in at an unexpected hour to risk encountering strangers. And who so likely to have found an opportunity, or contrived one, to secure a duplicate key as the provider’s jealous wife?”
“Talk all day. I still don’t believe it.”
Well, I thought to myself, observing Wolfe’s smirk and for once completely approving of it, Cramer the office-sealer has his choice of believing it or not and what the hell.
As for me, I had no choice.