“Why a hammer?” I demanded. “The nail could have been driven in with any heavy object.”
“Such as what?”
I ruminated over the appointments of the room as I remember them, and said, a little lamely, “Well, one could take off his shoe to drive the nail.”
“Yes, one could,” Kee assented, “but it doesn’t sound likely——”
“The whole affair doesn’t sound likely,” I countered, “and anyway, it doesn’t matter. Somebody did drive that nail, and what it was driven with is unimportant. As far as I can learn, they’ve found nothing conclusive in the way of fingerprints. I’m not keen on those things myself, but in New York they would have been fingerprinting the whole crowd of us.”
“Of course, there are no available fingerprints on the nail,” Kee said, “and that’s the only thing that matters. I don’t give a fig for all the feather dusters, flowers, oranges and such things.”
“Not even the watch in the water pitcher?” I asked.
“Well, yes, I do consider the watch in the water pitcher. In fact, I think that’s the key note of the whole performance.”
“You’ve got to tell us why,” I told him. “You can’t say that and leave it unexplained.”
“Indeed I can. A real detective never explains his cryptic utterances.”