“May I see it?”
“I have it,” Colonel Ryder put in. He took a sheet of paper from under a weight on his desk and stepped across to pass it to his superior. But Fife was using his hands to pat the pockets of his jacket.
“Left my glasses upstairs. Read it.”
Ryder did so.
“Dear sir: I address this to you because I understand that your investigating committee is authorized to inquire into matters of this sort. As you know, in the emergency of the war the Army is being entrusted with the secrets of various industrial processes. This practice is probably justified in the circumstances, but it is being criminally abused. Some of the secrets, without patent or copyright protection, are being betrayed to those who intend to engage in post-war competition of the industries involved. Values amounting to tens of millions of dollars are being stolen from their rightful owners. “Proof will be hard to get because of the difficulty of showing intent to defraud until it is put into practice after the war. I give you no details, but an honest and rigorous investigation will certainly disclose them. And I suggest a starting point: the death of Captain Albert Cross of Military Intelligence. He is supposed to have jumped, or fallen by accident, from the twelfth floor of the Bascombe Hotel in New York day before yesterday. Did he? What sort of inquiry had he been assigned to by his superior officers? What had he found out? You might start there. “A Citizen”
Silence. Dead silence.
Colonel Tinkham cleared his throat. “Well-written letter,” he observed, in the tone of a teacher commending a pupil for a good composition.
“May I look at it?” Nero Wolfe inquired.
Ryder handed it to him, and I got up and crossed the room to take a squint over Wolfe’s shoulder. Tinkham and Lawson got the same notion and did likewise. Wolfe considerately held it at an angle so we could all see. It was a plain sheet of ordinary bond paper, and the text was single-spaced neatly in the center of the sheet with no errors or exings. From habit and experience I noted two mechanical peculiarities: the c hit below the line; and the a was off to the left — in war, for instance, it touched the top corner of the w. I was going on from there when Tinkham and Lawson finished and moved away, and Wolfe handed the sheet to me to return to Ryder.
“Hot stuff,” Lawson said, sitting down. “He could a tale unfold, but he doesn’t. Nothing but insinuations.”