“No,” Wolfe said. “Not from my office.”
That was the central point of the situation. Twenty minutes earlier Daniel’s empty stomach was all that had kept Wolfe from chasing him to the police, and it wouldn’t have hurt his appetite any if I had gone along to keep Daniel company, but this was different. For a cop to remove persons from the house, any person whatever, with or without a charge or a warrant, except at Wolfe’s instigation, was an intolerable insult to his pride, his vanity, and his sense of the fitness of things. So as was to be expected, he acted with a burst of energy amounting to violence. He sat up straight in his chair.
“Mr. Cramer,” he said, “sit down.”
“Not a chance.” Cramer meant it. “You’re not going to take me in with one of your goddamn—”
“Archie, show Mr. Cramer that report from the Fisher Laboratories.”
I stuck it under his nose. His impulse was to push it away, but no cop, not even an Inspector, dares to refuse to look at a paper. So he snatched it and scowled at it. Daniel started to say something, but Wolfe shushed him, and Daniel finished off the cheese and the last cracker, and put sugar in his tea and began to stir it.
“So what?” Cramer growled. “How do I know—”
“I sometimes doubt if you know anything,” Wolfe said shortly. “I was not and am not interested in Miss Huddleston’s death, though you and Mr. Huddleston and Archie keep pestering me about it. I have no client. My client died. You are even affronted to find Mr. Huddleston here eating. If he’s hungry, why the devil shouldn’t he eat? When he appeared here at one o’clock with that turf, I told him to take it to the police. He said they regarded him as a nuisance. Why he returned here with the laboratory report, I do not know; I only know he was hungry. If you are disgruntled because you have no assurance that the piece of turf examined by the laboratory is the piece onto which the chimpanzee poured some of the contents of the bottle of supposed iodine, I can’t help it. Why didn’t you get the turf yourself when Mr. Huddleston first called on you, five days ago? It was an obvious thing to do.”
“I didn’t know then that the chimpanzee had poured—”
“You should have. Proper questioning would have got it. Either it was worth investigating competently, or not at all. Well, sir, there’s your report. Keep it. You’ll get a bill for it from the Fisher Laboratories. Archie, make a note of that. It wasn’t iodine in that bottle; it was argyrol, and it was reeking with tetanus bacilli. An uncommonly ugly thing to do. I have never heard of a more objectionable way of committing murder, nor of an easier or simpler one. I trust, sir, that you’ll make an arrest. You should, since you have only five people to deal with — the five who were there, not counting Archie—”