Pitcairn was frowning. “It’s neither sensible nor not sensible. It’s merely appropriate. You had to stay, of course, as long as you were needed — but now you’re not needed. Now that this miserable and sordid episode is finished, I must request—”
“No,” Wolfe snapped. “No indeed.”
“No what?”
“The episode is not finished. I didn’t mean Mr. Noonan is to be commended by me, only by you. He was, in fact, an ass to leave the people on your premises free to go as they please, since one of them is a murderer. None of you should be allowed to take a single step unobserved and unrecorded. As for—”
Sybil burst out laughing. The sound was a little startling, and it seemed to startle her as much as it did her audience, for she suddenly clapped her hand to her mouth to choke it off.
“There you are,” Wolfe told her, “you’re hysterical.” His eyes darted back to Pitcairn. “Why is your daughter hysterical?”
“I am not hysterical,” she denied scornfully. “Anyone would laugh. It wasn’t only melodramatic, it was corny.” She shook her head, held high. “I’m disappointed in you, Nero. I thought you were better than that.”
I think what finally made him take the plunge was her calling him Nero. Up to then he had been torn. It’s true that his telling Andy he hoped it would be only a matter of hours had been a commitment of a sort, and God knows he needed Andy, and the law trampling over him had made bruises, especially Lieutenant Noonan, but up to that point his desire to get back home had kept him from actually making the dive. I knew him well, and I had seen the signs. But this disdainful female stranger calling him Nero was too much, and he took off.
He came up out of the chair and was erect. “I am not comfortable,” he told Joseph G. stiffly, “sitting here in your house with you standing. Mr. Krasicki has engaged me to get him cleared and I intend to do it. It would be foolhardy to assume that you would welcome a thorn for the sake of such abstractions as justice or truth, since that would make you a rarity almost unknown, but you have a right to be asked. May I stay here, with Mr. Goodwin, and talk with you and your family and servants, until I am either satisfied that Mr. Krasicki is guilty or am equipped to satisfy others that he isn’t?”
Sybil, though still scornful, nodded approvingly. “That’s more like it,” she declared. “That rolled.”