“I’ll give you an explanation,” Wolfe told him, “when I have one. I’m going to sit here and work and must not be disturbed. It may take ten minutes; it may take ten hours. Go in there; stay here; go anywhere, but let me alone.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes, and his lips started moving. Cramer slid farther back in his chair, crossed his legs, got out a cigar and sank his teeth in it.
Searching the office was quite different from searching the front room. In the first place, it was a lot bigger. Also, there were a lot more places where you could hide a cushion — files, drawers, bookshelves, magazine and newspaper racks, cabinets, miscellaneous. It had a high ceiling, and the steps had to be used for all the upper shelves and file and cabinet compartments. None of them could be ruled out, because the shelves were deep, and it was no trivial job to pull out all those books and slide them back again. Fritz went at it with his usual deliberate thoroughness, and I couldn’t have been called a whirlwind either because I was using my brain along with my hands, trying to work out how and why the fact of a missing cushion crashed into the structure like a comet shattering a world. Now and then a glance at Wolfe showed me that he was still working, his lips moving and his eyes shut.
Half an hour or so had passed, maybe a little more, when I heard him let out a grunt. I nearly toppled off the steps, turning to look at him. He was in motion. He picked up his wastebasket, which was kept at the far corner of his desk, held it so that the light shone directly into it, inspected it, shook his head, put it down again, and began opening the drawers of his desk, all the way out, and inspecting their interiors, starting with the top one on the right side. The first two, the one at the top and the one in the middle, apparently didn’t get him anything, but when he yanked out the double-depth one at the bottom as far as it would go, he looked in, bent over closer to see better, stuck a hand in and seemed to be poking around, closed the drawer, got himself erect, and announced:
“I’ve found it.”
In those three little words there was at least two tons of self-satisfaction and smirk.
We all goggled at him.
He looked at me. “Archie. Get down off that thing and don’t fall. Look in your desk and see if one of my guns has been fired.”
I stepped down and went and opened the armament drawer. The first one I picked up was innocent. I tried the second with a sniff and a look and reported, “Yes, sir. There were six cartridges and now there are five. Same as the cushions. The shell is here.”
“Tchah! The confounded ass! Tell Miss Geer and Mr. Jensen that they may come in here if they care to hear what happened, or they may go home or anywhere else. We don’t need them. Take Mr. Stebbins upstairs with you and bring Mr. Hackett down here. Use caution and search him with great care. He is an extremely dangerous man and an unsurpassable idiot.”