Wolfe grunted. “You were all staring at it? For twelve minutes straight?”
“She didn’t say we were staring at it,” Leddegard blurted offensively.
“Pfui.” Wolfe was disgusted. “A lummox could have managed it. Reaching for something — a roll, a cocktail glass — dropping the hand onto the box, checking glances while withdrawing the hand, changing capsules beneath the table, returning the box with another casual unnoticeable gesture. I would undertake it myself with thin inducement, and I’m not Houdini.”
“Tell me something,” Leddegard demanded. “I may be thick, but why did it have to be done at the restaurant? Why not before?”
Wolfe nodded. “That’s not excluded, certainly. You five people were not the only ones intimate enough with Arthur Rackell to know about his pink vitamin capsules and that he took three a day, one before each meal. Nor did you have a monopoly of opportunity. However—” His glance went left. “Mrs. Rackell, will you repeat what you told me this afternoon? About Saturday evening?”
She had been keeping her eyes at Wolfe but now moved her head to take the others in. Judging from her expression as she went down the line, apparently she was convinced not that one of them was a Commie and a murderer, but that they all were — excluding her husband, of course.
She returned to Wolfe. “My husband and Arthur had spent the afternoon getting an important shipment released, and got home a little before six. They went to their rooms to take a shower and change. While Arthur was in the shower my cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Kremp, went to his room to get things out for him, shirt and socks and underwear — she’s like that; she’s been doing it for years. The articles he had taken from his pockets were on the bureau, and she looked in the pillbox and saw it was empty, and she got three capsules from the bottle in a drawer — it held a hundred and was half full — and put them in the box. She did that too, every day. She is a competent woman, but she’s extremely sentimental.”
“And she had no reason,” Wolfe inquired, “for wishing your nephew dead?”
“Certainly not!”
“She has of course told the police?”