“Something.”
“Well, that was it all right. Poor smoked about a box every two days, boxes of twenty-five. He bought them, ten boxes at a time, from a place on Varick Street near his office and factory. There were four unopened boxes in his apartment and they’re okay. The one he started on when he got home Tuesday night — the twenty-four left in it are all loaded. Any one of them would have killed him two seconds after he lit it.”
Wolfe muttered, “That’s hard to believe — inside a cigar—”
“Right. I thought so too. The firm of Blaney and Poor has been making trick cigars for years, but they’re harmless, all they do is phut and make you jump. What’s in these twenty-four is anything but harmless — a special kind of instantaneous fuse the size of an ordinary thread, and a very special explosive capsule that was invented during the war and is still on the secret list. Even this is confidential, it’s made by the Beck Products Corporation, and their men and the FBI are raising hell trying to find out how this murderer got hold of them. That’s not for publication.”
“I’m not a publisher.”
“Okay.” Cramer got a cigar from his pocket, gazed at it with an attention that was not his habit, bit off an end, and lit it. Wolfe and I watched the operation, which we had both seen Cramer perform at least two hundred times, as if there was something very interesting about it.
“Of course,” Wolfe remarked, “the Alta Vista people deny all knowledge.”
“Sure. We let them analyze five of the twenty-four, after removing the fuses and capsules, and they say the fillers are theirs but the wrappers are not. They say whoever sliced them open and inserted the things and re wrapped them was an expert, and anyhow, anybody could see that.” Cramer sank his teeth deeper in his cigar. “Now then. There are six people connected with Blaney and Poor who are good at making trick cigars. Four of them are mixed up in this. Helen Vardis is one of their most highly skilled workers. Joe Groll is the foreman and can do anything. Blaney is the best of all, he shows them how. And Mrs. Poor worked there for four years when she was Martha Davis, up to two years ago when she married Poor.”
Wolfe shuddered. “Six people good at making trick cigars. Couldn’t the murder have been a joint enterprise? Couldn’t you convict all of them?”
“I don’t appreciate jokes about murder,” Cramer said morosely. “I wish I could. It’s a defect of character. As for getting the loaded cigars into Poor’s apartment, that also is wide open. He always had them delivered to his office, and the package would lie around there, sometimes as long as two or three days, until he took it home. So anybody might have substituted the loaded box. But now about Mrs. Poor. How do you like this? Naturally we gave the cigars and the box everything we had. It was a very neat job. But underneath the cigars we found two human hairs, one five inches long and one six and a half inches. We have compared them with hairs taken from various heads. Those two came from the head of Mrs. Poor. Unquestionably. So I think I’ll charge her.”