“No, go on. Step on it. I feel fine.”
XI
At noon the next day, Saturday, I was getting fed up with all the jabber because I had a question or two I wanted to ask myself. Cramer had come to Nero Wolfe’s office prepared to attack from all sides at once, bringing not only Sergeant Purley Stebbins but also a gang of civilians consisting of Helen Vardis, Joe Groll, and Conroy Blaney. Blaney had not been let in. On that Wolfe would not budge. Blaney was not to enter his house. The others had all been admitted and were now distributed around the office, with Cramer, of course, in the red leather chair. For over half an hour he and Wolfe had been closer to getting locked in a death grip than I had ever seen them before.
Wolfe was speaking. “Then arrest me,” he said. “Shut up, get a warrant, and arrest me.”
Cramer, having said about all an inspector could say, merely glared.
“Wording the charge would be difficult,” Wolfe murmured. When he was maddest he murmured. “I have not withheld evidence, or obstructed justice, or shielded the guilty. I thought it possible that Mrs. Poor, confronted suddenly with that evidence, would collapse and confess.”
“Nuts,” Cramer said wearily. “How about confronting me with the evidence? Instead of evidence, what you confront me with is another corpse. And I know” — he tapped the chair arm with a stiff finger — “exactly why. The only evidence you had that was worth a damn was that photograph of Arthur Howell. If you had turned it over to me—”
“Nonsense. You already had a photograph of Arthur Howell. Several of them. The Beck Products Corporation people gave them to you on Thursday. So they told Saul Panzer. What good would one more do you?”
“Okay.” Cramer was in a losing fight and knew it. “But I didn’t know that Howell had come to see you on Tuesday with Mrs. Poor, passing himself off as her husband. Dressed in the same kind of suit and shirt and tie that Poor was wearing that day. Only you and Goodwin knew that.”
“I knew it. Mr. Goodwin didn’t. He thought it was a photograph of Mr. Poor.”