Wolfe raised a finger, and suddenly bent in to aim straight at Jean. “I am fairly warning you. It is nothing against you that you told me you last saw Paul Nieder over a year ago. Nobody likes to be involved in disagreeable matters. But now be careful. If, after what I have just said, you persist in lying, you can’t blame us if we surmise — look at his face, Mr. Cramer! Do you see his face?”
Wolfe let the silence work, and the pairs of eyes all fixed on Jean’s face, with his finger still nailing the target, for a full five seconds, and then suddenly snapped, like the snap of a whip.
“When and where did you last see Paul Nieder, Mr. Daumery?”
It was devilish. No man could have stood up under it completely whole. What was Jean going to do about his face? What was he going to say?
He said nothing.
Wolfe leaned back and let his eyes open to more than slits. “It offers,” he said like a lecturer, “a remarkable field for speculation. What, for instance, made you suspect that his suicide was a fake? Possibly you were as well acquainted with his character as he was with yours, and you knew it was extremely improbable that he could jump into a geyser with no clothes on. Indeed, there are few men who could. In any case, he was right about you; you did not forget or abandon your intention. It would have been dangerous to hire someone to find him, and if you undertook it yourself it might have taken years. You decided to coax him out. You went to Florida on a fishing trip with your nephew, and you arranged with him to stage a drowning for you. Another speculation: how much did you tell him? Did you have to let him in—”
“No!”
It was Bernard. He was out of his chair, but not to confront his uncle or to bear down on Wolfe. He had turned to where Cynthia’s new position had put her in his rear, and his explosion was for her.
“Get this straight, Cynthia!” he told her. “I’m not trying any scuttle or any sneak, and whatever he has done that’s up to him with no pushes from me, but this is my part and you’ve got to have it straight!” He wheeled to his uncle. “You told me that someone had it in for you and your life was in danger. You said nothing about Paul Nieder, and of course I thought he was dead. You said that your supposed death would force this person to take certain steps and that the situation would soon be changed so that you could reappear. For all I know, that’s who it really was. I don’t know.” He turned back to Cynthia. “I don’t know anything, except that I’m damned if I’m going to have you listen to insinuations that I’m mixed up in this.”
“Shut up and sit down,” his uncle told him.