“And Thursday afternoon Mr. Irby returned with his client, Mr. Hagh, who had flown from Venezuela. I no longer needed him or his client as bait for you, but I invited them to join us that evening, provided they came as observers and not participants. As you know, they were here. What is it, Archie?”
“I’ll tend to me,” I told him. I had left my chair and was moving. I won’t say I had caught up with him, but at least I could see his dust, and I admit that I had also seen Saul Panzer, not with any flourish, take a gun from his pocket and rest it on his thigh. I did not display a gun. I merely circled around the end of the couch and stopped, and stood less than arm’s length northwest of Eric Hagh’s right shoulder. He didn’t turn his head, but he knew I was there. His eyes were glued to Wolfe.
“Okay,” I told Wolfe. “I’m not warped enough to break his neck. How come?”
Satisfied that I wasn’t going to throw a tantrum, he returned to the Softdown quintet. “When you left here Thursday evening, I had nothing new about you with regard to the murder of Miss Eads, but it seemed more than ever doubtful, under my hypothesis, that a motive could be found for any of you to kill Mrs. Fomos. As I said, I told Mr. Goodwin that I thought I knew who had committed the murders, but I also told him that there was a contradiction that had to be solved, and for that purpose I asked him to have Mrs. Jaffee here at eleven o’clock the next morning.”
He turned left. “What was the contradiction, Mr. Cramer?”
Cramer shook his head. “I’m not clear up with you. I suppose the point was that this Eric Hagh is not Hagh, he’s a ringer, from what you said about him killing Mrs. Fomos because he knew she couldn’t recognize him, but then where were you?”
“I was facing a contradiction.”
“What?”
“You should know. Among the items furnished by me to Lieutenant Rowcliff on Friday was a carbon copy of a report, typed by Mr. Goodwin, of his conversation with Mrs. Jaffee on Wednesday at her apartment. Surely you have read it, and this is an excerpt from it. I quote: ‘That was the last letter I ever got from Pris. The very last. Maybe I still have it — I remember she enclosed a picture of him.’
“Mrs. Jaffee said that to Mr. Goodwin. It contradicted my hypothesis that the man calling himself Eric Hagh was an impostor; for if Mrs. Jaffee had seen a picture of Hagh, why didn’t she denounce this man when she saw him here? It was to get an answer to that question that I asked Mr. Goodwin to have her here Friday morning.”