“That’s right. Please be seated.”
“Where did you get her?”
“That can wait. No interruptions and no demands. Confound it, sit down!”
Cramer went and lowered himself onto the red leather chair. Purley Stebbins got one of the yellow ones and planted it behind the row, between Chaffee and Aland.
Wolfe regarded the quartet. “I was about to say, gentlemen, that it was something the dog did that pointed to the murderer for me. But before—”
“What did it do?” Cramer barked.
“You know all about it,” Wolfe told him coldly. “Mr. Goodwin related it to you exactly as it happened. If you interrupt again, by heaven, you can take them all down to your quarters, not including the dog, and stew it out yourself.”
He went back to the four. “But before I come to that, another thing or two. I offer no comment on your guile with Mr. Meegan. You were all friends of Miss Jones’s, having, I suppose, enjoyed various degrees of intimacy with her, and you refused to disclose her to a husband whom she had abandoned and professed to fear. I will even concede that there was a flavor of gallantry in your conduct. But when Mr. Kampf was murdered and the police swarmed in, it was idiotic to try to keep her out of it. They were sure to get to her. I got to her first only because of Mr. Goodwin’s admirable enterprise and characteristic luck.”
He shook his head at them. “It was also idiotic of you to assume that Mr. Goodwin was a police officer, and admit him and answer his questions, merely because he had been present during the abortive experiment with the dog. You should have asked to see his credentials. None of you had any idea who he was. Even Mr. Meegan, who had seen him in this office in the morning, was bamboozled. I mention this to anticipate any possible official complaint that Mr. Goodwin impersonated an officer. You know he didn’t. He merely took advantage of your unwarranted assumption.”
He shifted in his chair. “Another thing. Yesterday morning Mr. Meegan called here by appointment to ask me to do a job for him. With his first words I gathered that it was something about his wife, and I don’t take that kind of work, and I was brusque with him. He was offended. He rushed out in a temper, getting his hat and raincoat from the rack in the hall, and he took Mr. Goodwin’s coat instead of his own. Late in the afternoon Mr. Goodwin went to Arbor Street, with the coat that had been left in error, to exchange it. He saw that in front of number twenty-nine there were collected two police cars, a policeman on post, some people, and a dog. He decided to postpone his errand and went on by, after a brief halt during which he patted the dog. He walked home, and had gone nearly two miles when he discovered that the dog was following him. He brought the dog in a cab the rest of the way, to this house and this room.”