“You must remember,” I told him, “that I had just dropped in for a shave. I had to show the right amount of intellectual curiosity but I had to be damn careful not to carry it too far. From what Ed said, I gathered that opportunity is fairly wide open, except he excludes himself. As you know, they all keep darting behind that partition for one thing or another. Ed can’t remember who did and who didn’t during that ten or fifteen minutes, and it’s a safe bet that the others can’t remember either. The fact that the cops were interested enough to ask shows that Carl and Tina haven’t got a complete monopoly on it. As Ed remarked, they’ve gotta have evidence, and they’re still looking.”
Wolfe grunted in disgust.
“It also shows,” I went on, “that they haven’t got any real stopper to cork it, like prints from the car or localizing the scissors or anything they found on the corpse. They sure want Carl and Tina, and you know what happens when they get them, but they’re still short on exhibits. If you like your suggestion to keep our guests here until Cramer and Stebbins get their paws on the right guy it might work fine as a long-term policy, but you’re against the idea of women living here, or even a woman, and after a few months it might get on your nerves.”
“It is no good,” Tina said, back to her gasping whisper again. “Just let us go! I beg you, do that! We’ll find our way to the country, we know how. You are wonderful detectives, but it is no good!”
Wolfe ignored her. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and heaved a deep sigh, and from the way his nose began to twitch I knew he was coercing himself into facing the hard fact that he would have to go to work — either that or tell me to call Purley, and that was ruled out of bounds by both his self-respect and his professional vanity. The Vardas family sat gazing at him, not in hope, but not in utter despair either. I guess they had run out of despair long ago and had none left to call on. I watched Wolfe too, his twitching nose until it stopped, and then his lips in their familiar movement, pushed out and then pulled in, out and in again, which meant he had accepted the inevitable and was getting the machinery going. I had seen him like that for an hour at a stretch, but this time it was only minutes.
He sighed again, opened his eyes, and rasped at Tina, “Except for Mr. Fickler, that man questioned you first. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me what he said. What he asked. I want every word.”
I thought Tina did pretty well under the circumstances. Convinced that her goose was cooked and that therefore what Wallen had asked couldn’t affect her fate one way or the other, she tried to play ball anyway. She wrinkled her brow and concentrated, and it looked as if Wolfe got it all out of her. But she couldn’t give him what she didn’t have.
He kept after it. “You are certain he produced no object, showed you no object whatever?”