“The devil you do. Who told you?”
“Pit. Pitney Scott.”
I gritted my teeth and wanted to bite myself. Another chance underplayed, and all because I had believed the cripple’s warning. Wolfe was saying:
“Then you did keep a bridge open.”
“No. He opened it himself. The third day I was around there I met him face to face by bad luck, and of course he recognized me.” Hibbard suddenly stopped, and turned a little pale. “By heaven — ha, there goes another illusion — I thought Pit...”
“Quite properly, Mr. Hibbard. Keep your illusion; Mr. Scott has told us nothing; it was Mr. Goodwin’s acuteness of observation, and my feeling for phenomena, that uncovered you.—But to resume: if you knew that Mr. Chapin had sent those verses, falsely boasting of murdering you, it is hard to see how you could keep your respect for him as an assassin. If you knew one of his murders, the latest one, to be nothing but rodomontade...”
Hibbard nodded. “You make a logical point, certainly. But logic has nothing to do with it. I am not engaged in developing a scientific thesis. There are twenty-five years behind this... and Bill Harrison, Gene Dreyer... and Paul that day in the courtroom... I was there, to testify to the psychological value of his book... It was on the day that Pit Scott showed me those verses about me sucking air in through my blood that I discovered that I wanted to kill Paul, and if I wanted it I intended it, or what the devil was I doing there?”
Wolfe sighed. “It is a pity. The back-seat driving of the less charitable emotions often makes me wonder that the brain does not desert the wheel entirely, in righteous exasperation. Not to mention their violent and senseless oscillations. Mr. Hibbard. Three weeks ago you were filled with horrified aversion at the thought of engaging me to arrange that Mr. Chapin should account legally for his crimes; today you are determined to kill him yourself. You do intend to kill him?”
“I think so.” The psychological runt put his whiskey glass on the desk. “That doesn’t mean that I will. I don’t know. I intend to.”
“You are armed? You have a weapon?”