I took the knife to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, rubbed the blood off with a piece of gauze, and wiped it. Through the open door I couldn’t hear any talking. I went back.
“Now,” Wolfe instructed me, “grip the handle firmly in your right hand. Come towards the desk, so Mrs. Chapin can see you better; turn your back. So. Elevate your arm and pull the knife across your neck; kindly be sure to use the back of the blade, not to carry the demonstration too far. You noted the length and the position of the cuts on Mrs. Chapin? Duplicate them on yourself.—Yes. Yes, quite good. A little higher for that one. Another, somewhat lower. Confound you, be careful. That will do.—You see, Mrs. Chapin? He did it quite neatly, don’t you think? I am not insulting your intelligence by hinting that you expected us to think the wounds could not have been self-inflicted in the position you chose for them. More likely, you selected it purely as a matter of precaution, knowing that the front, the neighborhood of the anterior jugular...”
He stopped, because he had no one to talk to except me. When I turned around after my demonstration she was already getting up from her chair, holding her head stiff and a clamp on her mouth. Without a word, without bothering to make any passes at him with her little gray glass eyes, she just got up and went; and he paid no attention, he went on with his speech until she had opened the office door and was through it. I noticed she was leaving her knife, but thought we might as well have it in our collection of odds and ends. Then all of a sudden I jumped for the hall.
“Hey, lady, wait a minute! Your fur!”
I got it from Fritz and caught her at the front door and put it around her. Pitney Scott got out of his cab and came over to help her down the stoop, and I went back in.
Wolfe was glancing through a letter from Hoehn and Company that had come in the morning mail. When he had finished he put it under a paperweight — a piece of petrified wood that had once been used to bust a guy’s skull — and said:
“The things a woman will think of are beyond belief. I knew a woman once in Hungary whose husband had frequent headaches. It was her custom to relieve them by the devoted application of cold compresses. It occurred to her one day to stir into the water with which she wetted the compresses a large quantity of penetrating poison which she had herself distilled from an herb. The result was gratifying to her. The man on whom she tried the experiment was myself. The woman—”
He was just trying to keep me from annoying him about business. I cut in. “Yeah. I know. The woman was a witch you had caught riding around in the curl of a pig’s tail. In spite of all that, it’s time for me to brush up a little on this case we’ve got. You can give me a shove by explaining in long words how you knew Dora Chapin did her own manicuring.”
Wolfe shook his head. “That would not be a shove, Archie; it would be a laborious and sustained propulsion. I shall not undertake it. I remind you merely: I have read all of Paul Chapin’s novels. In two of them Dora Chapin is a character. He of course appears in all. The woman who married Dr. Burton, Paul Chapin’s unattainable, seems to be in four out of five; I cannot discover her in the latest one. Read the books, and I shall be more inclined to discuss the conclusions they have led me to. But even then, of course, I would not attempt to place plain to your eyes the sights my own have discerned. God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.”
Fritz came to the door and said lunch was ready.