“You haven’t got any yet.”
“No.”
I grinned. “Anyway, you’re working in a lot of nice complications. I’ll have to tell Wolfe about it; I hope to God it don’t bore him. Why don’t you just decide to believe it was suicide after all, and let it go at that?”
“Nothing doing. Especially since Hibbard disappeared. And even if I wanted to, George Pratt and that bunch wouldn’t let me. They got those warnings. I don’t blame them. Those things sound like business to me, even if they are dolled up. I suppose you’ve read them.”
I nodded. He stuck his paw in his breast pocket and pulled out some papers and began looking through them. He said, “I’m a damn fool. I carry copies of them around with me, because I can’t get rid of a hunch that there’s a clue in them somewhere, some kind of a clue, if I could find it. Listen to this one, the one he sent last Friday, three days after Hibbard disappeared:
One. Two. Three.
Ye cannot see what I see:
His bloody head, his misery, his eyes
Dead but for terror and the wretched hope
That this last blow, this finis, will not fall.