Cramer shook his head. “This is just a lot of junk. There may be one or two items worth something. I’ve followed up your line, that it’s sure to be hooked up with the Frosts, on account of the way McNair started his story to you. The Frosts and this fellow Gebert are being investigated from every angle, up, down, and across. But there’s two other bare possibilities I don’t like to lose sight of. First, suicide. Second, this woman, this Countess von Rantz-Deichen, that’s been after McNair lately. There’s a chance—”
“Tommyrot!” Wolfe was explosive. “Excuse me, Mr. Cramer. I am in no mood for fantasy. Get on.”
“Okay.” Cramer grunted. “Sore, huh? Okay. Fantasy. Notwithstanding, I’ll leave two men on the Countess.” He was shuffling through the papers from the briefcase. “First for the bottle of aspirin. There were fourteen tablets in it. Twelve of them were perfectly all right. The other two consisted of potassium cyanide tablets, approximately five grains each, with a thin coating of aspirin on the outside, apparently put on as a dry dust and carefully tapped down all over. The chemist says the coating was put on skillfully and thoroughly, so there would have been no cyanide taste for the few seconds before the tablet was swallowed. There was no cyanide smell, the bitter almond smell, in the bottle, but of course it was bone dry.”
Wolfe muttered, “And yet you talk of suicide.”
“I said bare possibility. Okay, forget it. The preliminary on the autopsy says cyanide of potassium, but they can’t tell whether the tablets he took were loaded or not, because that stuff evaporates fast as soon as it’s moist. I don’t suppose he’s worrying much about whether it was one or two tablets, so I’m not either. Next, who put the phonies in with the aspirins? Or anyway, who had a chance to? I’ve had three good men on that, and they’re still on it. The answer so far is, most anyone. For the past week and more McNair has been taking aspirin the way a chicken takes corn. There has been a bottle either on his desk or in a drawer all the time. There’s none there now, so when he went out yesterday he must have stuck it in his pocket. Thirty-six are gone from that fifty, and if you figure he took twelve a day that would mean that bottle has been in use three days, and in that time dozens of people have been in and out of his office where the bottle was kept. Of course all the Frosts have, and this Gebert. By the way—” Cramer thumbed to find a paper and stopped at one — “what’s a camal... camallot doo something in French?”
Wolfe nodded. “ Camelot du roi. A member of a Parisian royalist political gang.”
“Oh. Gebert used to be one. I cabled Paris last night and had one back this morning. Gebert was one of those. He has been around New York now over three years, and we’re after him. The preliminary reports I’ve had are vague. N.V.M.S. Paris says so too.”
Wolfe lifted a brow. “N.V.M.S.”
I told him, “Police gibberish. No visible means of subsistence. Bonton for bum.”
Wolfe sighed. Cramer went on, “We’re doing all the routine. Fingerprints on the bottle, on the drawers of McNair’s desk and so on. Purchases of potassium cyanide—”