They didn’t sit. Harvey stood gazing at me as if there were something about me he didn’t like, and Stevens advanced to the end of Wolfe’s desk and announced, “We don’t like the wording. We want it to read this way:
“As loyal American citizens, devoted to the public welfare and the ideals of true democracy, we believe that all lawbreakers should be punished, regardless of their political affiliations. Therefore, in the interest of justice, we have written our names on the above photograph, and we hereby attest that the man in that photograph is known to us as William Reynolds, and that to our knowledge he has been for eight years, until today, a member of the Communist Party of the USA. Upon learning that he was to be charged with murder, the Communist Party’s Executive Committee immediately expelled him.”
My opinion of Stevens went up a notch, technically. With nothing to refer to, not even a cuff, he rattled that off as if he had known it by heart for years.
Wolfe lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “If you like it better with all that folderol. Do you want Mr. Goodwin to type it, or will you write it by hand?”
I was just as well pleased that he preferred to use his pen. It would have been an honor to type such a patriotic paragraph, but I wouldn’t put anything beneath a Commie, and what if one of them happened to take a notion to pull the letter from a friend out of his pocket and compare the typing? Even with the naked eye it would have been easy to spot the n slightly off line and the faint defect in the w. So I gladly let Stevens sit at my desk to write it. He did so, and signed it, and wrote his name on the picture. Then Harvey did likewise. Wolfe and I signed as witnesses, after Wolfe had read it over. Having the tube of paste at hand, as I have said, he proceeded to attach the photograph to the top of the sheet.
“May I see it a moment?” Stevens asked.
Wolfe handed it to him.
“There’s a point,” Stevens said. “We can’t let you have this without some kind of guarantee that Reynolds will be locked up tonight. You said before midnight.”
“That’s right. He will be.”
“You can have this as soon as he is.”