That got a reaction from practically everybody. The loudest, from Purley Stebbins, reached me through the others from twenty feet off. “Jesus! Can you beat him?”
Wolfe sat and let them react. In a moment he put up a hand.
“That’s a felony, I know, Mr. Archer. You can decide what to do about it at your leisure, when it’s all over. Your decision may be influenced by the fact that if it hadn’t been committed the killer of Mr. Rony wouldn’t have been caught.”
He took in the audience, now quiet again. “All they took from him was the money in his wallet. That was necessary in order to validate it as a holdup — and by the way, the money has been spent in my investigation of his death, which I think he would regard as fitting. But Mr. Goodwin did something else. He found on Mr. Rony the object he had been guarding, and took some photographs of it, not taking the object itself. It was a membership card, in the name of William Reynolds, in the American Communist party.”
“Then I was right!” Sperling was so excited and triumphant that he yelled it. “I was right all the time!” He glared indignantly, sputtering. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t—”
“You were as wrong,” Wolfe said rudely, “as a man can get. You may be a good businessman, Mr. Sperling, but you had better leave the exposure of disguised Communists to competent persons. It’s a task for which you are disqualified by mental astigmatism.”
“But,” Sperling insisted, “you admit he had a membership card—”
“I don’t admit it, I announce it. But it would have been witless to assume that William Reynolds was necessarily Louis Rony. In fact, I had knowledge of Rony that made it unlikely. Anyway, we have the testimony of three persons that the card was in his possession — you’ll find that a help in the courtroom, Mr. Archer. So at the time the identity of William Reynolds — whether it was Mr. Rony or another person — was an open question.”
Wolfe turned a hand up. “But twenty-four hours later it was no longer open. Whoever William Reynolds was, almost certainly he wasn’t Louis Rony. Not only that, it was a workable assumption that he had murdered Rony, since it was better than a conjecture that he had dragged the body behind a bush in order to search it, had found the membership card, and had taken it. I made that assumption, tentatively. Then the next day, Tuesday, I was carried a step further by the news that it was my car that had killed Rony. So if William Reynolds had murdered Rony and taken the card, he was one of the people there present. One of those now in this room.”
A murmur went around, but only a murmur.