“Nuts,” he said scornfully.
“I might as well have,” I declared.
The doorbell rang. I reached for the switch and turned on the stoop light and looked through the panel of one-way glass. It was the first consignment of cops.
III
In my opinion Inspector Cramer made a mistake. Opinion, hell, of course he did. It is true that in a room where a murder has occurred the city scientists — measurers, sniffers, print-takers, specialists, photographers — may shoot the works, and they do. But except in rare circumstances the job shouldn’t take all week, and in the case of our office a couple of hours should have been ample. In fact, it was. By eight o’clock the scientists were through. But Cramer, like a sap, gave the order to seal it up until further notice, in Wolfe’s hearing. He knew damn well that Wolfe spent as least three hundred evenings a year in there, in the only chair and under the only light that he really liked, and that was why he did it. It was a mistake. If he hadn’t made it, Wolfe might have called his attention to a certain fact as soon as Wolfe saw it himself, and Cramer would have been saved a lot of trouble.
The two of them got the fact at the same time, from me. We were in the dining room — this was shortly after the scientists had got busy in the office, and the guests, under guard, had been shunted to the front room — and I was relating my conversation with Cynthia Brown. They wanted all of it, or Cramer did rather, and they got it. Whatever else my years as Wolfe’s assistant may have done for me or to me, they have practically turned me into a tape recorder, and Wolfe and Cramer didn’t get a rewrite of that conversation, they got the real thing, word for word. They also got the rest of my afternoon, complete. When I finished, Cramer had a slew of questions, but Wolfe not a one. Maybe he had already focused on the fact above referred to, but neither Cramer nor I had. The shorthand dick seated at one end of the dining table had the fact too, in his notebook along with the rest of it, but he wasn’t supposed to focus.
Cramer called a recess on the questions to take steps. He called men in and gave orders. Colonel Brown was to be photographed and fingerprinted and headquarters records were to be checked for him and Cynthia. The file on the murder of Doris Hatten was to be brought to him at once. The lab reports were to be rushed. Saul Panzer and Fritz Brenner were to be brought in.
They came. Fritz stood like a soldier at attention, grim and grave. Saul, only five feet seven, with the sharpest eyes and one of the biggest noses I have ever seen, in his unpressed brown suit, and his necktie crooked — he stood like Saul, not slouching and not stiff. He would stand like that if he were being awarded the Medal of Honor or if he were in front of a firing squad.
Of course Cramer knew both of them. He picked on Saul. “You and Fritz were in the hall all afternoon?”
Saul nodded. “The hall and the front room, yes.”