“See if they’re gone and bolt the door. Send Saul home and tell him to come at nine in the morning. Tell Fritz I want beer.”
I obeyed. The hall and front room were uninhabited. Saul, whom I found in the kitchen with Fritz, said he had made a complete tour upstairs and everything was in order. I stayed for a little chat with him while Fritz took a tray to the dining room. When I left him and went back Wolfe, removing the cap from a bottle of beer with the opener Fritz had brought on the tray, was making a face, which I understood. The opener he always used, a gold item that a satisfied client had given him years ago, was in the drawer of his desk in the office. I sat and watched him pour beer.
“This isn’t a bad room to sit in,” I said brightly.
“Pfui! I want to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“I want your opinion of this. Assume that we accept without reservation the story Miss Brown told you. By the way, do you?”
“In view of what happened, yes.”
“Then assume it. Assume also that the man she had recognized, knowing she had recognized him, followed her downstairs and saw her enter the office; that he surmised that she intended to consult me; that he postponed joining her in the office either because he knew you were in there with her or for some other reason; that he saw you come out and go upstairs; that he took an opportunity to enter the office unobserved, got her off guard, killed her, got out unobserved, and returned upstairs. All of those assumptions seem to be required, unless we discard all that and dig elsewhere.”
“I’ll take it that way.”
“Very well. Then we have significant indications of his character. Consider it. He has killed her and is back upstairs, knowing that she was in the office talking with you for some time. He would like to know what she said to you. Specifically, he would like to know whether she told you about him, and if so how much. Had she or had she not named or described him in his current guise? With that question unanswered, would a man of his character as indicated leave the house? Or would he prefer the challenge and risk of remaining until the body had been discovered, to see what you would do? And I too, of course, after you had talked with me, and the police?”