“But why a woman? Why not a man?”
“Oh, that.” Wolfe picked up the glass and drained it with more deliberation than usual, wiped his lips with extra care, and put the glass down. He was having a swell time. “I told you in my dining room” — he pointed a finger — “that something had occurred to me and I wanted to consider it. Later I would have been glad to tell you about it if you had not acted so irresponsibly and spitefully in sealing up this office. That made me doubt if you were capable of proceeding properly on any suggestion from me, so I decided to proceed myself. What had occurred to me was simply this: that Miss Brown had told Mr. Goodwin that she wouldn’t have recognized ‘him’ if he hadn’t had a hat on. She used the masculine pronoun, naturally, throughout that conversation, because it had been a man who had called at Doris Hatten’s apartment that October day, and he was fixed in her mind as a man. But it was in my plant rooms that she had seen him that afternoon, and no man wore his hat up there. The men left their hats downstairs. Besides, I was there and saw them. But nearly all the women had hats on.” Wolfe upturned a palm. “So it was a woman.”
Cramer eyed him. “I don’t believe it,” he said flatly.
“You have a record of Mr. Goodwin’s report of that conversation. Consult it.”
“I still wouldn’t believe it.”
“There were other little items.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “For example: the strangler of Doris Hatten had a key to the door. But surely the provider, who had so carefully avoided revealment, would not have marched in at an unexpected hour to risk encountering strangers. And who so likely to have found an opportunity, or contrived one, to secure a duplicate key as the provider’s jealous wife?”
“Talk all day. I still don’t believe it.”
Well, I thought to myself, observing Wolfe’s smirk and for once completely approving of it, Cramer the office-sealer has his choice of believing it or not and what the hell.
As for me, I had no choice.