Wolfe nodded. “So you did. Go on.”
“And I went, that’s all. I had some money saved, and I could borrow some, to pay him. But while I was sitting there in the waiting room, with that man and woman there, I suddenly thought I must be crazy, I must have got so bitter and vindictive I didn’t realize what I was doing, and I wanted to think about it, and I got up and went. Going down in the elevator I felt as if a crisis had passed — that’s a feeling a nurse often has about other people — and then as I left the elevator I heard the names Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, and the idea came to me, why not get them to find him? So I spoke to Mr. Goodwin, and there I was again, but I couldn’t make myself tell him about it, so I just told him I wanted to see Nero Wolfe to ask his advice, and he said he would try to arrange it, and he would phone me or I could phone him.”
She fluttered a hand. “That’s how it was.”
Wolfe regarded her. “It’s not incoherent, but neither is it sapient. Do you consider yourself an intelligent woman?”
“Why — yes. Enough to get along. I’m a good nurse, and a good nurse has to be intelligent.”
“Yet you thought that quack could expose the man who planted the bomb in the hospital by his hocus-pocus?”
“I thought he did it scientifically. I knew he had a great reputation, just as you have.”
“Good heavens.” Wolfe opened his eyes wide at her. “It is indeed a bubble, as Jacques said. What were you going to ask my advice about?”
“Whether you thought there was any chance — whether you thought the police were going to find him.”
Wolfe’s eyes were back to normal, half shut again. “This performance I’m engaged in, Miss Maturo — this inquisition of a person involved by circumstance in a murder — is a hubbub in a jungle, at least in its preliminary stage. Blind, I grope, and proceed by feel. You say you never saw Mr. Heller, but you can’t prove it. I am free to assume that you had seen him, not at his office, and talked with him; that you were convinced, no matter how, that he had planted the bomb in the hospital and caused the holocaust; and that, moved by an obsessive rancor, you went to his place and killed him. One ad—”