She was gawking. “Why on earth would I think he had planted the bomb?”
“I have no idea. As I said, I’m groping. One advantage of that assumption would be that you have confessed to a hatred so overpowering that surely it might have impelled you to kill if and when you identified its object. It is Mr. Cramer, not I, who is deploying the hosts of justice in this enterprise, but no doubt two or three men are calling on your friends and acquaintances to learn if you have ever hinted a suspicion of Leo Heller in connection with the hospital disaster. Also they are probably asking whether you had any grudge against the hospital that might have provoked you to plant the bomb yourself.”
“My God!” A muscle at the side of her neck was twitching. “Me? Is that what it’s like?”
“It is indeed. That wouldn’t be incongruous. Your proclaimed abhorrence of the perpetrator could be simply the screeching of your remorse.”
“Well, it isn’t.” Suddenly she was out of her chair, and a bound took her to Wolfe’s desk, and her palms did a tattoo on the desk as she leaned forward at him. “Don’t you dare say a thing like that! The six people I cared for most in the world — they all died that night! How would you feel?” More tattoo. “How would anybody feel?”
I was up and at her elbow, but no bodily discipline was required. She straightened and for a moment stood trembling all over, then got her control back and went to her chair and sat. “I’m sorry,” she said in a tight little voice.
“You should be,” Wolfe said grimly. A woman cutting loose is always too much for him. “Pounding the top of my desk settles nothing. What were the names of the six people you cared for most in the world, who died?”
She told him, and he wanted to know more about them. I was beginning to suspect that actually he had no more of a lead than I did, that he had given Cramer a runaround to jostle him loose from the NW he had fixed on, and that, having impulsively impounded the five hundred bucks, he had decided to spend the night trying to earn it. The line he now took with Susan Maturo bore me out. It was merely the old grab-bag game — keep her talking, about anything and anybody, in the hope that she would spill something that would faintly resemble a straw. I had known Wolfe, when the pickings had been extremely slim, to play that game for hours on end.
He was still at it with Susan Maturo when an individual entered with a message for Cramer which he delivered in a whisper. Cramer got up and started for the door, then thought better of it and turned.
“You might as well be in on this,” he told Wolfe. “They’ve got Mrs. Tillotson, and she’s here.”