Wolfe’s lips were pursed. “I won’t commit myself on that, Mr. Ennis. But you have by no means demonstrated that it is fatuous to suppose you might have killed Heller. What if he devised a formula from the data you supplied, discovered the trick that would transform your faulty contraption into a whiz, as you expressed it, and refused to divulge it except on intolerable terms? That would be a magnificent motive for murder.”
“It sure would,” Ennis agreed without reservation. “I would have killed him with pleasure.” He leaned forward and was suddenly intense and in dead earnest. “Look. I’m headed for the top. I’ve got what I need in here” — he tapped his forehead — “and nothing and nobody is going to stop me. If Heller had done what you said, I might have killed him, I don’t deny it; but he didn’t.” He jerked to Cramer. “And I’m glad of a chance to tell you what I’ve told those bozos that have been grilling me. I want to go through Heller’s papers to see if I can find the formula he worked up for me. Maybe I can’t recognize it, and if I do I doubt if I can figure it out, but I want to look for it, and not next year either.”
“We’re doing the looking,” Cramer said dryly. “If we find anything that can be identified as relating to you, you’ll see it, and eventually you may get it.”
“I don’t want it eventually, I want it now. Do you know how long I’ve been working on that thing? Four years! It’s mine, you understand that, it’s mine!” He was getting upset.
“Calm down, bud,” Cramer advised him. “We’re right with you in seeing to it that you get what’s yours.”
“Meanwhile,” Wolfe said, “there’s a point or two. When you entered that building this morning, why did you stop and gape at Mr. Goodwin and Miss Maturo?”
Ennis’s chin went up. “Who says I did?”
“I do, on information. Archie. Did he?”
“Yes,” I stated. “Rudely.”
“Well,” Ennis told Wolfe, “he’s bigger than I am. Maybe I did, at that.”