“Yes.”
“Are you holding Mr. Chisholm for the same reason?”
Chisholm made a noise. Skinner and Hennessy stared. Skinner said, “We’re not holding Mr. Chisholm.”
“You should be, for consistency,” Wolfe declared. “This afternoon, when I reached my seat in the stands — of which only the front edge was accessible to me — at twenty minutes past one, the Mayor and others were there in a nearby box, but Mr. Chisholm was not. He arrived a few minutes later. He has told me that when he arrived with his party, including the Mayor, about one o’clock, he had the others escorted to the stands and the box, that he started for the clubhouse for a word with his employees, that he was delayed by the crowd and decided it was too late, that he went on a private errand to a men’s room and then proceeded to the box. If the others are vulnerable on opportunity, so is he.”
They made remarks, all three of them, not appreciative. Wolfe put the bottle to his lips, tilted it and his head, and swallowed beer. Paper cups had been supplied, but he hates them.
He put the bottle down empty. “I was merely,” he said mildly, “commenting on the murder as a specialist. As for my job, learning who drugged the drinks, I haven’t even made a start. How could I in this confounded hubbub? Trampled by an army. I have been permitted to sit here and talk to people, yes, with a succession of your subordinates standing behind me, breathing down my neck. One of them was chewing gum! Pfui. Working on a murder and chewing gum!”
“We’ll bounce him,” Hennessy said dryly. “The commissioner has asked you, what’s the play with those four men?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Not only those four. I included others in my request to Mr. Chisholm — Doctor Soffer, Mr. Kinney, Mr. Durkin, and of course Mr. Chisholm himself. I am not arranging a parlor game. I make a living as a professional detective, and I need their help on this job I’ve undertaken. I think I know why, engrossed as you are with the most sensational case you’ve had in years, you’re spending all this time chatting with me; you suspect I’m contriving a finesse. Don’t you?”
“You’re damn right we do.”
Wolfe nodded. “So I am.”