“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m with you. Absolutely. They’re a bunch of wolverines, Prescott is a two-faced shyster, and Stauffer is Ossie. But may I ask you a hypothetical question?”
“It would take more than a hypothetical question to make me budge, Mr. Goodwin.”
“I’ll ask it anyway. It’ll be good exercise for us and pass the time. Let’s say, of course just as a hypothesis, that Nero Wolfe is ruthless, unscrupulous, and quite cunning; that you get him sore by refusing even to go and discuss it with him; that he’s out to do you; that he gets the bright idea of basing the attack on the will, not on the ground that it’s unfair, but on the ground that it’s phony; that he is able—”
“So that’s it.” Miss Karn’s eyes were going through me. “That’s the new threat, is it? It’s no better than the other one, not even as good. Didn’t Mr. Prescott himself draw the will? Wasn’t it in his possession?”
“Sure it was. That’s the point. It’s your own idea that he’s conspiring against you, isn’t it? Since he drew the will and had it in his possession, isn’t he in an ideal position to support Wolfe’s contention that there has been a substitution and the will’s a phony?”
“No. He couldn’t. He is on record as accepting the will’s authenticity.”
“On record with who? Wolfe and the Hawthornes. His fellow conspirators.”
“But—” She chopped it off. Her eyes had narrowed and she sat motionless. In a moment she said slowly, “Mr. Prescott wouldn’t do that. After all, he is an attorney of high standing and reputation—”
“Your opinion of him seems to be going up.”
“My opinion of him is unimportant. But another thing, if he intended to play as dirty a trick as that, he could simply have not produced it. He could have destroyed it.”