“That’s too bad.” Wolfe put his palms on the table. “Now, gentlemen, I’ll be as brief as may be. When I’m through we can consider whether I have to enter a defense against Mr. Hansen’s charge of treachery. Until the moment of Mr. Assa’s collapse in my office last evening I was concerned only with the job I had been hired for, not with murder. I invited Mr. Cramer to the meeting because I expected that developments to be contrived by me .would remove both the contestants and yourselves as primary targets of his inquiry, which was surely desirable. My first objective was to demonstrate to the contestants that their receipt of the answers by mail had made it impossible to proceed with the verses that had been given them last week, and it would be futile for them to resist the inevitable; and to get their unanimous agreement to the distribution of new verses as soon as their freedom of movement was restored.”
“You say that now.” Hansen was buying nothing.
“It will be supported. I was confident I could do that, for they had no feasible alternative. Then I would be through with them and they would leave, and I would pursue the second objective with the rest of you. I confess that the second objective was not at all clear, and the path to it was poorly mapped, until nearly seven o’clock last evening, when Mr. Assa called. -Mr. Hansen, did you know that Mr. Assa came to see me at that hour yesterday?”
“No. I don’t know it now.”
“Did you, Mr. Buff?”
“No.”
“Mr. O’Garro?”
“No!”
“Mr. Heery?”
“I did not.”
Wolfe nodded. “One of you is lying, and that may help. He came and we talked. Mr. Goodwin was present, and he has typed a transcript of the conversation for Mr. Cramer. He could report it to you now, but it would take too long, so I’ll summarize it. Mr. Assa said he was speaking for himself, not for the firm; that he had not consulted his associates. He congratulated me for what he called my brilliant stroke in sending the answers to the contestants and thereby rescuing the contest from ruin. He offered his personal guarantee for payment of my fee. He took a drink of Pernod and poured another. And he began and ended with a demand that I call off the meeting for last evening. As for me, I denied sending the answers to the contestants, and I refused to call off the meeting. He left in a huff.”
Wolfe took a breath. “That was all I needed. Mr. Assa’s pretended certainty that I had sent the answers, and his eagerness to give me credit for it privately, could only mean that he had sent them himself, having got them from the paper in Dahlmann’s wallet, or that he knew who had. The former was much more probable. Now the second objective of the meeting, and the path to it, were quite clear. I would proceed as planned with the contestants, get their consent to a new agreement, and then dismiss them. After they had gone I would tackle Mr. Assa and the rest of you, in the presence of Mr. Cramer. I wasn’t assuming that Assa had killed Dahlmann; on the contrary, I was assuming that he hadn’t, since in that case he would hardly have dared expose himself as he did in coming to me. My supposition was that Assa had gone to Dahlmann’s apartment, found him dead, and took the wallet—one of Mr. Cramer’s theories, as you know. If so, it had to be disclosed to Mr. Cramer, and the sooner the better—the better not only for the demands of justice, but for my client, the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa. It would embarrass an individual, Vernon Assa, but it would be to the advantage of everyone else. It would eliminate the contestants as murder suspects, and would substantially lessen the burden of suspicion for the rest of you. I intended to expound that position to all of you and get you to help me exert pressure on Mr. Assa, and I expected to succeed.”
He took another deep breath, deeper. “I am, as you see, confessing to an egregious blunder. It came from my failure to consider sufficiently the possibility that Mr. Assa had himself been duped or had miscalculated. I now condemn myself, but on the other hand, if I had known at nine o’clock last evening exactly what—”
“You can omit the if’s,” Hansen said coldly. “Apologize to yourself, we’re not interested. How did Assa miscalculate?”
“By thinking that the man who had admitted to him that he had taken Dahlmann’s wallet was telling the truth when he said that he had found Dahlmann dead. By dismissing the possibility that in fact he had killed Dahlmann.”
“Wait a minute,” Heery objected. “You thought that yourself about Assa.”
“But Assa had come to me, and besides, I have said I blundered. It was painfully obvious, of course, when Assa died before my eyes. No effort was required to learn what had happened; the only question was, which one of you had made it happen. Which one—”
“Not obvious to me,” O’Garro said.
“Then I’ll describe it.” Wolfe shifted in the chair, which was almost big enough but not used to him. “Since that bottle is under guard, with great assurance. Yesterday afternoon Assa learned somehow that one of you had Dahlmann’s wallet in your possession. Whether he learned it by chance or by enterprise doesn’t matter; he learned it, and he confronted you. You—”
Heery put in, “You just said that you assumed Assa took the wallet from Dahlmann himself. And he had it in his pocket.”
“Pfui.” Wolfe was getting testy. “If Assa took it, who killed him and what for? His death changed everything, including my assumptions. He confronted one of you with his knowledge that you had the wallet. You explained that you had gone to Dahlmann’s apartment that night, found him dead, and took the wallet, and Assa believed you. Either you told him that you had sent the answers to the contestants, or that you hadn’t. If the former, Assa conceived the stratagem of giving me credit for it as a blind; if the latter, he really thought I had done it. You two discussed the situation and decided what to do, or perhaps you didn’t; Assa may have discussed it only with himself and made his own plans. It would be interesting to know whether he insisted on keeping the wallet or you insisted on his taking it. If I knew that I would have a better guess who you are.”
Wolfe’s tone sharpened. “Whether or not you knew of his visit to me beforehand, you knew its result. He told you that I had refused to cancel the meeting, and that both of you would of course have to come. This raises an interesting point. If it was his report of his talk with me that so heightened your alarm that you decided to kill him, then you went to the cabinet to get the poison after seven o’clock. If your fatal resolve was formed earlier, before he came to me, you might have gone to the cabinet earlier. The former seems more likely. Dread feeds on itself. At first you were satisfied that Assa believed you, that he had no slight suspicion that you had killed Dahlmann, but that sort of satisfaction is infested with cancer—the cancer of mortal fear. The fear that Assa might himself suspect you, or already did; the fear that if he didn’t suspect you, I would; the fear that if I didn’t suspect you, the police would. When Assa told you of his failure to persuade me to cancel the meeting, the fear became terror; though you believed him when he said that he had given me no hint of his knowledge regarding the wallet, there was no telling what he would do or say under pressure from me with the others present. As I said, it seems likely that it was then, when fear had festered into the panic of terror, that you resolved to kill him. Therefore it—”
“This is drivel,” Hansen said curtly. “Pure speculation. If you have a fact, what is it?”
“Out there, Mr. Hansen.” Wolfe aimed a thumb over his shoulder at the door. “It could even be conclusive if that bottle has identifiable fingerprints, but I doubt if you—one of you—had lost his mind utterly. That’s my fact, and it justifies a question. Mr. Assa left my office yesterday at ten minutes past seven. Who was on these premises later than that? Were you, Mr. Hansen?”
“No. I told you. I was here from four o’clock on, but left before six-thirty.”
“Were you, Mr. Heery?”
“No. I told you when I was here.”
“Mr. O’Garro?”
“Don’t answer, Pat,” Hansen commanded him.
“Pah.” Wolfe was disgusted. “Something so easy to explore? If you prefer the plague—“