Saul Panzer stood facing the cast, not the audience. There is nothing impressive about Saul. He is undersized, his nose and ears are too big, and his shoulders slant. With Saul a thousand wrongdoers had made the mistake of believing what they saw. He spoke. “I believe this is the way it was Thursday evening when Mr Wolfe entered. Does anyone disagree?”
No one did. He went on, “I’ll sit on the couch where Mrs Jaffee was. I wasn’t here, but it has been described to me, and if I do anything wrong it can be corrected. Archie, will you ring for Mr Wolfe as you did Thursday?”
He passed between Viola Duday and me to get to the couch. I stepped to Wolfe’s desk and pressed the button, one long and two short, and returned to my chair. Wolfe entered. On account of the row of audience he couldn’t bear right along the wall, so he navigated through the cast to make his desk. Standing beside his chair, he took his time for a look from right to left, ending with those against the wall, the representatives of the People of the State of New York.
“You gentlemen don’t look very comfortable,” he muttered.
They said they were all right. He sat. There was a tingle in my spine. I knew his look and manner as well as I did his voice, and there was no doubt about it, he was going to pull one, or try to.
He addressed the District Attorney. “I assume, Mr Bowen, that these people know why you have brought them here?”
Bowen nodded. “Yes, it’s been thoroughly explained to them, and they have all agreed to cooperate. Mr Helmar, Mr Parker, and Mr Irby have made certain reservations about the use of the recording, and they have been covered in a memo. Do you want to see it?”
“Not if Mr Parker has approved it. Then we may proceed?”
“Please do.”
Wolfe turned. “Miss Duday and gentlemen. You understand that the purpose of this gathering is for us to iterate our words and movements of last Thursday evening. The first thing that happened after I entered the room was Mr Goodwin’s identification for me of Miss Duday and Messrs. Brucker, Quest, and Pitkin. Then I sat down. Then Mr Helmar said he had a statement he would like to read, and that, I suppose, is where we should start, but before we do so I wish to make some remarks.”
A sound came from one person, not one of the cast. It was Inspector Cramer, and the sound was a cross between a growl and a snort. Cramer knew Wolfe better than anyone there except me.
Wolfe leaned back and got comfortable. “I told you Thursday evening that my sole interest was investigation of the murder of Priscilla Eads, and that is still true, except that now the murder of Sarah Jaffee is joined to it. After you people left that evening I told Mr Goodwin that I thought I knew who killed Miss Eads and Mrs Fomos. That surmise, for that is all it was then, was based on two things: first, the impression I had got of you five people that evening; and second, the fact that Mrs Fomos had been killed.
“The supposition that the attack on Mrs Fomos was solely for the purpose of getting the keys to Miss Eads’ apartment was clearly not acceptable if any alternative could be had. If that was all that was wanted it would only have been necessary to snatch her bag. A dozen women’s bags are snatched every day in this city. Killing Mrs Fomos greatly increased the hazard of killing Miss Eads. If her body had been discovered sooner, as it might easily have been, and if that city detective—Auerbach, was it, Mr Cramer?”
“Yes.” Cramer’s eyes were narrowed at him.
“If he had got his notion about the keys more promptly, he would have got to Miss Eads’ apartment before her return and would have found the murderer ambushed there. Surely the murderer was capable of calculating such a risk, and he would not have killed Mrs Fomos except under a strong impulsion. This objection of course occurred to the police, and I understand that they met it by assuming that in his attempt to get the bag from Mrs Fomos her assailant was recognized and so was compelled to kill her. That assumption was not impossible, but it implied that the murderer was an egregious bungler, and I doubted it. I preferred to assume exactly the opposite—that Mrs Fomos had been killed, not because she had recognized her attacker, but because he knew she couldn’t recognize him.”
“Is this for effect?” Skinner demanded. “Or do you think you’re getting somewhere?”
“I am already somewhere,” Wolfe retorted. “I’ve just told you who the murderer is.”
Purley Stebbins stood up with his gun in his hand, his eyes on the cast, trying to keep them all in focus at once.
“Go on and spell it,” Cramer growled.
“He wanted the keys, certainly,” Wolfe conceded, “but he didn’t have to kill Mrs Fomos to get them. He killed her because she was herself a danger to him, as great a danger as Miss Eads. It would have done him no good to kill the one unless he killed the other. That was my hypothesis as early as Tuesday evening, but there were then too many alternatives, more easily tested, to give it priority. Wednesday Mr Goodwin called on Mrs Jaffee and Mr Fomos, and late that afternoon Mr Irby came and provided me with bait to get you people here. Thursday morning Mrs Jaffee came, as the result of a brilliant maneuver by Mr Goodwin the day before, and gave me much better bait than Mr Irby had supplied, and, as you all know, I used it. But for that maneuver by Mr Goodwin, Mrs Jaffee would not have come to see me, and almost certainly she would be alive now. That seems to me much firmer ground for his feeling of responsibility for her death than her phone call to him Thursday night and its sequel. It is regrettable, but not surprising, that his feeling was so intense as to warp his mental processes and pervert his judgment. I did and do sympathize with him.”
“Is all this necessary?” Bowen wanted to know.
“Perhaps not,” Wolfe allowed, “but I’m exposing a murderer and claim a measure of indulgence. You must have expected to spend hours here. Am I tedious?”
“Go ahead.”
“And Thursday afternoon Mr Irby returned with his client, Mr Hagh, who had flown from Venezuela. I no longer needed him or his client as bait for you, but I invited them to join us that evening, provided they came as observers and not participants. As you know, they were here. What is it, Archie?”
“I’ll tend to me,” I told him. I had left my chair and was moving. I won’t say I had caught up with him, but at least I could see his dust, and I admit that I had also seen Saul Panzer, not with any flourish, take a gun from his pocket and rest it on his thigh. I did not display a gun. I merely circled around the end of the couch and stopped, and stood less than arm’s length northwest of Eric Hagh’s right shoulder. He didn’t turn his head, but he knew I was there. His eyes were glued to Wolfe.
“Okay,” I told Wolfe. “I’m not warped enough to break his neck. How come?”
Satisfied that I wasn’t going to throw a tantrum, he returned to the Softdown quintet. “When you left here Thursday evening, I had nothing new about you with regard to the murder of Miss Eads, but it seemed more than ever doubtful, under my hypothesis, that a motive could be found for any of you to kill Mrs Fomos. As I said, I told Mr Goodwin that I thought I knew who had committed the murders, but I also told him that there was a contradiction that had to be solved, and for that purpose I asked him to have Mrs Jaffee here at eleven o’clock the next morning.”
He turned left. “What was the contradiction, Mr Cramer?”
Cramer shook his head. “I’m not clear up with you. I suppose the point was that this Eric Hagh is not Hagh he’s a ringer, from what you said about him killing Mrs Fomos because he knew she couldn’t recognize him, but then where were you?”
“I was facing a contradiction.”
“What?”
“You should know. Among the items furnished by me to Lieutenant Rowcliff on Friday was a carbon copy of a report, typed by Mr Goodwin, of his conversation with Mrs Jaffee on Wednesday at her apartment. Surely you have read it, and this is an excerpt from it. I quote: ‘That was the last letter I ever got from Pris. The very last. Maybe I still have it—I remember she enclosed a picture of him.’