“Mrs Jaffee said that to Mr Goodwin. It contradicted my hypothesis that the man calling himself Eric Hagh was an impostor; for if Mrs Jaffee had seen a picture of Hagh, why didn’t she denounce this man when she saw him here? It was to get an answer to that question that I asked Mr Goodwin to have her here Friday morning.”
“Why didn’t you ask her then and there?”
“If that’s a challenge, Mr Cramer, I ignore it. If it’s a request for information, the—”
“It is.”
“Good. The circumstances were not favorable. My suspicion of Hagh had no support but a hypothesis, and I was not certain of the bona fides of Mrs Jaffee herself. I wanted first to get an opinion from Mr Goodwin and Mr Parker, and Mrs Jaffee was leaving with Mr Parker. It was late at night, and I was tired. Of course I regret it. I regretted it only two hours after I had gone to bed, when I was awakened by the phone and Mr Goodwin told me that Mrs Jaffee had been murdered. Then, too late for her, I knew. I even got out of bed and sat in a chair, something I never do.”
“This is being recorded, Wolfe,” Bowen warned him. “You say you knew the identity of a murderer. Whom did you notify?”
“Pfui. That’s childish, Mr Bowen. I had no evidence. You have had every scrap of information I have had, and the services of Mr Goodwin to boot, which is a great advantage when his head is on straight. I had started, remember, with pure hypothesis, in an effort to account for the murder of Mrs Fomos as a preamble to the murder of Miss Eads. In fact, I had started with several different hypotheses, but by far the most attractive was this: that someone in Caracas had got hold of the document Miss Eads, then Mrs Hagh, had signed, giving her husband a half interest in her property, and was impersonating Hagh to make the claim; that, deciding he would have to come to New York in person to press the claim, he had determined to get rid of the only two people who, because they knew Hagh, made his appearance here impossible; and that either he came here himself and killed them, or contrived it.
“It became more than hypothesis when Mrs Jaffee was killed. The killer had got her keys from her bag here that evening, and, so far as was known, no one else, of those present, had the slightest motive for killing Mrs Jaffee. And my contradiction was resolved. Mrs Jaffee had realized that Eric Hagh was not the man whose picture had been sent her by her friend six years ago, but she had not denounced him because it was not in her character to do so. She had revealed her character with some clarity to Mr Goodwin. She didn’t like to get involved with anyone or anything. She had never gone to a stockholders’ meeting of the corporation whose dividends were her only source of income. She came here Thursday to lend her name to a legal action only because she was under great obligation to Mr Goodwin. No, she did not denounce the impostor, but indubitably she made him aware that she knew he was not Eric Hagh. She may have done so merely by the way she looked at him, or she may have asked him some naive and revealing question. In any case, he knew he was in deadly peril from her, and he acted quickly and audaciously—and with dexterity, taking her keys from her bag. No, he is not a bungler, but—”
A voice broke in. It was Dewdrop Irby, and his voice was good and loud, with no oil at all in it “I want to state at this time, for the record, that I had no—”
“Shut up!” Cramer barked at him.
“But I want—”
“You’ll get what you want. I’ll deliver it personally.”
Wolfe asked, “Shall I finish?”
“Yes.”
“As I said, I got out of bed and sat in a chair. It took little consideration for me to conclude that my hypothesis had been violently, tragically, and completely validated. I did not phone your office, Mr Cramer, because it is not my habit to make the police a gift, unasked, of the product of my brain, because I was personally concerned, and because I knew how badly Mr Goodwin’s self-esteem had been bruised and I thought he would be gratified if we, not you, got the murderer. I did phone not long after getting the news from Mr Goodwin—though not to you—and at three o’clock in the morning succeeded in reaching a man in Caracas whom I know a little and can trust within reason. Five hours later he called me back to say that Eric Hagh was new to Caracas and apparently had no background there.”
“I could have told you that,” Cramer grumbled. “He has been living at the Orinoco Hotel for two months.”
“It’s a pity I didn’t ask you and save twenty dollars. While waiting for the report from Caracas, I had phoned Saul Panzer. He had come and eaten breakfast with me, and I had supplied him with money from my emergency cash reserve. From here he went to a newspaper office and got pictures of the man calling himself Eric Hagh, and from there he went to Idlewild Airport. At ten o’clock he boarded a plane for South America.”
“Not for Caracas,” Purley Stebbins objected. He was still standing with his gun in hand. “Not at ten o’clock.”
“He didn’t go to Caracas. He went to Cajamarca, Peru. The document signed by Priscilla Eads Hagh was written there. At Cajamarca he found people who had known Hagh, and two who also remembered Mrs Hagh, and he learned, one, that Hagh was a professional gambler; two, that he had not been in Cajamarca for three years; and three, that the pictures he had with him were not of Hagh. He flew to Lima, engaged the interest of the police by a method not utterly unknown in our own city, and within twelve hours had collected enough items to phone me. The items included—you tell them, Saul. Briefly.”
Saul gave his voice a little more volume than usual, because he wasn’t facing the bulk of his audience. He had his eyes straight at Eric Hagh and had no intention of shifting them.
“They had all known Eric Hagh,” he said. “Hagh had been a gambler working up and down the coast for years. As far as they knew he had been in the States only twice, once for a spell in Los Angeles and once in New Orleans, and from New Orleans he brought back a rich American bride. They all knew about the paper he had, signed by his wife, giving him half her property. Hagh had shown it around, bragging about it. He said it had been her idea to give it to him, but he was too proud a man to sponge on a woman and he was keeping it as a souvenir. They said he had meant it; he was like that. I couldn’t ask him because he was dead. He had been caught in a snow slide in the mountains three months ago, on March nineteenth. Nobody knew what had happened to the document.”
Saul cleared his throat. He’s always a little husky. “The man I had pictures of, the man I’m looking at now—his name is Siegfried Muecke. Twenty-six people in Lima recognized him from the pictures. He was first seen there about two years ago, and no one knows where he came from. He is also a professional gambler, and he went around a good deal with Hagh. He was with him in the mountains, working a tourist resort with him, when Hagh was killed by a snow slide. Nobody has seen Siegfried Muecke around Lima since Hagh’s death. Do you want more details?”
“Not at present, Saul,” Wolfe told him.
Purley Stebbins was moving. He passed in front of Helmar and between Brucker and Quest, and around me, and posted himself directly behind Siegfried Muecke, who was now fairly well seen to, with Saul at his left, Purley at his rear, and me at his right.
Wolfe was going on. “Mr Muecke’s preparations for his coup, crossing the Andes to Caracas so as to operate from a base where he and Mr Hagh were both unknown, can of course be traced. At Caracas he selected a lawyer, with some care probably, and decided to present his claim in a letter—not to the former Mrs Hagh, but to the trustee of the property, Mr Helmar. At some point he also decided that effective pursuit of the claim would require his presence in New York, and of course it would be fatal to his plans if either Miss Eads or Mrs Fomos ever got a glimpse of him. There was only one way to solve that difficulty: they must die.”