“You impervious bastard,” Skinner said, but wasting no energy on it.
“In effect, then,” Hombert said resentfully, “you are saying that you have nothing to tell us, that you have nothing to offer, that you can’t help us any.”
“I’m helping all I can. I am paying a man twenty dollars a day to explore the possibility that Miss Gunther broke that cylinder into little pieces and put it in the rubbish receptacle in her apartment in Washington. That’s going to an extreme, because I doubt if she destroyed it. I think she expected to use it some day.”
Hombert shifted impatiently in his chair as if the idea of hunting for a lousy cylinder, possibly broken anyhow, only irritated him. “Suppose,” he said, “you tell us what it is we all know that gives you a good clear idea of who the murderer is, including the who. Off the record.”
“It isn’t any one thing.”
“I don’t care if it’s a dozen things. I’ll try to remember them. What are they?”
Wolfe shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Because of your idiotic treatment of Mr. Cramer. If it seemed to make sense to you, and I believe it would, you would pass it on to Mr. Ash, and heaven knows what he would do. He might even, by pure chance, do something that would result in his solving the case, and I would stop short of nothing to prevent that outcome.” Wolfe’s middle finger started tapping again. “Help Mr. Ash to a triumph? God forbid!” He frowned at Hombert. “Besides, I’ve already given you the best advice I’ve got. Find that cylinder. Put a hundred men on it, a thousand. Find it!”
“We’re not neglecting the damn cylinder. How about this, do you think Miss Gunther knew who killed Boone?”
“Certainly she did.”
Skinner broke in. “Naturally you’d like that,” he said pessimistically, “since it would eliminate your clients. If Miss Gunther knew who it was, and it was an NIA man, she would have handed it to us on a platter. So if she did know, it was and is one of the other four-Dexter or Kates or one of the Boone women.”
“Not at all,” Wolfe contradicted him.
“But damn it, of course!”
“No.” Wolfe sighed. “You’re missing the whole point. What has been the outstanding fact about this case for a whole week now? What was its peculiar characteristic? This, that the public, the people, had immediately brought the case to trial as usual, without even waiting for an arrest, and instead of the customary prolonged disagreement and dissension regarding various suspects, they reached an immediate verdict. Almost unanimously they convicted-this was the peculiar fact-not an individual, but an organization. The verdict was that the National Industrial Association had murdered Cheney Boone. Now what if you were Miss Gunther and knew who had killed Boone? No matter how you knew, that’s another question; the point is that you knew. I think she did know. Let’s suppose she knew it was young Mr. Erskine. Would she have exposed him? No. She was devoted to the interests of her own organization, the BPR. She saw the rising tide of resentment and indignation against the NIA, constantly increasing in force and intensity. She saw that it might result, if sustained long enough, in completely discrediting the NIA and its purposes, policies, and objectives. She was intelligent enough to calculate that if an individual, no matter who, were arrested for the murder with good evidence, most of the resentment against the NIA would be diverted away from it as an organization.”
Wolfe sighed again. “What would she do? If she had evidence that pointed to Mr. Erskine, or to anyone else, she would suppress it; but she wouldn’t destroy it, for she wouldn’t want the murderer eventually to escape his punishment. She would put it where it wouldn’t be found, but where she could retrieve it and produce it when the time came, when the NIA had been sufficiently damaged. It is not even necessary to assume loyalty to the BPR as her dominating motive. Suppose it was personal devotion to Mr. Boone and a desire to avenge him. The best possible revenge, the perfect revenge, would be to use his death and the manner of it for the discomfiture and the destruction of the organization which had hated him and tried to thwart him. In my opinion Miss Gunther was capable of that. She was a remarkable young woman. But she made the mistake of permitting the murderer to learn that she knew who he was, how is still another question, and that she paid for.”
Wolfe raised his hand and let it fall. “However, note this. Her own death served her purpose too. In the past two days the wave of anger against the NIA has increased tremendously. It is going deep into the feeling of the people, and soon it will be impossible to dredge it out again. She was a remarkable woman. No, Mr. Skinner, Miss Gunther’s knowing the identity of the murderer would not eliminate my clients. Besides, no man is my client, and no men are. My checks come from the National Industrial Association, which, having no soul, could not possibly commit a murder.”
Wolfe cocked an eye at Hombert. “Speaking of checks. You have seen the NIA advertisement offering a reward of one hundred thousand dollars. You might let your men know that whoever finds the missing cylinder will get that reward.”
“Yes?” Hombert was skeptical. “You’re as bad as Cramer. What makes you so damn sure about that cylinder? Have you got it in your pocket?”
“No. If I had!”
“What makes you so sure about it?”
“Well. I can’t put it in a sentence.”
“We’ve got all the time there is.”
“Didn’t Mr. Cramer explain it to you?”
“Forget Cramer. He’s out of it.”
“Which is nothing to your credit, sir.” Wolfe rearranged his pressures and angles, shifting the mass to get the center of gravity exactly right for maximum comfort. An unaccustomed chair always presented him with a complicated engineering problem. “You really want me to go into this?”
“Yes.”
