if he decided to lam. When the phone rang and I told him it was Jarrell he took his time getting to it.
“Mr. Jarrell? I have in my hand a letter which Mr. Goodwin has just typed, dictated by me, which I intended to send you at once by messenger, but on second thought I’m going to read it to you first. Here it is.”
He read it. My notes were in the wastebasket, but my memory is good too, and not a word was changed. It was just as he had dictated it. He even finished the last sentence, which he had left hanging: ‘“In the unlikely event that you wish me to continue to act for you, let me know at once. Sincerely.’ That’s the letter. It occurs to me-”
“You can’t do that! What’s the circumstance?”
“No, sir. As I said in the letter, I’m not at liberty to reveal it, at least not in a letter, and certainly not on the telephone. But it occurs-”
“Get this straight, Wolfe. If you give anybody information about my private affairs that you got working for me in a confidential capacity, you’ll be sorry for it as long as you live!”
“I’m already sorry. I’m sorry I ever saw you, Mr. Jarrell. Let me finish, please. It occurs to me that there is a chance, however slim, that a reason can be found for ignoring the circumstance. I doubt it, but I’m willing to try. When I dictated the letter I intended to ask Mr. Cramer to visit me here at six o’clock, three hours from now. I’ll postpone it on one condition, that you come at that hour and bring with you everyone who was here on Friday- except Mr. Brigham, who is dead-with the-”
“What for? What good will that do?”
“If you’ll let me finish. With the understanding that you stay, all of you, until I am ready to adjourn, and that I will insist on answers to any questions I ask. I can’t compel answers, but I can insist, and I may learn more from refusals to answer than from the answers I get. That’s the condition. Will you come?”
“What do you want to ask about? They have already told you they didn’t take my gun!”
“And you have told me that you know your daughter-in-law took it. Anyway, one of them lied, and I told them so. You’ll know what I want to ask about when you hear me. Will you come?”
He balked for another five minutes, among other things demanding to know what the circumstance was that had made Wolfe write the letter, but only because he was used to being at the other end of the whip and it was a new experience for him. He had no choice and knew it.
Wolfe hung up, shook his head like a bull trying to chase a fly, and rang for beer.
Chapter 12
WOLFE STARTED IT OFF with a bang. He surveyed them with the air of a judge about to impose a stiff one, and spoke, in a tone that was meant to be offensive and succeeded.
“There is nothing to be crafty about so I won’t try. When you were here on Friday my main purpose was to learn which of you had taken Mr. Jarrell’s gun; today it is to learn which of you used it to kill Mr. Eber and Mr. Brigham. I am convinced that one of you did. First I’ll- Don’t interrupt me!”
He glared at Jarrell, but it was more the voice than the glare that stopped Jarrell with only two words out. Wolfe doesn’t often bellow, and almost never at anyone but Cramer or me, but when he does he means it. Having corked the client, who was in the red leather chair, he gave the others the glare. In front were Susan, Wyman, Trella, and Lois, as before. With Brigham no longer available and me back where I belonged, there were only two in the rear, Nora Kent and Roger Foote. “I will not be interrupted.” It was as positive as the bellow, though not so loud. “I have no more patience for you people-including you, Mr. Jarrell. Especially you. First I’ll explain why I am convinced that one of you is a murderer. To do so I’ll have to disclose a fact that the police have discovered but are keeping to themselves. If they learn that I’ve told you about it and are annoyed, then they’ll be annoyed. I am past regard for trivialities. The fact is that the bullets that killed Eber and Brigham came from the same gun. That, Mr. Jarrell, is the circumstance I spoke of on the phone.”
“How do-”
“Don’t interrupt. The technical basis of the fact is of course a comparison of the bullets in the police laboratory. How I learned it is not material. So much for the fact; now for my conclusion from it. The bullets are thirty-eights; the gun that was taken from Mr. Jarrell’s desk was a thirty-eight. On Friday I appealed to all of you to help me find Mr. Jarrell’s gun, and told you how, if it was innocent, it could be recovered with no stigma for anyone. Surely, if it was innocent, one of you would have acted on that appeal, but you didn’t, and it was therefore a permissible conjecture that the gun had been used to kill Eber, but only a conjecture. Now it is no longer a conjecture; it has reached the status of a reasonable assumption. For Brigham was killed by a bullet from the gun that killed Eber, and those two men were both closely associated with you people. Eber lived with you for five years, and Brigham was in your familiar circle. Not only that, they were both concerned in the matter which I was hired to investigate one week ago today, the matter which took Mr. Goodwin there-”
“That’ll do! You know what-”
“Don’t interrupt!” It was close to a bellow again. “The matter which took Mr. Goodwin there under another name. I need not unfold that matter; enough that it was both grave and exigent, and that both Eber and Brigham were involved in it. So consider a hypothesis: that those two men were killed by some outsider with his own private motive, and it is merely a chain of coincidences that they were both in your circle, that the gun was the same caliber as Mr. Jarrell’s, that Mr. Jarrell’s gun was taken by one of you the day before Eber was killed, and that in spite of my appeal the gun has not been found. If you can swallow that hypothesis, I can’t. I reject it, and I conclude that one of you is a murderer. That is our starting point.”
“Just a minute.” It was Wyman. His thin nose looked thinner, and the deep creases in his brow looked deeper. “That may be your starting point, but it’s not mine. Your man Goodwin was there. What for? All this racket about a stolen gun-what if he took it? That’s your kind of stunt, and his too, and of course my father was in on it. That’s
