“For God's sake,” Nat Traub blurted, “let the fine points go! Let's have it!”
“You'll have to be patient, sir,” Wolfe reproved him. “I'm not merely reporting, I'm doing a job. Whether a murderer gets arrested, and tried, and convicted, depends entirely on how I handle this. There is no evidence and if I don't squeeze it out of you people now, tonight, there may never be any. The trouble all along, both for the police and for me, has been that no finger pointed without wavering. In going for a murderer as well concealed as this one it is always necessary to trample down improbabilities to get a path started, but it is foolhardy to do so until a direction is plainly indicated. This time there was no such plain indication, and, frankly, I had begun to doubt if there would be one-until yesterday morning, when Mr Anderson and Mr Owen visited this office. They gave it to me.”
“You're a liar!” Anderson stated.
“You see?” Wolfe upturned a palm. “Some day, sir, you're going to get on the wrong train by trying to board before it arrives. How do you know whether I'm a liar or not until you know what I'm saying? You did come here. You gave me a cheque for the full amount of my fee, told me that I was no longer in your hire, and said that you had withdrawn as a sponsor of Miss Fraser's programme. You gave as your reason for withdrawal that the practice of blackmail had been injected into the case, and you didn't want your product connected in the public mind with blackmail because it is dirty and makes people gag. Isn't that so?”
“Yes. But-”
“I'll do the butting. After you left I sat in this chair twelve straight hours, with intermissions only for meals, using my brain on you. If I had known then that before the day was out sixteen other products were scrambling to take your Starlite place, I would have reached my conclusion in much less than twelve hours, but I didn't. What I was exploring was the question, what had happened to you? You had been so greedy for publicity that you had even made a trip down here to get into a photograph with me. Now, suddenly, you were fleeing like a comely maiden from a smallpox scare. Why?”
“I told you-”
“I know. But that wasn't good enough. Examined with care, it was actually flimsy. I don't propose to recite all my twistings and windings for those twelve hours, but first of all I rejected the reason you gave. What, then? I considered every possible circum- stance and all conceivable combinations. That you were yourself the murderer and feared I might sniff you out; that you were not the murderer, but the blackmailer; that, yourself innocent, you knew the identity of one of the culprits, or both, and did not wish to be associated with the disclosure; and a thousand others. Upon each and all of my conjectures I brought to bear what I knew of you-your position, your record, your temperament, and your character. At the end only one supposition wholly satisfied me. I concluded that you had somehow become convinced that someone closely connected with that programme, which you were sponsoring, had committed the murders, and that there was a possibility that that fact would be discovered. More: I concluded that it was not Miss Koppel or Miss Vance or Mr Meadows or Mr Strong, and certainly not Mr Savarese. It is the public mind that you are anxious about, and in the public mind those people are quite insignificant. Miss Fraser is that programme, and that programme is Miss Fraser. It could only be her. You knew, or thought you knew, that Miss Fraser herself had killed Mr Orchard, and possibly Miss Poole too, and you were getting as far away from her as you could as quickly as you could. Your face tells me that you don't like that!”
“No,” Anderson said coldly, “and you won't either before you hear the last of it. You through?”
“Good heavens, no. I've barely started. As I say, I reached that conclusion, but it was nothing to crow about. What was I to do with it? I had a screw I could put on you, but it seemed unwise to be hasty about it, and I considered a trial of other expedients. I confess that the one I chose to begin with was feeble and even sleazy, but it was at breakfast this morning, before I had finished my coffee and got dressed, and Mr Goodwin was fidgety and I wanted to give him something to do. Also, I had already made a suggestion to Mr Cramer which was designed to give everyone the impression that there was evidence that Miss Vance had been blackmailed, that she was under acute suspicion, and that she might be charged with murder at any moment. There was a chance, I thought, that an imminent threat to Miss Vance, who is a personable young woman, might impel somebody to talk.”
“So you started that,” Elinor Vance said dully.
Wolfe nodded. “I'm not boasting about it. I've confessed it was worse than second-rate, but I thought Mr Cramer might as well try it; and this morning, before I was dressed, I could devise nothing better than for Mr Goodwin to type an anonymous letter about you and take it up there-a letter which implied that you had committed murder at least twice.”
“Goddam pretty,” Bill Meadows said.
“He didn't do it,” Elinor said.
“Yes, he did,” Wolfe disillusioned her. “He had it with him, but didn't get to use it. The death of Miss Koppel was responsible not only for that, but for other things as well-for instance, for this gathering. If I had acted swiftly and energetically on the conclusion I reached twenty-four hours ago, Miss Koppel might be alive now. I owe her an apology but I can't get it to her. What I can do is what I'm doing.”
Wolfe's eyes darted to Anderson and fastened there. “I’m going to put that screw on you, sir. I won't waste time appealing to you, in the name of justice or anything else, to tell me why you abruptly turned tail and scuttled. That would be futile. Instead, I'll tell you a homely little fact: Miss Fraser drank Starlite only the first few times it was served on her programme and then had to quit and substitute coffee. She had to quit because your product upset her stomach. It gave her a violent indigestion.”
“That's a lie,” Anderson said. “Another lie.”
“If it is, it won't last long. Miss Vance. Some things aren't as important as they once were. You heard what I said. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Mr Strong?”
“I don't think this-”
“Confound it, you're in the same room and the same chair! Is it true or not?”
“Yes.”
“Mr Meadows?”
“Yes.”
“That should be enough. So, Mr Anderson-”
“A put-up job,” the president sneered. “I left their damn’ programme.”
Wolfe shook his head. They're not missing you. They had their choice of sixteen offers. No, Mr Anderson, you're in a pickle. Blackmail revolts you, and you're being blackmailed. It is true that newspapers are reluctant to offend advertisers, but some of them couldn't possibly resist so picturesque an item as this, that the product Miss Fraser puffed so effectively to ten million people made her so ill that she didn't dare swallow a spoonful of it. Indeed yes, the papers will print it; and they'll get it in time for Monday morning.”
“You sonofabitch.” Anderson was holding. “They won't touch it. Will they Fred?”
But the director of public relations was frozen, speechless with horror.
“I think they will,” Wolfe persisted. “One will, I know. And open publication might be better than the sort of talk that would get around when once it's started. You know how rumours get distorted; fools would even say that it wasn't necessary to add anything to Starlite to poison Mr Orchard. Really, the blackmail potential of this is very high. And what do you have to do to stop it?
Something hideous and insupportable? Not at all. Merely tell me why you suddenly decided to scoot.”