Suddenly he turned and spoke: “Mr. Cramer! Please leave Mr. Stebbins in here with Miss Geer and Mr. Jensen. You can stay here, too, or come with me, as you prefer. Fritz and Archie, come.” He headed for the office.
Cramer, knowing Wolfe’s tones of voice almost as well as I did, came with us.
Wolfe waited until he was in his chair before he spoke: “I want to know if that cushion is on the premises. Search the house from the cellar up — except the south room; Mr. Hackett is in there lying down. Start in here.”
Cramer barked, “What the hell is all this about?”
“I’ll give you an explanation,” Wolfe told him, “when I have one. I’m going to sit here and work, now, and must not be disturbed.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes, and his lips started moving. Cramer slid farther back in his chair, crossed his legs, and got out a cigar and sank his teeth in it.
Half an hour had passed while I searched the office, when I heard Wolfe let out a grunt. I nearly toppled off the stepladder turning to look at him. He was in motion. He picked up his wastebasket, which was kept at the far corner of his desk, inspected it, shook his head, put it down again, and began opening the drawers of his desk. The first two, the one at the top and the one in the middle, apparently didn’t get him anything, but when he yanked out the double-depth one at the bottom, as far as it would go, he looked in, bent over closer to see better, then closed the drawer and announced, “I’ve found it.”
In those three little words there was at least two tons of self-satisfaction and smirk.
We all goggled at him.
He looked at me: “Archie. Get down off that thing, and don’t fall. Look in your desk and see if one of my guns has been fired.”
I stepped down and went and opened the armament drawer. The first one I picked up was innocent. I tried the second with a sniff and a look, and reported, “Yes, sir. There were six cartridges, and now there are five. Same as the cushions. The shell is here.”
“Tchah! The confounded ass!... Tell Miss Geer and Mr. Jensen that they may come in here if they care to hear what happened, or they may go home or anywhere else. We don’t need them. Take Mr. Stebbins with you upstairs and bring Mr. Hackett down here. Use caution, and search him with great care. He is an extremely dangerous man.”
Naturally, Jane and Jensen voted for joining the throng in the office, and their pose during the balloting was significant. They stood facing each other, with Jensen’s right hand on Jane’s left shoulder, and Jane’s right hand, or perhaps just the fingers, on Jensen’s left forearm. I left it to them to find the way to the office alone, told Purley Stebbins what our job was, and took him upstairs with me.
It was approximately ten minutes later that we delivered our cargo in the office. Even though Mr. Hackett staged one of the most convincing demonstrations of unwillingness to cooperate that I have ever encountered.
We got him to the office in one piece, nothing really wrong with any of us that surgical gauze wouldn’t fix. We propped him in a chair.
I said, “He was reluctant.”
I’ll say one thing for Wolfe — I’ve never seen him gloat over a guy about to get it. He was contemplating Hackett more as an extraordinary object that deserved study.
I said, “Purley thinks he knows him.”
Purley, as was proper, spoke to his superior: “I swear, Inspector, I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere, but I can’t remember.”
Wolfe nodded. “A uniform makes a difference. I suggest that he was in uniform.”
“Uniform?” Purley scowled. “Army?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Mr. Cramer told me Wednesday morning that the doorman on duty at the apartment house at the time Mr. Jensen and Mr. Doyle were killed was a fat nitwit who had been hired two weeks ago and didn’t know the tenants by name, and also that he claimed to have been in the basement stoking the water heater at the moment the murders were committed. A phone call would tell us whether he is still working there.”
“He isn’t,” Cramer growled. “He left Wednesday afternoon because he didn’t like a place where people were murdered. I never saw him. Some of my men did.”
“Yeah,” Purley said, gazing at Hackett’s face. “By God, it’s him.”
“He is,” Wolfe declared, “a remarkable combination of fool and genius. He came to New York deter-mined to kill Mr. Jensen and me. By the way, Mr. Hackett, you look a little dazed. Can you hear what I’m saying?”
Hackett made no sound.
“I guess you can,” Wolfe went on. “This will interest you. I requested Military Intelligence to have an examination made of the effects of Captain Root at the prison in Maryland. A few minutes ago I phoned for a report, and got it. Captain Root was lying when he stated that he was not in communication with his father and had not been for years. There are several letters from his father among his belongings, dated in the past two months, and they make it evident that his father, whose name is Thomas Root, regards him as a scion to be proud of. To the point of mania.”
Wolfe wiggled a finger at Hackett. “I offer the conjecture that you are in a position to know whether that is correct or not. Is it?”
“One more day,” Hackett said in his husky croak. His hands were twitching. “One more day,” he repeated.
Wolfe nodded. “I know. One more day and you would have killed me, with the suspicion centered on Miss Geer or Mr. Jensen, or both, on account of your flummery here this afternoon. And you would have disappeared.”
Jensen popped up. “You haven’t explained the flummery.”
“I shall, Mr. Jensen.” Wolfe got more comfortable in his chair. “But first that performance Tuesday evening.”
He was keeping his eyes on Hackett. “That was a masterpiece. You decided to kill Mr. Jensen first, which was lucky for me, and, since all apartment house service staffs are short-handed, got a job there as doorman with no difficulty. All you had to do was await an opportunity, with no passers-by or other onlookers. It came the day after you mailed the threat, an ideal situation in every respect except the presence of the man he had hired to guard him.
“Arriving at the entrance to the apartment house, naturally they would have no suspicion of the doorman in uniform. Mr. Jensen probably nodded and spoke to you. With no one else in sight, and the elevator man ascending with a passenger, it was too good an opportunity to lose. Muffling the revolver with some piece of cloth, you shot Mr. Doyle in the back, and when Mr. Jensen whirled at the sound you shot him in the front, and skedaddled for the stairs to the basement and started stoking the water heater. I imagine the first thing you fed it was the cloth with which you had muffled the gun.”
Wolfe moved his eyes. “Does that rattle anywhere, Mr. Cramer?”
“It sounds tight from here,” Cramer said.
“That’s good. Because it is for those murders that Mr. Hackett — or Mr. Root, I suppose I should say — must be convicted. He can’t be electrocuted for hacking a little gash in his own ear.” Wolfe’s eyes moved again, to me. “Archie, did you find any tools in his pockets?”
“Only a boy scout’s dream,” I told him. “One of those knives with scissors, awl, nail file...”
“Let the police have it to look for traces of blood. Just the sort of thing Mr. Cramer docs best.”
“The comedy can wait,” Cramer growled. “I’ll take it as is for Tuesday night and go on from there.”
Wolfe heaved a sigh. “You’re rushing past the most interesting point of alclass="underline" Mr. Hackett’s answering my advertisement for a man. Was he sufficiently acute to realize that its specifications were roughly a description of me, suspect that I was the advertiser, and proceed to take advantage of it to approach me? Or was it merely that he was short of funds and attracted by the money offered?