“Those instructions,” Jensen said sharply, “are dangerous if he-”
“He’s all right.”
“I would like you to search me.” Jensen stuck his hands toward the ceiling.
“That,” I said, “is more like it,” and crossed to him and explored him from neck to ankles, invited him to relax in a chair, and turned to Jane. She darted me a look of pure and lofty disgust and backed away as from a noxious miasma.
I remarked, “If you refuse to stand inspection and then you happen to make a gesture and Fritz shoots you in the tummy, don’t blame me.”
She darted more looks, but took it. I felt her over not quite as comprehensively as I had Jensen, took her bag and glanced in it and returned it to her, and then stepped around Wolfe’s desk to examine Hackett’s blood. He wasn’t screaming or moaning, but the expression on his face was something. After Jensen had announced the blood, he had put his hand up to feel, and he was staring at the red on his fingers with his big jaw hanging open.
“My head?” he croaked. “Is it my head?”
The exhibition he was making of himself was no help to Nero Wolfe’s reputation for intrepidity. After a brief look I told him distinctly, “No, sir. Nothing but a nick in the upper outside corner of your ear.” I wiped with my handkerchief. “You might go to the bathroom and use a towel.”
“I am not-hurt?”
I could have murdered him. Instead, I told Fritz, standing there with my gun, that unnecessary movements were still forbidden, and took Hackett to the bathroom in the far corner and shut the door behind me. While I showed him the ear in the mirror and dabbed on some iodine and taped on a bandage, I told him to stay in there until his nerves calmed down and then rejoin us, act detached and superior, and let me do the talking. He said he would, but at that moment I would have traded him for one wet cigarette.
As I reappeared in the office, Jane shot at me, “Did you search him?” I ignored her and circled around Wolfe’s desk for a look at the back of the chair. The head-rest was upholstered in brown leather; and about eight inches from the top and a foot from the side edge, a spot that would naturally have been on a line behind Hackett’s left ear as he sat, there was a hole in the leather. I looked behind, and there was another hole on the rear side. I looked at the wall back of the chair and found still another hole, torn into the plaster. From the bottom draw of my desk I got a screwdriver and hammer, started chiseling, ran against a stud, and went to work with the point of my knife. When I finally turned around I held a small object between my thumb and finger. As I did so Hackett emerged from the bathroom, apparently more composed.
“Bullet,” I said informatively. “Thirty-eight. Passed through Mr. Wolfe’s ear and the back of his chair and ruined the wall. Patched plaster is an eyesore.”
Jane sputtered. Jensen sat and gazed at me with narrowed eyes. Hackett said, in what he probably thought was a detached and superior tone, “I’ll search them again.” I tried not to glare at him.
“No, sir,” I said deferentially, “I made sure of that. But I suggest-”
“It could be,” Jensen put in, “that Wolfe fired that bullet himself.”
“Yeah?” I returned his gaze. “Mr. Wolfe would be glad to let you inspect his face for powder marks.”
“He washed them off in the bathroom,” Jane snapped.
“They don’t wash off.” I continued to Jensen, “I’ll lend you a magnifying glass. You can examine the leather on the chair too.”
By gum, he took me up. He nodded and arose, and I got the glass from Wolfe’s desk, the big one. First he went over the chair, the portion in the neighborhood of the bullet hole, and then crossed to Hackett and gave his face and ear a look. Hackett stood still, with his lips compressed and his eyes straight ahead.
Jensen gave me back the glass and returned to his seat. I asked him, “Did Mr. Wolfe shoot himself in the ear?”
“No,” he admitted. “Not unless he had the gun wrapped.”
“Sure.” My tone cut slices off of them. “He tied a pillow around it, held it at arm’s length, pointing it at his ear, and pulled the trigger. How would you like to try demonstrating it? Keeping the bullet within an inch of your frontal lobe?”
He never stopped gazing at me. “I am,” he declared, “being completely objective. With some difficulty. I agree it is highly improbable.”
“If I understand what happened-” Hackett began, but I doubted if he was going to offer anything useful, so I cut him off.
“Excuse me, sir. The bullet helps, but the gun would help still more. Let’s be objective too. We might possibly find the object in the front room.” I moved, touching his elbow to take him along. “Fritz, see that they stay put.”
“I,” said Jensen, getting up, “would like to be present-”
“The hell you would.” I wheeled to him. My voice may have gone up a notch. “Sit down, brother. I am trying not to fly off the handle. I am trying not to be rude. Whose house is this, with bullets zipping around? I swear to God Fritz will shoot you in the knee.” He had another remark to contribute, and so did Jane, but I disregarded them and wrangled Hackett ahead of me into the front room and shut the soundproof door. Hackett began to talk, but I shut him off.
He insisted he had something to say. I told him to spill it. “It seems incredible,” he asserted, meeting my eye and choosing his words, “that one of them could have shot at me from in here, through the open door, without me seeing anything.”
“You said that before, in the bathroom. You also said you didn’t remember whether your eyes were open or shut, or where you were looking, when you heard that shot.” I moved my face to within fourteen inches of his. “See here. If you are suspecting that I shot at you, or that Wolfe did, you have got fleas or other insects playing tag in your brain and should have it attended to. One thing alone: the way the bullet went, straight past your ear and into the chair back, it had to come from in front, the general direction of that door and this room. It couldn’t have come from the door in the hall or anywhere else, because we haven’t got a gun that shoots a curve. I can’t help it if your eyes were focused somewhere else or were closed or you went temporarily blind. You will please sit in that chair against the wall and not move or talk.”
He grumbled but obeyed. I surveyed the field. On the assumption that the gun had been fired in that room, I adopted the theory that either it was still there or it had been transported or propelled without. As for transportation, I had got there not more than five seconds after the shot and found them there staring at each other. As for propulsion, the windows were closed and the Venetian blinds down. I preferred the first alternative and began to search.
Obviously it couldn’t be anything abstruse, since five seconds wasn’t long enough to pry up a floor board or make a hole in a table leg, so I tried easier places, like under furniture and behind cushions. It might be thought that under the circumstances I would have been dead sure of finding it, but I had the curious feeling that I probably wouldn’t no matter how thoroughly I looked; I have never understood why. If it was a hunch it was a bad day for hunches, because when I came to the big vase on the table between the windows and peeked into it and saw something white and stuck my hand in, I felt the gun. Getting it by the trigger guard, I lifted it out. Judging by smell, it had been fired recently, but of course it had had time to cool off. It was an old Granville thirty-eight, next door to rusty. The white object I had seen was an ordinary cotton handkerchief, man’s size, with a tear in it through which the butt of the gun protruded. With proper care about touching, I opened the cylinder and found there were five loaded cartridges and one shell.