Before Midnight

"Sure you did," Cramer blurted. "Naturally. Because he was certain you had sent the answers to the contestants, so he knew nobody else could have sent them, and the only way he could have known that was obvious."

"Nothing of the sort." Wolfe didn't sound humiliated, but I'm not saying he hadn't been. It was just that he had a good repair department. "On the contrary. Because he was eager to give me the credit for sending the answers, though he knew I hadn't. If he hadn't known who had sent them he wouldn't have risked such a move, so he had sent them himself, getting them from the paper in Dahl-mann's wallet. I rejected the remote possibility that he had got them from the originals in the safe deposit vault, since he wouldn't have dared go there alone and ask for that box. The brilliant stroke that saved the contest, for which he heaped praise on me, was his own. Therefore he had either taken the wallet himself or he knew who had, and the former was the more probable, since he said he had come to me on his own initiative and responsibility without consulting his associates. And of course he wanted the meeting canceled."

"Why not?" Cramer demanded. "Why didn't you cancel it?"

"Because I had a double obligation, and not to him. One was my obligation to my client, the firm of Lippert, Buff and Assa, to do the job I had been hired for, and the other was my obligation to myself, not to be hoodwinked." He stopped short, tightened his lips, and half closed his eyes. "Not to be hoodwinked," he said bitterly, "and look at me."

He opened his eyes. "Hoodwinked, however, not by a Mr. Assa trying to save a perfume contest, but by a man who had already murdered once and was ready to murder again. I was assuming that Assa had taken Dahlmann's wallet, but not that he had killed him; and anyway, that was your affair. Now it's quite different. To assume that Assa was killed merely because someone knew he had taken the wallet and sent the answers to the contestants would be infantile. To assume that Assa knew that Hansen or Buff or O'Garro or Heery had taken the wallet and sent the answers, and that one of them killed him to forestall disclosure, would be witless. The only tolerable assumption is that Assa knew, or had reason to believe, that one of them had killed Dahlmann. That would be worth killing for, but by heaven, not in my office!"

"Yeah, that was cheeky." Cramer took the cigar from his mouth, what was left of it. "Why just those four? What about the contestants?"