In the Best Families

At first, that first night, I was thinking that word might come from Wolfe in the next hour. Then I started thinking it might come the next day. As the days kept creeping along they changed my whole attitude, and before the end of April

I was thinking it might come next week. By the time May had passed, and most of

June, and the calendar and the heat both said summer, I was beginning to think it might never come.

But first to finish with April. The Rackham case followed the routine of spectacular murders when they never quite get to the point of a first-degree charge against anyone. For a week, the front page by unanimous consent; then, for a week or ten days, the front page only by cooking up an angle; and then back to the minors. None of the papers happened to feel like using it to start a crusade in the name of justice, so it took a normal course. It did not roll over and die, not with that all-star cast, including Nobby and Hebe; even months later a really new development would have got a three-column spread; but the development didn't come.

I made three more trips, by official request, to White Plains, with no profit to anyone, including me. All I could do was repeat myself, and all they could do was think up new ways to ask the same questions. For mental exercise I tried to get a line on whether Cramer's notions about Arnold Zeck had been passed on to

Archer and Ben Dykes, but if so they never let on.

All I knew was what I read in the papers, until one evening I ran into Sergeant

Purley Stebbins at Jake's and bought him a lobster. From him I got two little unpublished items: two F.B.I, men had been called in to settle an argument about the legibility of fingerprints on the crinkly silver handle of the knife, and had voted no; and at one point Barry Rackham had been held at White Plains for twenty straight hours while the battle raged over whether they had enough to charge him. The noes won that time too.

The passing days got very little help from rne. I had decided not to start pawing the ground or rearing up until Wolfe had been gone a full month, which would be May ninth, and I caught up on a lot of personal things, including baseball games, which don't need to be itemised. Also, with Fred Durkin, I finished up the poison-pen case and other loose ends that Wolfe had left dangling-nothing important-drove out to Long Island to see if Theodore and the plants had got settled in their new home, and put one of the cars, the big sedan, in dead storage.