Murder by the Book

"Very well. Satisfactory. Fritz and I are going to do a guinea hen, and there is barely time. If you get Mr. Corrigan down here, or even all of them, what will happen? I will show him that notation and he will deny all knowledge of it. I will ask where that letter has been, and will be told that it has been easily accessible to all of them. That will take perhaps five minutes. Then what?"

"Nuts. If you insist on playing pool instead of working on Sunday, wait till tomorrow. Why hand it to Cramer?"

"Because for its one purpose he is as good as I am-even better. It validates for them, if not for me, my assumption that someone in that firm has a guilty connection with the murder of three people. We have already scared him into this; with that letter a police inspector may scare him into something else. Take it to Mr. Cramer and don't bother me. You know quite well that for me pool is not play; it is exercise."

He strode to the refrigerator.

I had a notion to spend a couple of hours with the Sunday papers before going downtown, but decided there was no point in my being childish just because Wolfe was. Besides, with him I never knew. It could be that he merely wanted to cook and eat and play pool instead of working, but it could also be that he was pulling something fancy. He often got subtle without letting me in on it, and it wasn't impossible that there was something about that notation, or the way we got it, that made him figure it would be better to turn it over to Cramer than spring it himself. Walking the fifteen blocks to Twentieth Street with a cold March wind whipping at me

from the right, I considered the matter and concluded that it might either rain or snow.

Cramer wasn't in, but Sergeant Purley Stebbins was. He gave me the chair at the end of his desk and listened to my tale. I gave it all to him except the detail of how we had learned it was Corrigan's handwriting, seeing no necessity of dragging Blanche into it. I merely told him that we had good reason to believe that it looked like Corrigan's writing. Of course he knew that Baird Archer's novel had been titled "Put Not Your Trust." He looked around for a Bible to check on the third verse of the 146th Psalm, but couldn't find one.

He was skeptical, but not about that. "You say Wolfe got this letter yesterday?" he demanded.

"Right."

"And he's done nothing about it?"

"Right."

"He hasn't asked Corrigan about it, or any of the others?"

"Right."

"Then what the hell's wrong with it?"