Plot It Yourself

Thomas Dexter of Title House squared his shoulders and set his long, bony jaw. “I don’t care how you look at it, Mr Harvey,” he said. “I know how I look at it. I’m not condemning Mr Wolfe or the members of this committee, or even myself, but I have a feeling of guilt. I regard myself as guilty of incitation to murder. Unwittingly, yes, but what are wits for? I should have considered the possible consequences of signing that agreement not to prosecute Simon Jacobs.”

It was noon the next day, Wednesday. If you are fed up with committee meetings, so was Wolfe and so was I, but that’s one disadvantage of having a committee for a client. And it was no longer merely a Joint Committee on Plagiarism. Within two hours after I had supplied the details to Stebbins they had all been visited by city employees. Knapp had been interrupted in the middle of a bridge game, Oshin had been found at dinner at Sardi’s. Imhof and Amy Wynn had been called from a conference with three other executives of Victory Press. Dexter and Harvey and Cora Ballard had received the callers at home. Harvey had elicited these details from them so Wolfe would realize the gravity of the situation.

Having come at eleven o’clock, they had been at it for an hour, and there had been raised voices and heated words, with no unanimity on anything. Take the question, did they accept the assumption that Jacobs had been killed to keep him from squealing? Knapp and Harvey said no, he might have been killed from some quite different motive; it might have been merely coincidence. Dexter and Oshin said yes, that they couldn’t get from under a responsibility by laying it to coincidence. Imhof and Amy Wynn and Cora Ballard were on the fence. Wolfe ended that argument by saying that it didn’t matter whether they accepted the assumption or not; the police had made it, and so had he, as a working hypothesis.

Of course that led to a hotter question. If Jacobs had been killed to keep him from telling who had written “What’s Mine Is Yours” and got him to make his claim on Richard Echols, the murderer must have known about the plan to pry Jacobs open. Who had told him? That was what the cops had been after when they called on the members of the committee, and that was what Wolfe wanted, but look what they got: