Before Midnight

I was wishing he would take his glasses off so I could see his eyes. From his easy posture and his voice and his superior smile he was taking it well, a manly and gallant bozo refusing to squirt blood under the wheels of calamity. But without more sales pressure I wasn't buying the notion that one definition of "calamity" was half a million bucks, even for a man as highly educated as him, and I wanted to see his eyes. All I could see was the reflection of the ceiling light from the lenses.

"You're in a fix," Wolfe admitted, "but I still think your despair is excessive. Establish academic scholarships with your prize money."

"I've thought of that. It wouldn't help much." He smiled. "The simplest way would be to confess to the murder. That would do it."

"Not without corroboration. Could you furnish any?"

"I'm afraid not. I couldn't describe his apartment, and I don't know what kind of gun was used."

"Then it would be hopeless. Perhaps a better expedient, expose the murderer and become a public hero. The acclaim would smother the infamy. You are not a bloodhound by profession, I know, but you have cerebral resources. You could start by recalling all the details of the meeting last evening. How did they act and talk? What signs of greed or zealotry did they display? Particularly, what did they say and do when Mr. Dahlmann showed the paper and said it was the answers?"

"Nothing. Nothing whatever."

"It was a shock, naturally. But afterward?"

"Not afterward either." The smile was getting more superior. "I would suppose you wouldn't need to be told what the atmosphere was like. We were tigers crouching to spring upon the same prey. Vultures circling to swoop and be first on the carcass to get the heart and liver. The amenities were forced and forged. We separated immediately after the meeting, each clutching his envelope, each wishing the others some crippling misfortune, anything up to death."

"Then you have no idea which of them, if any, thought Mr. Dahlmann was joking."

"Not the faintest."

"Did you?"