Before Midnight

"Not if they expected me to earn my fee." Wolfe looked up at the clock. "It's midnight. Mr. Cramer. I can only say that I reject your theory utterly. Not only for certain reasons of my own--as you say, I'm on the inside track on the contest--but also from other considerations. If one of those men went there last night and found Dahlmann dead, why was he ass enough to take the wallet, when he knew it would be missed, and that that would make a botch of the contest? He had to have the paper, of course, since if it were left on the corpse it would be seen by policemen, and possibly by reporters too, but why didn't he just take the paper and leave the wallet?"

"By God," Cramer said, "you were lying after all."

"Yes? Why?"

"Because that's dumb and you're not dumb. He goes in and finds a corpse, and he's nervous. It makes people nervous to find a corpse. He wants to turn and run like hell, they all do, especially if there's the slightest reason for them to be suspected, but he makes himself get the wallet from the corpse's pocket. He may even intend to take the paper and put the wallet back and start looking for the paper, but he thinks of fingerprints. Maybe he can wipe the wallet off before he puts it back, but he might miss one. Even so, he might try, if he calmly considered all the consequences of taking the wallet, but he's not calm and there's no time and he has to get out of there. So he gets, with the wallet. Excuse me for taking up your valuable time with kindergarten stuff, but you asked for it."

He stood up, looked at the cigar in his hand, threw it at my wastebasket, and missed. He glared at it and then at Wolfe. "If that's the best you can do I'll be going." He turned.

"Manifestly," Wolfe said, "you don't believe Mr. Hansen and the others when they profess their conviction that Mr. Dahlmann's display of the paper was only a hoax?'"

Cramer turned at the door long enough to growl, "Nuts. Do you?"

When I returned to the office after seeing him out Wolfe was still at his desk, pinching the lobe of his ear with a thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. I put my empty milk glass on one of the beer trays, took them to the kitchen, washed and wiped the glasses, disposed of the bottles, and put the trays away. Fritz goes to bed at eleven unless he has been asked not to. Back in the office, the ear massage was still under way. I spoke. "I can finish the typing tonight if there are other errands for the morning. Have I got a program?"

"No."