Final Deduction

Everyone in the house, of course including the servants, had known that Benjamin Franklin was wobbly. The Gazette had a piece by an expert about the different methods of fastening the bronze feet of a man to the base he stands on. He hadn't been permitted to examine the statue that had toppled onto Jimmy Vail, but he said the trouble couldn't have been a loose nut; his guess was that the bolt or bolts had had a flaw and had cracked at some time when the statue was being handled. It was quite possible, he said, that Jimmy Vail, half aroused from a deep sleep, on his way across the room to the door, had lost his balance and grabbed at the statue and pulled it down on him. I thought it was darned decent of the Gazette to run the piece. A good murder or suspicion of one will sell thousands of extra papers, and here they were promoting the idea that it had been accidental. They had got the picture Lon had said would be beautiful, of Benjamin Franklin on top of Jimmy Vail.

There were no quotes from any members of the family. Mrs Vail was in bed under a doctor's care, inaccessible. Andrew Frost wasn't seeing reporters, but he had told the police that when he left the house around midnight, unescorted, he had not stopped at the library on his way out.

As I have said, there was nothing new on the radio at eleven o'clock Friday morning. At 11:10 I phoned Homicide West from Doc Vollmer's office downstairs-he was at the hospital-and told the desk man to tell Inspector Cramer that Nero Wolfe had some information for him regarding Jimmy Vail. At 11:13 I called the District Attorney's office at White Plains, got an assistant DA, and told him to tell Hobart that Wolfe had decided to answer any questions he might care to ask. At 11:18 I rang the Gazette, got Lon Cohen, and told him it was all his and would probably soon be everybody's, and he could even use our names as the source if he spelled them right. Of course he wanted more, but I hung up. At 11:24 we thanked Helen Gillard and asked her to thank the doctor for us, left the house, walked sixty yards to Wolfe's, found the door was bolted, pushed the button and were admitted by Fritz, and learned that Sergeant Purley Stebbins had come yesterday ten minutes after we left, and Inspector Cramer had come at six o'clock. No search warrant, but Cramer had phoned at 8:43 and again at 10:19. At the office door Wolfe asked about the mussels, and Fritz said they were in perfect condition. Wolfe was at his desk with his eyes closed, in the only chair that will really do, sitting and breathing, and I was at my desk opening the mail, when the doorbell rang and I went. It was Inspector Cramer, his rugged pink face a little pinker than normal and his burly shoulders hunched a little. When I let him in he didn't even give me an eye, but kept going, to the office, and as I followed, after closing the door, I heard him rasping.

"Where have you and Goodwin been since yesterday noon?"

Fifty minutes later, as I have said, at 12:35 P.M., he demanded, "I still want to know where you and Goodwin have been and what you've done the past twenty-four hours."

We had opened the bag. Most of the talking had been done by me because the whole world knows-well, six or eight people-that the only difference between me and a tape recorder is that you can ask me questions. And for some of it-the White Plains part and the session in the Harold F. Tedder library-Wolfe hadn't been present. We had handed over the note that had come in the mail, the original, and my transcriptions, carbons, of the other two notes and the telephone conversation between Mrs Vail and Mr Knapp. I did make a few improvements on Wolfe's phrasing, and mine too, by making it emphatic that the main point had been, first, to get Jimmy Vail back alive, and then to protect him and Mrs Vail by keeping his promise to the kidnapers. Of course Cramer landed on that with both feet. Why had we gone on protecting Vail for twenty-four hours after he was dead? Obviously, so Wolfe could hang onto the money he already had in the bank. Withholding information vital to a murder investigation. Obstructing justice to earn a fee.

Wolfe snorted, and my feelings were hurt. There had still been Mrs Vail to consider, and we hadn't known that Vail had been murdered. Did he? I had read an article by a statue expert which said that it could have been an accident. Wasn't it? Cramer didn't say, but he didn't have to; his being there was enough to show that it was open, though maybe not open-and-shut. He said we had of course seen the statement of the District Attorney's office in the morning paper that the apparent cause of Vail's death was the statue falling on him, that a final determination would be made when the autopsy had been completed, and that a thorough investigation was being made. Then he took the chewed unlit cigar from his mouth and said he still wanted to know where we had been the past twenty-four hours.