Free Gambit by Rex Stout Page B

the biggest goddam fool on earth?”
    “I haven’t met him. Is he?”
    “No. He’s a very intelligent man. He’s anything but a fool. And he’s level-headed. Some men fixed like him, men of wealth and standing, have the idea that they can do anything they please, and get away with it, because they’re above suspicion, but not him. He’s not like that, not at all. So I took it easy - or rather, I didn’t. It was hard to believe that such a man had put poison in the chocolate and took it to Jerin and then went and got the cup and pot and rinsed them out. I don’t have to spell that out.”
    “No.”
    “So we covered it good, every angle. We eliminated the possibility that the arsenic had been in something else, not in the chocolate, and I mean eliminated.
    We established that no one besides Blount and those four men, the messengers,
    had entered that room, the library, after the chess games started, and the games had been going for about seven minutes when Blount went to see about the chocolate - and I mean established. So that left it absolutely that the arsenic had been put in the chocolate by one of seven men: the four messengers, the cook, the steward, and Blount. Okay. Which one of them, or which ones, had some kind of connection with Jerin'I put eleven of my men on that angle, and the District Attorney put eight from the Homicide Bureau. For that kind of job there are no better men anywhere. You know that.”
    “They’re competent,” Wolfe conceded.
    “They’re better than competent. We got Blount’s connection right away, from Blount himself. Of course you know about that. The daughter.”
    “Yes.”
    “But we kept the nineteen men on the other six. In four days and nights they didn’t get a smell. Even after the District Attorney decided it had to be Blount and charged him, I kept nine of my men on the others. A full week. Okay. You know how it is with negatives, you can’t nail it down, but I’ll bet a year’s pay to one of the flowers in that vase that none of those six men had ever met Paul Jerin or had any connection with him or his.”
    “I won’t risk the flower,” Wolfe said.
    “You won’t?”
    “No.”
    “Then do you think one of them happened to have arsenic with him and put it in the chocolate just because he didn’t like the way Jerin played chess?”
    “No.”
    “Then what kind of game are you playing'What can you possibly have that makes you think you can spring Blount?”
    “I haven’t said I have anything.”
    “Nuts. Damn it, I know you!”
    Wolfe cleared his throat. “Mr. Cramer. I admit that I know something you don’t know about one aspect of this matter. I know who hired me and why. You have concluded that no one had hired me, that, having somehow learned of a circumstance not known to you, I am arranging to use it for my private gain.
    You’re wrong; you are incomparably better acquainted than I am with all the circumstances - all of them surrounding the death of Paul Jerin. But you don’t believe me.”
    “I do not.”
    “Then there’s nothing more to say. I’m sorry I have nothing for you because you put me in your debt. You have just furnished me with a fact which suggests an entirely different approach to the problem. It will save me -“
    “What fact?”
    Wolfe shook his head. “No, sir. You wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t accept my interpretation of it. But I’m obliged to you, and I don’t forget an obligation.
    If and when I learn something significant I’ll stretch a point to share it with you as soon as may be. At present I have nothing to share.”
    “Like hell you haven’t.” Cramer got to his feet. He threw the cigar at my wastebasket, twelve feet away, and missed as usual. “One little point, Wolfe.
    Anyone has a right to hire you to investigate something, even a homicide. But if you haven’t been hired, and I know damn well you haven’t, if you’re horning in on your own, that’s different. And if you are in possession of