Free The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

competently. Then her eyes changed. 'Look, this is off the record?'
    'Sure, you and me. And my boss, but he never tells anybody anything.'
    'I'm fed up.' She worked her jaw like a man, no lip trembling. 'I'm going to quit and get a job sewing on buttons. The day anyone catches the murderer of Cheney Boone, finds him and proves it on him, it will rain up instead of down. In fact it will-'
    I nodded encouragingly. 'What else will it do?'
    She abruptly got to her feet. 'I'm talking too much.'
    'Oh, no, not enough. You've just started. Sit down.'
    'No, thank you.' Her eyes were competent again. 'You're the first man I've collapsed in front of for a long, long time. For heaven's sake, don't get the idea that I know secrets and try to dig them out of me. It's just that this thing is more than I can handle and I've lost my head. Don't bother to let me out.'
    She went.
    When Wolfe came down to the office at six o'clock I reported the conversation in full. At first he decided not to be interested, then changed his mind. He wanted my opinion and I gave it to him, that I doubted if she knew anything that would help much, and even if she did she was through collapsing in front of me, but he might have a go at her.
    He grunted. 'Archie. You are transparent. What you mean is that you don't want to bother with her, and you don't want to bother with her because Miss Gunther has got you fidgeting.'
    I said coldly, 'I don't fidget.'
    'Miss Gunther has got you on a string.'
    Usually I stay right with him when he takes that line, but there was no telling how far he might go in the case of Phoebe Gunther and I didn't want to resign in the middle of a murder job, so I cut it off by going to the front door for the evening papers.
    We get two of each, to avoid friction, and I handed him his share and sat at my desk with mine. I looked at the Gazette first, and on the front page saw headlines that looked like news. It was. Mrs. Boone had got something in the mail.
    One detail that I believe I haven't mentioned before was Boone's wallet. I haven't mentioned it because its being taken by the murderer provided no new angle on the crime or the motive, since he hadn't carried money in it. His money had been in a billfold in his hip pocket and hadn't been touched. He had carried the wallet in the breast pocket of his coat and used it for miscellaneous papers and cards, and it had not been found on the body, and therefore it was presumed that the murderer had taken it. The news in the Gazette was that Mrs. Boone had received an envelope in the mail that morning, with her name and address printed on it with a lead pencil, and in it had been two objects that Boone had always carried in the wallet: his automobile license and a photograph of Mrs. Boone in her wedding dress. The Gazette article remarked that the sender must be both a sentimentalist and a realist; sentimental, because the photo was returned; realist, because the auto license, which was still of use, had been returned, while Boone's operator's license, which he had also kept in the wallet, had not been. The Gazette writer was picturesque about it, saying that the operator's license had been canceled with a monkey wrench.
    'Indeed,' Wolfe said loud enough for me to hear. I saw that he was reading it too, and spoke:
    'If the cops hadn't already been there and got it, and if Miss Gunther didn't have me on a string, I'd run up to see Mrs. Boone and get that envelope.'
    'Three or four men in a laboratory,' Wolfe said, 'will do everything to that envelope but split its atoms. Before long they'll be doing that too. But this is the first finger that has pointed in any direction at all.'
    'Sure,' I agreed, 'now it's a cinch. All we have to do is find out which of those one thousand four hundred and ninety-two people is both a sentimentalist and a realist, and we've got him.'
    We went back to our papers.
    Nothing more before dinner. After the meal, which for me consisted chiefly of thin toast and liver pate