Free And Be a Villain by Rex Stout Page A

Which one of the people at that broadcast placed that glass and bottle in front of Mr. Orchard?”
    “I don’t know. I’m going to find it very interesting to compare your handling of me with the way the police did it. What you’re trying to do, of course, is to proceed from probability toward certainty, as close as you can get. Say you start, as you see it, with one chance in five that I poisoned Orchard. Assuming that you have no subjective bias, your purpose is to move as rapidly as possible from that position, and you don’t care which direction. Anything I say or do will move you one way or the other. If one way, the one-in-five will become one-in-four, one-in-three, and so on until it becomes one-in-one and a minute fraction, which will be close enough to affirmative certainty so that you will say you know that I killed Orchard. If it goes the other way, your one-in-five will become one-in-ten, one-in-one-hundred, one-in-one-thousand; and when it gets to one-in-ten-billion you will be close enough to negative certainty so that you will say you know that I did not kill Orchard. There is a formula—”
    “No doubt.” Wolfe was controlling himself very well. “If you want to compare me with the police you’ll have to let me get a word in now and then. Had you ever seen Mr. Orchard before the day of the broadcast?”
    “Oh, yes, six times. The first time was thirteen months earlier, in February 1947. You’re going to find me remarkably exact, since the police have had me over all this, back and forth. I might as well give you everything I can that will move you toward affirmative certainty, since subjectively you would prefer that direction. Shall I do that?”
    “By all means.”
    “I thought that would appeal to you. As a mathematician I have always been interested in the application of the calculation of probabilities to the various forms of gambling. The genesis of normal distributions—”
    “Not now,” Wolfe said sharply.
    “Oh—of course not. There are reasons why it is exceptionally difficult to calculate probabilities in the case of horse races, and yet people bet hundreds of millions of dollars on them. A little over a year ago, studying the possibilities of some formulas, I decided to look at some tip sheets, and subscribed to three. One of them was the Track Almanac , published by Cyril Orchard. Asked by the police why I chose that one, I could only say that I didn’t know. I forget. That is suspicious, for them and you; for me, it is simply a fact that I don’t remember. One day in February last year a daily double featured by Orchard came through, and I went to see him. He had some intelligence, and if he had been interested in the mathematical problems involved I could have made good use of him, but he wasn’t. In spite of that I saw him occasionally, and he once spent a week end with me at the home of a friend in New Jersey. Altogether, previous to that broadcast, I had seen him, been with him, six times. That’s suspicious, isn’t it?”
    “Moderately,” Wolfe conceded.
    Savarese nodded. “I’m glad to see you keep as objective as possible. But what about this? When I learned that a popular radio program on a national network had asked for opinions on the advisability of having a horse race tipster as a guest, I wrote a letter strongly urging it, asked for the privilege of being myself the second guest on the program, and suggested that Cyril Orchard should be the tipster invited.” Savarese smiled all over, beaming. “What about your one-in-five now?”
    Wolfe grunted. “I didn’t take that position. You assumed it for me. I suppose the police have that letter you wrote?”
    “No, they haven’t. No one has it. It seems that Miss Fraser’s staff doesn’t keep correspondence more than two or three weeks, and my letter has presumably been destroyed. If I had known that in time I might have been less candid in describing the letter’s contents to the police, but on the other