"What are you doing now, changing the subject?" I stuck to the chair near his desk, though I saw that I was being regarded as a mild nuisance, for I had some questions to ask. "It was clouding up as I came in. Is it going to rain all over your clues?"
He was placid, still bent over the magnifying glass. "Some day, Archie, when I decide you are no longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a woman of very modest mental capacity to get an appropriate audience for your wretched sarcasms. When I mentioned the rain I had your own convenience and comfort in mind. This afternoon it struck me as desirable that you should visit Sullivan Street, but tomorrow will do as well."
It was hard to believe unless you were as well acquainted with him as I was; I knew that he was really serious, he thought that leaving the house at any time was an unpleasant venture, but to go out in the rain was next to foolhardy. I said, "What do you think I am, the Chinese army? Of course I'll go. That was one of my questions. Why do you suppose Anna Fiore closed up so hard on O'Grady? Because he wasn't all grace and charm like you and me?"
"Likely. Excellent conjecture, Archie. The more so because when I sent Panzer for her today she confessed only reluctantly to her name and she would not budge. So your grace and charm will be needed. If it would be convenient have her here in the morning at eleven. It's not of great importance but can do no harm for passing the time, and such stubbornness deserves a siege."
"I'll go get her now."
"No. Really. Tomorrow. Sit down. I would prefer to have you here, idle and useless, while I purposelessly inspect this futile flower. Futile and sterile apparently. As I have remarked before, to have you with me like this is always refreshing because it constantly reminds me how distressing it would be to have someone present--a wife, for instance--whom I could not dismiss at will."
"Yes, sir." I grinned. "Go on with the rest of it."
"Not just now. Not with the rain falling. I dislike it."
"All right, then tell me a few things. How did you know Carlo Maffei had been murdered? How do you know Barstow was poisoned? How do you know he's got a needle in him? Of course I see how it got there since you had the boy from Corliss Holmes show us, but how did you get that far?"
Wolfe laid down his magnifying glass and sighed. I knew I was making him uncomfortable, but aside from curiosity it was a matter of business. He never seemed to realize that while it was all very well for me to feel in my bones that he would never get us committed to a mistake, I could do my part with a little more intelligence if I knew what was making the wheels go round. I don't believe he ever would have opened up once, on any case big or little, if I hadn't kept nudging him.
He sighed. "Must I again remind you, Archie, of the reaction you would have got if you had asked Velasquez to explain why Aesop's hand was resting inside his robe instead of hanging by his side? Must I again demonstrate that while it is permissible to request the scientist to lead you back over his footprints, a similar request of the artist is nonsense, since he, like the lark or the eagle, has made none? Do you need to be told again that I am an artist?"
"No, sir. All I need to be told is how you knew Barstow was poisoned."
He took up the magnifying glass. I sat and waited, lighting another cigarette. I had finished it, and had about decided to go to the front room for a book or magazine, when he spoke.
"Carlo Maffei is gone. Common enough, beaten and robbed probably, until the telephone call and the advertisement. The telephone call as a whole does not lack interest, but it is the threat, I'm not the one to be scared, that has significance. The advertisement adds a specification; to that point Maffei has been this and that, he now becomes also a man who may have made something intricate and difficult that would work. The word mechanism made that a good advertisement, but it also offered magnificent suggestions to an inquiring mind. Then, quite by accident just as the creation of life was an accident, Maffei becomes something else: a man who clipped the Barstow news from the paper on the morning of his disappearance. So, read the Barstow news again and find the aspect of it that closely concerned Carlo Maffei. An obscure Italian metal-worker immigrant; a famous learned wealthy university president. Still there must be a connection, and the incongruity of the elements would make it only the more plain if it was visible at all. There is the article; find the link if it is there; stop every word and give it passage only if its innocence is sure. But little effort is required; the link is so obvious that it is at once apparent. At the moment of, and for some time immediately preceding, his collapse, Barstow had in his hands and was using not one, but an entire assortment, of instruments which if they were not intricate and difficult mechanisms were admirably adapted to such a use. It was a perfectly composed picture. But while it needed no justification, nothing indeed but contemplation, as a work of art, if it were to be put to practical uses a little fixative would help. So I merely asked Miss Fiore if she had ever seen a golf club in Maffei's room. The result was gratifying."
"All right," I said. "But what if the girl had just looked and said no, she never saw one anywhere?"
"I have told you before, Archie, that even for your amusement I shall not advise replies to hypothetical questions."
"Sure, that's an easy out."
Wolfe shook his head regretfully. "To reply is to admit the validity of your jargon, but I have learned not to expect better of you. How the devil do I know what I would have done if anything? Probably bade her good night. Would I have found varnish for my picture elsewhere? Maybe; maybe not. Shall I ask you how you would have seen to eat if your head had been put on backwards?"
I grinned. "I wouldn't have starved. Neither will you; if I know anything I know that. But how did you know that Maffei had been murdered?"
"I didn't, until O'Grady came. You heard what I said to him. The police had searched his room. That could only be if he had been taken in a criminal act, or been murdered. The first was unlikely in the light of other facts."
"All right. But I've saved the best till the last. Who killed Barstow?"
"Ah." Wolfe murmured it softly. "That would be another picture, Archie, and I hope an expensive one. Expensive for the purchaser and profitable for the artist. Also, one of its characters would be a worthy subject. To continue my threadbare metaphor, we shan't set up our easel until we are sure of the commission. Yet in point of fact that isn't strictly true. We shall get in a spot of the background tomorrow morning if you can bring Miss Fiore here."
"Let me get her now. It's only a little after nine."
"No--hear the rain? Tomorrow will do."
I knew there was no use insisting, so after a try at a couple of magazines had got me good and bored I got a raincoat from upstairs and went out for an hour at a movie. I wouldn't have admitted to anyone else, but I did to myself, that I wasn't any too easy in my mind. I had had the same kind of experience often before, but that didn't make me like it any better. I did absolutely feel in my bones that Wolfe would never let us tumble into a hole without having a ladder we could climb out with, but in spite of that I had awful doubts sometimes. As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as I was when the guy shot himself an hour later. But there was no use trying to get Wolfe to pull up a little; I hardly ever wasted time on that any more. If I undertook to explain how easy he might be wrong he would just say, "You know a fact when you see it, Archie, but you have no feeling for phenomena." After I had looked up the word phenomena in the dictionary I couldn't see that he had anything, but there was no use arguing with him.
So here I was uneasy again. I wanted to think it over, so I got my raincoat and went to a movie where I could sit in the dark with something to keep my eyes on and let my mind work. It wasn't hard to see how Wolfe had doped it out. Someone wanted to kill Barstow, call him X. He put an ad in the paper for an expert to make him something, fixing it to get someone intending to leave the country for good so if he had any curiosity later on it wouldn't hurt him any. Maffei answered the ad and got the job, namely to make an arrangement inside a golf club so that when the inset on the face hit a ball it would release a trigger and shoot a needle out of the handle at the other end. Probably X presented it as a trial of skill for the European commission to follow; but he gave the Italian so much money for doing it that Maffei decided not to go back home after all. Anyhow, X proceeded to use the club for its calculated purpose, putting it in Barstow's bag (it had of course been made identical in appearance with Barstow's own driver). Then Maffei happened to read Monday's Times and put two and two together, which wasn't strange considering the odd affair he had been paid to construct. X had telephoned; Maffei had met him, made him a present of his suspicions, and tried blackmail. That started an argument. X didn't wait this time for an expert design and mechanism, he just used a knife, leaving it in Maffei's back to keep from soiling the upholstery of the car. He then drove around the Westchester hills until he found a secluded spot, put the body in a thicket and pulled out the knife and later tossed it into a handy stream or reservoir. Arriving home at a decent hour, he had a drink or two before going to bed, and when he got up in the morning put on a cutaway instead of a business suit because he was going to his friend Barstow's funeral.