Taking Mrs. Bruner to the alcove, followed by Saul, I slid the panel and showed her the hole. “As I said,” I told her, “Wragg is coming and will be in the office with Mr. Wolfe and me. Mr. Panzer will bring the stool from the kitchen, and you’ll sit here on it, and he’ll stand here. It will last anywhere from ten minutes to two hours, I don’t know. You won’t understand everything you hear, but you’ll understand enough. If you feel a cough or sneeze coming, go to the kitchen fast on your toes. Saul will motion to you if—”
The doorbell rang. I stuck my head around the alcove corner, and there he was on the stoop, five minutes ahead of time. I told Saul to get the stool, and as he headed for the kitchen I started down the hall. At the door I looked back, got a nod from him at the alcove corner, and opened the door.
Richard Wragg was forty-four years old. He lived in an apartment in Brooklyn with a wife and two children and had been with the FBI fifteen years. Detectives know things. He was about my height, with a long face and a pointed chin, and would be bald on top in four years, or maybe three. He didn’t offer to shake, but he turned his back as I peeled his coat off, so he trusted me to a certain extent. When I ushered him to the office and to the red leather chair he stood and looked the room over, and I thought he was too interested in the picture of the waterfall, but perhaps not. He was still standing when the sound of the elevator came and Wolfe entered and stopped short of his desk to say, “Mr. Wragg? I’m Nero Wolfe. Be seated.” As he went to his chair Wragg sat down, found he was only on the edge, and slid back.
Their eyes met. From my angle I couldn’t see Wolfe’s, but Wragg’s were straight and steady.
“I know about you,” Wragg said, “but I’ve never met you.”
Wolfe nodded. “Some paths don’t cross.”
“But now ours have. I assume that this is being recorded.”
“No. There is equipment, but it isn’t turned on. We might as well ignore such matters. I have assumed for a week that everything said in this house was overheard. You may have a device on your person. I might have my recorder going — though, as I say, I haven’t. Let’s ignore it.”
“We haven’t bugged this house.”
Wolfe’s shoulders went up an eighth of an inch and down. “Ignore it. You wanted to see me?”
Wragg’s fingers were curled over the ends of the chair arms. At ease. “As you expected. We don’t need to waste time shadow-boxing. I want the credentials you took from two of my men last night by force.”
Wolfe turned a hand over. Also at ease. “But you are shadow-boxing. Retract that ‘by force.’ The force was initiated by them. They entered my house by force. I merely met force with force.”
“I want those credentials.”
“Do you retract your ‘by force’?”
“No. I acknowledge that your retort was valid. Give me the credentials and we’ll talk on even terms.”
“Pfui. Are you a dunce, or do you take me for one? I have no intention of talking on even terms. You came to see me because I constrained you to, but if you came to talk nonsense you may as well leave. Shall I describe the situation as I see it?”
“Yes.”
Wolfe turned his head. “Archie. Mrs. Bruner’s letter engaging me.”
I went to the safe and got it. As I returned Wolfe nodded at Wragg, and I handed it to him. I stood there, and when he had read it I put out a hand. He read it again, slower, and handed it over without looking up at me, and I went to my desk and put it in a drawer.
“Quite a document,” he told Wolfe. “For the record, if there was any espionage of Mrs. Bruner or her family or associates, which I am not admitting, it was in connection with a security check.”
Wolfe nodded. “You say that, of course. A routine lie. I am describing the situation. Your men departed last night, leaving their credentials in my possession, because they dared not call on the police to rescue them. They knew that if a citizen charged them with the crime of entering his house illegally, and pushed the charge, the sympathy of the New York police and the District Attorney would be with the citizen. You know it too. You will not take legal steps to recover the credentials, so they will not be recovered. I shall keep them. I suggest an exchange. You engage to stop all surveillance of Mrs. Bruner and her family and associates, including the tap on her telephone, and I—”
“I haven’t conceded the surveillance.”
“Bah. If you — no. It’s simpler to rephrase it. Disregarding the past, you engage that from six o’clock today there will be by your bureau no surveillance of Mrs. Bruner or her family or associates, or her house, which includes a wiretap, and no surveillance of Mr. Goodwin or me, or my house. I engage to leave the credentials where they are, in my safe-deposit box, to take no action against your men for their invasion of my premises, and to make public no disclosure of it. That’s the situation, and that’s my offer.”
“Do you mean engage in writing?”
“Not unless you prefer it.”
“I don’t. Nothing in writing. I’ll agree to the surveillance part, but I must have the credentials.”
“You won’t get them.” Wolfe pointed a finger at him. “Understand this, Mr. Wragg. I’ll surrender the credentials only if ordered to by a court, and I’ll contest the order with all my resources and those of my client. You may—”
“Damn it, you have four witnesses!”
“I know. But judges and juries are sometimes whimsical. They may capriciously doubt the credibility of witnesses, even five of them — counting me. It would be fatuous for you to question my good faith. I have no desire to enter into a mortal feud with your bureau; my sole purpose is to do the job I have been hired for. As long as you harass or annoy neither my client nor me, I shall have no use either for the credentials or for my witnesses.”
Wragg looked at me. I thought he was going to ask me something, but no, I was just a place to give his eyes a rest from Wolfe while he answered some question he had asked himself. It took him a while. Finally he went back to Wolfe.
“You’ve left something out,” he said. “You say your sole purpose is to do the job you’ve been hired for. Then why have you been investigating a homicide we have no connection with? Why has Goodwin gone twice to see Mrs. David Althaus, and twice to Morris Althaus’s apartment, and why did you have those six people here last Thursday evening?”
Wolfe nodded. “You think one of your men shot Morris Althaus.”
“I do not. That’s absurd.”
Wolfe got testy. “Confound it, sir, can’t you talk sense? What could they have conceivably been after when they invaded my house? You suspected that I had somehow discovered that three of your men had been in Morris Althaus’s apartment the night he was killed, as indeed I had. They had reported to you that he was dead when they arrived, but you didn’t believe them. At least you doubted them. I don’t know why; you know them; I don’t. And you suspected or feared that I had not only learned that they were there but had also secured evidence that they, one of them, had killed him. Talk sense.”
“You still haven’t told me why you were investigating a homicide.”
“Isn’t that obvious? Because I had learned that your men had been there.”
“How did you learn that?”
Wolfe shook his head. “That’s reserved.”
“Have you been in touch with Inspector Cramer?”
“No. I haven’t seen or spoken with him for months.”
“Or the District Attorney’s office?”
“No.”
“Are you going to continue the investigation?”