Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe Read Online Free PDF Page A

girls started to make noises, and, hearing them, he put the glass down and came back.
    â€œYou’re in a pickle,” he said. “So am I. You heard me apologize to Mr. Brenner and avow my responsibility for his undertaking to cook that meal. When, upstairs, I saw that Mr. Pyle would die, and reached the conclusions I told you of, I felt myself under compulsion to expose the culprit. I am committed. When I came down here I thought it would be a simple matter to learn who had served poisoned food to Mr. Pyle, but I was wrong. It’s obvious now that I have to deal with one who is not only resourceful and ingenious, but also quick-witted and audacious. While I was closing in on her just now, as I thought, inexorably approaching the point where she would either have to contradict one of you or deny that she had served the first course to anyone, she was fleering at me inwardly, and with reason, for her coup had worked. She had slipped through my fingers, and—”
    â€œBut she didn’t!” It came from one of them whose name I didn’t have. “She said she didn’t serve anybody!”
    Wolfe shook his head. “No. Not Miss Faber. She is the only one who is eliminated. She says she was absent from this room during the entire period when the plates were being taken from the table, and she wouldn’t dare to say that if she had in fact been here and taken a plate and carried it in to Mr. Pyle. She would certainly have been seen by some of you.”
    He shook his head again. “Not her. But it couldhave been any other one of you. You—I speak now to that one, still to be identified—you must have extraordinary faith in your attendant godling, even allowing for your craft. For you took great risks. You took a plate from the table—not the first probably, but one of the first—and on your way to the dining room you put arsenic in the cream. That wasn’t difficult; you might even have done it without stopping if you had the arsenic in a paper spill. You could get rid of the spill later, perhaps in the room which Miss Faber calls a john. You took the plate to Mr. Pyle, came back here immediately, got another plate, took it to the dining room, and gave it to one who had not been served. I am not guessing; it had to be like that. It was a remarkably adroit stratagem, but you can’t possibly be impregnable.”
    He turned to Zoltan. “You say you watched as the plates were taken, and each of them took only one. Did one of them come back and take another?”
    Zoltan looked fully as unhappy as Fritz. “I’m thinking, Mr. Wolfe. I can try to think, but I’m afraid it won’t help. I didn’t look at their faces, and they’re all dressed alike. I guess I didn’t watch very close.”
    â€œFritz?”
    â€œNo, sir. I was at the range.”
    â€œThen try this, Zoltan. Who were the first ones to take plates—the first three or four?”
    Zoltan slowly shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s no good, Mr. Wolfe. I could try to think, but I couldn’t be sure.” He moved his eyes right to left and back again, at the girls. “I tell you, I wasn’t looking at their faces.” He extended his hands, palms up. “You will consider, Mr. Wolfe, I was not thinking of poison. I was only seeing that the plates were carried properly. Was I thinking which one has got arsenic? No.”
    â€œI took the first plate,” a girl blurted—anotherwhose name I didn’t know. “I took it in and gave it to the man in my chair, the one at the left corner at the other side of the table, and I stayed there. I never left the dining room.”
    â€œYour name, please?”
    â€œMarjorie Quinn.”
    â€œThank you. Now the second plate. Who took it?”
    Apparently nobody. Wolfe gave them ten seconds, his eyes moving to take them all in, his lips tight. “I advise you,” he said, “to jog