Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 45 by Please Pass the Guilt

other possibilities, but probabilities have precedence. A question, Mr. Abbott: Do you think it likely that the person who put the bomb in the drawer is now in this room?”
    “ That’s absurd,” Abbott snapped. “I wouldn’t answer that and you know it.”
    “But you have answered it. You didn’t give me a positive no, and you’re a positive man.” Wolfe’s eyes went right. “Mr. Falk. Do you think it likely?”
    “Yes, I do,” Falk said, “and I could name names, three of them, but I won’t. I have no evidence, but I have an opinion, and that’s what you asked for.”
    “I don’t expect names. Mrs. Browning. The same question.”
    “Don’t answer, Phyllis,” Browning said. A command.
    “Of course not. I wasn’t going to.” Her voice didn’t match her scrawniness; it was a full, rich contralto, with color.
    Wolfe asked, “Then you, Mr. Browning? Are you going to answer?”
    “Yes. I’ll tell you exactly what I have told the police and the District Attorney. I not only have no evidence, I have no basis whatever for an opinion. Not even an opinion as to whether the bomb was intended for me or for Odell. It was my room and my desk, but the fact remains that it was Odell who got it. I’ll also tell you that I am not surprised that Mrs. Odell has engaged you, and I don’t blame her. After nearly three weeks the official investigation is apparently completely stymied.”
    Wolfe nodded. “I may have better luck. Miss Lugos? The same question.”
    “The same as Mr. Browning,” she said. I acknowledge that her voice wasn’t as good as Mrs. Browning’s; it was thinner and pitched higher. “I have no idea. None at all.” Also she wasn’t a good liar. When you have asked about ten thousand people about a million questions you may not be able to spot a lie as well as you think you can, but you’re right a lot oftener than you’re wrong.
    “Mr. Meer?”
    Naturally I was wondering about Kenneth Meer. Like everybody who reads about murders in newspapers, I knew that he had been the fourth or fifth person to enter Browning’s room after the explosion, so he had seen blood all right, but that alone wouldn’t account for the blood-on-his-hands crisis that had sent him to the clinic, unless he had bad kinks in his nervous system, bad enough to keep him from working up to such an important job at CAN and hanging onto it. There was the obvious possibility that he had planted the bomb, but surely not for Browning, and if for Odell, how did he know Odell was going to the room and open the drawer? Of course Mrs. Odell had made the answer to that one easy: Browning had told him. Now, how would he answer Wolfe’s question?
    He answered it with a declaration which he had had plenty of time to decide on: “I think it extremely likely that the person who put the bomb in the drawer is now in this room, but that’s all I can say. I can’t give any reason or any name.”
    “You can’t, or you won’t?”
    “Does it matter? Just make it I don’t.”
    “But I ask you if—no. That will come later, if at all. Miss Venner?”
    She wasn’t showing the dimples. Instead, she had been squinting at Wolfe, and still was. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t think you are dumb, but this is dumb, and I wonder why you’re doing it. Even if I thought I could name the person who put the bomb in the drawer, would I tell you with them here? Mr. Abbott is the head of the company that employs me, and Mr. Browning is going to be. I can’t, but even if I could … I don’t get it.”
    “You haven’t listened,” Wolfe told her. “I said that I had little hope of getting any useful facts from you, and I could have added that even if I do, you probably won’t know it. For instance, the question I ask you now. About three months ago CAN had a special program called ‘Where the Little Bombs Come From.’ Did you see it?”
    “Yes. Of course.”
    “Then you know that the preparation for that program required