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vote on it—the air audience—and out of over fourteen thousand letters ninety-two point six per cent were in favor. Second, one of the letters was from an assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University, suggesting that the second guest on the program should be him, or some other professor, who could speak as an expert on the law of averages. That gave it a different slant entirely, and I was for it. Nat Traub, for the agency, was still against it.”
    “And I still am,” Traub declared. “Can you blame me?”
    “So,” Wolfe asked Strong. “Mr. Traub was a minority of one?”
    “That’s right. We went ahead. Miss Vance, who does research for the program in addition to writing scripts, got up a list of prospects. I was surprised to find, and the others were too, that more than thirty tip sheets of various kinds are published in New York alone. We boiled it down to five and they were contacted.”
    I should have warned them that the use of “contact” as a verb was not permitted in that office. Now Wolfe would have it in for him.
    Wolfe frowned. “All five were invited?”
    “Oh, no. Appointments were made for them to see Miss Fraser—the publishers of them. She had to find out which one was most likely to go over on the air and not pull something that would hurt the program. The final choice was left to her.”
    “How were the five selected?”
    “Scientifically. The length of time they had been in business, the quality of paper and printing of the sheets, the opinions of sports writers, things like that.”
    “Who was the scientist? You?”
    “No … I don’t know …”
    “I was,” a firm quiet voice stated. It was Elinor Vance. I had put her in the chair nearest mine because Wolfe isn’t the only one who likes to have things around that he enjoys looking at. Obviously she hadn’t caught up on sleep yet, and every so often she had to clamp her teeth to keep her chin from quivering, but she was the only one there who could conceivably have made me remember that I was not primarily a detective, but a man. I was curious how her brown eyes would look if and when they got fun in them again some day. She was going on:
    “First I took out those that were plainly impossible, more than half of them, and then I talked it over with Miss Koppel and Mr. Meadows, and I think one or two others—I guess Mr. Strong—yes, I’m sure I did—but it was me more than them. I picked the five names.”
    “And they all came to see Miss Fraser?”
    “Four of them did. One of them was out of town—in Florida.”
    Wolfe’s gaze went to the left. “And you, Miss Fraser, chose Mr. Cyril Orchard from those four?”
    She nodded. “Yes.”
    “How did you do that? Scientifically?”
    “No.” She smiled. “There’s nothing scientific about me. He seemed fairly intelligent, and he had much the best voice of the four and was the best talker, and I liked the name of his sheet, Track Almanac —and then I guess I was a little snobbish about it, too. His sheet was the most expensive—ten dollars a week.”
    “Those were the considerations that led you to select him?”
    “Yes.”
    “You had never seen or heard of him before he came to see you as one of the four?”
    “I hadn’t seen him, but I had heard of him, and I had seen his sheet.”
    “Oh?” Wolfe’s eyes went half shut. “You had?”
    “Yes, about a month before that, maybe longer, when the question of having a tipster on the program had come up again, I had subscribed to some of the sheets—three or four of them—to see what they were like. Not in my name, of course. Things like that are done in my manager’s name—Miss Koppel. One of them was this Track Almanac .”
    “How did you happen to choose that one?”
    “My God, I don’t know!” Madeline Fraser’s eyes flashed momentarily with irritation. “Do you remember, Debby?”
    Deborah shook her head. “I think we phoned somebody.”
    “The New York State Racing Commission,” Bill