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naturally he won't say so. He's probably at his office. Shall I ring him?'
    'No. I will not confess that performance to Mr. Cramer. I will not unfold the morning paper to a disclosure of that outlandish masquerade.'
    'Then you're going to sit and read Here and Now until they come with a warrant?'
    'No. That would be fatuous.' He took in air through his mouth, as far down as it would go, and let it out through his nose. 'I'm going to find the murderer and present him to Mr. Cramer. There's nothing else.'
    'Oh. You are.'
    'Yes.'
    'You might have said so and saved my breath, instead of letting me spout.'
    'I wanted to see if your appraisal of the situation agreed with mine. It does.'
    'That's fine. Then you also know that we may have two weeks and we may have two minutes. At this very second some expert may be phoning Homicide to say that he has found fingerprints that match on the card of Wolfe, Nero-'
    The phone rang, and I jerked around as if someone had stuck a needle in me. Maybe we wouldn't have even two minutes. My hand wasn't trembling as I lifted the receiver, I hope. Wolfe seldom lifts his until I have found out who it is, but that time he did.
    'Nero Wolfe's office, Archie Goodwin speaking.'
    'This is the District Attorney's office, Mr. Goodwin. Regarding the murder of Kurt Bottweill. We would like you to be here at ten o'clock tomorrow morning.'
    'All right. Sure.'
    'At ten o'clock sharp, please.'
    'I'll be there.'
    We hung up. Wolfe sighed. I sighed.
    'Well,' I said, 'I've already told them six times that I know absolutely nothing about Santa Claus, so they may not ask me again. If they do, it will be interesting to compare my voice when I'm lying with when I'm telling the truth.'
    He grunted. 'Now. I want a complete report of what happened there after I left, but first I want background. In your intimate association with Miss Dickey you must have learned things about those people. What?'
    'Not much.' I cleared my throat. 'I guess I'll have to explain something. My association with Miss Dickey was not intimate.' I stopped. It wasn't easy.
    'Choose your own adjective. I meant no innuendo.'
    'It's not a question of adjectives. Miss Dickey is a good dancer, exceptionally good, and for the past couple of months I have been taking her here and there, some six or eight times altogether. Monday evening at the Flamingo Club she asked me to do her a favor. She said Bottweill was giving her a runaround, that he had been going to marry her for a year but kept stalling, and she wanted to do something. She said Cherry Quon was making a play for him, and she didn't intend to let Cherry take the rail. She asked me to get a marriage-license blank and fill it out for her and me and give it to her. She would show it to Bottweill and tell him now or never. It struck me as a good deed with no risk involved, and, as I say, she is a good dancer. Tuesday afternoon I got a blank, no matter how, and that evening, up in my room, I filled it in, including a fancy signature.'
    Wolfe made a noise.
    'That's all,' I said, 'except that I want to make it clear that I had no intention of showing it to you. I did that on the spur of the moment when you picked up your book. Your memory is as good as mine. Also, to close it up, no doubt you noticed that today just before Bottweill and Mrs. Jerome joined the party Margot and I stepped aside for a little chat. She told me the license did the trick. Her words were, 'Perfect, simply perfect.' She said that last evening, in his office, he tore the license up and put the pieces in his wastebasket. That's okay, the cops didn't find them. I looked before they came, and the pieces weren't there.'
    His mouth was working, but he didn't open it. He didn't dare. He would have liked to tear into me, to tell me that my insufferable flummery had got him into this awful mess, but if he did so he would be dragging in the aspect he didn't want mentioned. He saw that in time, and saw that I saw it. His mouth worked, but