The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

the pose long enough for five takes, then slowly straightened up. 'What do you want?'
    'I want to know where you got this thing.'
    'All right, I'll tell you. Last evening-'
    'Excuse me. Archie. Your notebook. Go ahead, sir.'
    'Last evening around eight-thirty I got a phone call at home. It was a woman. She said her name was Dorothy Unger and she was a stenographer at the New York office of the Bureau of Price Regulation. She said she had made a bad mistake. She said that in an envelope addressed to me she had enclosed something that was supposed to be enclosed in a letter to someone else. She said that she had remembered about it after she got home, and that she might even lose her job if her boss found out about it. She asked me when I received the envelope to mail the enclosure to her at her home, and she gave me her address. I asked her what the enclosure was and she said it was a ticket for a parcel that had been checked at Grand Central Station. I asked her some more questions and told her I would do what she asked me to.'
    Wolfe put in, 'Of course you phoned her back.'
    'I couldn't. She said she had no phone and was calling from a booth. This morning I received the envelope and the enclosure was-'
    'This is Sunday,' Wolfe snapped.
    'Damn it, I know it's Sunday! It came special delivery. It contained a circular about price ceilings, and the enclosure. If it had been a weekday I would have communicated with the BPR office, but of course the office wasn't open.' O'Neill gestured impatiently. 'What does it matter what I would have done or what I thought'You know what I did do. Naturally, you know more about it than me, since you arranged the whole thing!'
    'I see.' Wolfe put up a brow. 'You think I arranged it?'
    'No.' O'Neill leaned on the desk again. 'I know you arranged it! What happened'Wasn't Goodwin right there'I admit I was dumb when I came here Friday. I was afraid you had agreed to frame Boone's murder on someone in the BPR, or at least someone outside the NIA. And already, you must have been, you were preparing to frame someone in the NIA! Me! No wonder you think I'm a nincompoop!'
    He jerked erect, glared at Wolfe, turned to glare at me, went to the red leather chair and sat down, and said in a completely different voice, calm and controlled:
    'But you'll find that I'm not a nincompoop.'
    'That point,' Wolfe said, frowning at him, 'is relatively unimportant. The envelope you received this morning special delivery-have you got it with you?'
    'No.'
    'Where is it, at your home?'
    'Yes.'
    'Telephone and tell someone to bring it here.'
    'No. I'm going to have some detective work done on that envelope and not by you.'
    'Then you won't hear what those cylinders have to say,' Wolfe explained patiently. 'Must I keep repeating that?'
    This time O'Neill didn't try to argue. He used the phone on my desk, dialed, got his party, and told someone whom he called Honey to get the envelope as described from the top of his chiffonier and send it by messenger to Nero Wolfe's office. I was surprised. I would have made it five to one that there was no such envelope, and it was still even money with me that it would be gone from the chiffonier because it must have dropped to the floor and the maid thought it was trash.
    When O'Neill was back in the red leather chair Wolfe said, 'You're going to find it a little difficult to get anyone to believe that you suspect Mr. Goodwin and me of arranging this. For if that's true, why didn't you insist on going to the police'He wanted to.'
    'He did not want to.' O'Neill was keeping calm. 'He merely threatened to.'
    'But the threat worked. Why did it work?'
    'You know damn well why it worked. Because I wanted to hear what's on those cylinders.'
    'You did indeed. Up to five thousand dollars. Why?'
    'Do I have to tell you why?'
    'No. You don't have to. You know how it stands.'
    O'Neill gulped. He had probably swallowed 'Go to hell' thirty times in thirty minutes. 'Because I have reason to suppose, and