The murder was two weeks old, but what had happened, and how, had been plain and clear in the first reports and had not been substantially revised or amended. At 3:17 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20, a man named Peter J. Odell had entered a room on the sixth floor of the CAN building on West Fifty-fourth Street, pulled open the bottom drawer of a desk, and died instantly. The bomb that shredded him was so powerful that it not only blew the metal desk up to the ceiling but even buckled two of the walls. CAN stood for Continental Air Network, which occupied the whole building, and Peter J. Odell had been Please Pass the Guilt 13 its vice-president in charge of development. The room and desk were not his; they belonged to Amory Browning, the vice- president in charge of programming. All right, that was what happened, but in addition to the main question, who had put the bomb in the drawer, there were others that had still not been answered, at least not for publication. It wasn't unheard of for a vice-president to enter another vice-president's room, but why had Odell opened that drawer? That drawer. It was known to enough people at CAN to get into both the Times and the Gazette that that drawer had rarely, possibly never, been opened by anyone but Browning himself because nothing was kept in it but a bottle or bottles of twelve-year-old Ten-Mile Creek bourbon. It had almost certainly been known to Odell. No one had admitted seeing Odell enter Browning's room. Helen Lugos, Browning's secretary, whose room adjoined his, had been down the hall in a file room. Kenneth Meer, Browning's chief assistant, had been down on the ground floor in conference with some technicians. Browning himself had been with Cass R. Abbott, the president of CAN, in his office--the corner office on that floor. If anyone knew why Odell had gone to Browning's room, he wasn't saying. So the answer to the question. Who put the bomb in the drawer? depended partly on the answer to another question: Whom did he expect to open the drawer? Rereading the accounts in fifteen copies of the Times and fifteen of the Gazette, I was impressed by how well I had absorbed the details of an event we had not been involved in, and by nothing else.