"Oh. You are. You are?"

"I am. Of course you'll send everything you found to the lab, and it won't take them long to get it, maybe a couple of days. But you might like to have the pleasure of supplying it yourself. I know what the bomb was in."

"You do. And didn't put it in your statement."

"It would have taken about a page, and I was tired, and also I prefer to tell you. Have you ever seen a Don Pedro cigar?"

He finished swallowing the last bite of the sandwich, with his eyes glued to me. "No."

"Cramer wouldn't buy them to chew. Ninety cents apiece. Rusterman's has them. They come in aluminum tubes. DON PEDRO is on the tube in capital letters, dark green, and Honduras is on it, lower case. In the stuff you collected is a piece of aluminum with DO in caps on it, and one with du in lower case, and a bigger one with EDR in caps. So this is what happened. When I left the room, he sat or stood or walked around for a few minutes and decided he might as well undress and go to bed and went and opened the closet door. When you take your coat oft to hang it up, do you automatically stick your hands in the pockets? I do. So did he. And in one of them was a Don Pedro cigar aluminum tube, which of course he recognized. He had no idea how it got there, and he screwed the cap off, holding it fairly close to his face-say ten inches. It was a piece of aluminum that made the gash on his jaw. There's a word for the force that pushed his face in, but I've forgotten it. If you want to include it in your report, you can look it up."

Purley's mouth was shut tight. He didn't open it. His eyes looking at me were half shut. There was half an inch of milk left in my glass, and I lifted it and drank. "What those pieces of aluminum were-" I said, "I had that figured before I phoned, but the rest of it, where it had been and exactly how it happened-I doped that out later to occupy my mind while I sat around.