“Yeah. I thought so.”
“But nothing came of it. As you know, it takes a fillip on the flank for my mare to dance, and the fillip was not forthcoming. You were away at the time, and since your return the incident has not been discussed. It is odd that you should have innocently been the cause, by mere chance, of its revival.”
“I don’t get you.”
Fritz came with beer. Wolfe took the opener from the drawer, poured a glass, gulped, and leaned back again. He resumed, “By annoying me about the man on the witness-stand. I resigned myself to your tantrum because it was nearly four o’clock. As you know, the book came. I read it last night.”
“Why did you read it?”
“Don’t badger me. I read it because it was a book. I had finished The Native’s Return, by Louis Adamic, and Outline of Human Nature, by Alfred Rossiter, and I read books.”
“Yeah. And?”
“This will amuse you. Paul Chapin, the man on the witness-stand, the author of Devil Take the Hindmost, is the villain of Andrew Hibbard’s tale. He is the psychopathic avenger of an old and tragic injury.”
“The hell he is.” I gave Wolfe a look; I had known him to invent for practice. “Why is he?”
Wolfe’s eyelids went up a shade. “Do you expect me to explain the universe?”