“I’ll do my own speculating, thank you. Mr. Getz may not have liked the pictures. Mr. Koven?”
Lon turned a hand over. “Well? What better could you ask? Getz had him buffaloed, no doubt about it. Getz ruled the roost, plenty of evidence on that, and nobody knows why, so the only question is what he had on Koven. It must have been good, but what was it? You say this is a private conversation?”
“Yes.”
“Then here’s something we got started on just this afternoon. It has to be checked before we print it. That house on Seventy-sixth Street is in Getz’s name.”
“Indeed.” Wolfe shut his eyes and opened them again. “And Mrs. Koven?”
Lon turned his other hand over. “Husband and wife are one, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Man and wife make one fool.”
Lon’s chin jerked up. “I want to print that. Why not?”
“It was printed more than three hundred years ago. Ben Jonson wrote it.” Wolfe sighed. “Confound it, what can I do with only a few scraps?” He pointed at the carton. “You want that stuff back, I suppose?”
Lon said he did. He also said he would be glad to go on with the private conversation in the interest of justice and the public welfare, but apparently Wolfe had all the scraps he could use at the moment. After ushering Lon to the door I went up to my room to spend an hour attending to purely personal matters, a detail that had been too long postponed. I was out of the shower, selecting a shirt, when a call came from Saul Panzer in response to the message I had left. I gave him all the features of the picture that would help and told him to report to Parker’s law office in the morning.