Wolfe: “Then there’s a misunderstanding. I heard Miss Lowell’s talk with you on the phone, both ends of it. I got the impression that my threat to inform the police—”
“That’s enough!” Wolfe called. I turned it off. Wolfe looked at Koven. “I would call that,” he said dryly, “a suggestion that I take my information to the police. Wouldn’t you?”
Koven wasn’t saying. Wolfe’s eyes moved. “Wouldn’t you, Miss Lowell?”
She shook her head. “I’m not an expert on suggestions.”
Wolfe left her. “We won’t quarrel over terms, Mr. Koven. You heard it. Incidentally, about the other tape you heard the start of through Mr. Goodwin’s clumsiness, you may wonder why I haven’t given it to the police to refute you. Monday evening, when Inspector Cramer came to see me, I still considered you as my client and I didn’t want to discomfit you until I heard what you had to say. Before Mr. Cramer left he had made himself so offensive that I was disinclined to tell him anything whatever. Now you are no longer my client. We’ll discuss this matter realistically or not at all. I don’t care to badger you into an explicit statement that you lied to the police; I’ll leave that to you and them; I merely insist that we proceed on the basis of what we both know to be the truth. With that understood—”
“Wait a minute,” Pat Lowell put in. “The gun was in the drawer Sunday morning. I saw it.”
“I know you did. That’s one of the knots in the tangle, and we’ll come to it.” His eyes swept the arc. “We want to know who killed Adrian Getz. Let’s get at it. What do we know about him or her? We know a lot.
“First, he took Koven’s gun from the drawer sometime previous to last Friday and kept it somewhere. For that gun was put back in the drawer when Goodwin’s was removed shortly before Getz was killed, and cartridges from it were placed in Goodwin’s gun.
“Second, the thought of Getz continuing to live was for some reason so repugnant to him as to be intolerable.
“Third, he knew the purpose of Koven’s visit here Saturday evening, and of Goodwin’s errand at the Koven house on Monday, and he knew the details of the procedure planned by Koven and Goodwin. Only with—”