“I think it may have been.”
“You didn’t put it like that. However, skip it. You gave us the five names. By the way, was that Adrian Getz, the one you called Squirt?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’re all five here, and we can go ahead and get it over with. As I understand it, I am to put my gun there in the drawer where yours was, and you get them up here for a conference, with me present. You were to cook up something to account for me. Have you done that?”
He swallowed another nibble of toast and egg. Wolfe would have had that meal down in five seconds flat — or rather, he would have had it out the window. “I thought this might do,” Koven said. “I can say that I’m considering a new stunt for Dan, have him start a detective agency, and I’ve called Nero Wolfe in for consultation, and he sent you up for a conference. We can discuss it a little, and I ask you to show us how a detective searches a room to give us an idea of the picture potential. You shouldn’t start with the desk; start maybe with the shelves back of me. When you come to do the desk I’ll push my chair back to be out of your way, and I’ll have them right in front of me. When you open the drawer and take the gun out and they see it—”
“I thought you were going to do that.”
“I know, that’s what I said, but this is better because this way they’ll be looking at the gun and you, and I’ll be watching their faces. I’ll have my eye right on them, and the one that took my gun, if one of them did it — when he or she suddenly sees you pull a gun out of the drawer that’s exactly like it, it’s going to show on his face, and I’m going to see it. We’ll do it that way.”
I admit it sounded better there on the spot than it had in Wolfe’s office — and besides, he had revised it. This way he might really get what he wanted. I considered it, watching him finish the tonic water. The toast and egg were gone.
“It sounds all right,” I conceded, “except for one thing. You’ll be expecting a look of surprise, but what if there are five looks of surprise? At seeing me take a gun out of your desk — those who don’t know you had a gun there.”
“But they do know.”