'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 178
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?'
'I don't know them even yet,' Hildebrand squeaked.
'Neither do I,' Pete Jordan declared.
'The innocent can afford ignorance,' Wolfe told them. 'Enjoy it if you have it. Only with that knowledge could he have devised his intricate scheme and carried it out.
'Fourth, his mental processes are devious but defective. His deliberate and spectacular plan to make it appear that Goodwin had killed Getz, while ingenious in some respects, was in others witless. Going to Koven's office to get Goodwin's gun from the drawer and placing Koven's gun there, transferring the cartridges from Koven's gun to Goodwin's, proceeding to the room below to find Getz asleep, shooting him
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in the head, using a pillow to muffle the sound?all that was well enough, competently conceived and daringly executed, but then what? Wanting to make sure that the gun would be quickly found on the spot, a quite unnecessary precaution, he slipped it into the monkey's cage. That was probably improvisation and utterly brainless. Mr. Goodwin couldn't possibly be such a vapid fool.
'Fifth, he hated the monkey deeply and bitterly, either on its own account or because of its association with Getz. Having just killed a man, and needing to leave the spot with all possible speed, he went and opened a window, from only one conceivable motive. That took a peculiar, indeed an unexampled, malevolence. I admit it was effective. Miss Lowell tells me the monkey is dying.
'Sixth, he placed Koven's gun in the drawer Sunday morning and, after it had been seen there, took it out again. That was the most remarkable stratagem of all. Since there was no point in putting it there unless it was to be seen, he arranged that it should be seen. Why? It could only have been that he already knew what was to happen on Monday when Mr. Goodwin came, he had already conceived his scheme for framing Goodwin for the homicide, and he thought he was arranging in advance to discredit Goodwin's story. So he not only put the gun in the drawer Sunday morning, he also made sure its presence would be noted?and not, of course, by Mr. Koven.'
Wolfe focused on one of them. 'You saw the gun in the drawer Sunday morning, Mr. Hildebrand?'
'Yes.' The squeak was off pitch. 'But I didn't put it there!'
'I didn't say you did. Your claim to innocence has not yet been challenged. You were in the workroom, went up to consult Mr. Koven, encountered Mrs. Koven one flight up, were told by her that Mr. Koven was still in bed, ascended to the office, found Miss Lowell there, and you pulled the drawer open and both of you saw the gun there. Is that correct?'
'I didn't go up there to look in that drawer. We just?'
'Stop meeting accusations that haven't been made. It's a bad habit. Had you been upstairs earlier that morning?' 180
'No!'
'Had he, Miss Lowell?'
'Not that I know of.' She spoke slowly, with a drag, as if she had only so many words and had to count them. 'Our looking into the drawer was only incidental.'
'Had he, Mrs. Koven?'
The wife jerked her head up. 'Had what?' she demanded.
'Had Mr. Hildebrand been upstairs earlier that morning?'
She looked bewildered. 'Earlier than what?'
'You met him in the second-floor hall and told him that your husband was still in bed and that Miss Lowell was up in the office. Had he been upstairs before that? That morning?' 'I haven't the slightest idea.'
'Then you don't say that he had been?'
