After they had left I remarked to Wolfe, “In addition to everything else, here’s a pleasant thought. Not only do you have no Andy, not only do you have to get back home and start watering ten thousand plants, but at a given moment, maybe in a month or maybe sooner, you’ll get a subpoena to go to White Plains and sit on the witness stand.” I shrugged. “Well, if it’s snowy and sleety and icy, we can put on chains and stand a fair chance of getting through.”
“Shut up,” he growled. “I’m trying to think.” His eyes were closed.
I perched on the bench. After some minutes he growled again. “I can’t. Confound this chair.”
“Yeah. The only one I know of that meets the requirements is fifty miles away. By the way, whose guests are we, now that he who invited us in here has been stuck in the coop?”
I got an answer of a kind, though not from Wolfe. The door to the warm room opened, and Joseph G. was with us. His daughter Sybil was with him. By that time I was well acquainted with his listed nose, and with her darting green eyes and pointed chin.
He stopped in the middle of the room and inquired frostily, “Were you waiting for someone?”
Wolfe opened his eyes halfway and regarded him glumly. “Yes,” he said.
“Yes? Who?”
“Anyone. You. Anyone.”
“He’s eccentric,” Sybil explained. “He’s being eccentric.”
“Be quiet, Sybil,” Father ordered her, without removing his eyes from Wolfe. “Before Lieutenant Noonan left he told me he would leave a man at the entrance to my grounds to keep people from entering. He thought we might be annoyed by newspapermen or curious and morbid strangers. But there will be no trouble about leaving. The man has orders not to prevent anyone’s departure.”
“That’s, sensible,” Wolfe approved. “Mr. Noonan is to be commended.” He heaved a deep sigh. “So you’re ordering me off the place. That’s sensible too, from your standpoint.” He didn’t move.
Pitcairn was frowning. “It’s neither sensible nor not sensible. It’s merely appropriate. You had to stay, of course, as long as you were needed — but now you’re not needed. Now that this miserable and sordid episode is finished, I must request—”
“No,” Wolfe snapped. “No indeed.”
“No what?”
“The episode is not finished. I didn’t mean Mr. Noonan is to be commended by me, only by you. He was, in fact, an ass to leave the people on your premises free to go as they please, since one of them is a murderer. None of you should be allowed to take a single step unobserved and unrecorded. As for—”
Sybil burst out laughing. The sound was a little startling, and it seemed to startle her as much as it did her audience, for she suddenly clapped her hand to her mouth to choke it off.
“There you are,” Wolfe told her, “you’re hysterical.” His eyes darted back to Pitcairn. “Why is your daughter hysterical?”
“I am not hysterical,” she denied scornfully. “Anyone would laugh. It wasn’t only melodramatic, it was corny.” She shook her head, held high. “I’m disappointed in you, Nero. I thought you were better than that.”
I think what finally made him take the plunge was her calling him Nero. Up to then he had been torn. It’s true that his telling Andy he hoped it would be only a matter of hours had been a commitment of a sort, and God knows he needed Andy, and the law trampling over him had made bruises, especially Lieutenant Noonan, but up to that point his desire to get back home had kept him from actually making the dive. I knew him well, and I had seen the signs. But this disdainful female stranger calling him Nero was too much, and he took off.
He came up out of the chair and was erect. “I am not comfortable,” he told Joseph G. stiffly, “sitting here in your house with you standing. Mr. Krasicki has engaged me to get him cleared and I intend to do it. It would be foolhardy to assume that you would welcome a thorn for the sake of such abstractions as justice or truth, since that would make you a rarity almost unknown, but you have a right to be asked. May I stay here, with Mr. Goodwin, and talk with you and your family and servants, until I am either satisfied that Mr. Krasicki is guilty or am equipped to satisfy others that he isn’t?”
Sybil, though still scornful, nodded approvingly. “That’s more like it,” she declared. “That rolled.”
“You may not,” Pitcairn said, controlling himself. “If the officers of the law are satisfied, it is no concern of mine that you are not.” He put his hand in his side coat pocket. “I’ve been patient and I’m not going to put up with any more of this. You know where your car is.”
His hand left the pocket, and damned if there wasn’t a gun in it. It was a Colt.38, old but in good condition.
“Let me see your license,” I said sternly.
“Pfui.” Wolfe lifted his shoulders a millimeter and let them down. “Very well, sir, then I’ll have to manage.” He put his hand into his own side pocket, and I thought my God, he’s going to shoot it out with him, but when the hand reappeared all it held was a key. “This,” he said, “is the key to Mr. Krasicki’s cottage, which he gave me so I could enter to collect his belongings — whatever is left of them after the illegal visitations of the police. Mr. Goodwin and I are going there, unaccompanied. When we return to our car we shall await you or your agent to inspect our baggage. Have you any comment?”
“I—” Pitcairn hesitated, frowning, then he said, “No.”
“Good.” Wolfe turned and went to a table for his coat, hat, and cane. “Come, Archie.” He marched.
As we reached the door Sybil’s voice came at our backs. “If you find the box of morphine don’t tell anybody.”
Outdoors I held Wolfe’s coat for him and got mine on. The whole day had been dark, but now it was getting darker, though a cold wind was herding the clouds down to the horizon and on over. When we reached the rear of the house I swung left for a detour to the car to get a flashlight, and caught up with Wolfe on the path. No ducking was necessary now, as the twigs had dried. We passed the tennis court and entered the grove of evergreens, where it was already night.
I glanced at my wrist. “Four o’clock,” I announced cheerily to Wolfe, who was ahead. “If we were home, and Theodore was still there, or Andy had come, you would be just going up to the plant rooms to poke around.”
He didn’t even tell me to shut up. He was way beyond that.
It was dark enough in the cottage to need lights, and I turned them on. Wolfe glanced around, spotted a chair nearly big enough, took off his hat and coat, and sat, while I started a tour. The dicks had left it neat. This medium-sized room wasn’t bad, though the rugs and furniture had seen better days. To the right was a bedroom and to the left another one, and in the rear was a bathroom and a kitchen.
I took only a superficial look and then returned to Wolfe and told him, “Nothing sticks out. Shall I pack?”
“What for?” he asked forlorn.
“Shall I see if they missed something important?”
He only grunted. Not feeling like sitting and looking at him, I began a retake. A desk and a filing cabinet yielded nothing but horticultural details and some uninteresting personal items, and the rest of the room nothing at all. The bedroom at the left was even blanker. The one at the right was the one Andy had used, and I went over it good, but if it contained anything that could be used to flatten Lieutenant Noonan’s nose I failed to find it. The same for the bathroom. And ditto for the kitchen, except that at the rear of a shelf, behind some packages of prunes and cereals, I dug up a little cardboard box. There was no morphine in it, and there was no reason to suppose there ever had been, and I reported its contents to Wolfe merely to get conversation started.
“Keys,” I said, jiggling the box, “and one of them is tagged d-u-p period g-r-n-h-s period, which probably means duplicate to the greenhouse. It would come in handy if we want to sneak in some night and swipe that Phalaenopsis.”
No comment. I put the keys in my pocket and sat down.
Pretty soon I spoke. “I’d like to make it plain,” I said distinctly, “that I don’t like the way you’re acting. Many times, sitting in the office, you have said to me, ‘Archie, go get Whosis and Whosat and bring them here.’ Usually, I have delivered. But if you now tell me to drive you home, and, upon arriving, tell me to go get the Pitcairns and Imbries and Gus Treble, which is what I suspect you of, save it. I wouldn’t even bother to answer, not after the way you’ve bitched it up just because a pretty girl called you by your first name.”
“She isn’t pretty,” he growled.
“Nuts. Certainly she’s pretty, though I don’t like her any better than you do. I just wanted to make sure that you understand what the situation will be if we go home.”
He studied me. After a while he nodded, with his lips compressed, as if in final acceptance of an ugly fact.
“There’s a phone,” he said. “Get Fritz.”
“Yeah, I saw it, but what if it’s connected with the house?”
“Try it.”
I went to the desk and did so, dialing the operator, and, with no audible interference, got her, gave the number, and heard Fritz’s voice in my ear. Wolfe got up and came across and took it away from me.
“Fritz? We have been delayed. No, I’m all right. I don’t know. The delay is indefinite. No, confound it, he’s in jail. I can’t tell now but you’ll hear from me again well before dinnertime. How are the plants? I see. No, that’s all right, that won’t hurt them. I see. No no no, not those on the north! Not a one! Certainly I did, but...”
I quit listening, not that I was callous, but because my attention was drawn elsewhere. Turning away, for no special reason, a window was in my line of vision, and through it, outdoors near the pane, I saw a branch of a shrub bob up and down and then wiggle to a stop. I am no woodsman, but it didn’t seem reasonable that wind could make a leafless branch perform like that, so I turned to face Wolfe again, listened for another minute, and then sauntered across the room and into the kitchen. I switched off the light there, carefully and silently eased the back door open, slipped outside, and pulled the door to.
It was all black, but after I had stood half a minute I could see a little. I slipped my hand inside my vest to my shoulder holster, but brought it out again empty; it was just an automatic check. I saw now that I was standing on a concrete slab only a shallow step above the ground. Stepping off it to the left, I started, slow motion, for the corner of the house. The damn wind was so noisy that my ears weren’t much help. Just as I reached the corner a moving object came from nowhere and bumped me. I grabbed for it, but it, instead of grabbing, swung a fist. The fist was hard when it met the side of my neck, and that got me sore. I sidestepped, whirled, and aimed one for the object’s kidney, but there wasn’t enough light for precision and I missed by a mile, nearly cracking a knuckle on his hip. He came at me with a looping swing that left him as open as a house with a wall gone, I ducked, and he went on by and then turned to try again. When he turned I saw who it was: Andy’s assistant, Gus Treble.
I stepped back, keeping a guard up for defense only.
“Lookit,” I said, “I’d just as soon go on if you really want to, but why do you want to? It’s more fun when I know what it’s for.”
“You double-crossing sonofabitch,” he said, not panting.
“Okay, but it’s still vague. Who did I cross? Pitcairn? The daughter? Who?”
“You made him think you were with him and then you helped get him framed.”
“Oh. You think we crossed Andy?”
“I know damn well you did.”
“Listen, brother.” I let my guard down. “You know what you are? You’re the answer to a prayer. You’re what I wanted for Christmas. You’re dead wrong, but you’re wonderful. Come in and have a talk with Nero Wolfe.”
“I wouldn’t talk with that crook.”
“You were looking at him through a window. What for?”
“I wanted to see what you were up to.”
“That’s easy. You should have asked. We were up to absolutely nothing. We were sunk up to our ears. We were phut. We were and are crazy for Andy. We wanted to take him home with us and pamper him, and they wouldn’t let us.”
“That’s a goddam lie.”
“Very well. Then you ought to come in and tell Mr. Wolfe to his face that he’s a double-crosser, a crook, and a liar. You don’t often get such a chance. Unless you’re afraid. What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing,” he said, and wheeled and marched to the kitchen door, opened it, and went in. I was right behind.
Wolfe’s voice boomed from the other room. “Archie! Where the devil—”
We were with him. He had finished with the phone. He shot a glance at Gus and then at me.
“Where did you get him?”
I waved a hand. “Oh, out there. I’ve started deliveries.”