“I want to sit down,” Wolfe repeated firmly.
But he didn’t get to, not yet. Krasicki said sure, go on in and make him self at home, but he had just been starting for the greenhouse when we arrived and he would have to go. I put in to remark that maybe we’d better get back to town, to our own greenhouse, and start the day’s work. That
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reminded Wolfe that I was there, and he gave Krasicki and me each other’s names, and we shook hands. Then Krasicki said he had a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in Bower we might like to see.
Wolfe grunted. “Species? I have eight.”
“Oh, no.” It was easy to tell from Krasicki’s tone of horticultural snobbery, by no means new to me, that he really belonged. “Not species and not dayana. Sanderiana. Nineteen sprays.”
“Good heavens,” Wolfe said enviously. “I must see it.”
So we neither went in and sat down nor went back to our car, which was just as well, since in either case we would have been minus a replacement for Theodore. Krasicki led the way along the path by which we had come, but as we approached the house and outbuildings he took a fork to the left which skirted shrubs and perennial borders, now mostly bare but all neat. As we passed a young man in a rainbow shirt who was scattering peat moss on a border, he said, “You owe me a dime, Andy. No snow,” and Krasicki grinned and told him, “See my lawyer, Gus.”
The greenhouse, on the south side of the house, had been hidden from our view as we had driven in. Approaching it even on this surly December day, it stole the show from the mansion. With stone base walls to match the house, and curving glass, it was certainly high, wide, and handsome. At its outer extremity it ended in a one-story stone building with a slate roof, and the path Krasicki took led to that, and around to its door. The whole end wall was covered with ivy, and the door was fancy, stained oak slabs decorated with black iron, and on it was hanging a big framed placard, with red lettering so big you could read it from twenty paces:
DANGER DO NOT ENTER DOOR TO DEATH
I muttered something about a cheerful welcome. Wolfe cocked an eye at the sign and asked, “Cyanogas G?”
Krasicki, lifting the sign from its hook and putting a key in the hole, shook his head. “Ciphogene. That’s all right; the vents have been open for several hours. This sign’s a little poetic, but it was here when I came. I understand Mrs. Pitcaim painted it herself.”
Inside with them, I took a good sniff of the air. Ciphogene is the fumigant Wolfe uses in his plant rooms, and I knew how deadly it was, but there was only a faint trace to my nose, so I went on breathing. The inside of the stone building was the storage and workroom, and right away Wolfe started looking things over.
Andy Krasicki said politely but briskly, “If you’ll excuse me, I’m always behind a morning after fumigating…”
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Wolfe, on his good behavior, followed him through the door into the greenhouse, and I went along.
“This is the cool room,” Krasicki told us. “Next is the warm room, and then, the one adjoining the house, the medium. I have to get some vents closed and put the automatic on.”
It was quite a show, no question about that, but I was so used to Wolfe’s arrangement, practically all orchids, that it seemed pretty messy. When we proceeded to the warm room there was a sight I really enjoyed: Wolfe’s face as he gazed at the P. Aphrodite sanderiana with its nineteen sprays. The admiration and the envy together made his eyes gleam as I had seldom seen them. As for the flower, it was new to me, and it was something special —rose, brown, purple, and yellow. The rose suffused the petals, and the brown, purple, and yellow were on the labellum.
“Is i£ yours?” Wolfe demanded.
Andy shrugged. “Mr. Pitcaim owns it.”
“I don’t care a hang who owns it. Who grew it?”
“I did. From a seed.”
Wolfe grunted. “Mr. Krasicki, I’d like to shake your hand.”
Andy permitted him to do so and then moved along to proceed through the door into the medium room, presumably to close more vents. After Wolfe had spent a few more minutes coveting the Phalaenopsis, we followed. This was another mess, everything from violet geraniums to a thing in a tub with eight million little white flowers, labeled Serissa foetida. I smelled it, got nothing, crushed one of the flowers with my ringers and smelled that, and then had no trouble understanding the foetida. My fingers had it good, so I went out to the sink in the workroom and washed with soap.
I got back to the medium room in time to hear Andy telling Wolfe that he had a curiosity he might like to see. “Of course,” Andy said, “you know Tibouchina semidecandra, sometimes listed as Pleroma macanthrum or Pleroma grandifiora.”
“Certainly,” Wolfe assented.
I bet he had never heard of it before. Andy went on. “Well, I’ve got a two-year plant here that I raised from a cutting, less than two feet high, and a branch has sported. The leaves are nearly round, not ovate, foveolate, and the petioles—wait till I show you—it’s resting now out of light—”
He had stepped to where a strip of green canvas hung from the whole length of a bench section, covering the space from the waist-high bench to the ground, and, squatting, he lifted the canvas by its free bottom edge and stuck his head and shoulders under the bench. Then he didn’t move. For too many seconds he didn’t move at all. Then he came back out, bumping his head on the concrete bench, straightened up to his full height, and
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stood as rigid as if he had been made of concrete himself, facing us, all his
color gone and his eyes shut.
When he heard me move his eyes opened, and when he saw me reaching for the canvas he whispered to me, “Don’t look. No. Yes, you’d better look.”
I lifted the canvas and looked. After I had kept my head and shoulders under the bench about as long as Andy had, I backed out, not bumping my head, and told Wolfe, “It’s a dead woman.”
“She looks dead,” Andy whispered.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “she is dead. Dead and cooled off.”
“Confound it,” Wolfe growled.
m
I WILL make an admission. A private detective is not a sworn officer of the law, like a lawyer, but he operates under a license which imposes a code on him. And in my pocket was the card which put Archie Goodwin under the code. But as I stood there, glancing from Wolfe to Andy Krasicki, what was in the front of my mind was not the next and proper step according to the code, but merely the thought that it was one hell of a note if Nero Wolfe couldn’t even take a little drive to Westchester to try to lasso an orchid tender without a corpse butting in to gum the works. I didn’t know then that Wolfe’s need for an orchid tender was responsible for the corpse being there that day, and that what I took for coincidence was cause and effect.
Andy stayed rigid. Wolfe moved toward the canvas, and I said, Tou can’t
bend over that far.”
But he tried to, and, finding I was right, got down on his knees and lifted the canvas. I squatted beside him. There wasn’t much light, but enough, considering what met the eye. Whatever had killed her had done things to her face, but it had probably been all right for looks. She had fine light brown hair, and nice hands, and was wearing a blue patterned rayon dress. She lay stretched out on her back, with her eyes open and also her mouth open. There was nothing visible under there with her except an overturned eight-inch flower pot with a plant in it which had a branch broken nearly off. Wolfe withdrew and got erect, and I followed suit. Evidently Andy hadn’t moved.
“She’s dead,” he said, this dme out loud.
Wolfe nodded. “And your plant is mutilated. The branch that sported is
broken.”
“What? Plant?”
“Your Tibouchina.”
Andy frowned, shook his head as if to see if it rattled, squatted by the
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canvas again, and lifted it. His head and shoulders disappeared. I violated the code, and so did Wolfe, by not warning him not to touch things. When he reappeared he had not only touched, he had snitched evidence. In his hand was i-he broken branch of the Tibouchina. With his middle finger he raked a furrow in the bench soil, put the lower stem of the branch in it, replaced the soil over the stem, and pressed the soil down.