“Did you kill her?” Wolfe snapped at him.
In one way it was a good question and in another way a bad one. It jolted Andy out of his trance, which was okay, but it also made him want to plug Wolfe. He came fast and determined, but the space between the benches was narrow and I was in between. As for plugging me, I had arms too. He stopped close against me, chest to chest, with pressure.
“That won’t help you any,” Wolfe said bitterly. “You were going to start to work for me tomorrow. Now what? Can I leave you here with this? No. You’d be in jail before I got home. That question you didn’t like, you’ll be answering it many times before the day ends.”
“Good God.” Andy fell back.
“Certainly. You might as well start with me. Did you kill her?”
“No. Good God, no!”
“Who is she?”
“She’s—it’s Dini. Dini Lauer. Mrs. Pitcaim’s nurse. We were going to be married. Yesterday, just yesterday, she said she would marry me. And I’m standing here.” Andy raised his hands, with all the fingers spread, and shook them. “I stand here! What am I going to do?”
“Hold it, brother,” I told him.
“You’re going to come with me,” Wolfe said, squeezing past me. “I saw a telephone in the workroom, but we’ll talk a little before we use it. Archie, stay here.”
“I’ll stay here,” Andy said. The trance look was gone from his eyes and he was fully conscious again, but his color hadn’t returned and there were drops of sweat on his forehead. He repeated it. “I’ll stay here.”
It took two good minutes to get him to let me have the honor. Finally he shoved off, with Wolfe behind, and after they had left that room I could see them, through the glass partitions, crossing the warm and cool rooms and opening the door to the workroom. They closed it behind them, and I was alone, but of course you’re never really alone in a greenhouse. Not only do you have the plants and flowers for company, but also the glass walls give you the whole outdoors. Anyone within seeing distance, in three directions, was really with me, and that led me to my first conclusion: that Dini Lauer, alive or dead, had not been rolled behind that canvas between the hours of seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. The question, alive or dead, made me want a second conclusion, and again I squatted to
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lift the canvas in search of it. When, some four years previously, the ciphogene tank had been installed in Wolte’s plant rooms to replace cyanogas and Nico-Fume, I had read the literature, which had included a description of what you would look like if you got careless, and a second thorough inspection of Dini’s face and throat brought me my second conclusion: she had been alive when she was rolled or pushed under the bench. It was the ciphogene that did it. Since it seemed improbable that she had consciously and obligingly crawled under the bench and lain still, I went on to look and feel for a bump or broken skin, but found neither.
As I got upright again a noise came, knuckles on wood, and then a man’s voice, raised to carry through the wood.
“Andy!” It raised some more. “Andy!”
The wood belonged to a large door at the end of the room, the end where the greenhouse was attached to the mansion. The benches stopped some twenty feet short of that end, leaving room for an open space where there was a floor mat flanked by tubs and jars of oversized plants. The pounding came again, louder, and the voice, also louder. I stepped to the door and observed three details: that it opened away from me, presumably into the house, that it was fastened with a heavy brass bolt on my side, and that all its edges, where it met the frame and sill, were sealed with wide bands of
tape.
The voice and knuckles were authoritative. No good could come of an attempt to converse through the bolted door, me with the voice of a stranger. If I merely kept still, the result would probably be an invasion at the other end of the greenhouse, via the workroom, and I knew how Wolfe hated to be interrupted when he was having a talk. And I preferred not to let company enter, under the circumstances.
So I slid the bolt back, pushed the door open enough to let myself through, shut it by backing against it, and kept my back there.
The voice demanded, ‘Who the hell are you?”
It was Joseph G. Pitcairn, and I was in, not a hall or vestibule, but the enormous living room of his house. He was not famous enough to be automatically known, but when we had started, by mail, to try to steal a gardener from him, I had made a few inquiries and, in addition to learning that he was an amateur golfer, a third-generation coupon clipper, and a loafer, I had got a description. The nose alone was enough, with its list to starboard, the result, I had been told, of an accidental back stroke from someone’s Number
Four iron. “Where’s Andy?” he demanded, without giving me time to tell him who
the hell I was.
“My name—” I began. “Is Miss Lauer in there?” he demanded.
DOOR TO DEATH
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My function, of course, was to gain time for Wolfe. I let him have a refined third-generation grin in exchange for his vulgar glare, and said quietly, “Make it an even dozen and I’ll start answering.” “A dozen what?”
“Questions. Or I’ll trade you. Have you ever heard of Nero Wolfe?” “Certainly. What about him? He grows orchids.” “That’s one way of putting it. As he says, the point is not who owns them but who grows them. In his case, Theodore Horstmann was in the plant rooms twelve hours a day, sometimes more, but he had to leave because his mother took sick. That was a week ago yesterday. After floundering around, Mr. Wolfe decided to take Andy Krasicki away from you. You must remember that he—”
It wasn’t Joseph G. who made me break off. He and I were not alone. Standing back of him were a young man and young woman; off to one side was a woman not so young but still not beyond any reasonable deadline, in a maid’s uniform; and at my right was Neil Imbrie, still in his coveralls. It was the young woman who stopped my flow by suddenly advancing and chopping at me.
“Quit stalling and get away from that door. Something’s happened and I’m going in there!” She grabbed my sleeve to use force.
The young man called to her without moving, “Watch it, Sibby! It must be Archie Goodwin and he’d just as soon hit a woman as—”
“Be quiet, Donald!” Joseph G. ordered him. “Sybil, may I suggest a little decent restraint?” His cold gray eyes came back to me. “Your name is Archie Goodwin and you work for Nero Wolfe?” “That’s right.” “You say you came to see Krasicki?”
1 nodded. “To get him away from you.” I rubbed that in hoping to get a nice long argument started, but he didn’t bite.
“Does that excuse your bursting into my house and barricading a door?” “No,” I conceded. “Andy invited me into the greenhouse, and I was standing there when I heard you knocking and calling him. He was busy with Mr. Wolfe, and I saw the door was bolted, and I thought it must be you and you certainly had a right to have the door of your own greenhouse opened, so I opened it. As for the barricading, that’s where we get to the point. I admit I’m not acting normal. Assuming that the reason is somehow connected with this Miss Lauer, whom I have never met, naturally I would like to know why you asked me if Miss Lauer is in there. Why did you?”
Joseph G. took one long stride, which was all he needed to reach me. “Get away,” he said, meaning it.
I shook my head, keeping my grin refined, and opened my mouth to speak just as he reached for me. I had already decided that it wouldn’t be tactful
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to let the cold war get hot, especially since he had Donald and Neil Imbrie in reserve, and that as a last resort I would release some facts, but it didn’t get that far. As my muscles tightened in reHex to the touch of his hand, the sound of a car’s engine came from outdoors. From where Imbrie stood he had to move only two steps to get a view through a window, and he did so, staring out. Then he turned to his employer.
“State police, Mr. Pitcaim,” he said. “Two cars.”