“Archie!” Wolfe’s voice came in his most menacing tone. I knew what was eating him. He wanted me to get out of there and drive him home, and he thought I was showing off, and he knew I was sore. As he called my name again I turned my back on him to welcome the law. A big flatfoot with no neck shoved through the crowd to the rope and got over it and strode across the grass. I blocked his way at Harry’s feet.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked gruffly.
I moved aside and let him pass. He stopped and got a corner of the newspaper and jerked it off.
“Archie!” Wolfe bellowed.
Some of the spectators could see Harry’s face and they were reacting. The ropes were bellied in, taut, with the pressure from behind. The guard was charging across the grass at them and Anne was on her feet again and Fred Updegraff was there.
“Hell, he’s dead,” the cop said.
“You guessed it,” I conceded. “Shall I get some help?”
“Go ahead.”
I won’t say that I already knew things I didn’t know, but I already had stirrings above the ears and, besides, I didn’t want Wolfe to bust a lung, so I went that way and found him standing with Hewitt a few paces to the rear of the throng.
“Hold everything,” I muttered to him.
“Confound you-”
“I said hold everything.” I cantered off to the phone booths at the front of the room, parted with a nickel and dialed a number and got connected with Extension 19, gave my name and asked for Inspector Cramer. His voice came:
“What do you want?”
“Me? Nothing. I’m helping with the chores. Wolfe and I are up at the Flower Show-”
“I’m busy!”
“Okay. Now you’re busier. Rucker and Dill’s exhibit, third floor, Flower Show. Man murdered. Shot through the top of the head. Lying there on the grass guarded by one bull-necked bull who will never be an inspector. That’s all.”
“Wait a min-”
“Can’t. I’m busy.”
I slid out of the booth and dodged through the traffic back across the room. In that short time the mob surrounding the glade had doubled in size. A glance showed me that the cop and the guard had got reinforcements and Anne and Fred Updegraff were not in sight, and Wolfe and Hewitt had retreated to the other side of the rose garden next door. W. G. Dill was with them. Wolfe glared at me as I approached. He was still hanging onto those measly plants and was speechless with rage.
“. . . feel a sort of responsibility,”Hewitt was saying. “I am Honorary Chairman of the Committee. I don’t like to shirk responsibility, but what can I do-just look at them-”
“That policeman,” Dill said. “Imbecile. Wouldn’t let me in my own exhibit. Broke my shoulder blade. It feels like it.” He worked his shoulder up and down, grimacing. “There’s the doctor-no-”
“A doctor won’t help any. He’s dead.”
They looked at me. Dill stopped working his shoulder. “Dead? Dead!” He darted off and burrowed into the crowd.
“You said he had an attack,” Hewitt regarded me accusingly. “How can he be dead? What did he die of?”
“He ceased breathing.”
“Archie,” Wolfe said in his most crushing tone. “Stop that. I asked you an hour ago to take these plants. Take them, and take me home.”
“Yes, sir.” I took the plants. “But I can’t leave yet. I’m looking-”
“Good heavens,” Hewitt said. “What a calamity . . . poor Dill … I must see . . . excuse me . . .” He marched off towards the main stair.
At that instant I caught sight of an object I had been halfway expecting to see. I only got a glimpse of the gray coat with its collar of 14th Street squirrel, for she came from the other side and disappeared into the crowd. I put the pots on the floor at the edge of the rose garden and dashed off before Wolfe could say a word. I didn’t care how sore it made him because he had it coming to him after his degrading performance with Hewitt, but I admit I glanced back over my shoulder as I went to see if he was throwing something. His face was purple. I’ll bet he lost ten pounds that afternoon.
I skirted the throng and went into it on the other side. In a minute I saw her, squirming through to the front. I took it easy working through to her because I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, and, getting right behind her, saw that the blue leather bag was under her right arm. I shifted Wolfe’s coat to my own right arm and under its cover got my fingers on the end of the bag and pulled gently. It started coming, and she was so interested in what she was trying to see around the people still in front of her that she didn’t notice it even when the bag was out from under her arm and safely under Wolfe’s coat. I kept an eye on her as I backed out, apologizing to the flower lovers as I went, and as soon as I was in the clear turned and made for the stairs.
In the men’s room on the second floor I spent a nickel to achieve privacy and sat down and opened the bag, which was monogrammed “RL.” It inventoried about as usual, handkerchief and compact and purse and so on, but it also had what I was after, her name and address. They were on an envelope addressed to Miss Rose Lasher, 326 Morrow Street, New York City, which checked with the RL on the bag. I copied it in my notebook. The letter inside was from Ellie and explained why she hadn’t paid back the two dollars. And another item was more than I had bargained for. It was a clipping from the Gazette of a picture of Harry and Anne playing mumblety-peg. It had cut edges, not torn, and was neatly folded.
I put everything back in, went back to the third floor, worked my way into the crowd, not taking it so easy this time, found her in the front row against the rope, and put my hand on her shoulder. Her head twisted around.
“Will you please-” she began indignantly.
“Okay, sister. It’s me. Here’s your bag.”
“My bag!”
“You dropped it and I risked life and limb to get it. It’s yours, isn’t it?”
“Sure it’s mine!” She grabbed it.
“Say thank you.”
She mumbled something and was through with me. I glanced at the scene. The cast had been augmented. The contents of two radio police cars, four of them in uniform, were there in the glade, one of them standing at Harry’s feet watching a doctor, who was on his knees applying a stethoscope. W. G. Dill stood at the cop’s side, his hands in his pockets, scowling. There was no sign that anyone had got interested in the moss on the rocks. I backed out again
without bruising anyone seriously and circled around to the rose garden to rejoin Wolfe.
He wasn’t there.
He was gone. The two pots were there on the floor, but he wasn’t anywhere.
The damn hippopotamus, I thought. He’ll get lost. He’ll be kidnapped. He’ll fall in a hole. He’ll catch cold.
I went back down to the men’s room on the second floor and yelled his name in front of the private apartments, but no soap. I went up to the fourth, to the orchid benches. No. I went down to the ground floor and out the main exit and to where I had parked the car on 46th Street, but he wasn’t in it. It was trying to snow in March gusts. I spat at a snowflake as it sailed by. Our little Nero, I thought, out on such a night and no coat. The bag fat flumpus. I’ll put salt on his grapefruit. It was a quarter past five.
I stood and applied logic to it. Had he taken a taxi home? Not the way he hated taxis. What, as I had left him standing there, what had been his most burning desires? That was easy. To shoot me, to sit down, and to drink beer. He couldn’t shoot me because I wasn’t there. Where might he have found a chair?
I went back and paid four bits to get in again, mounted one flight, and made my way across the grain of the traffic to the corner of the room where a door said OFFICE. People were standing around, and one of them plucked at my sleeve as I put my hand on the knob, and I recognized him. It was the gray-haired geezer I had seen on previous days looking at Anne from a distance as if he was saying his prayers. He looked worried under an old felt hat, and his fingers on my sleeve were trembling.