'Yes. They look sick.'
'They are sick. They're dying. The Kurume yellows. The underside of the leaves shows the typical brown spots. Some scoundrel deliberately infected those plants, and I'd give a good deal to know who it was. I intend to know who it was!'
Wolfe looked sympathetic, and he really was sympathetic. Between plant growers a fatal fungus makes a bond. 'It's too bad your exhibit was spoiled,' he said. 'But why a personal devil? Why a deliberate miscreant?'
'It was.'
'Have you evidence?'
'No. Evidence is what I want.'
'My dear sir. You are a child beating the stick it tripped on. You had that disease once on your place. A nest of spores in a bit of soil-'
Dill shook his head. 'The disease was at my Long Island place. These plants came from my place in New Jersey. The soil could not possibly have become contaminated.'
'With fungi almost anything is possible. A tool taken from one place to the other, a pair of gloves-'
'I don't believe it.' Dill's voice indicated that nothing was going to make him believe it. 'With the care we take. I am convinced it was done deliberately and maliciously, to ruin my exhibit. And I'm going to know who it was. I'll pay you a thousand dollars to find out for me.'
Wolfe abandoned the ship. Not physically, but mentally. His face went bland and blank. 'I don't believe I could undertake it, Mr. Dill.'
'Why not? You're a detective, aren't you? Isn't that your business?'
'It is.'
'This is a job for a detective. Isn't it?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Because you wouldn't walk across the continent to take a swim in the Pacific Ocean. The effort and expense are out of proportion to the object sought. You say you have no evidence. Do you suspect anyone in particular?'
'No. But I absolutely intend-'
I butted in. I said to Wolfe, 'I've got to go and judge some brussels sprouts,' and I beat it.
I did have a destination in mind, but mostly I wanted to be somewhere else. What with a couple of lucrative cases we had handled since the first of the year, the budget was balanced for months to come, but even so it always gave me the nettles to hear Wolfe turn down a job, and I didn't want to start riding him right there in front of Hewitt's hybrids. To avoid the mob, I opened a door marked PRIVATE and descended a flight of stairs. This part was not open to the public. On the floor below I made my way through a jungle of packing cases and trees and bushes and spraying equipment and so on, and went along a corridor and turned right with it. This stretch of the corridor extended almost the length of the building, but I knew there was an exit halfway. Along the left wall were cluttered more trees and shrubs and paraphernalia, surplus from the exhibits, and along the right wall, which was the partition between the corridor and the main room, were doors with cards on them, all closed, leading into the exhibits themselves from the back. As I passed the one with a card tacked on it saying RUCKER AND DILL, I threw a kiss at it.
Through the door further on I entered the main room. There was even more of a crowd than when Wolfe and I had passed by half an hour earlier. I dodged through the field as far as the rustic scene which had labels on the rope-posts reading UPDEGRAFF NURSERIES, ERIE, PENNA. The exhibits on this side were a series of peninsulas jutting into the main room, with aisles between them extending back to the partition, on which they were based. I skirted the band of spectators taking in the Updegraff arrangement and halted beside a runty specimen who was standing there by the rope scowling at the foliage. 'Hello, Pete,' I said. He nodded and said hello.
I had met Pete day before yesterday. I didn't really like him. In fact I disliked him. His eyes didn't match and that, together with a scar on his nose, made him look unreliable. But he had been hospitable and made me at home around the place.
'Your peonies look nice,' I said socially. Someone tittered on my left and made a remark which probably wasn't intended for my ear but I have good ears. I turned and saw a pair of vintage Helen Hokinsons from Bronxville. I stared and compelled an eye.
'Yes, madam, peonies,' I said. 'What's a Cymbidium miranda? You don't know. I've known that since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. What's a Phalaenopsis? Do you know?'
'No, I don't, but I know those are rhododendrons. Peonies! Come, Alice.'
I watched them waddle off and turned back to Pete. 'Excuse me for chasing your audience, but it's none of her business if I prefer to call them peonies. What were you scowling at? Looking for the Kurume yellows?'
His head jerked around at me. 'What about the Kurume yellows?' he demanded.
'Nothing. Just conversation. I heard Dill saying his woodland glade has got it and I wondered if it was spreading. You don't need to look at me like that. I haven't got it.'
His left eye blinked but the off-color one didn't. 'When did you hear Dill say that?'
'Just a while ago.'
'So. What I suspected.' He stretched himself as high as he could up on his toes, looking in all directions at the throng. 'Did you see my boss?'
