Wolfe nodded. 'Have you asked the favor of Mr. Anderson that you have asked of me?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
She hesitated. 'Well-it didn’t seem necessary. It didn’t seem-I don’t know how to express it.'
'Use your wits, Miss Barstow. Was it because it appeared unlikely that he would do any discovering worthy the name?'
She was holding herself tight. Her hands-damn good hands with strong fingers and honest knuckles- were little fists in her lap. 'No!' she said.
'Very well. But what made you think it likely, at least possible, that my discovering might be more to the point?'
She began, 'I didn’t think-'
But he stopped her: 'Come, control yourself. It is an honest plain question. You did think me more competent at discovery than Mr. Anderson, did you not? Was it because I had made the original discovery?'
'Yes.'
'That is, because I had somehow known that your father was killed by a poisoned needle propelled from the handle of a golf club?'
'I-don’t-know. I don’t know, Mr. Wolfe.'
'Courage. This will soon be over. Curiosity alone prompts the next question. What gave you the strange idea that I was so rare a person as to respond favorably to the idiotic request you meant to make of me?'
'I didn’t know. I didn’t have that idea really. But I was ready to try, and I had heard a professor at the university, Gottlieb, the psychologist, mention your name-he had written a book called Modern Crime Detection-'
'Yes. A book that an intelligent criminal should send as a gift to every detective he knows.'
'Perhaps. His opinion of you is more complimentary. When I telephoned Professor Gottlieb he said that you were not susceptible of analysis because you had intuition from the devil, and that you were a sensitive artist as well as a man of probity. That sounded-well, I decided to come to see you. Mr. Wolfe, I beg you-I beg of you-'
I was sure she was going to cry and I didn’t want her to. But Wolfe brusquely brought her up: 'That’s all, Miss Barstow. That is all I need to know. Now I shall ask a favor of you: will you permit Mr. Goodwin to take you upstairs and show you my plants?'
She stared; he went on, 'No subterfuge is intended. I merely wish to be alone with the devil. Half an hour perhaps; and to make a telephone call. When you return I shall have a proposal for you.' He turned to me. 'Fritz will call you.'
She got up and came with me without a word. I thought that was pretty good, for she was shaky and suspicious all over. Instead of asking her to walk up two flights of stairs I took her down the hall and used Wolfe’s elevator. As we got out on the top floor she stopped me by catching my arm.
'Mr. Goodwin. Why did Mr. Wolfe send me up here?'
I shook my head. 'No good, Miss Barstow. Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you, and since I don’t know we might as well look at the flowers.' As I opened the door to the passage Horstmann appeared from the potting room. 'All right, Horstmann. May we look around a little?' He nodded and trotted back.
As many times as I had been there, I never went in the plant-rooms without catching my breath. It was like other things I’ve noticed, for instance no matter how often you may have seen Snyder leap in the air and one-handed spear a hot-liner like one streak of lightning stopping another one, when you see it again your heart stops. It was that way in the plant-rooms.
Wolfe used concrete benches and angle-iron staging, with a spraying system Horstmann had invented for humidity. There were three main rooms, one for Cattleyas Laelias and hybrids, one for Odontoglossums, Oncidiums and Miltonia hybrids, and the tropical room. Then there was the potting room, Horstmann’s den, and a little corner room for propagation. Supplies-pots, sand, sphaguum, leafmold, loam, osmundine, charcoal, and crocks-were kept in an unheated and unglazed room in the rear alongside the shaft where the outside elevator came up.
Since it was June the lath screens were on, and the slices of shade and sunshine made patterns everywhere-on the broad leaves, the blossoms, the narrow walks, the ten thousand pots. I liked it that way, it seemed gay.
It was a lesson to watch the flowers get Miss Barstow. Of course when she went in she felt about as much like looking at flowers as I did like disregarding her mother’s ad, and down the first rows of Cattleyas she tried to be polite enough to pretend there was something there to see. The first one that really brought her up was a small side-bunch, only twenty or so, of Laeliocattleya Lustre. I was pleased because it was one of my favorites. I stopped behind her.
'Astonishing,' she said. 'I’ve never seen one like that. The colors-amazing.'
'Yes. It’s a bi-generic hybrid, they don’t come in nature like that.'
She got interested. In the next walk were some Brassocattlaelias Truffautianas and I cut off a couple and handed them to her. I told her a little about hybridization and seedlings and so on, but maybe she didn’t hear me. Then, in the next room, I had a disappointment. She liked the Odontoglossums better than the Cattleyas and hybrids! I suspected it was because they were more expensive and difficult, but it turned out that she hadn’t known that. No accounting for tastes, I thought. And best of all, even after we had been through the tropical room, she
