Three Doors to Death (The Rex Stout Library)

Andy shrugged. 'Mr. Pitcairn 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 fingers 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 mecanthrum or Pleroma grandiflora.'

'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 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.

III

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, 'You 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 time 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 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 the 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.

'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.'