V
After they had left I remarked to Wolfe, 'In addition to everything else, here's a pleasant thought. Not only do you have no Andy, not only do you have to get back home and start watering ten thousand plants, but at a given moment, maybe in a month or maybe sooner, you'll get a subpoena to go to White Plains and sit on the witness stand.' I shrugged. 'Well, if it's snowy and sleety and icy, we can put on chains and stand a fair chance of getting through.'
'Shut up,' he growled. 'I'm trying to think.' His eyes were closed.
I perched on the bench. After some minutes he growled again. 'I can't. Confound this chair.'
'Yeah. The only one I know of that meets the requirements is fifty miles away. By the way, whose guests are we, now that he who invited us in here has been stuck in the coop?'
I got an answer of a kind, though not from Wolfe. The door to the warm room opened, and Joseph G. was with us. His daughter Sybil was with him. By that time I was well acquainted with his listed nose, and with her darting green eyes and pointed chin.
He stopped in the middle of the room and inquired frostily, 'Were you waiting for someone?'
Wolfe opened his eyes halfway and regarded him glumly. 'Yes,' he said.
'Yes? Who?'
'Anyone. You. Anyone.'
'He's eccentric,' Sybil explained. 'He's being eccentric.'
'Be quiet, Sybil,' Father ordered her, without removing his eyes from Wolfe. 'Before Lieutenant Noonan left he told me he would leave a man at the entrance to my grounds to keep people from entering. He thought we might be annoyed by newspapermen or curious and morbid strangers. But there will be no trouble about leaving. The man has orders not to prevent anyone's departure.'
'That's sensible,' Wolfe approved. 'Mr. Noonan is to be commended.' He heaved a deep sigh. 'So you're ordering me off the place. That's sensible too, from your standpoint.' He didn't move.
Pitcairn was frowning. 'It's neither sensible nor not sensible. It's merely appropriate. You had to stay, of course, as long as you were needed – but now you're not needed. Now that this miserable and sordid episode is finished, I must request -'
'No,' Wolfe snapped. 'No indeed.'
'No what?'
'The episode is not finished. I didn't mean Mr. Noonan is to be commended by me, only by you. He was, in fact, an ass to leave the people on your premises free to go as they please, since one of them is a murderer. None of you should be allowed to take a single step unobserved and unrecorded. As for -'
Sybil burst out laughing. The sound was a little startling, and it seemed to startle her as much as it did her audience, for she suddenly clapped her hand to her mouth to choke it off.
'There you are,' Wolfe told her, 'you're hysterical.' His eyes darted back to Pitcairn. 'Why is your daughter hysterical?'
'I am not hysterical,' she denied scornfully. 'Anyone would laugh. It wasn't only melodramatic, it was corny.' She shook her head, held high. 'I'm disappointed in you, Nero. I thought you were better than that.'
I think what finally made him take the plunge was her calling him Nero. Up to then he had been torn. It's true that his telling Andy he hoped it would be only a matter of hours had been a commitment of a sort, and God knows he needed Andy, and the law trampling over him had made bruises, especially Lieutenant Noonan, but up to that point his desire to get back home had kept him from actually making the dive. I knew him well, and I had seen the signs. But this disdainful female stranger calling him Nero was too much, and he took off.
He came up out of the chair and was erect. 'I am not comfortable,' he told Joseph G. stiffly, 'sitting here in your house with you standing. Mr. Krasicki has engaged me to get him cleared and I intend to do it. It would be foolhardy to assume that you would welcome a thorn for the sake of such abstractions as justice or truth, since that would make you a rarity almost unknown, but you have a right to be asked. May I stay here, with Mr. Goodwin, and talk with you and your family and servants, until I am either satisfied that Mr. Krasicki is guilty or am equipped to satisfy others that he isn't?'
Sybil, though still scornful, nodded approvingly. 'That's more like it,' she declared. 'That rolled.'
'You may not,' Pitcairn said, controlling himself. 'If the officers of the law are satisfied, it is no concern of mine that you are not.' He put his hand in his side coat pocket. 'I've been patient and I'm not going to put up with any more of this. You know where your car is.'
His hand left the pocket, and damned if there wasn't a gun in it. It was a Colt.38, old but in good condition.
'Let me see your license,' I said sternly.
'Pfui.' Wolfe lifted his shoulders a millimeter and let them down. 'Very well, sir, then I'll have to manage.' He put his hand into his own side pocket, and I thought my God, he's going to shoot it out with him, but when the hand reappeared all it held was a key. 'This,' he said, 'is the key to Mr. Krasicki's cottage, which he gave me so I could enter to collect his belongings – whatever is left of them after the illegal visitations of the police. Mr.
