Three Doors to Death (The Rex Stout Library)

her giving him the idea when his wife was there.

Not that she was raw; she could put it in a flash and then cover. And what she could do with her voice! Sometimes I myself had to walk off. Anyhow I've got a girl at Bedford Hills.'

'Wasn't Mr. Krasicki aware of all this?'

'Andy?' Gus leaned forward. 'Listen. That was one of those things. From the first day he glimpsed her and heard her speak, he got drowned. He didn't even float, he just laid there on the bottom. And him no fool, anything but, but it hit him so quick and hard he never got a chance to analyze. Once I undertook to try a couple of words, very careful, and the look he gave me! It was pathetic.' Gus shook his head. 'I don't know. If I had known he had talked her into marrying him I might have fumigated her myself, just as a favor to him.'

'Yes,' Wolfe agreed, 'that would have been an adequate motive. So much for you. You mentioned Mr. Imbrie. What about him? Assume that Miss Lauer also gave him the idea when his wife was not there, that he reacted like a male, as you put it, that developments convinced him that he was in heaven, that she told him last evening of her intention to go away and marry Mr. Krasicki, and that he decided she must die. Are those assumptions permissible?'

'I wouldn't know. They're not mine, they're yours.'

'Come come,' Wolfe snapped. 'I'm not Mr. Noonan, thank God. Prudence will get us nowhere. Has Mr. Imbrie got that in him?'

'He might, sure, if she hooked him deep enough.'

'Have you any facts that contradict the assumptions?'

'No.'

'Then we'll keep them. You understand, of course, that there are no alibis. There were four hours for it: from eleven o'clock, when Miss Lauer said good night to Mr. Krasicki and left him, to three o'clock, when you and Mr. Krasicki entered the greenhouse to fumigate. Everyone was in bed, and in separate rooms except for Mr. and Mrs. Imbrie. Their alibi is mutual, but also marital and therefore worthless. His motive we have assumed. Hers is of course implicit in the situation as you describe it, and besides, women do not require motives that are comprehensible by any intellectual process.'

'You said it,' Gus acquiesced feelingly. 'They roll their own.'

I wondered what the girl at Bedford Hills had done now. Wolfe went on.

'Let's finish with the women. What about Miss Pitcairn?'

'Well -' Gus opened his mouth wide to give his lips a stretch, touched the upper one with the tip of his tongue, and closed up again. 'I guess I don't understand her. I feel as if I hate her, but I don't really know why, so maybe I don't understand her.'

'Perhaps I can help?'

'I doubt it. She puts up a hell of a front, but one day last summer I came on her in the grove crying her eyes out. I think it's a complex, only she must have more than one. She had a big row with her father one day on the terrace, when I was working there in the shrubs and they knew it – it was a couple of weeks after Mrs. Pitcairn's accident and he was letting the registered nurse go and sending for a practical nurse which turned out later to be this Dini Lauer – and Miss Pitcairn was raising the roof because she thought she ought to look after her mother herself. She screamed fit to be tied, until the nurse called down from an upstairs window to please be quiet. Another thing, she not only seems to hate men, she says right out that she does. Maybe that's why I feel I hate her, just to balance it up.'

Wolfe made a face. 'Does she often have hysterics?'

'I wouldn't say often, but of course I'm hardly ever in the house.' Gus shook his head. 'I guess I don't understand her.'

'I doubt if it's worth an effort. Don't try. What I'd like to get from you, if you have it, is not understanding but a fact. I need a scandalous fact about Miss Pitcairn. Have you got one?'

Gus looked bewildered. 'You mean about her and Dini?'

'Her and anyone or anything. The worse the better. Is she a kleptomaniac or a drug addict? Does she gamble or seduce other women's husbands or cheat at cards?'

'Not that I know of.' Gus took a minute to concentrate. 'She fights a lot. Will that help?'

'I doubt it. With what weapons?'

'I don't mean weapons; she just fights – with family, friends, anyone. She always knows best. She fights a lot with her brother. As far as he's concerned, it's a good thing somebody knows best, because God knows he don't.'

'Why, does he have complexes too?'

Gus snorted. 'He sure has got something. The family says he's sensitive – that's what they tell each other, and their friends, and him. Hell, so am I sensitive, but I don't go around talking it up. He has a mood every hour on the hour, daily including Sundays and holidays. He never does a damn thing, even pick flowers. He's a four-college man – he got booted out of Yale, then Williams, then Cornell, and then something out in Ohio.'

'What for?' Wolfe demanded. 'That might help.'

'No idea.'

'Confound it,' Wolfe complained, 'have you no curiosity? A good damning fact about the son might be even more useful than one about the daughter. Haven't you got one?'

Gus concentrated again, and when a minute passed without any sign of contact on his face, Wolfe insisted, 'Could his expulsion from those colleges have been on account of trouble with women?'

'Him?' Gus snorted again. 'If he went to a nudist camp and they lined the men up on one side and the