Rex Stout - Door to Death

None of them had seen Dini since shortly after dinner. Asked if it wasn’t unusual for Dini not to make an evening visit to the patient she was caring for, they all said no, and Sybil explained that she was quite capable of turning down her mother’s bed for her. Asked if they knew about Mrs. Imbrie’s morphine pellets and where the box was kept, they all said certainly. They all admitted that no known fact excluded the possibility that one of them, sometime between eleven and three, had got Dini to drink a glass of beer with enough morphine in it to put her out, and, after the morphine took, had carried her to the greenhouse and rolled her under the bench, but the implication didn’t seem to quicken anyone’s pulse except Vera Imbrie’s. She was silly enough to assert that she hadn’t known Andy was going to fumigate that night, but took it back when reminded that everyone else admitted that the word of warning had been given to all as usual. The cops didn’t hold it against her, and I concede that I didn’t either.

Nor were there any contradictions about the morning. The house stirred late and breakfast was free-lance. Sybil had had hers upstairs with her mother. They hadn’t missed Dini and started looking for her until after nine o’clock, and their inquiries had resulted in the gathering in the living room and Pitcairn’s knocking on the door to the greenhouse and yelling for Andy.

It was all perfectly neat. No visible finger pointed anywhere except at Andy.

“Someone’s lying,” Wolfe insisted doggedly.

The law wanted to know, “Who? What about?”

“How do I know?” He was plenty exasperated. “That’s your job! Find out!”

“Find out yourself,” Lieutenant Noonan sneered.

Wolfe had put questions, such as, if Andy wanted to kill, why did he pick the one spot and method that would point inevitably to him? Of course their answer was that he had picked that spot and method because he figured that no jury would believe that he had been fool enough to do so, but that was probably another point which the DA thought needed attention. I had to admit, strictly to myself, that none of Wolfe’s questions was unanswerable. His main point, the real basis of his argument, was a little special. Other points, he contended, made Andy’s guilt doubtful; this one proved his innocence. The law assumed, and so did he, Wolfe, that the flower pot under the bench was overturned when Dini Lauer, drugged but alive, was rolled under. It was inconceivable that Andy Krasicki, not pressed for time, had done that. Firstly, he would have moved the pot out of harm’s way; secondly, if in his excitement he had failed to do that and had overturned the pot he would certainly have righted it, and, seeing that the precious branch, the one that had sported, was broken, he would have retrieved it. For such a plant man as Andy Krasicki righting the pot and saving the branch would have been automatic actions, and nothing could have prevented them. He had in fact performed them under even more trying circumstances than those the law assumed, when still stunned from the shock of the discovery of the body.

“Shock hell,” Noonan snorted. “When he put it there himself? I’ve heard tell of your fancies, Wolfe. If this is a sample, I’ll take strawberry.”

By that time I was no longer in a frame of mind to judge Wolfe’s points objectively. What I wanted was to get my thumbs in a proper position behind Noonan’s ears and bear down, and, since that wasn’t practical, I was ready to break my back helping to spring Andy as a substitute. Incidentally, I had cottoned to Andy, who had handled himself throughout like a two-handed man. He had used one of them, the one not fastened to the dick, to shake hands again with Wolfe just before they led him out to the vehicle.

“All right,” he had said, “I’ll leave it to you. I don’t give a damn about me, not now, but the bastard that did it...”

Wolfe had nodded. “Only hours, I hope. You may sleep at my house tonight.”

But that was too optimistic. As aforesaid, at three o’clock they were done and ready to go, and Noonan took a parting crack at Wolfe.

“If it was me you’d be wanting bail yourself as a material witness.”

I may get a chance to put thumbs on him yet some day.

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.