Three Doors to Death (The Rex Stout Library)

by Rex Stout

  Wolfe thanked him and made for the path, with me for rearguard. It had just about made up its mind to stop raining, but everything was soaking wet, and after we got into the shrubbery we had to duck whenever a bare twig stretched out low to avoid making our own private rain. For me, young and limber and in good trim, that was nothing, but for Wolfe, with his three hundred pounds, which is an understatement, especially with his heavy tweed overcoat and hat and cane, it was asking a lot. The shrubbery quit at the other side of the tennis court, and we entered a grove of evergreens, then an open space, and there was the cottage.

  Wolfe knocked on the door, and it opened, and facing us was a blond athlete not much older than me, with big bright blue eyes and his whole face ready to laugh. I never completely understand why a girl looks in any other direction when I am present, but I wouldn't have given it a moment's thought if this specimen had been in sight. Wolfe told him good morning and asked if he was Mr. Andrew Krasicki.

  "That's my name." He made a little bow. "And may I – by God, it's Nero Wolfe! Aren't you Nero Wolfe?"

  "Yes," Wolfe confessed modestly. "May I come in for a little talk, Mr. Krasicki? I wrote you a letter but got no reply, and yesterday on the telephone you -"

  The blond prince interrupted. "It's all right," he declared. "All settled!"

  "Indeed. What is?"

  "I've decided to accept. I've just written you a letter."

  "When can you come?"

  "Any time you say. Tomorrow. I've got a good assistant and he can take over here."

  Wolfe did not whoop with glee. Instead, he compressed his lips and breathed deep through his nose. In a moment he spoke. "Confound it, may I come in? I want to sit down."

  II

  Wolfe's reaction was perfectly natural. True, he had just got wonderful news, but also he had just learned that if he had stayed home he would have got it just the same in tomorrow morning's mail, and that was hard to take standing up. He hates going outdoors and rarely does, and he would rather trust himself in a room alone with three or four mortal enemies than in a piece of machinery on wheels.

  But he had been driven to the wall. Four people live in the old brownstone house on West 35th Street. First, him. Second, me, assistant everything from detective to doorbell answerer. Third, Fritz Brenner, cook and house manager. And fourth, Theodore Horstmann, tender and defender of the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms on the roof. But that was the trouble: there was no longer a fourth. A telegram had come from Illinois that Theodore's mother was critically ill and he must come at once, and he had taken the first train. Wolfe, instead of spending a pleasant four hours a day in the plant rooms pretending he was hard at it, had had to dig in and work like a dog. Fritz and I could help some, but we weren't experts. Appeals were broadcast in every direction, especially after word came from Theodore that he couldn't tell whether he would be back in six days or six months, and there were candidates for the job, but no one that Wolfe would trust with his rare and precious hybrids. He had already heard of this Andrew Krasicki, who had successfully crossed an Odontoglossum cirrhosum with an O. nobile veitchianum, and when he learned from Lewis Hewitt that Krasicki had worked for him for three years and was as good as they come, that settled it. He had to have Krasicki. He had written him; no answer. He had phoned, and had been brushed off. He had phoned again, and got no further. So, that wet December morning, tired and peevish and desperate, he had sent me to the garage for the car, and when I rolled up in front of the house there he was on the sidewalk, in his hat and overcoat and cane, grim and resolute, ready to do or die. Stanley making for Livingstone in the African jungle was nothing compared to Wolfe making for Krasicki in Westchester.

  And here was Krasicki saying he had already written he would come! It was an awful anticlimax.

  "I want to sit down," Wolfe repeated firmly.

  But he didn't get to, not yet. Krasicki said sure, go on in and make himself at home, but he had just been starting for the greenhouse when we arrived and he would have to go. I put in to remark that maybe we'd better get back to town, to our own greenhouse, and start the day's work. That reminded Wolfe that I was there, and he gave Krasicki and me each other's names, and we shook hands. Then Krasicki said he had a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in flower we might like to see.

  Wolfe grunted. "Species? I have eight."

  "Oh, no." It was easy to tell from Krasicki's tone of horticultural snobbery, by no means new to me, that he really belonged. "Not species and not dayana. Sanderiana. Nineteen sprays."

  "Good heavens," Wolfe said enviously. "I must see it."

  So we neither went in and sat down nor went back to our car, which was just as well, since in either case we would have been minus a replacement for Theodore. Krasicki led the way along the path by which we had come, but as we approached the house and outbuildings he took a fork to the left which skirted shrubs and perennial borders, now mostly bare but all neat. As we passed a young man in a rainbow shirt who was scattering peat moss on a border, he said, "You owe me a dime, Andy. No snow," and Krasicki grinned and told him, "See my lawyer, Gus."

  The greenhouse, on the south side of the house, had been hidden from our view as we had driven in. Approaching it even on this surly December day, it stole the show from the mansion. With stone base walls to match the house, and curving glass, it was certainly high, wide, and handsome. At its outer extremity it ended in a one-story stone building with a slate roof, and the path Krasicki took led to that, and around to its door. The whole end wall was covered with ivy, and the door was fancy, stained oak slabs decorated with black iron, and on it was hanging a big framed placard, with red lettering so big you could read it from twenty paces:

  DANGER

  DO NOT ENTER

  DOOR TO DEATH

  I muttered something about a cheerful welcome. Wolfe cocked an eye at the sign and asked, "Cyanogas G?"

  Krasicki, lifting the sign from its hook and putting a key in the hole, shook his head. "Ciphogene. That's all right; the vents have been open for several hours.

  This sign's a little poetic, but it was here when I came. I understand Mrs. Pitcairn painted it herself."

  Inside with them, I took a good sniff of the air. Ciphogene is the fumigant Wolfe uses in his plant rooms, and I knew how deadly it was, but there was only a faint trace to my nose, so I went on breathing. The inside of the stone building was the storage and workroom, and right away Wolfe started looking things over.

  Andy Krasicki said politely but briskly, "If you'll excuse me, I'm always behind a morning after fumigating…"

  Wolfe, on his good behavior, followed him through the door into the greenhouse, and I went along.

  "This is the cool room," Krasicki told us. "Next is the warm room, and then, the one adjoining the house, the medium. I have to get some vents closed and put the automatic on."

  It was quite a show, no question about that, but I was so used to Wolfe's arrangement, practically all orchids, that it seemed pretty messy. When we proceeded to the warm room there was a sight I really enjoyed: Wolfe's face as he gazed at the P. Aphrodite sanderiana with its nineteen sprays. The admiration and the envy together made his eyes gleam as I had seldom seen them. As for the flower, it was new to me, and it was something special – rose, brown, purple, and yellow. The rose suffused the petals, and the brown, purple, and yellow were on the labellum.

  "Is it yours?" Wolfe demanded.

  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 t
he 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."

  "Good God." Andy fell back.

  "Certainly. You might as well start with me. Did you kill her?"

  "No. Good God, no!"

  "Who is she?"

  "She's – it's Dini. Dini Lauer. Mrs. Pitcairn's nurse. We were going to be married. Yesterday, just yesterday, she said she would marry me. And I'm standing here." Andy raised his hands, with all the fingers spread, and shook them. "I stand here! What am I going to do?"

  "Hold it, brother," I told him.

  "You're going to come with me," Wolfe said, squeezing past me. "I saw a telephone in the workroom, but we'll talk a little before we use it. Archie, stay here."

  "I'll stay here," Andy said. The trance look was gone from his eyes and he was fully conscious again, but his color hadn't returned and there were drops of sweat on his forehead. He repeated it. "I'll stay here."

  It took two good minutes to get him to let me have the honor. Finally he shoved off, with Wolfe behind, and after they had left that room I could see them, through the glass partitions, crossing the warm and cool rooms and opening the door to the workroom. They closed it behind them, and I was alone, but of course you're never really alone in a greenhouse. Not only do you have the plants and flowers for company, but also the glass walls give you the whole outdoors. Anyone within seeing distance, in three directions, was really with me, and that led me to my first conclusion: that Dini Lauer, alive or dead, had not been rolled behind that canvas between the hours of seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. The question, alive or dead, made me want a second conclusion, and again I squatted to lift the canvas in search of it. When, some four years previously, the ciphogene tank had been installed in Wolfe's plant rooms to replace cyanogas and Nico-Fume, I had read the literature, which had included a description of what you would look like if you got careless, and a second thorough inspection of Dini's face and throat brought me my second conclusion: she had been alive when she was rolled or pushed under the bench. It was the ciphogene that did it. Since it seemed improbable that she had consciously and obligingly crawled under the bench and lain still, I went on to look and feel for a bump or broken skin, but found neither.

  As I got upright again a noise came, knuckles on wood, and then a man's voice, raised to carry through the wood.

  "Andy!" It raised some more. "Andy!"

  The wood belonged to a large door at the end of the room, the end where the greenhouse was attached to the mansion. The benches stopped some twenty feet short of that end, leaving room for an open space where there was a floor mat flanked by tubs and jars of oversized plants. The pounding came again, louder, and the voice, also louder. I stepped to the door and observed three details: that it opened away from me, presumably into the house, that it was fastened with a heavy brass bolt on my side, and that all its edges, where it met the frame and sill, were sealed with wide bands of tape.

  The voice and knuckles were authoritative. No good could come of an attempt to converse through the bolted door, me with the voice of a stranger. If I merely kept still, the result would probably be an invasion at the other end of the greenhouse, via the workroom, and I knew how Wolfe hated to be interrupted when he was having a talk. And I preferred not to let company enter, under the circumstances.

  So I slid the bolt back, pushed the door open enough to let myself through, shut it by backing against it, and kept my back there.

  The voice demanded, "Who the hell are you?"

  It was Joseph G. Pitcairn, and I was in, not a hall or vestibule, but the enormous living room of his house. He was not famous'
enough to be automatically known, but when we had started, by mail, to try to steal a gardener from him, I had made a few inquiries and, in addition to learning that he was an amateur golfer, a third-generation coupon clipper, and a loafer, I had got a description. The nose alone was enough, with its list to starboard, the result, I had been told, of an accidental back stroke from someone's Number Four iron.

  "Where's Andy?" he demanded, without giving me time to tell him who the hell I was.

  "My name -" I began.

  "Is Miss Lauer in there?" he demanded.

  My function, of course, was to gain time for Wolfe. I let him have a refined third-generation grin in exchange for his vulgar glare, and said quietly, "Make it an even dozen and I'll start answering."

  "A dozen what?"

  "Questions. Or I'll trade you. Have you ever heard of Nero Wolfe?"

  "Certainly. What about him? He grows orchids."

  "That's one way of putting it. As he says, the point is not who owns them but who grows them. In his case, Theodore Horstmann was in the plant rooms twelve hours a day, sometimes more, but he had to leave because his mother took sick. That was a week ago yesterday. After floundering around, Mr. Wolfe decided to take Andy Krasicki away from you. You must remember that he -"

  It wasn't Joseph G. who made me break off. He and I were not alone. Standing back of him were a young man and young woman; off to one side was a woman not so young but still not beyond any reasonable deadline, in a maid's uniform; and at my right was Neil Imbrie, still in his coveralls. It was the young woman who stopped my flow by suddenly advancing and chopping at me.

  "Quit stalling and get away from that door. Something's happened and I'm going in there!" She grabbed my sleeve to use force.

  The young man called to her without moving, "Watch it, Sibby! It must be Archie Goodwin and he'd just as soon hit a woman as -"

  "Be quiet, Donald!" Joseph G. ordered him. "Sybil, may I suggest a little decent restraint?" His cold gray eyes came back to me. "Your name is Archie Goodwin and you work for Nero Wolfe?"