Door to Death

IV

Five hours later, at three o’clock in the afternoon, seated in the one decent chair in the workroom of the greenhouse, Nero Wolfe was making a last frantic despairing try.

“The charge,” he urged, “can be anything you choose to make it, short of first degree murder. The bail can be any amount and it will be furnished. The risk will be minimal, and in the end you’ll thank me for it, when I’ve got the facts and you’ve got to take them.”

Three men shook their heads with finality.

One said, “Better give up and get yourself a gardener that’s not a killer.” That was Ben Dykes, head of the county detectives.

Another said nastily, “If it was me you’d be wanting bail yourself as a material witness.” That was Lieutenant Con Noonan of the State Police. He had been a stinker from the start, and it was only after the arrival of the DA, who had good reason to remember the Fashalt case, that Wolfe and I had been accepted as human.

The third said, “No use, Wolfe. Of course any facts you get will be welcome.” That was Cleveland Archer, District Attorney of Westchester County. Any common murder he would have left to the help, but not one that a Joseph G. Pitcairn was connected with, no matter how. He went on, “What can the charge be but first degree murder? That doesn’t mean the file is closed and I’m ready for trial. Tomorrow’s another day, and there are a couple of points that need some attention and they’ll get it, but it looks as if he’s guilty.”

The five of us were alone at last. Wolfe was in the best chair available, I was perched on a corner of a potting bench, and the other three were standing. The corpse had left long ago in a basket, the army of official scientists had finished and gone, ten thousand questions had been asked and answered by everyone on the premises, the statements had been signed, and Andy Krasicki had departed for White Plains in a back seat, handcuffed to a dick. The law had made a quick clean job of it.

And Wolfe, having had nothing to eat since breakfast but four sandwiches and three cups of coffee, was even more desperate than when he had sent me for the car that dark December morning. Andy had been his, and he had lost him.

The case against him was fair to middling. There was general agreement that he had been jelly for Dini Lauer since he had first sighted her, two months back, when she had arrived to take care of Mrs. Pitcairn, who had tumbled down some steps and hurt her back. That had been testified to even by Gus Treble, the young man in the rainbow shirt, Andy’s assistant, who was obviously all for Andy. Gus said that Dini had given Andy the fanciest runaround he had ever seen, which wasn’t too bright of Gus if he had his sympathy on straight.

To the question why should Andy want to get rid of Dini the very day she consented to marry him, the answer was, who says she consented? Only Andy. No one else had heard tell of it, and he himself had announced the good news only to Wolfe and me. Then had he fumigated her to death merely because he couldn’t have her? That was probably one of the points which the DA thought needed attention. For a judge and jury some Grade A jealousy would have helped. That was a little ticklish, and naturally the DA wanted a night to sleep on it. Who had been the third point of the jealous triangle? Of those present. Neil Imbrie didn’t look the part, Gus Treble didn’t act it, and Pitcairn and son were not the sort of people a DA will take a poke at if he can help it. So he couldn’t be blamed for wanting to take a look around. Besides, he had asked them all questions, plenty, and to the point, without getting a lead.

Noonan and Dykes had got all their personal timetables early in the game, but when the quickie report on the p.m. had come from White Plains, telling about the morphine, the DA had had another try at them. The laboratory reported that there was morphine present but not enough to kill, and that it could safely be assumed that Dini had died of ciphogene poisoning. The morphine answered one question — how had she been made unconscious enough to stay put under the bench until the ciphogene would take over? — but it raised another one. Was the law going to have to prove that Andy had bought morphine? But that had been a cinch. They had it covered in a matter of minutes. Vera Imbrie, the cook, Neil’s wife, whom I had seen in the background in uniform when I invaded the living room, was troubled with facial neuralgia and kept a box of morphine pellets in a cupboard in the kitchen. She hadn’t had to use them for nearly a month, and now the box was gone. Andy, along with everyone else, had known about them and where she kept them. It gave the law a good excuse to search the whole house, and a dozen or so spent an hour at it, but found no morphine and no box. Andy’s cottage had of course already been frisked, but they had another go at that too.

So the DA checked over their personal timetables with them, but found nothing new. Of course Andy was featured. According to him, at a tête-à-tête in the greenhouse late in the afternoon Dini had at last surrendered and had agreed not only to marry him sometime soon, but also, since he wanted to accept the offer from Nero Wolfe, to quit the Pitcairn job and get one in New York. She had asked him to keep it quiet until she had broken the news to Mrs. Pitcairn. That had been around five o’clock, and he had next seen her some four hours later, a little after nine, when he had been in the greenhouse on his evening round and she had entered through the door that connected with the living room. They had looked at flowers and talked, and then had gone to sit in the workroom and talk some more, and to drink beer, which Dini had brought from the kitchen. At eleven o’clock she had said good night and left via the door to the living room, and that was the last he had seen of her. That’s how he told it.

He too had left, by the outside door, and gone to his cottage and written the letter to Wolfe, deciding not to go to bed because, first, he was so excited with so much happiness, and second, he would have to be up at three anyway. He had worked at propagation records and got his things in order ready to pack. At three o’clock he had gone to the greenhouse and had been joined there by Gus Treble, who was to get his last lesson in the routine of preparation for fumigation. After an hour’s work, including bolting and taping the door to the living room, and opening the ciphogene master valve in the workroom for eight minutes and closing it again, and locking the outside door and putting up the DOOR TO DEATH sign, Gus had gone home and Andy had returned to the cottage. Again he admitted he had not gone to bed. At seven o’clock he had gone to the greenhouse and opened the vents with outside controls, returned to the cottage, finally felt tired, and slept. At eight-thirty he awoke, ate a quick breakfast and drank coffee, and was ready to leave for the day’s work when there was a knock on the door and he opened it to find Nero Wolfe and me.

The timetables of the others, as furnished by them, were less complicated. Gus Treble had spent the evening with a girl at Bedford Hills and stayed late, until it was time to leave for his three o’clock date with Andy at the greenhouse. Neil and Vera Imbrie had gone up to their room a little before ten, listened to the radio for half an hour, and gone to bed and to sleep. Joseph G. Pitcairn had left immediately after dinner for a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Northern Westchester Taxpayers’ Association, at somebody’s house in North Salem, and had returned shortly before midnight and gone to bed. Donald, after dining with his father and Dini Lauer, had gone to his room to write. Asked what he had written, he said fiction. He hadn’t been asked to produce it. Sybil had eaten upstairs with her mother, who was by now able to stand up and even walk around a little but wasn’t venturing downstairs for meals. After eating, she had read aloud to her mother for a couple of hours and helped her with going to bed, and had then gone to her own room for the night.

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.