“Don’t try to be witty. No side roads, no sudden changes of pace, and no speeding. It would be foolhardy. That man is an irresponsible maniac and capable of anything.”
I had no comment because I had to agree. We were flat on our faces. So I took the best route to Hawthorne Circle and there, with the enemy right behind, swung into the Sawmill River Parkway. The dashboard clock said a quarter to seven. My biggest trouble was that I couldn’t see Wolfe’s face. If he was holding on and working, fine. If he was merely nervous and tense against the terrific extra hazards of driving after dark, maybe okay. But if he had settled for getting back home and that was all, I should be talking fast and I wanted to. I couldn’t tell. I had never realized how much I depended on the sight of his big creased face.
We made the first traffic light in eleven minutes from Hawthorne Circle, which was par. It was green and we sailed through. Four minutes farther on, at the second light, we were stopped by red, and Noonan’s car practically bumped our behind. Off again, we climbed the hills over Yonkers, wound down into the valley and the stretch approaching the toll gates, parted with a dime, and in another mile were passing the sign that announces New York City.
I kept to the right and slowed down a little. If he once got inside his house I knew of no tool that could pry him loose again, but we were now only twenty-five minutes away and from where I sat it looked hopeless.
However, I slowed to thirty and spoke. “We’ve left Westchester, and Noonan is gone. They turned off back there. That’s as far as my orders go. Next?”
“Where are we?”
“Riverdale.”
“How soon will we get home?”
But there I fooled you. That’s what I was sure he would say, but he didn’t. What he said was, “How can we get off of this race course?”
“Easy. That’s what the steering wheel’s for.”
“Then leave it and find a telephone.”
I never heard anything like it. At the next opening I left the highway, followed the side drive a couple of blocks and turned right, and rolled up a hill and then down. I was a stranger in the Riverdale section, but anybody can find a drugstore anywhere, and soon I pulled up at the curb in front of one.
I asked if he was going in to phone and he said no, I was. I turned in the seat to get a look at him.
“I don’t know, Archie,” he said, “whether you have ever seen me when my mind was completely dominated by a single purpose.”
“Sure I have. I’ve rarely seen you any other way. The purpose has always been to keep comfortable.”
“It isn’t now. It is—never mind. A purpose is something to achieve, not talk about. Get Saul if possible. Fred or Orrie would do, but I’d rather have Saul. Tell him to come at once and meet us—where can we meet?”
“Around here?”
“Yes. Between here and White Plains.”
“He’s to have a car?”
“Yes.”
“The Covered Porch near Scarsdale would do.”
“Tell him that. Phone Fritz that we are still delayed and ask him how things are. That’s all.”
I got out, but even at a risk I wanted to have it understood, so I poked my head in and asked, “What about dinner? Fritz will want to know.”
“Tell him we won’t be there. I’ve already faced that. My purpose is enough to keep me from going home, but I wouldn’t trust it to get me out again if I once got in.”
Evidently he knew himself nearly as well as I knew him. I entered the drugstore and found the booth.
I got Fritz first. He thought I was kidding him, and then, when I made it plain that I was serious, he suspected me of concealing a calamity. He simply couldn’t believe that Wolfe was a free man and sound of mind and body, and yet wasn’t coming home to dinner. It looked for a while as if I would have to go and bring Wolfe to the phone, but I finally convinced him, and then went after Saul.
As Wolfe had said, Fred or Orrie would do, but Saul Panzer was worth ten of them or nearly anyone else, and I had a feeling that we were going to need the best we could get for whatever act Wolfe was preparing to put on to achieve his dominant purpose. So when I learned that Saul wasn’t home but was expected sometime, I gave his wife the number and told her I would wait for a call. It was so long before it came that when I went back out to the car I expected Wolfe to make some pointed remarks, but all he did was grunt. The purpose sure was dominant. I told him that from Saul’s home in Brooklyn it would take him a good hour and a quarter to drive to the rendezvous, whereas we could make it easy in thirty minutes. Did he have any use for the extra time? No, he said, we would go and wait, so I got the car moving and headed for the parkway.
When, a little before nine o’clock, Saul Panzer joined us at the Covered Porch, we were at a table in a rear corner, as far as we could get from the band. Wolfe had cleaned up two dozen large oysters, tried a plate of clam chowder and swallowed five spoonfuls of it, disposed of a slice of rare roast beef with no vegetables, and was starting to work on a pile of zwieback and a dish of grape jelly. He hadn’t made a single crack about the grub.
By the time Wolfe had finished the zwieback and jelly and had coffee Saul had made a good start on a veal cutlet. Wolfe said he would wait until Saul was through, but Saul said no, go ahead, he liked to hear things while he ate. Wolfe proceeded. First he described the past, enough of it to give Saul the picture, and then gave us a detailed outline of the future as he saw it. It took quite a while, for he had to brief us on all foreseeable contingencies. One of them was the possibility that the key tagged “Dup Grnhs” which was in my pocket wouldn’t fit. Another prop was the sketch made by Gus Treble of the ground plans of the mansion. Still another prop was a sheet of plain white paper, donated on request by the management of the Covered Porch, on which Wolfe wrote a couple of paragraphs with my fountain pen. That too was for Saul, and he put it in his pocket.
It sounded to me as if the whole conception was absolutely full of fleas, but I let it pass. If Wolfe was man enough to stay away from dinner at his own table, damned if I was going to heckle just because it looked as if we stood a very fine chance of joining Andy in jail before midnight. The only item I pressed him on was the gun play.
“On that,” I told him, “I want it A, B, C. When you’re in the cell next to mine, on a five-year ticket, I won’t have you keep booming at me that I bollixed it up with the gun. Do I shoot at all and if so when?”
“I don’t know,” he said patiently. “There are too many eventualities. Use your judgment.”
“What if someone makes a dash for a phone?”
“Head him off. Stop him. Hit him.”
“What if someone starts to scream?”
“Make her stop.”
I gave up. I like to have him depend on me, but I only have two hands and I can’t be two places at once.
The arrangement was that Saul was to follow us in his car because it would be useful for a preliminary approach. It was after ten when we rolled out of the parking lot of the Covered Porch and turned north. When I pulled off the road at a wide place, in the enemy country, the dashboard clock said twelve minutes to eleven, and it had started to snow a little. Saul’s car had stopped behind us.
I turned off the lights, got out and went back, and told him, “Half a mile on, maybe a little more, at the left. You can’t miss the big stone pillars.”
He swung his car back into the road and was off. I returned to our car and climbed in, and turned to face the rear because I thought a little cheerful conversation was called for, but Wolfe wouldn’t cooperate, and I well knew why. He was holding his breath until he learned whether Saul would bring good news or bad. Would we be able to drive right in and make ourselves at home? Or …?
The news wasn’t long in coming, and it was bad. Saul’s car came back, turned around, and parked close behind us, and Saul came to us with snowflakes whirling around him and announced, “He’s still there.”
“What happened?” Wolfe demanded peevishly.
“I turned in at the entrance, snappy, and he flashed a light at me and yelled. I told him I was a newspaperman from New York, and he said then I’d better get back where I belonged quick because it was snowing. I tried a little persuasion to stay in character, but he was in a bad humor. So I backed out.”
“Confound it.” Wolfe was grim. “I have no rubbers.”
VIII
Before we got to the Pitcairn greenhouse Wolfe fell down twice, I fell four times, and Saul once. My better score, a clear majority, was because I was in the lead.
Naturally we couldn’t show a light, and while the snow was a help in one way, in another it made it harder, since enough of it had fallen to cover the ground and therefore you couldn’t see ups and downs. For walking in the dark without making much noise levelness is a big advantage, and there was none of it around there at all, at least not on the route we took.
It had to be all by guess. We left the road and took to the jungle a good three hundred yards short of the entrance, to give the guy in bad humor a wide miss. Almost right away we were mountain climbing, and I slipped on a stone someone had waxed and went down, grabbing for a tree and missing.
“Look out, a stone,” I whispered.
“Shut up,” Wolfe hissed.
Just when I had got used to the slope up, the terrain suddenly went haywire and began to wiggle, bobbing up and down. After a stretch of that it went level, but just as it did so the big trees quit and I was stopped by a thicket which I might possibly have pushed through but Wolfe never could, so I had to detour. The thicket forced me around to the rim of a steep decline, though I didn’t know it until my feet told me three times. It was at the foot of that decline that we struck the brook. I realized what the dark streak was only when I was on its sloping edge, sliding in, and I leaped like a tiger, barely reaching the far bank and going to my knees as I landed, which I didn’t count as a fall. As I got upright I was wondering how in God’s name we would get Wolfe across, but then I saw he was already coming, wading it, trying to hold the skirt of his coat up with one hand and poking his cane ahead of him with the other.
I have admitted I’m no woodsman, and I sure proved it that dark night. I suppose I didn’t subtract enough for the curves of the driveway. I had it figured that we would emerge into the open about even with the house, on the side where the greenhouse was. But after we had negotiated a few more mountains, and a dozen more twigs had stuck me in the eye, and I had had all my tumbles, and Wolfe had rolled down a cliff to a stop at Said’s feet, and I was wishing the evergreens weren’t so damn thick so I could see the lights of the house, I suddenly realized we had hit a path, and after I had turned left on it and gone thirty steps its course seemed familiar. When we reached the edge of the evergreens and saw the house lights there was no question about it: it was the path we knew.
From there on the going was easy and, since the snow was coming thicker, no belly crawling seemed called for as we neared the house. When we reached the spot where the path branched to the left, toward the south of the house, I turned and asked Wolfe, “Okay?”
“Shut up and go on,” he growled.
I did so. We reached the greenhouse at its outer end. I took the key from my pocket and inserted it, and it worked like an angel. I carefully pushed the door open, and we entered, and I got the door shut with no noise. So far so good. We were in the workroom. But was it dark!
According to plan, we took off our snow-covered coats and dropped them on the floor, and our hats. I didn’t know until later that Wolfe hung onto his cane, probably to use on people who screamed or dashed for a phone. I led the way again, with Wolfe against my back and Saul against his, through into the cool room, but it wasn’t cool, it was hot. It was ticklish going down the alley between the benches, and I learned something new: that with all lights out in a glass house on a snowy night the glass is absolutely black.
We made it without displacing any horticulture, and on through the warm room, which was even hotter, into the medium room. When I judged that we were about in the middle of it I went even slower, stopping every couple of feet to feel at the bottom of the bench on my left. Soon I felt the beginning of the canvas, and got hold of Wolfe’s hand and guided him to it. He followed me on a little, and then together we pulled the canvas up and Saul crawled under and stretched out where the body of Dini Lauer had been. Unable to see him, I felt him to make sure he was under before I let the canvas fall. Then Wolfe and I moved on to the open space beyond the end of the benches.
By now it was sure enough that there was no one in the dark greenhouse, and whispers would have been perfectly safe, but there was nothing to say. I took my gun from the holster and dropped it in my side pocket, and moved to the door that opened into the living room, with Wolfe beside me. It was a well-fitted door, but there was a tiny thread of light along the bottom. Now our meanest question would be answered: was the door locked on the inside? I heard the sound of voices beyond the thick door, and that helped. With a firm grasp on the knob, I turned it at about the speed of the minute hand on a clock, and when it came to a stop I pushed slow and easy. It wasn’t locked.
“Here we go,” I muttered to Wolfe, and flung the door open and stepped in.
The first swift glance showed me we were lucky. All three of them were there in the living room—Joseph G., daughter, and son—and that was a real break. Another break was the way their reflexes took the sight of the gun in my hand. One or more might easily have let out a yell, but no, all three were stunned into silence. Sybil was propped against cushions on a divan with a highball glass in her hand. Donald was on a nearby chair, also with a drink. Papa was on his feet, and he was the only one who had moved, whirling to face us as he heard the door open.
“Everybody hold it,” I told them quick, “and no one gets hurt.”
The noise from Joseph G. sounded like the beginning of an outraged giggle. Sybil put hers in words.
“Don’t you dare shoot! You wouldn’t dare shoot!”
Wolfe was moving past me, approaching them, but I extended my left arm to stop him. Shooting was the last thing I wanted, by me or anyone else, since a yell might or might not have been heard by the law out at the entrance but a shot almost certainly would. I stepped across to Joseph G., poked the gun against him, rubbed his pockets, and went to Donald and repeated. I would just as soon have given Sybil’s blue dinner dress a rub, but it would have been hard to justify it.
“Okay,” I told Wolfe.
“This is a criminal act,” Pitcairn stated. The words were virile enough, but his voice squeaked.
Wolfe, who had approached him, shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said conversationally. “We had a key. I admit that Mr. Goodwin’s flourishing a gun complicates matters, but anyway, all I want is a talk with you people. I asked for it this afternoon and was refused. Now I intend to have it.”
“You won’t get it.” Pitcairn’s eyes went to his son. “Donald, go to the front door and call the officer.”
“I’m still flourishing the gun,” I said, doing so. “I can use it either to slap with or shoot with, and if I didn’t intend to when necessary I wouldn’t have it.”
“More corn,” Sybil said scornfully. She hadn’t moved from her comfortable position against the cushions. “Do you actually expect us to sit here and converse with you at the point of a gun?”
“No,” Wolfe told her. “The gun is childish, of course. That was merely a formality. I expect you to converse with me for reasons which it will take a few minutes to explain. May I sit down?”
Father, daughter, and son said “No” simultaneously.
Wolfe went to a wide upholstered number and sat. “I must overrule you,” he said, “because this is an emergency. I had to wade your confounded brook.” He bent over and unlaced a shoe and pulled it off, did likewise with the other one, took off his socks, pulled his wet trousers up nearly to his knees, and then leaned to the right to get hold of the corner of a small rug.
“I�
��m afraid I’ve dripped a little,” he apologized, wrapping the rug around his feet and calves.
“Wonderful,” Sybil said appreciatively. “You think we won’t drive you out into the snow barefooted.”
“Then he’s wrong,” Pitcairn said furiously. His squeak was all gone.
“I’ll get him a drink,” Donald offered, moving.
“No,” I said firmly, also moving. “You’ll stay right here.” I still had the formality in my right hand.
“I think, Archie,” Wolfe told me, “you can put that thing in your pocket. We’ll soon know whether we stay or go.” He glanced around at them, ending with Joseph G. “Here are your alternatives. Either we remain here until we are ready to leave, and are allowed a free hand for our inquiry into the murder of Miss Lauer on these premises, or I go, return to my office in New York—”
“No, you don’t,” Pitcairn contradicted. He remained standing even after his guest was seated. “You go to jail.”
Wolfe nodded. “If you insist, certainly. But that will merely postpone my return to my office until I get bail, which won’t take long. Once there, I act. I announce that I am convinced of Mr. Krasicki’s innocence and that I intend to get him freed by finding and exposing the culprit. There are at least three papers that will consider that newsworthy and will want to help. All the inmates of this house will become legitimate objects of inquiry and public report. Anything in their past that could conceivably have a bearing on their guilt or innocence will be of interest and printable.”
“Aha,” Sybil said disdainfully, still reclining.
“The devil of it,” Wolfe went on, ignoring her, “is that everyone has a past. Take this case. Take the question of Mr. Hefferan’s purchase of a home and acres surrounding it, only a few miles from here. I’m sure you remember the name—Hefferan. Where did he get the money? Where did a certain member of his family go to, and why? The newspapers will want all the facts they can get, all the more since their employees are not permitted to enter these grounds. I shall be glad to cooperate, and I have had some experience at investigation.”
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