“Okay. Are you sure he knows you recognized him?”
“Yes. He looked straight at me, and his eyes—”
She was stopped by the house phone buzzing. Stepping to my desk, I picked it up and asked it, “Well?”
Nero Wolfe’s voice, peevish, came. “Archie!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What the devil are you doing? Come back up here!”
“Pretty soon. I’m talking with a prospective client—”
“This is no time for clients! Come at once!”
The connection went. He had slammed it down. I hung up and went back to the prospective client. “Mr. Wolfe wants me upstairs. He didn’t stop to think in time that the Manhattan Flower Club has women in it as well as men. Do you want to wait here?”
“Yes.”
“If Mrs. Orwin asks about you?”
“I didn’t feel well and went home.”
“Okay. I shouldn’t be long — the invitations said two-thirty to five. If you want a drink, help yourself. What name does this murderer use when he goes to look at orchids?”
She looked blank. I got impatient.
“Damn it, what’s his name? This bird you recognized.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Describe him.”
She thought it over a little, gazing at me, and then shook her head. “I don’t think—” she said doubtfully. She shook her head again, more positive. “Not now. I want to see what Nero Wolfe says first.” She must have seen something in my eyes, or thought she did, for suddenly she came up out of her chair and moved to me and put a hand on my arm. “That’s all I mean,” she said earnestly. “It’s not you — I know you’re all right.” Her fingers tightened on my forearm. “I might as well tell you — you’d never want any part of me anyhow — this is the first time in years, I don’t know how long, that I’ve talked to a man just straight — you know, just human? You know, not figuring on something one way or another. I—” She stopped for a word, and a little color showed in her cheeks. She found the word. “I’ve enjoyed it very much.”
“Good. Me too. Call me Archie. I’ve got to go, but describe him. Just sketch him.”
But she hadn’t enjoyed it that much. “Not until Nero Wolfe says he’ll do it,” she said firmly.
I had to leave it at that, knowing as I did that in three more minutes Wolfe might have a fit. Out in the hall I had the notion of passing the word to Saul and Fritz to give departing guests a good look, but rejected it because (a) they weren’t there, both of them presumably being busy in the cloakroom, (b) he might have departed already, and (c) I had by no means swallowed a single word of Cynthia’s story, let alone the whole works. So I headed for the stairs and breasted the descending tide of guests leaving.
Up in the plant rooms there were plenty left. When I came into Wolfe’s range he darted me a glance of cold fury, and I turned on the grin. Anyway, it was a quarter to five, and if they took the hint on the invitation it wouldn’t last much longer.
II
They didn’t take the hint on the dot, but it didn’t bother me because my mind was occupied. I was now really interested in them — or at least one of them, if he had actually been there and hadn’t gone home.
First there was a chore to get done. I found the three Cynthia had been with, a female and two males, over by the odontoglossum bench in the cool room. Getting through to them, I asked politely, “Mrs. Orwin?”
She nodded at me and said, “Yes?” Not quite tall enough but plenty plump enough, with a round full face and narrow little eyes that might have been better if they had been wide open, she struck me as a lead worth following. Just the pearls around her neck and the mink stole over her arm would have made a good haul, though I doubted if that was the kind of loot Cynthia specialized in.
“I’m Archie Goodwin,” I said. “I work here.”
I would have gone on if I had known how, but I needed a lead myself, since I didn’t know whether to say Miss Brown or Mrs. Brown. Luckily one of the males horned in.
“My sister?” he inquired anxiously.
So it was a brother-and-sister act. As far as looks went he wasn’t a bad brother at all. Older than me maybe, but not much, he was tall and straight, with a strong mouth and jaw and keen gray eyes. “My sister?” he repeated.
“I guess so. You are—”
“Colonel Brown. Percy Brown.”
“Yeah.” I switched back to Mrs. Orwin. “Miss Brown asked me to tell you that she went home. I gave her a little drink and it seemed to help, but she decided to leave. She asked me to apologize for her.”
“She’s perfectly healthy,” the colonel asserted. He sounded a little hurt. “There’s nothing wrong with her.”
“Is she all right?” Mrs. Orwin asked.
“For her,” the other male put in, “you should have made it three drinks. Three big ones. Or just hand her the bottle.”
His tone was mean and his face was mean, and anyhow that was no way to talk in front of the help in a strange house, meaning me. He was some younger than Colonel Brown, but he already looked enough like Mrs. Orwin, especially the eyes, to make it more than a guess that they were mother and son. That point was settled when she commanded him, “Be quiet, Gene!” She turned to the colonel. “Perhaps you should go and see about her?”
He shook his head, with a fond but manly smile at her. “It’s not necessary, Mimi. Really.”
“She’s all right,” I assured them and pushed off, thinking there were a lot of names in this world that could stand a reshuffle. Calling that overweight narrow-eyed pearl-and-mink proprietor Mimi was a paradox.
I moved around among the guests, being gracious. Fully aware that I was not equipped with a Geiger counter that would flash a signal if and when I established a contact with a strangler, the fact remained that I had been known to have hunches, and it would be something for my scrapbook if I picked one as the killer of Doris Hatten and it turned out later to be sunfast.
Cynthia Brown hadn’t given me the Hatten, only the Doris, but with the context that was enough. At the time it had happened, some five months ago, early in October, the papers had given it a big play of course. She had been strangled with her own scarf, of white silk with the Declaration of Independence printed on it, in her cozy fifth-floor apartment in the West Seventies, and the scarf had been left around her neck, knotted at the back. The cops had never got within a mile of charging anyone, and Sergeant Purley Stebbins of Homicide had told me that they had never even found out who was paying the rent, but there was no law against Purley being discreet.
I kept on the go through the plant rooms, leaving all switches open for a hunch. Some of them were plainly preposterous, but with everyone else I made an opportunity to exchange some words, fullface and close up. That took time, and it was no help to my current and chronic campaign for a raise in wages, since it was the women, not the men, that Wolfe wanted off his neck. I stuck at it anyhow. It was true that if Cynthia was on the level, and if she hadn’t changed her mind by the time I got Wolfe in to her, we would soon have specifications, but I had had that tingle at the bottom of my spine and I was stubborn.
As I say, it took time, and meanwhile five o’clock came and went, and the crowd thinned out. Going on five-thirty the remaining groups seemed to get the idea all at once that time was up and made for the entrance to the stairs. I was in the moderate room when it happened, and the first thing I knew I was alone there, except for a guy at the north bench, studying a row of dowianas. He didn’t interest me, as I had already canvassed him and crossed him off as the wrong type for a strangler, but as I glanced his way he suddenly bent forward to pick up a pot with a flowering plant, and as he did so I felt my back stiffening. The stiffening was a reflex, but I knew what had caused it: the way his fingers closed around the pot, especially the thumbs. No matter how careful you are of other people’s property, you don’t pick up a five-inch pot as if you were going to squeeze the life out of it.