“Plant rooms fourth and last stop.
And take it from me, if you knock over a bench of orchid pots you’ll find more trouble here than you brought with you.”
Rowcliff was licked.
He wasn’t saying so, and he was trying not to look it, but he was.
He growled,
“Wolfe up there?”
“He is.”
“All right.
Come along, Jack.
You two wait here.”
The three of us got to the top in single file and I called to him to push in.
We entered and he saw the elevator standing there with the door gaping.
He opened the door to the stairs and called down,
“Hey, Al!
Come up and give this elevator a go and look over the shaft!” Then he rejoined us.
Those plant rooms had been considered impressive by better men than Lieutenant Rowcliff—for example among many others, by Pierre Fracard, President of the Horticultural Society of France.
I was in and out of them ten times a day and they impressed me, though I pretended to Theodore Horstmann that they didn’t.
Of course they were more startling in February than they were in October, but Wolfe and Horstmann had developed a technique of forcing that made them worth looking at no matter when it was.
Inside the door of the first room, which had Odontoglossums, Oncidiums, and Miltonia hybrids, Rowcliff and the dick stopped short.
The angle-iron staging gleamed in its silver paint, and on the concrete benches and shelves three thousand pots of orchids showed greens and blues and yellows and reds.
It looked spotty to me, since I had seen it at the top of its glory, but it was nothing to sniff at.
I said,
“Well, do you think you’re at the flower show?
You didn’t pay to get in.
Get a move on, huh?”
Rowcliff led the way.
He didn’t leave the center aisle.
Once he stopped to stoop for a peek under a bench, and I let a laugh bust out and then choked it and said,
“Excuse me, lieutenant, I know you have your duty to perform.”
He went on with his shoulders up, but I knew the eager spirit of the chase had oozed down into his shoes.
In the next room, Cattleyas, Laelias, hybrids, and miscellaneous, Theodore Horstmann was over at one side pouring fertilizer on a row of Cymbidiums, which are terrestrials, and Rowcliff took a look at him but didn’t say anything.
The dick in between us stopped to bend down and stick his nose against a big lilac hybrid, and I told him,
“Nope.
If you smell anything sweet, it’s me.”
We went on through the tropical room, where it was hot with the sun shining and the lath screens already off, and continued to the potting room.
It had enough free space to move around in, and it also had inhabitants.
Francis Horrocks, still unsoiled, stood leaning with his back against an angle-iron, talking to Nero Wolfe, who was using the pressure spray.
A couple of boards had been laid along the top of a long low wooden box which was filled with osmundine, and on the boards had been placed thirtyfive or forty pots of Laeliocatdeya lustre.
Wolfe was spraying them with high pressure, and it was pretty wet around there.
Horrocks was saying,
“It really seems a devilish lot of trouble.
What?
Of course, you know, it’s perfectly proper for every chap …”
Rowcliff looked around.
There were sphagnum, sand, charcoal, crock for drainage, stacks of hundreds of pots.
Rowcliff moved forward, and Wolfe shut off the spray and turned to him. “Do I know you, sir?”
I closed in.
“Mr. Nero Wolfe, Lieutenant Rowcliff.”
Wolfe inclined his head one inch.
“How do you do.” He looked toward the door, where the dick stood. “And your companion?”