On the sidewalk they were joined by their brothers who had been left there.
I shut the door, heard the lock snap, and put on the bolt.
I turned and went to the office.
I seldom took a drink before dark, but the idea of a shot of bourbon seemed pleasing, so I went to the cabinet and helped myself.
It felt encouraging going down.
In my opinion, there was very little chance that Rowcliff had enough eagerness left in him to try a turn-around, but I returned to the entrance and pulled the curtain and stood looking out for a minute.
There was no one in sight that had the faintest resemblance to a city employee.
So I mounted the stairs, clear to the plant rooms, and went through to the potting room.
Wolfe and Horrocks were standing there, and Wolfe looked at me inquiringly.
I waved a hand.
“Gone.
Done.”
Wolfe hung the spray tube on its hook and called,
“Theodore!”
Horstmann came trotting.
He and I together lifted the pots of Laeliocatdeyas, which Wolfe had been spraying, from the boards, and put them on a bench.
Then we removed the boards from the long box of osmundine;
Horrocks took one.
Wolfe said,
“All right. Miss Fox.”
The mossy fiber, dripping with water, raised itself up out of the box, fell all around us, and spattered our pants.
We began picking off patches of it that were clinging to Clara Fox’s soaked dress, and she brushed back her hair and blurted,
“Thank God I wasn’t born a mermaid!”
Honocks put his fingers on the sleeve of her dress.
“Absolutely saturated.
Really, you know—”
He may have been straight, but he had no right to be in on it.
I cut him off.
“I know you’ll have to be going.
Fritz can attend to Miss Fox.
If you don’t mind?”
Chapter 12
At twelve o’clock noon Wolfe and I sat in the office.
Fred Durkin was out in the kitchen eadng pork chops and pumpkin pie.
He had made his appearance some twenty minutes before, with the pork chops in his pocket, for Fritz to cook, and a tale of injured innocence.
One of Barber’s staff had found him in a detention room down at headquarters, put there to weigh his sins after an hour of displaying his ignorance to Inspector Cramer.
The lawyer had pried him loose without much trouble and sent him on his way, which of course was West 35th Street.
Wolfe hadn’t bothered to see him.
Up in the tropical room was the unusual sight of Clara Fox’s dress and other items of apparel hanging on a string to dry out, and she was up in the south room sporting the dressing gown Wolfe had given me for Christmas four years before.
I hadn’t seen her, but Fritz had taken her the gown.
It looked as if we’d have to get her out of the house pretty soon or I wouldn’t have a thing to put on.
Francis Horrocks had departed, having accepted my hint without any whats.
Nothing had been explained to him.
Wolfe, of course, wasn’t openly handing Clara Fox anything, but it was easy to see that she was one of the few women he would have been able to think up a reason for, from the way he talked about her.
He told me that when she and Horrocks had come running into the potting room she had immediately stepped into the osmundine box, which had been all ready for her, and standing there she had fixed her eyes on Horrocks and said to him,
“No questions, no remarks, and you do what Mr. Wolfe says.
Understand.”
And Horrocks had stood and stared with his mouth open as she stretched herself out in the box and Horstmann had piled osmundine on her three inches deep while Wolfe got the spray ready.
Then he had come to and helped with the boards and the pots.
In the office at noon, Wolfe was drinking beer and making random remarks as they occurred to him.