“All right. Tell me just one thing, was Dazy Perrit’s daughter-”
I told her nothing doing and ended it. A glance at my wristwatch, on the fly as I headed for the stairs, showed me eleven-fifty-two. At the bottom I slowed to a normal pace, to enter the office with an attitude of indifference, but that proved unnecessary because L. A. Schwartz was gone. Wolfe sat at his desk pouring beer. “She saw pictures of Perrit and me in the Gazette,” I reported. “She’ll come the back way and be here in half an hour.”
“Satisfactory.” He put the bottle down. “Take her straight upstairs to the south room. She must be seen by no one.” He scowled at me. “Confound it, I suppose she must be invited to lunch. Sit down and tell me everything that happened last night.”
“I thought I was out of it. When did I get in again?”
“Pfui. Go ahead.”
Having been reporting uncombed events to Wolfe for over ten years, I had got expert at it, but this called for extra concentration since the time was limited. I tried to get it all in and make a clean job of it, but he had questions to put as usual, and was still asking them when the clock said twelve-twenty and I had to go. I left by way of the kitchen and the back stairs, emerging into our little private yard where Fritz grows chives and tarragon and other vegetation. Leaving the door through the solid board fence unlocked, since it wouldn’t get out of my sight, I skirted piles of rubbish on the premises south of us, and another twenty steps got me to the entrance of the passage.
There was no one there. But I didn’t wait long. Within a couple of minutes a figure appeared at the other end of the passage, looked in, and started toward me. Only it wasn’t Beulah. It was the law student. She was right behind him, and as they approached me she darted around to the front and spoke first.
“It’s all right that Morton came along, isn’t it? He wouldn’t let me come alone.”
“Well, he’s here,” I growled. “Hello.” My impulse was to tell him to go home and study, because we already had complications enough, but since we had made him so welcome the night before, and him practically a member of the family, I decided not to make an issue of it.
“Watch where you step,” I told them and led the way back around the rubbish piles, through the door in the fence, which I locked, into the basement, up to the kitchen, and on up two more flights to the south room, which was on the same floor as mine, at the other end of the hall. It wasn’t often used, but was by no means wasted space. On various occasions all kinds had slept in it, from a Secretary of State to a woman who had poisoned three husbands and was making a fourth one very sick.
Wolfe was there, standing by a window. There was no chair in that room that would take him without complaints from both him and the chair. He did his little bow, head forward eleven-sixteenths of an inch. “How do you do, Miss Page. And Morton. You came along?”
“Yes, sir.” Morton was firm. “I would like to know what this is all about. Goodwin saying his name was Stevens-”
“Of course. Not illegal, no felony, but at least odd. Miss Page deserves an explanation, and she’ll get it. Doubtless you’ll get it too, later, from her. Mr. Goodwin and I are taking Miss Page up to the plant rooms to show her my orchids and have a talk with her.” He waved a hand. “There are books and magazines here, or you may go down to the office if you prefer.”
The muscles of Morton’s jaw had set. “I must insist-”
“No. Don’t try.” Wolfe was curt. “Since this concerns Miss Page, I do not intend to substitute my discretion for hers. We’ll rejoin you in half an hour or so. Archie, tell Fritz that there will be two luncheon guests, at one sharp.”
XI
Wolfe never tries to deny he’s vain, but I doubt if he’ll ever admit that it’s an exercise of vanity when he takes someone who is under a strain up to the plant rooms. He acts nonchalant, but I can tell when he’s enjoying himself.
Beulah met expectations. In the blaze of the Cattleya room she only looked dazed, but the Dendrobiums and Phalaenopsis really got her. She stopped dead and just looked, with her mouth open. “Someday,” Wolfe said, not sounding pleased, with his usual self-control, “you must spend an hour up here. Or two hours. Now I’m afraid we haven’t time.” He nudged her along to the potting room and told Theodore, the orchid nurse, that he had better go and see to the ventilators.
When Theodore had gone and Wolfe was in his chair and Beulah and I on stools, he said abruptly, “You’re not an infant, Miss Page. You’re nineteen years old.”
She nodded. “In Georgia I could vote.”
“So you could. Then I won’t have to use a nipple for this. We’ll ignore nonessentials; they can be dealt with later, at more leisure-as, for instance, why Mr. Goodwin chose such a name as Harold Stevens to lure you down here yesterday. Do you know what a hypothetical question is?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I’ll put one to you. Suppose these things: that with me as intermediary, your father has arranged to make available to you a considerable sum of money; that he is not in a position to disclose himself to you and cannot ever be expected to do so; that he has put it wholly within my discretion whether you shall be told his name and your mother’s name; and that the circumstances are such that it will be a deuce of a job to keep you from guessing his name and guessing it right. Supposing all that, here’s something for you to think over.”
Wolfe pointed a finger at her. “Do you want me to tell you the names or not?”
“I don’t need to think it over. I want you to tell me.”
“That’s an impulse.”
“It is not an impulse. Good lord, an impulse? If you only knew what I-for years-” Beulah made a little gesture. “I want to know.”
“What if your father is-say, a convicted pickpocket?”
“I don’t care what he is! I want to know!”
“Then you should. Mr. Perrit, your father, died last night.”
Wolfe inclined his head toward a window. “Out there on the sidewalk.”
“I knew it,” Beulah said calmly.
“The devil you did!”
But she wasn’t actually as calm as she sounded. Her hands were clasped tight together and she had started a swallowing marathon. She didn’t even try to resume the conversation, but just sat, and all signs indicated the same outcome.
The outcome arrived in something like a minute. It started with her shoulders going up and down in a minor convulsion, and then her head went forward and her hands went up to cover her face, and the regulation sounds began to come.
“Good God,” Wolfe muttered in a tone of horror, and got to his feet and went. In a moment, above the sounds Beulah was making, I heard the bang of his elevator door. I merely sat and waited, thinking it was natural for me to understand better than he did the most desirable and effective course of action when a young woman began to cry. After all, I thought, I see a good deal more of them than he does.
Time passed by. I was deciding the moment had come for a sympathetic hand on her shoulder when her face came up and she blurted, “Why haven’t you got sense enough to go too?”
It didn’t faze me. “I have,” I said politely, “but I was waiting for the noise to die down enough for you to hear me tell you that if you don’t want to go in the room where Morton is in your present condition, the room at the front on that floor is mine, is unlocked, and has a bathroom with a mirror.”