It was dark enough in the cottage to need lights, and I turned them on. Wolfe glanced around, spotted a chair nearly big enough, took off his hat and coat, and sat, while I started a tour. The dicks had left it neat. This medium-sized room wasn’t bad, though the rugs and furniture had seen better days. To the right was a bedroom and to the left another one, and in the rear was a bathroom and a kitchen.
I took only a superficial look and then returned to Wolfe and told him, “Nothing sticks out. Shall I pack?”
“What for?” he asked forlorn.
“Shall I see if they missed something important?”
He only grunted. Not feeling like sitting and looking at him, I began a retake. A desk and a filing cabinet yielded nothing but horticultural details and some uninteresting personal items, and the rest of the room nothing at all. The bedroom at the left was even blanker. The one at the right was the one Andy had used, and I went over it good, but if it contained anything that could be used to flatten Lieutenant Noonan’s nose I failed to find it. The same for the bathroom. And ditto for the kitchen, except that at the rear of a shelf, behind some packages of prunes and cereals, I dug up a little cardboard box. There was no morphine in it, and there was no reason to suppose there ever had been, and I reported its contents to Wolfe merely to get conversation started.
“Keys,” I said, jiggling the box, “and one of them is tagged d-u-p period g-r-n-h-s period, which probably means duplicate to the greenhouse. It would come in handy if we want to sneak in some night and swipe that Phalaenopsis.”
No comment. I put the keys in my pocket and sat down.
Pretty soon I spoke. “I’d like to make it plain,” I said distinctly, “that I don’t like the way you’re acting. Many times, sitting in the office, you have said to me, ‘Archie, go get Whosis and Whosat and bring them here.’ Usually, I have delivered. But if you now tell me to drive you home, and, upon arriving, tell me to go get the Pitcairns and Imbries and Gus Treble, which is what I suspect you of, save it. I wouldn’t even bother to answer, not after the way you’ve bitched it up just because a pretty girl called you by your first name.”
“She isn’t pretty,” he growled.
“Nuts. Certainly she’s pretty, though I don’t like her any better than you do. I just wanted to make sure that you understand what the situation will be if we go home.”