“Then we’ll keep them. You understand, of course, that there are no alibis. There were four hours for it: from eleven o’clock, when Miss Lauer said good night to Mr. Krasicki and left him, to three o’clock, when you and Mr. Krasicki entered the greenhouse to fumigate. Everyone was in bed, and in separate rooms except for Mr. and Mrs. Imbrie. Their alibi is mutual, but also marital and therefore worthless. His motive we have assumed. Hers is of course implicit in the situation as you describe it, and besides, women do not require motives that are comprehensible by any intellectual process.”
“You said it,” Gus acquiesced feelingly. “They roll their own.”
I wondered what the girl at Bedford Hills had done now. Wolfe went on.
“Let’s finish with the women. What about Miss Pitcairn?”
“Well—” Gus opened his mouth wide to give his lips a stretch, touched the upper one with the tip of his tongue, and closed up again. “I guess I don’t understand her. I feel as if I hate her, but I don’t really know why, so maybe I don’t understand her.”
“Perhaps I can help?”
“I doubt it. She puts up a hell of a front, but one day last summer I came on her in the grove crying her eyes out. I think it’s a complex, only she must have more than one. She had a big row with her father one day on the terrace, when I was working there in the shrubs and they knew it — it was a couple of weeks after Mrs. Pitcairn’s accident and he was letting the registered nurse go and sending for a practical nurse which turned out later to be this Dini Lauer — and Miss Pitcairn was raising the roof because she thought she ought to look after her mother herself. She screamed fit to be tied, until the nurse called down from an upstairs window to please be quiet. Another thing, she not only seems to hate men, she says right out that she does. Maybe that’s why I feel I hate her, just to balance it up.”
Wolfe made a face. “Does she often have hysterics?”
“I wouldn’t say often, but of course I’m hardly ever in the house.” Gus shook his head. “I guess I don’t understand her.”
“I doubt if it’s worth an effort. Don’t try. What I’d like to get from you, if you have it, is not understanding but a fact. I need a scandalous fact about Miss Pitcairn. Have you got one?”