“Good God.” Andy fell back.
“Certainly. You might as well start with me. Did you kill her?”
“No. Good God, no!”
“Who is she?”
“She’s — it’s Dini. Dini Lauer. Mrs. Pitcairn’s nurse. We were going to be married. Yesterday, just yesterday, she said she would marry me. And I’m standing here.” Andy raised his hands, with all the fingers spread, and shook them. “I stand here! What am I going to do?”
“Hold it, brother,” I told him.
“You’re going to come with me,” Wolfe said, squeezing past me. “I saw a telephone in the workroom, but we’ll talk a little before we use it. Archie, stay here.”
“I’ll stay here,” Andy said. The trance look was gone from his eyes and he was fully conscious again, but his color hadn’t returned and there were drops of sweat on his forehead. He repeated it. “I’ll stay here.”
It took two good minutes to get him to let me have the honor. Finally he shoved off, with Wolfe behind, and after they had left that room I could see them, through the glass partitions, crossing the warm and cool rooms and opening the door to the workroom. They closed it behind them, and I was alone, but of course you’re never really alone in a greenhouse. Not only do you have the plants and flowers for company, but also the glass walls give you the whole outdoors. Anyone within seeing distance, in three directions, was really with me, and that led me to my first conclusion: that Dini Lauer, alive or dead, had not been rolled behind that canvas between the hours of seven in the morning and five in the afternoon. The question, alive or dead, made me want a second conclusion, and again I squatted to lift the canvas in search of it. When, some four years previously, the ciphogene tank had been installed in Wolfe’s plant rooms to replace cyanogas and Nico-Fume, I had read the literature, which had included a description of what you would look like if you got careless, and a second thorough inspection of Dini’s face and throat brought me my second conclusion: she had been alive when she was rolled or pushed under the bench. It was the ciphogene that did it. Since it seemed improbable that she had consciously and obligingly crawled under the bench and lain still, I went on to look and feel for a bump or broken skin, but found neither.
As I got upright again a noise came, knuckles on wood, and then a man’s voice, raised to carry through the wood.