Davis faced Wolfe. “You’re clever,” he said in a cold and bitter tone. “Damned clever. And of course you’re right. Prescott did it. You wanted to open me up, and you have. He wanted Naomi six years ago, but she preferred me. He has always wanted her. He’s sly and he’s secretive and it has gone on festering inside of him. I knew he never stopped wanting her, but I didn’t know how it had rotted his insides until she told me Friday evening what he had done about the will and the proposal he had made to her. And she had accepted it. She was going to marry him. You’re right about her too — she was ambitious, greedy and unscrupulous, but she — well, she’s dead. When she learned Friday that Hawthorne had been murdered, she knew Prescott had killed him. To get her. And she decided to ditch him. That’s why he killed her — that, and the fear that if it got hot she would squeal.”
Cramer rumbled, “Sit down.”
Skinner said, “Wait a minute.” He was scowling at Wolfe. “You said you had evidence that Davis did it.”
“No, sir. I said I had evidence. Archie, get that envelope from the safe.”
I threaded my way between customers, got it and returned with it, and handed it to him. He shook the contents onto the desk, selected a snapshot, and told me to give it to Prescott. I did so. I practically had to close his fist on it, and he made no effort to look at it. His one good eye was glassy.
“That,” said Wolfe, “is a picture of you, Mr. Prescott, taken at six o’clock Tuesday by Sara Dunn as you awaited her with your car in front of the shop where she works. The flower in your buttonhole is a rosa setigera. A wild rose. You remembered that yesterday and stole her camera, but you were too late. Where in the heart of New York City, where did you get that wild rose?”
He paused, but Prescott didn’t reply, and obviously wasn’t able to. All he could do was stare like an imbecile.
“You didn’t get it in New York,” Wolfe continued inexorably. “No New York florist ever has a wild rose. And when you left your office around one o’clock Tuesday, according to the observant young woman at the reception desk — what’s her name, Johnny?”
“Mabel Shanks,” said Johnny, louder than necessary. “But she isn’t young.”
“At any rate, a woman. What was Mr. Prescott wearing in his buttonhole when he left for lunch Tuesday?”