The Rubber Band

He backed out of the closet, straightened up, and glared at me. He bellowed, "You shut your trap, see? Or I will take you somewhere, and it won't be to Cramer!"

I grinned at him. "That's childish, lieutenant. Make saps out of yourselves and then try to take it out on citizens. Oh, wait! Baby, wait till this gets out!"

He tramped to the hall and started up the next flight with his army behind. I'll admit I was a little squeamish as they entered the south room; it's hard for anyone to stay in a room ten hours and not leave a trace; but they weren't looking for traces, they were looking for a live woman. Anyway, she had followed Wolfe's instructions to the letter and it looked all right. That only took a couple of minutes, and the same for the north room, where Saul Panzer had slept. When they came out to the hall again I opened the door to the narrow stairs going up, and held it for them.

"Plant rooms fourth and last stop. And take it from me, if you knock over a bench of orchid pots you'll find more trouble here than you brought with you."

Rowcliff was licked. He wasn't saying so, and he was trying not to look it, but he was. He growled, "Wolfe up there?"

"He is."

"All right. Come along, Jack. You two wait here."

The three of us got to the top in single file and I called to him to push in. We entered and he saw the elevator standing there with the door gaping. He opened the door to the stairs and called down, "Hey, Al! Come up and give this elevator a go and look over the shaft!" Then he rejoined us.

Those plant rooms had been considered impressive by better men than Lieutenant Rowcliff- for example among many others, by Pierre Fracard, President of the Horticultural Society of France. I was in and out of them ten times a day and they impressed me, though I pretended to Theodore Horstmann that they didn't. Of course they were more startling in February than they were in October, but Wolfe and Horstmann had developed a technique of forcing that made them worth looking at no matter when it was. Inside the door of the first room, which had Odontoglossums, Oncidiums, and Miltonia hybrids, Rowcliff and the dick stopped short. The angle-iron staging gleamed in its silver paint, and on the concrete benches and shelves three thousand pots of orchids showed greens and blues and yellows and reds. It looked spotty to me, since I had seen it at the top of its glory, but it was nothing to sniff at.