Speak for the Dead Read Free

doors, Solano clapped a hand to his forehead. “Holy cow! I forgot to check the water for the mosses!” He started for a corner of the conservatory.
    “Hold it,” Wager said. “I wish you wouldn’t do anything until the lab people get finished.”
    “Oh boy—Mr. Sumner’s not gonna go for that.”
    Mr. Sumner wouldn’t have a damned thing to say about it—the area was a crime scene, and the police had full authority. “I’ll explain things to him,” said Wager.
    “You think I better call him about this? He really won’t like cops stomping around in the specimens. Yeah,” Solano answered his own question, “he’ll be up by now; I better call him.” He went to the lobby telephone.
    “Fine. Then I want to ask you a few more questions.”
    Solano made his call and hung up the phone. “He said he’d be right down. He really sounded upset. He told me not to let anybody do anything until he gets here.” The man’s brown eyes looked toward the conservatory. “You think it’s O.K. to let that laboratory guy mess around in there?”
    “He’ll be real careful, Solano. Have you showed me all the doors? There’s no other way to get into the conservatory?”
    “There’s the balcony doors up there. But you have to come in through the lobby here. That’s the stairs.” He pointed to the sloping ceiling that roofed the janitor’s room. Over a ledge, Wager could see the glass of the upper doors. “There’s this balcony on the other side, and a ramp leads down to ground level in the conservatory.”
    “Any other doors into the conservatory?”
    “The west end has a set. But they’re emergency doors and only open from the inside. And they got an alarm—a bell goes off if anybody opens them. Kids are all the time setting it off.”
    Wager would take a look at those later. “Are those more stairs to a third floor?”
    “Yeah. The rooftop garden. It’s for showing patio plants and such. You know, like people grow on their apartment balconies. But it’s a dead end; that’s the only stairs up to it.”
    “What’s in there?” Wager pointed to the east wall of the lobby where large wooden doors with a little-used look hung shut.
    “That’s the education wing. The auditorium’s through there, and over there’s the library and herbarium,” Solano said.
    “Does it connect with the conservatory?”
    “Only through here.”
    As Bauman had told him, the victim sure as hell hadn’t walked here. “Windows? Any windows in the conservatory?”
    “Sure, plenty. But they’re all up on top.”
    “Could somebody open one from the outside?”
    Solano’s head wagged. “No way. They work off hydraulic pistons. I’ll show you.”
    Wager followed Solano back into the humid greenness of the domed space. The shorter man pointed up to the roof where triangles of glass sat at the peak of the structure. Even if someone had climbed up from the outside, there was no way to descend. “That’s a long way up,” said Wager.
    “Fifty feet. Even the sparrows have trouble getting in.”
    Wager studied the pages of the small notebook. “Was it crowded when the place closed yesterday?”
    “I don’t know. I get off at two-thirty or so. That’s one of the nice things about this job—every afternoon’s mine. And, heck, I never could sleep late anyway. Bad kidneys.”
    “Who locks up?”
    “Depends on who goes home last. Usually it’s Mauro. But Mr. Sumner can tell you. He’s got a chart that says. Are you sure it’s O.K. to let that guy mess around down there?”
    “It’s O.K.” Wager strolled to the middle of the conservatory, heels crunching in the gravel, and looked at the variety of growing things surging up through the moist air. Why. And how. It wasn’t likely that someone brought the head in just before the conservatory closed. It wasn’t likely that entry had been through the emergency doors with their alarm system. It was likely that somebody used a key. Unless Baird came up with something that