Black Orchids

by Rex Stout

  Through the door further on I entered the main room. There was even more of a crowd than when Wolfe and I had passed by half an hour earlier. I dodged through the field as far as the rustic scene which had labels on the rope-posts reading UPDEGRAFF NURSERIES, ERIE, PENNA. The exhibits on this side were a series of peninsulas jutting into the main room, with aisles between them extending back to the partition, on which they were based. I skirted the band of spectators taking in the Updegraff arrangement and halted beside a runty specimen who was standing there by the rope scowling at the foliage. “Hello, Pete,” I said. He nodded and said hello.

  I had met Pete day before yesterday. I didn’t really like him. In fact I disliked him. His eyes didn’t match and that, together with a scar on his nose, made him look unreliable. But he had been hospitable and made me at home around the place.

  “Your peonies look nice,” I said socially. Someone tittered on my left and made a remark which probably wasn’t intended for my ear but I have good ears. I turned and saw a pair of vintage Helen Hokinsons from Bronxville. I stared and compelled an eye.

  “Yes, madam, peonies,” I said. “What’s a Cymbidium miranda? You don’t know. I’ve known that since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. What’s a Phalaenopsis? Do you know?”

  “No, I don’t, but I know those are rhododendrons. Peonies! Come, Alice.”

  I watched them waddle off and turned back to Pete. “Excuse me for chasing your audience, but it’s none of her business if I prefer to call them peonies. What were you scowling at? Looking for the Kurume yellows?”

  His head jerked around at me. “What about the Kurume yellows?” he demanded.

  “Nothing. Just conversation. I heard Dill saying his woodland glade has got it and I wondered if it was spreading. You don’t need to look at me like that. I haven’t got it.”

  His left eye blinked but the off-color one didn’t. “When did you hear Dill say that?”

  “Just a while ago.”

  “So. What I suspected.” He stretched himself as high as he could up on his toes, looking in all directions at the throng. “Did you see my boss?”

  “No. I just came-”

  Pete darted off. Apparently I had started something. But he went off to the left, towards the front, so I didn’t follow him. I turned right, past a rose garden and a couple of other exhibits to Rucker and Dill’s.

  The crowd was about the same as before; it was only a quarter past three and they wouldn’t begin surging against the ropes until four o’clock, when Harry would lie down for a nap and Anne would take off her shoes and stockings, positively never seen before at a flower show in the history of the world. I got behind some dames not tall enough to obstruct the view. Mumblety-peg was over, and Harry was making a slingshot and Anne was knitting. What she was working on didn’t look as if it might be something I would be able to use, but anyway what I was interested in was her and not her output, which is a normal and healthy attitude during courtship. She sat there on the grass knitting as if there were no one within miles. Harry was nothing like as good an actor as she was. He didn’t look at the spectators’ faces, and of course he said nothing, since it was all pantomime and neither of them ever spoke, but by movements and glances he gave it away that he was conscious of the audience every minute.

  Naturally I was jealous of him, but aside from that he impressed me as a good deal of a wart. He was about my age and he put something on his hair to make it slick. His hair and eyes were dark and he smirked. Also he was cocky. One reason I had picked Anne was that while they were eating lunch Tuesday Harry had put his hand on her arm and she had pulled away, and it wasn’t an invitation to try it again. There had been further indications that she was resolved to keep herself innocent and unsullied for me, though of course she had no way of knowing that it was for me until I got a chance to speak to her. I admit her letting Hewitt decorate her with orchids and take her to dinner had been a bitter pill to swallow, but after all I had no right to expect her to be too spiritual to eat, with her legs.

  All of a sudden Harry jumped to his feet and yelled, “Hey!”

  It was the first word I had ever heard him utter.

  Everyone, including me, looked in the direction of his stare.

  “You, Updegraff!” Harry yelled. “Get out of that!”

  It was the wholesome young man with the serious chin who had been identified for me as Pete’s boss, Fred Updegraff, by Pete himself. At the right corner where the exhibit ended at the partition, he had straddled the rope, stretched an arm and snipped off a peony twig or maybe laurel with a pruning shears, picked up the twig, and was making off with it.

  “I’ll report that!” Harry yelled.

  The crowd muttered and ejaculated with indignation, and for a second I thought we might see a lynching as an added attraction for the most dramatic flower show on record, but all that happened was that two women and a man trotted after Updegraff and started remonstrating with him as he kept going. Believe it or not, Anne never looked up and didn’t miss a stroke with her needles. A born actress.

  My watch said 3:25. It would be over half an hour before the big scene started, and I didn’t dare leave Wolfe alone that long in a strange place, so I regretfully dragged myself away. Retracing my steps, I kept an eye out for Pete, thinking to tell him that his boss had resorted to crime, but he wasn’t visible. Taking the corridor again as a short cut, I saw it was inhabited by a sample who didn’t strike me as the flower show type, either for backstage or out front. She was standing there not far from the door with the RUCKER AND DILL card on it, a fancy little trick in a gray coat with 14th Street squirrel on the collar, with a little blue hat and a blue leather handbag under her arm, and as I approached she looked at me with an uneasy eye and a doubtful smile.

  I asked her, “You lost, sister?”

  “No,” she said, and the smile got confident. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Me?”

  “Nothing like you.”

  “That’s good. It could have been me a week ago, but now I’m booked.”

  I went on.

  Upstairs I found that Wolfe had stayed put, and W. G. Dill was still with him. Apparently the question of tracking down the gazook who had spoiled Dill’s exhibit had been settled one way or the other, for they were arguing about inoculated peat and sterile flasks for germination. I sat down on a vacant spot on a bench. After a while Dill departed and Wolfe went back to the glass case and started peering again, and a few minutes later here came Lewis Hewitt, with his topcoat over his arm. He glanced around as if he was looking for something and asked Wolfe:

  “Did I leave my stick here?”

  “I haven’t seen it. Archie?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Damn it,” Hewitt said. “I do leave sticks around, but I wouldn’t like to lose that one. Well. Do you want to inspect one of those beauties?”

  “Very much. Even without an inspection, I’d like to buy one.”

  “I imagine you would.” Hewitt chuckled. “Plehn offered ten thousand for one the other day.” He took a key from his pocket and leaned over the case. “I’m afraid I’m going to be regarded as a miser, but I can’t bear to let one go.”

  “I’m not a commercial grower,” Wolfe said ingratiatingly. “I’m an amateur like you.”

  “I know,” Hewitt conceded, lifting out one of the pots as if it was made of star bubbles and angels’ breath, “but, my dear fellow, I simply couldn’t part with one.”

  From there on the scene was painful. Wolfe was so damn sweet to him I had to turn my head away to conceal my feelings. He flattered him and yessed him and smiled at him until I expected any minute to hear him offer to dust off his shoes, and the worst of it was, it was obvious he wasn’t getting anywhere and wasn’t going to. When Hewitt went on and on with a discourse about ovules and pollen tubes, Wolfe beamed at him as if he was fascinated and, finally, when Hewitt offered to present him with a couple of C. hassellis, Wolfe thanked him as if they were just what
he asked Santa Claus for, though he had twenty specimens as good or better under his own glass. At a quarter past four I began to fidget. Not only would I have liked to give Wolfe a kick in the fundament for being such a sap, but also I wanted to conduct him past the woodland glade and prove to him that he was wrong when he said my affianced was too long from the knees down, and the big scene would end at four thirty, when Anne would flip water out of the pool onto her co-picnicker to wake him from his nap. That always got a big laugh.

  So I was relieved when they started off. Ordinarily Wolfe would have had me carry the two pots of C. hassellis, but he toted them himself, one in each hand, to show Hewitt how precious he thought they were. The big toad-eater. But the worst was yet to come. We went by the back stairs, and, at my suggestion, along the corridor on the floor below, and there on the floor at the base of the door to Rucker and Dill’s exhibit, I saw an object I recognized. I halted and told Hewitt:

  “There’s your cane.”

  Hewitt stood and looked at it and demanded, “How in the name of heaven did it get there?”

  And by gum, Wolfe told me to pick it up for him! I should have resigned on the spot, but I didn’t want to make a scene in front of Hewitt, so I stopped and grabbed it. There was a piece of green string looped on the crook and I brushed it off and extended the crook end toward Hewitt, controlling an impulse to jab him in the ribs. He thanked me democratically and we went on.

  “Curious,” Hewitt said. “I certainly didn’t leave it there. Very odd.”

  A door ahead of us opened and a man emerged. The door had a card on it, UPDEGRAFF NURSERIES, and the man was the twig-snitcher, Fred Updegraff. At sight of us he stopped, and stood there as we went by. A little farther on, after passing two more doors with exhibitors’ cards on them, I swerved to one that wasn’t labeled and turned the knob and opened it.

  “Where are you going?” Wolfe demanded.

  “The water nymph. The pool episode. I thought you might-”

  “Bosh. That bedlam-”

  “It’s really worth seeing,” Hewitt declared. “Charming. Perfectly charming. Really delightful. I’ll come too.”

  He headed for the door I was holding open, and Wolfe followed him like an orderly after a colonel, his hands full of potted plants. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been disgusting. I kept in front so as not to have to look at him.

  At the glade the audience was five and six deep around the ropes to the point on either side where the bushes were in the way, but all three of us were tall enough to get a good view. Anne was putting on a swell performance, dabbling with her toes and swishing around. Her knees were beautiful. I was proud of her. Harry was stretched out in the usual spot for his nap, his head on a grassy mound alongside the rocks and bushes, with a newspaper over his face. The audience was chattering. Anne kicked water onto a cluster of flowers that hung over the pool, and glistening drops fell from the petals.

  “Charming,” Hewitt said.

  “Delightful,” Wolfe said. “Archie, will you kindly take these plants? Be very careful-”

  Pretending not to hear him, I moved off to the right. Partly I thought he needed some ignoring, but also I wanted to get a better look at Harry’s right leg and foot. They were twisted into a strange and unnatural position for a man pretending to take a nap. I stretched tiptoe to get a good look over heads and hats and decided that either his shoe hurt him or he was doing a yogi leg exercise, and went back to Anne just as she took another glance at her wrist watch. She swished once more, swung her feet out of the pool, cast a mischievous eye on her companion, reached into the pool with her cupped hand, and sloshed water over Harry’s shirt. The audience screeched with glee.

  But Harry didn’t take his cue. He was supposed to jerk himself up and blink and look mad, but he didn’t move. Anne stared at him in astonishment. Someone called:

  “Douse him again!”

  I had a quick hunch it wasn’t funny, with his leg twisted like that. Pushing through to the front, I got over

  the rope. As I started across the grass a guard yelled at me, and so did some of the spectators, but I kept going and was bent over Harry when the guard grabbed my arm.

  “Hey, you-”

  “Shut up.” I shook him off and lifted the newspaper enough to see Harry’s face, and after one glimpse dropped the paper back over it. As I did that I sniffed. I thought I smelled something, a faint something that I recognized.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” a voice above me asked.

  It was the first time I had ever heard Anne’s voice, but I didn’t reply or look up at her because I was seeing something about the moss which clung to the face of the rocks just back of Harry’s head. On account of the shrubs and rocks I couldn’t get around to see the top of his head, so I reached a hand to feel of it, and the end of my finger went right into a hole in his skull, away in, and it was like sticking your finger into a warm apple pie. I pulled away and started wiping my finger off on the grass, and realized with a shock that the two white things there were Anne’s bare feet. I nearly got blood on them.

  Chapter 3

  I stood up and told Anne, “Put on your shoes and stockings.” “What-”

  “Do as I tell you.” I had the guard by the sleeve and stabbed into his sputtings, “Get a cop.” By the way his mouth fell open I saw he was too dumb even for something as simple as that without a fireside chat, so I turned to call to Hewitt and there was Fred Updegraff inside the ropes headed for us. His eyes were on Anne, but when I intercepted him and told him to get a cop he about-faced without a word and went. Wolfe’s voice barked above the din:

  “What the devil are you doing in there?”

  I ignored him again and raised my voice to address the multitude: “Ladies and gentlemen. That’s all for today. Mr. Gould has had an attack. If you’re sensible you’ll go and look at flowers. If you’re morbid or have got the itch you’ll stay where you are-outside the ropes-”

  A flash bulb flared at the left. Sympathetic murmurs arose, but they seemed to be a hundred percent morbid. At the right a guy with a camera came diving under the rope, but that was something for which arrangements had already been made inside the guard’s head and he responded promptly and adequately. I was gratified to see that Anne appeared to have a modicum of wits. She must have seen the color of what I had wiped from my finger, but she was sitting on the grass getting her feet shod, hastily but efficiently.

  “Archie!” Wolfe’s voice came in his most menacing tone. I knew what was eating him. He wanted me to get out of there and drive him home, and he thought I was showing off, and he knew I was sore. As he called my name again I turned my back on him to welcome the law. A big flatfoot with no neck shoved through the crowd to the rope and got over it and strode across the grass. I blocked his way at Harry’s feet.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked gruffly.

  I moved aside and let him pass. He stopped and got a corner of the newspaper and jerked it off.

  “Archie!” Wolfe bellowed.

  Some of the spectators could see Harry’s face and they were reacting. The ropes were bellied in, taut, with the pressure from behind. The guard was charging across the grass at them and Anne was on her feet again and Fred Updegraff was there.

  “Hell, he’s dead,” the cop said.

  “You guessed it,” I conceded. “Shall I get some help?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I won’t say that I already knew things I didn’t know, but I already had stirrings above the ears and, besides, I didn’t want Wolfe to bust a lung, so I went that way and found him standing with Hewitt a few paces to the rear of the throng.

  “Hold everything,” I muttered to him.

  “Confound you-”

  “I said hold everything.” I cantered off to the phone booths at the front of the room, parted with a nickel and dialed a number and got connected with Extension 19, gave my name and asked for Inspector Cramer. His voice came:

  “What do you want
?”

  “Me? Nothing. I’m helping with the chores. Wolfe and I are up at the Flower Show-”

  “I’m busy!”

  “Okay. Now you’re busier. Rucker and Dill’s exhibit, third floor, Flower Show. Man murdered. Shot through the top of the head. Lying there on the grass guarded by one bull-necked bull who will never be an inspector. That’s all.”

  “Wait a min-”

  “Can’t. I’m busy.”

  I slid out of the booth and dodged through the traffic back across the room. In that short time the mob surrounding the glade had doubled in size. A glance showed me that the cop and the guard had got reinforcements and Anne and Fred Updegraff were not in sight, and Wolfe and Hewitt had retreated to the other side of the rose garden next door. W. G. Dill was with them. Wolfe glared at me as I approached. He was still hanging onto those measly plants and was speechless with rage.

  “��� feel a sort of responsibility,“Hewitt was saying. “I am Honorary Chairman of the Committee. I don’t like to shirk responsibility, but what can I do-just look at them-”

  “That policeman,” Dill said. “Imbecile. Wouldn’t let me in my own exhibit. Broke my shoulder blade. It feels like it.” He worked his shoulder up and down, grimacing. “There’s the doctor-no-”

  “A doctor won’t help any. He’s dead.”

  They looked at me. Dill stopped working his shoulder. “Dead? Dead!” He darted off and burrowed into the crowd.

  “You said he had an attack,” Hewitt regarded me accusingly. “How can he be dead? What did he die of?”

  “He ceased breathing.”

  “Archie,” Wolfe said in his most crushing tone. “Stop that. I asked you an hour ago to take these plants. Take them, and take me home.”

  “Yes, sir.” I took the plants. “But I can’t leave yet. I’m looking-”

  “Good heavens,” Hewitt said. “What a calamity��� poor Dill��� I must see��� excuse me���” He marched off towards the main stair.