Black Orchids

by Rex Stout

  At that instant I caught sight of an object I had been halfway expecting to see. I only got a glimpse of the gray coat with its collar of 14th Street squirrel, for she came from the other side and disappeared into the crowd. I put the pots on the floor at the edge of the rose garden and dashed off before Wolfe could say a word. I didn’t care how sore it made him because he had it coming to him after his degrading performance with Hewitt, but I admit I glanced back over my shoulder as I went to see if he was throwing something. His face was purple. I’ll bet he lost ten pounds that afternoon.

  I skirted the throng and went into it on the other side. In a minute I saw her, squirming through to the front. I took it easy working through to her because I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, and, getting right behind her, saw that the blue leather bag was under her right arm. I shifted Wolfe’s coat to my own right arm and under its cover got my fingers on the end of the bag and pulled gently. It started coming, and she was so interested in what she was trying to see around the people still in front of her that she didn’t notice it even when the bag was out from under her arm and safely under Wolfe’s coat. I kept an eye on her as I backed out, apologizing to the flower lovers as I went, and as soon as I was in the clear turned and made for the stairs.

  In the men’s room on the second floor I spent a nickel to achieve privacy and sat down and opened the bag, which was monogrammed “RL.” It inventoried about as usual, handkerchief and compact and purse and so on, but it also had what I was after, her name and address. They were on an envelope addressed to Miss Rose Lasher, 326 Morrow Street, New York City, which checked with the RL on the bag. I copied it in my notebook. The letter inside was from Ellie and explained why she hadn’t paid back the two dollars. And another item was more than I had bargained for. It was a clipping from the Gazette of a picture of Harry and Anne playing mumblety-peg. It had cut edges, not torn, and was neatly folded.

  I put everything back in, went back to the third floor, worked my way into the crowd, not taking it so easy this time, found her in the front row against the rope, and put my hand on her shoulder. Her head twisted around.

  “Will you please-” she began indignantly.

  “Okay, sister. It’s me. Here’s your bag.”

  “My bag!”

  “You dropped it and I risked life and limb to get it. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “Sure it’s mine!” She grabbed it.

  “Say thank you.”

  She mumbled something and was through with me. I glanced at the scene. The cast had been augmented. The contents of two radio police cars, four of them in uniform, were there in the glade, one of them standing at Harry’s feet watching a doctor, who was on his knees applying a stethoscope. W. G. Dill stood at the cop’s side, his hands in his pockets, scowling. There was no sign that anyone had got interested in the moss on the rocks. I backed out again

  without bruising anyone seriously and circled around to the rose garden to rejoin Wolfe.

  He wasn’t there.

  He was gone. The two pots were there on the floor, but he wasn’t anywhere.

  The damn hippopotamus, I thought. He’ll get lost. He’ll be kidnapped. He’ll fall in a hole. He’ll catch cold.

  I went back down to the men’s room on the second floor and yelled his name in front of the private apartments, but no soap. I went up to the fourth, to the orchid benches. No. I went down to the ground floor and out the main exit and to where I had parked the car on 46th Street, but he wasn’t in it. It was trying to snow in March gusts. I spat at a snowflake as it sailed by. Our little Nero, I thought, out on such a night and no coat. The bag fat flumpus. I’ll put salt on his grapefruit. It was a quarter past five.

  I stood and applied logic to it. Had he taken a taxi home? Not the way he hated taxis. What, as I had left him standing there, what had been his most burning desires? That was easy. To shoot me, to sit down, and to drink beer. He couldn’t shoot me because I wasn’t there. Where might he have found a chair?

  I went back and paid four bits to get in again, mounted one flight, and made my way across the grain of the traffic to the corner of the room where a door said OFFICE. People were standing around, and one of them plucked at my sleeve as I put my hand on the knob, and I recognized him. It was the gray-haired geezer I had seen on previous days looking at Anne from a distance as if he was saying his prayers. He looked worried under an old felt hat, and his fingers on my sleeve were trembling.

  “Please,” he said, “if you’re going in there will you please give this to Miss Anne Tracy?”

  “Is she in there?”

  “Yes, she went in-I saw her go in-”

  I took the folded piece of paper and said I’d see that Miss Tracy got it, opened the door and entered, and was in an anteroom containing a tired-looking woman at a desk. I smiled at her irresistibly to keep her quiet, unfolded the piece of paper, and read what it said.

  Dear daughter,

  I hope there is no serious trouble. I am outside here. If there is anything I can do let me know.

  Your father.

  It was written with a pencil on cheap white paper. I folded it up again, thinking that one of the first jobs to tackle would be to buy my father-in-law a new hat.

  “Do you want something?” the woman at the desk asked in a sad and skeptical tone. I told her I had an important message for Miss Anne Tracy, and she opened her mouth and then decided not to use it any more and motioned to one of three doors. I opened it and passed through, and the first thing I saw was Nero Wolfe sitting in a chair almost big enough for him, with a tray on a table beside him holding four beer bottles, and a glass in his hand.

  You can’t beat logic.

  On another chair right in front of him, facing him, was Anne. Propped against a desk at the left was Lewis Hewitt. A man I didn’t know was at another desk writing something, and another one was standing by a window with Fred Updegraff.

  Wolfe saw me enter. I saw him see me. But he went on talking to Anne without dropping a stitch:

  “��� a matter of nerves, yes, but primarily it depends on oxygenation of the blood. The most remarkable case of self-control I ever saw was in Albania in 1915, displayed by a donkey, I mean a four-legged donkey, which toppled over a cliff-”

  I was standing by him. “Excuse me,” I said icily. “For you, Miss Tracy.” I extended the paper.

  She looked up at me, looked at the paper, took it, unfolded it, and read it.

  “Oh,” she said. She glanced around and looked up at me again. “Where is he?”

  “Outside.”

  “But I���” Her brow wrinkled. “Would you tell him��� no��� I’ll go���”

  She got up and started for the door. I went to open it for her, saw that Hewitt had the same intention, quickened my step, beat him to the knob, and swung it open. Anne was walking through, and then she wasn’t. A man barging through from the other side ran smack into her and nearly knocked her over, and I grabbed her arm to help her get her balance. I beat Hewitt to that too.

  “Pardon me,” the intruder said. His eyes swept the room and everything in it and went back to Anne. “Are you Anne Tracy?”

  “She is Miss Anne Tracy,” Hewitt said, “and that is scarcely the way-”

  Anne was sidling by to get to the door. The man put an arm out to stop her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to see my father.”

  “Where is he?”

  Another arm got in on it. Fred Updegraff arrived and his hand came out and contacted the intruder’s ribs and gave a healthy shove.

  “Learn some manners,” he said gruffly. “What business is-”

  “Permit me,” I interposed. “This is Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad.” I indicated another man on the door sill. “And Sergeant Purley Stebbins.”

  “Even so,” Lewis Hewitt said in a tone of displeasure. “It is scarcely necessary to restrain Miss Tracy by force. She merely wishes to speak with her fa
ther. I am Lewis Hewitt, Inspector. May I ask-”

  “Where is your father?”

  “Just outside the door,” I said.

  “Go with her, Purley. All right, Miss Tracy. Come back in here, please.”

  Purley went out at her heels. That cleared the doorway for another man to enter, W. G. Dill. His lips were in a thinner line than ever, and without looking at anybody or saying anything he crossed to a chair by the rear wall and sat down.

  “Hello, Wolfe,” Cramer said.

  “How do you do, Inspector.” With only two grunts, one under par, Wolfe got to his feet and moved forward. “Come, Archie. We’ll only be in the way.”

  “No,” Cramer said meaningly.

  “No?” Wolfe halted. “No what?”

  “Goodwin won’t be in the way. On the contrary. At least until I get through with him.”

  “He’s going to drive me home.”

  “Not now he isn’t.”

  “May I ask what this is all about?” Hewitt was still displeased. “This surveillance of Miss Tracy? This attitude-”

  “Certainly, Mr. Hewitt. Sit down.” Cramer waved at chairs, of which there were plenty. “Everybody sit down. This is going to be-ah, Miss Tracy, did you find your father? Good. Pull that chair around for Miss Tracy, Purley. Sit down, Goodwin.”

  I attended to the chair for Anne myself, then turned to face the Inspector.

  “No, thanks. I’m nervous.”

  “You are,” Cramer growled. “The day you’re nervous I’ll shave with a butter knife. How did you know that man had been shot in the top of the head when you called me on the phone?”

  Some of them made noises, but Anne didn’t. Her head jerked up and her nostrils tightened, but that was all. I admired her more all the time. Hewitt exclaimed, “Shot!” and Fred Updegraff demanded, “What man?”

  “Harry Gould,” I told him. I grinned at Cramer. “As you see, I didn’t blab around. I saved it for you-”

  “How did you know?”

  “Good heavens,” Hewitt said blankly. He rose half out of his chair and then dropped back again.

  “It was nothing to write home about,” I said. “I looked at his face and he looked dead. I smelled cordite. I saw a jagged hole in the moss at the back of his head, and the moss was puffed out. I couldn’t see the top of his head from where I was, but I felt of it, and my finger went in a hole. By the way, don’t build a theory from some blood on the grass about where his knees were. I wiped my finger there.”

  I saw Anne gulp.

  “Confound you,” Wolfe said angrily, “I might have known.”

  “Why did you go to him in the first place?” Cramer demanded. “You climbed the ropes and ran to him. Why did you do that?”

  “Because he didn’t move when Miss Tracy threw water on him, and because I had already noticed that his leg and foot were twisted in an unnatural position.”

  “Why did you notice that?”

  “Ah,” I said, “now you’ve got me. I give up. I’m trapped. Why does anybody notice anything?”

  “Especially a nervous man like you,” he said sarcastically. “What were you doing there? Why did you come here?”

  “I brought Mr. Wolfe.”

  “Did he come here on a case?”

  “You know damn well he didn’t. He never goes anywhere on a case. He came to look at flowers.”

  “Why were you there at that particular exhibit?”

  “For the same reason that other people were. To watch Miss Tracy dabble her feet in the pool.”

  “Did you know Miss Tracy? Or Gould?”

  “No.”

  “Did you, Wolfe?”

  “No,” Wolfe said.

  Cramer resumed with me. “And smelling the cordite and seeing the hole in the moss and feeling the one in his head, how did you figure someone had shot him? By lying hidden in the bushes and aiming through a crack in the rocks?”

  “Now have a heart, Inspector.” I grinned at him. “If you’re not careful you’ll trap me again. At the moment I didn’t do much figuring, but that was over an hour ago and you know what my brain is when it gets started. Gould took his nap at the same hour each day, and he put his head in exactly the same spot-”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mr. Wolfe has been sending me here to look at orchids. That’s a matter I’d rather not dwell on. The pile of rocks was only eight or nine inches from his head. Place a gun among the rocks at the right height, wedge it in, aimed the right way, and replace the moss. The rocks and the moss would muffle the report so that no one would notice it in that big noisy room-or what if they did notice it? Fasten a string to the trigger-make it green string so it won’t be seen among the foliage. At the proper time, which will be anywhere between four and four thirty, pull the string.”

  “Pull the string how? From where?”

  “Oh, suit yourself.” I waved a hand. “Hide in the bushes and after you’ve pulled it sneak out the door at the back of the exhibit that leads to the corridor. Or if the string’s long enough, run it through the crack at the bottom of the door and then you can pull it from the corridor, which would be safer. Or if you want to be fancy, tie the string to the doorknob and it will be pulled by whoever opens the door from the corridor side. Or if you want to be still fancier, run the string around the trunk of a bush and have its end a loop dangling into the pool, and take off your shoes and stockings and swish your feet around in the pool, and catch the loop with your toes and give it a jerk, and who would ever suspect-

  “That’s a lie!”

  That blurted insult came from Fred Updegraff. He confronted me, and his chin was not only serious, it was bigoted, and anyone might have thought I was a caterpillar eating his best peony.

  “Nonsense!” came another blurt, from W. G. Dill, who didn’t leave his chair.

  “It seems to me-” Lewis Hewitt began sarcastically.

  “Pooh,” I said. “You cavaliers. I wouldn’t harm a hair of her head. Don’t you suppose the Inspector had thought of that? I know how his mind works-”

  “Can it,” Cramer growled. “The way your mind works.” His eyes were narrowed at me. “We’ll discuss that a little later, when I’m through with Miss Tracy. The gun was wedged among the rocks and covered with the moss, and the string was tied to the trigger, and the string was green, so you’re quite a guesser-”

  “How long was the string?”

  “Long enough to reach. What else do you know?”

  I shook my head. “If you can’t tell guessing from logic-”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Nothing at present.”

  “We’ll see.” Cramer looked around. “If there’s a room where I can go with Miss Tracy-”

  The man who had been writing at a desk stood up. “Certainly, Inspector. That door there-”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Jim Hawley of the house staff. I don’t think there’s anyone in there-I’ll see-”

  But there was an interruption. The door to the anteroom opened, and in came a delegation of four. In front was a dick whom I recognized as a member of the squad, next came a lady, next my friend Pete with unmatched eyes, and bringing up the rear a cop in uniform. The lady wore a gray coat with a squirrel collar and had a blue leather bag under her arm, but I didn’t presume on old acquaintance by speaking to her.

  Chapter 4

  Cramer took in the influx with a glance and asked, “What have you got, Murphy?”

  “Yes, sir.” The dick stood with his shoulders straight. He was the military type. “At or about half past four o’clock this young woman was seen in the corridor opening the door leading to the Rucker and Dill exhibit.”

  “Who saw her?”

  “I did,” Pete spoke up.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Pete Arango. I work for Updegraff Nurseries. That’s my boss there, Mr. Updegraff. I went through the door at the back of our exhibit, into the corridor, to get some cookies, and I-”


  “To get what?”

  “Cookies. I eat cookies. In my locker in the corridor.”

  “Okay. You eat cookies. And saw what?”

  “I saw her opening that door. Rucker and Dill. After all what happened I remembered it and I told a cop-

  “Did she go inside?”

  Pete shook his head. “She saw me and she shut the door.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “No, she didn’t have anything to say.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, I went to my locker and got the cookies, and she must have gone away because when I came back she wasn’t there. Then when I got back on the floor and saw-”

  Cramer turned to the young woman. “What’s your name?”

  “None of your business!” she snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” the dick said. “She won’t co-operate.”

  “What do you mean, I won’t co-operate?” She was indignant, but I wouldn’t have said she looked scared. “I admit I opened the door and looked in, don’t I? I got into the corridor by mistake and I was looking for a way out. And why should I have to tell you my name and get my name in the papers-”

  “Why didn’t you get out the way you got in?”

  “Because I got in away around at the other side, and I just thought��� hey! Hello there!”

  Everyone looked the way she was looking, which resulted in all of us looking at Fred Updegraff. Fred himself turned red and was turning redder, as he met her gaze.

  “Well,” he said, and seemed to think he had said something.

  “It was you,” she said, “there with the door open, stooping down there peeking in when you heard me.”

  “Sure,” Fred acknowledged, “sure it was me.”

  “The Rucker and Dill door?” Cramer demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you looking for a way out too?”

  “No.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  “I was-” Fred swallowed it. He looked red and flustered, and then all of a sudden he looked relieved. There was no telling what sort of idea had popped into his head that relieved him and pleased him so much, but he certainly showed it. He spoke louder as if he didn’t want anyone to miss it: “I was looking at Miss Tracy. I’ve been doing that all week. My name is Fred Updegraff and I’m an exhibitor here. I was looking at Miss Tracy!” It sounded as if he almost thought he was singing it.