Black Orchids

by Rex Stout

  “I don’t know whether I can-”

  “Certainly you can,” Wolfe assured him. “Go ahead. The phone is there on the potting bench. Theodore, confound it, let him by and come in here and close the door.”

  Theodore obeyed orders. When Dill had passed through Theodore pulled the door shut and stood there resenting us. Hewitt sat down again and put his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. Anne had her head turned not to look at him. That made her face Fred Updegraff, who was next to her, and I became aware for the first time that he was holding her hand. Hardly as private as in a taxi, but he had her hand.

  “While we’re waiting,” Wolfe observed, “I may as well finish my speculations about the cane. Mr. Hewitt may have decided to use it on the theory that the fact of its being his cane would divert suspicion away from him instead of toward him. Was that it, Mr. Hewitt? But in that case, why did you submit to my threat to divulge the fact that it was your cane? I believe I can answer that too. Because you mistrusted my acumen? Because you were afraid my suspicions would be aroused if you failed to conform to the type of the eminent wealthy citizen zealously guarding his reputation from even the breath of scandal? Things like that gather complications as they go along. It’s too bad.”

  Wolfe looked at Hewitt, and shook his head as though regretfully. “But I have no desire to torment you. Theodore, try the door.”

  “I don’t have to,” Theodore said, standing with his back to the door. “I heard the bolt. The lower one squeaks.”

  I stood up. Not that there was anything I intended to do or could do, but I was coming to in a rush and I couldn’t stay sitting. Cramer did, but his eyes, on Wolfe, were nothing but narrow slits.

  “Try it anyway,” Wolfe said quietly.

  Theodore turned and lifted the latch and pushed, and turned back again. “It’s bolted.”

  “Indeed,” Wolfe said with a tingle in his voice. His head turned. “Well, Miss Lasher, what do you think of it?” His eyes swept the faces. “I ask Miss Lasher because she knew all along that I was lying. She knew it couldn’t have been Mr. Hewitt who put that cane there on the floor of the corridor, because she saw Mr. Dill do it. Mr. Hewitt, let me congratulate you on a superb performance-you can’t force it, Mr. Cramer, it’s a sturdy door-”

  Cramer was at it, lifting the latch, assaulting the panel with his shoulder. He turned, his face purple, blurted, “By God, I might have known-,” jumped across and grabbed up a heavy packing-box.

  “Archie!” Wolfe called sharply.

  In all my long and varied association with Inspector Cramer I had never had an opportunity to perform on him properly. This, at last, was it. I wrapped myself around him like cellophane around a toothbrush and turned on the pressure. For maybe five seconds he wriggled, and just as he stopped Fred Updegraff sprang to his feet and gasped in horror:

  “Ciphogene! For God’s sake-”

  “Stop it!” Wolfe commanded. “I know what I’m doing! There is no occasion for panic. Mr. Cramer, there is an excellent reason why that door must not be opened. If Archie releases you, will you listen to it? No? Then, Archie, hold him. This is a fumigating room where we use ciphogene, a gas which will kill a man by asphyxiation in two minutes. The pipe runs from a tank in the potting room and the valve is in there. This morning I closed the outlet of the pipe in this room, and removed the plug from an outlet in the potting room. So if Mr. Dill has opened that valve in the potting room, he is dead, or soon will be. And if you batter a hole in that door I won’t answer for the consequences. We might get out quickly enough and we might not.”

  “You goddamn balloon,” Cramer sputtered helplessly. It was the first and only time I ever heard him cuss in the presence of ladies.

  I unwrapped myself from him and stepped back. He shook himself and barked at Wolfe:

  “Are you going to just sit there? Are we going to just sit here? Isn’t there-can’t you call someone-”

  “I’ll try,” Wolfe said placidly. He lifted the osmundine fork and thumped the floor with it, five times, at regular intervals.

  Lewis Hewitt murmured, believe it or not, apparently to Theodore, “I was in the dramatic club at college.”

  Chapter 10

  All right, I’ll buy you a medal,” Inspector Cramer in utter disgust.

  Five hours had passed. It was six thirty that evening, and the three of us were in the office. I was at my desk, Cramer was in the red leather chair, and Wolfe was seated behind his own desk, leaning back with his fingertips touching on top of his digestive domain. He looked a little creasy around the eyes, which were almost open.

  Cramer went on sputtering: “Dill was a murderer, and he’s dead, and you killed him. You maneuvered him into the potting room with a fake phone call, and he took the bait and bolted the door to the fumigating room and opened the valve. And then why didn’t he walk out and go home? How did you know he wouldn’t do that?”

  “Pfui,” Wolfe said lazily. He grunted. “Without waiting four minutes to make sure the ciphogene had worked? And leaving the door bolted, and the valve open? Mr. Dill was a fool, but not that big a fool. After a few minutes he would have closed the valve and opened the door, held his nose long enough to take a look at us and make sure we were finished, and departed, leaving the door closed but not bolted to give it the appearance of an accident. And probably leaving the valve a bit loose so it would leak a little.” Wolfe grunted again. “No. That wasn’t where the thin ice was. It was next thing to a certainty that Mr. Dill wouldn’t decamp without having a look inside at us.”

  “You were sure of that.”

  “I was.”

  “You admit it.”

  “I do.”

  “Then you murdered him.”

  “My dear sir.” Wolfe wiggled a finger in exasperation. “If you are privately branding me to relieve your feelings, I don’t mind. If you are speaking officially, you are talking gibberish. I could be utterly candid even to a jury, regarding my preparations. I could admit that I plugged the outlet in the fumigating room, and opened the one in the potting room, so that it would be the latter, and not the former, that would be filled with ciphogene if Mr. Dill bolted that door and opened that valve. I could admit that I arranged with Mr. Hewitt to play his part, appealing to him in the interest of justice. He is a public-spirited man. And I discovered his weakness; he has always wanted to be an actor. He even gave me permission to mention his cane, and to recite that wild tale about him-which of course was true, though not true about him, but about Mr. Dill.

  “I could admit that I arranged with Theodore also to play his part. He works for me and obeyed orders. I could admit that I had Fritz stationed in the room below, and my three thumps on the floor were a signal to him to make the telephone call for Mr. Hewitt, and the five thumps, later, told him to come upstairs and start the ventilating blowers in the potting room, which can be done from the hall. I could admit that I deliberately postponed the second signal to Fritz for three minutes after I learned that the door had been bolted; that I had previously released a minute quantity of ciphogene in the potting room and fumigating room so that Mr. Dill’s nose would be accustomed to the smell and would not take alarm at any sudden odor in the potting room after he turned on the valve; that all my arrangements were made with the idea that if Mr. Dill should open that valve, thinking to murder all eight of us, he would die, I could admit all that to a jury.”

  Wolfe sighed. “But the fact would remain that Mr. Dill opened the valve of his own volition, intending to exterminate eight people, including you. No jury would find against me even for damage to your self-esteem.”

  “To hell with my self-esteem,” Cramer growled. “Why don’t you send a bill to the State of New York for the execution of a murderer f.o.b. your potting room? That’s the only thing you’ve left out. Why don’t you?”

  Wolfe chuckled. “I wonder if I could collect. It’s worth trying. I may tell you privately, Mr. Cramer, that there were several reasons why it would have bee
n unfortunate for Mr. Dill to be brought to trial. One, it might have been difficult to convict him. Only a fairly good case. Two, the part played by Mr. Hewitt’s cane would have been made public, and I had undertaken to prevent that. Three, Archie would have been embarrassed. He pulled the trigger and killed the man. Four, Miss Lasher would have committed suicide, or tried to. She’s not very bright, but she’s stubborn as the devil. She had decided that if she admitted having seen anything from her hiding-place in the corridor, she would have to testify to it publicly, her relations with Mr. Gould would have been exposed, and her family would have been dishonored.”

  “They would have been exposed anyway.”,

  “Certainly, once you got hold of her. When Archie brought her to the potting room, with you there, she was a goner. That was the beauty of it. Mr. Dill knew she was bound to crack, and that coupled with the threat of being confronted with the garage man was what cracked him. It was a delicate situation. Among many others was the danger that during my recital Miss Lasher might blurt out that it was Dill, not Hewitt, who had placed the cane there by the door, and that would have spoiled everything.”

  “Wasn’t it Hewitt’s cane?”

  “Yes. A fact as I have told you, not for publication.”

  “Where did Dill get it?”

  “I don’t know. Hewitt had mislaid it, and no doubt Dill spied it and decided to make use of it. By the way, another item not for publication is Miss Lasher’s statement. Don’t forget you promised that. I owe it to her. If she hadn’t included that garage job-card when she packed Mr. Gould’s belongings in her suitcase I wouldn’t have got anywhere.”

  “And another thing,” I put in. “A public airing of the little difficulty Miss Tracy’s father got into wouldn’t get you an increase in salary.”

  “Nothing in God’s world would get me an increase in salary,” Cramer declared feelingly. “And Miss Tracy’s father-” He waved it away.

  Wolfe’s eyes came to me. “I thought you were no longer affianced to her.”

  “I’m not. But I’m sentimental about my memories. My lord, but she’ll get sick of Fred. Peonies! Incidentally, while you’re sweeping up, what was Annie’s big secret?”

  “Not so big.” Wolfe glanced up at the clock, saw that it would be nearly an hour till dinner, and grimaced. “Miss Tracy admitted the soundness of my surmises this morning. Mr. Gould was as devious as he was ruthless. He told her that unless she married him he would force Mr. Dill to have her father arrested, and assured her that he had it in his power to do that. He also spoke of large sums of money. So naturally, when he was murdered Miss Tracy suspected that Mr. Dill was concerned in it, but she refused to disclose her suspicions for obvious reasons-the fear of consequences to her father.”

  Wolfe put his fingertips together again. “It is surprising that Mr. Gould lived as long as he did, in view of his character. He bragged to Miss Lasher that he was going to marry another girl. That was silly and sadistic. He let Miss Tracy know that he had a hold on Mr. Dill. That was rashly indiscreet. He even infected the Rucker and Dill exhibit with Kurume yellows, doubtless to dramatize the pressure he was exerting on Dill for his big haul-at least I presume he did. That was foolish and flamboyant. Of course Dill was equally foolish when he tried to engage me to investigate the Kurume yellows in his exhibit. He must have been unbalanced by the approaching murder he had arranged for, since bravado was not in his normal character. I suppose he had a hazy idea that hiring me to investigate in advance would help to divert suspicion from him. He really wasn’t cut out for a murderer. His nerves weren’t up to it.”

  “Yours are.” Cramer stood up. “I’ve got to run. One thing I don’t get, Dill’s going clear to Pennsylvania to bribe a guy to poison some bushes. I know you spoke about extremes in horticultural jealousy, but have they all got it? Did Dill have it too?”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I was then speaking of Mr. Hewitt. What Mr. Dill had was a desire to protect his investment and income. The prospect of those rhodaleas appearing on the market endangered the biggest department of his business.” He suddenly sat up and spoke in a new tone. “But speaking of horticultural jealousy-I had a client, you know. I collected a fee in advance. I’d like to show it to you. Archie, will you bring them down, please?”

  I was tired after all the hubbub and the strain of watching Wolfe through another of his little experiments, but he had said please, so I went up to the plant rooms and got them, all three of them, and brought them down and put them side by side on Wolfe’s desk. He stood up and bent over them, beaming.

  “They’re absolutely unique,” he said as if he was in church. “Matchless! Incomparable!”

  “They’re pretty,” Cramer said politely, turning to go. “Kind of drab, though. Not much color. I like geraniums better.”

  That’s the first of the two cases. That’s how he got the black orchids. And what do you suppose he did with them? I don’t mean the plants; it would take the lever Archimedes wanted a fulcrum for to pry one of those plants loose from him (just last week Cuyler Ditson offered him enough for one to buy an antiaircraft, gun); I mean a bunch of the blossoms. I saw them myself there on a corner of the casket, with a card he had scribbled his initials on, “N.W.” That was all.

  I put this case here with the other one only on account of the orchids. As I said, it’s a totally different set of people. If, when you finish it, you think the mystery has been solved, all I have to say is you don’t know a mystery when you see one.

  A.G.

  CORDIALLY INVITED TO MEET

  DEATH

  Chapter 1

  That wasn’t the first time I ever saw Bess Huddleston.

  A couple of years previously she had phoned the office one afternoon and asked to speak to Nero Wolfe, and when Wolfe got on the wire she calmly requested him to come at once to her place up at Riverdale to see her. Naturally he cut her off short. In the first place, he never stirred out of the house except in the direction of an old friend or a good cook; and secondly, it hurt his vanity that there was any man or woman alive who didn’t know that. An hour or so later here she came, to the office-the room he used for an office in his old house on West 35th Street, near the river-and there was a lively fifteen minutes. I never saw him more furious. It struck me as an attractive proposition. She offered him two thousand bucks to come to a party she was arranging for a Mrs. Somebody and be the detective in a murder game. Only four or five hours’ work, sitting down, all the beer he could drink, and two thousand dollars. She even offered an extra five hundred for me to go along and do the leg work. But was he outraged! You might have thought he was Napoleon and she was asking him to come and deploy the tin soldiers in a nursery.

  After she had gone I deplored his attitude. I told him that after all she was nearly as famous as he was, being the most successful party-arranger for the upper brackets that New York had ever had, and a combination of the talents of two such artists as him and her would have been something to remember, not to mention what I could do in the way of fun with five hundred smackers, but all he did was sulk.

  That had been two years before. Now, this hot August morning with no air conditioning in the house because he distrusted machinery, she phoned around noon and asked him to come up to her place at Riverdale right away. He motioned to me to dispose of her and hung up. But a little later, when he had gone to the kitchen to consult with Fritz about some problem that had arisen in connection with lunch, I looked up her number and called her back. It had been as dull as a blunt instrument around the office for nearly a month, ever since we had finished with the Nauheim case, and I would have welcomed even tailing a laundry boy suspected of stealing a bottle of pop, so I phoned and told her that if she was contemplating a trip to 35th Street I wanted to remind her that Wolfe was incommunicado upstairs with his orchid plants from nine to eleven in the morning, and from four to six in the afternoon, but that any other time he would be delighted to see her.

  I must say he didn’t act delighted,
when I ushered her in from the hall around three o’clock that afternoon. He didn’t even apologize for not getting up from his chair to greet her, though I admit no reasonable person would have expected any such effort after one glance at his dimensions.

  “You,” he muttered pettishly, “are the woman who came here once and tried to bribe me to play the clown.”

  She plopped into the red leather chair I placed for her, got a handkerchief out of her large green handbag, and passed it across her forehead, the back of her neck, and her throat. She was one of those people who don’t look much like their pictures in the paper, because her eyes made her face and made you forget the rest of it when you looked at her. They were black and bright and gave you the feeling they were looking at you when they couldn’t have been, and they made her seem a lot younger than the forty-seven or forty-eight she probably was.

  “My God,” she said, “as hot as this I should think you would sweat more. I’m in a hurry because I’ve got to see the Mayor about a Defense Pageant he wants me to handle, so I haven’t time to argue, but your saying I tried to bribe you is perfectly silly. Perfectly silly! It would have been a marvelous party with you for the detective, but I had to get a policeman, an inspector, and all he did was grunt. Like this.” She grunted.

  “If you have come, madam, to-”

  “I haven’t. I don’t want you for a party this time. I wish I did. Someone is trying to ruin me.”

  “Ruin you? Physically, financially-”

  “Just ruin me. You know what I do. I do parties-”

  “I know what you do,” Wolfe said curtly.

  “Very well. My clients are rich people and important people, at least they think they’re important. Without going into that, they’re important to me. So what do you suppose the effect would be-wait, I’ll show it to you-”

  She opened her handbag and dug into it like a terrier. A small bit of paper fluttered to the floor, and I stepped across to retrieve it for her, but she darted a glance at it and said, “Don’t bother, wastebasket,” and I disposed of it as indicated and returned to my chair.