Black Orchids

by Rex Stout

  “Sure. I’ll look it up. What reason do you suppose Doc Brady might have for putting your sister on the skids?”

  “So far as I know, none. None whatever.”

  “Then that lets him out. With everyone else out, there’s no one left but your sister.”

  “My sister?”

  I nodded. “She must have sent the letters herself.”

  That made him mad. In fact he rather blew up, chiefly because it was too serious a matter to be facetious about, and I had to turn on the suavity to calm him down. Then he went into a sulk. After fooling around with him for another ten minutes and getting nothing for my trouble, I decided to move on and he accompanied me downstairs and out to the terrace, where we heard voices.

  If that was a sample of a merry gathering arranged by Bess Huddleston, I’ll roll my own, though I admit that isn’t fair, since she hadn’t done any special arranging. She was lying on a porch swing with her dress curled above her knees by the breeze, displaying a pair of bare legs that were merely something to walk with, the feet being shod with high-heeled red slippers, and I don’t like shoes without stockings, no matter whose legs they are. Two medium-sized black bears were sitting on the flagstones with their backs propped against the frame of the swing, licking sticks of candy and growling at each other. Maryella Timms was perched on the arm of a chair with her hand happening to rest on the shoulder of Larry Huddleston, who was sitting at careless ease in the chair the way John Barrymore would. Janet Nichols, in riding clothes, was in another chair, her face hot and flushed, which made her look better instead of worse as it does most people, and standing at the other end of the swing, also in riding clothes, was a wiry-looking guy with a muscular face.

  When Bess Huddleston introduced us, Dr. Brady and me, I started to meet him halfway for the handshake, but I had taken only two and a half steps when the bears suddenly started for me as if I was the meal of their dreams. I leaped sideways half a mile in one bound and their momentum carried them straight on by, but as I whirled to faced them another big black object shot past me from behind like a bat out of hell and I jumped again, just at random. Laughter came from two directions, and from a third Bess Huddleston’s voice:

  “They weren’t after you, Mr. Goldwin, they smelled Mister coming and they’re afraid of him. He teases them.”

  The bears were not in sight. The orangutan jumped up on the swing and off again. I said savagely, “My name is Goolenwangel.”

  Dr. Brady was shaking my hand. He said with a laugh, “Don’t mind her, Mr. Goodwin. It’s a pose. She pretends she can’t remember the name of anyone not in the Social Register. Since her entire career is founded on snobbery-”

  “Snob yourself,” Bess Huddleston snorted. “You were born to it and believe in it. With me it’s business. But for heaven’s sake let’s not-Mister, you devil, don’t you dare tickle my feet!”

  Mister went right ahead. He already had the red slippers off, and, depositing them right side up on a flagstone, he proceeded to tickle the sole of her right foot. She screamed and kicked him. He tickled the other foot, and she screamed again and kicked him with that. That appeared to satisfy him, for he started off, but his next performance was unpremeditated. A man in a butler’s jacket, approaching with a tray of glasses and bottles, had just reached the end of the swing when Mister bumped him, and bumped him good. The man yelled and lost control, and down went the works. Dr. Brady caught one bottle on the fly, and I caught another, but everything else was shattered on the stones. Mister went twenty feet through the air and landed in a chair and sat there and giggled, and the man was trembling all over.

  “For God’s sake, Haskell,” Bess Huddleston said, “don’t leave now, with guests coming for dinner. Go to your room and have a drink and lie down. We’ll clean this up.”

  “My name is Hoskins,” the man said in a hollow tone.

  “So it is. Of course it is. Go and have a drink.”

  The man went, and the rest of us got busy. When Mister got the idea, which was at once, he waddled over to help, and I’ll say this much for him, he was the fastest picker-up of pieces of broken glass I have ever seen. Janet went and came back with implements, among them a couple of brooms, but the trouble was that you couldn’t make a comprehensive sweep of it on account of the strips of turf between the flagstones. Larry went for another outfit of drinks, and finally Maryella solved the problem of the bits of glass in the grass strips by bringing a vacuum cleaner. Bess Huddleston stayed on the swing. Dr. Brady carried off the debris, and eventually we got back to normal, everybody with a drink, including Mister, only his was non-alcoholic, or I wouldn’t have stayed. What that bird would have done with a couple of Martinis under his fur would have been something to watch from an airplane.

  “This seems to be a day for breaking things,” Bess Huddleston said, sipping an old-fashioned. “Someone broke my bottle of bath salts and it splattered all over the bathroom and just left it that way.”

  “Mister?” Maryella asked.

  “I don’t think so. He never goes in there. I didn’t dare ask the servants.”

  But apparently at the Huddleston place there was no such thing as settling down for a social quarter of an hour, whether Mister was drunk or sober, only the next disturbance wasn’t his fault, except indirectly. The social atmosphere was nothing to brag about anyhow, because it struck me that certain primitive feelings were being felt and not concealed with any great success. I’m not so hot at nuances, but it didn’t take a Nero Wolfe to see that Maryella was working on Larry Huddleston, that the sight of the performance was giving Dr. Brady the fidgets in his facial muscles, that Janet was embarrassed and trying to pretend she didn’t notice what was going on, and that Daniel was absent-mindedly drinking too much because he was worrying about something. Bess Huddleston had her ear cocked to hear what I was saying to Dr. Brady, but I was merely dating him to call at the office. He couldn’t make it that evening, but tomorrow perhaps��� his schedule was very crowded���

  The disturbance came when Bess Huddleston said she guessed she had better go and see if there was going to be any dinner or anyone to serve it, and sat up and put on her slippers. That is, she put one on; the second one, she stuck her foot in, let out a squeak, and jerked the foot out again.

  “Damn!” she said. “A piece of glass in my slipper! Cut my toe!”

  Mister bounced over to her, and the rest of us gathered around. Since Brady was a doctor, he took charge of matters. I didn’t amount to much, a shallow gash half an inch long on the bottom of her big toe, but it bled some, and Mister started whining and wouldn’t stop. Brother Daniel brought first-aid materials from the living room, and after Brady had applied a good dose of iodine, he did a neat job with gauze and tape.

  “It’s all right, Mister,” Bess Huddleston said reassuringly. “You don’t-hey!”,

  Mister had swiped the iodine bottle, uncorked it, and was carefully depositing the contents, drop by drop, onto one of the strips of turf. He wouldn’t surrender it to Brady or Maryella, but he gave it to his mistress on demand, after re-corking it himself, and she handed it to her brother.

  It was after six o’clock, and I wasn’t invited to dinner, and anyway I had had enough zoology for one day, so I said good-bye and took myself off. When I got the roadster onto the highway and was among my fellows again, I took a long deep breath of the good old mixture of gasoline and air and the usual odors.

  When I got back to the office Wolfe, who was making marks on a big map of Russia he had bought recently, said he would take my report later, so, after comparing the type on my sample with that on the Horrocks letter and finding they were written on the same machine, I went up to my room for a shower and a change. After dinner, back in the office, he told me to make it a complete recital, leaving out nothing, which meant that he had made no start and formed no opinion. I told him I preferred a written report, because when I delivered it verbally he threw me off the track by making faces and irritating me, but he leaned ba
ck and shut his eyes and told me to proceed.

  It was nearly midnight when I finished, what with the usual interruptions. When he’s doing a complete coverage, he thinks nothing of asking such a question as, “Did the animal pour the iodine on the grass with its right paw or its left?” If he were a movable object and went places himself it would save me a lot of breath, but then that’s what I get paid for. Partly.

  He stood up and stretched, and I yawned. “Well,” I asked offensively, “got it sewed up? Including proof?”

  “I’m sleepy,” he said, starting off. At the door he turned. “You made the usual quantity of mistakes, naturally, but probably the only one of importance was your failure to investigate the matter of the broken bottle in Miss Huddleston’s bathroom.”

  “Pah,” I said. “If that’s the best you can do. It was not a bottle of anonymous letters. Bath salts.”

  “All the same it’s preposterous. It’s even improbable. Break a bottle and simply go off, leaving it scattered around? No one would do that.”

  “You don’t know that orangutan. I do.”

  “Not orangutan. Chimpanzee. It might have done it, yes. That’s why you should have investigated. If the animal did not do it, there’s something fishy about it. Highly unnatural. If Dr. Brady arrives by eight fifty-nine, I’ll see him before I go up to the plant rooms. Good night.”

  Chapter 4

  That was Tuesday night, August 19th. On Friday the 22nd Bess Huddleston got tetanus. On Monday the 25th she died. To show how everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked when he was discussing the case with a friend the other day, if there had been a heavy rainfall in Riverdale between the 19th and 26th it would have been impossible to prove it was murder, let alone catch the murderer. Not that he showed any great-oh, well.

  On Wednesday the 20th Dr. Brady came to the office for an interview with Wolfe, and the next day brother Daniel and nephew Larry came. About all we got out of that was that among the men nobody liked anybody. In the meantime, upon instructions from Wolfe, I was wrapping my tentacles about Janet, coaxing her into my deadly embrace. It really wasn’t an unpleasant job, because Wednesday afternoon I took her to a ball game and was agreeably surprised to find that she knew a bunt from a base on balls, and Friday evening we went to the Flamingo Roof and I learned that she could dance nearly as well as Lily Rowan. She was no cuddler and a little stiff, but she went with the music and always knew what we were going to do. Saturday morning I reported to Wolfe regarding her as follows:

  1. If she was toting a grievance against Bess

  Huddleston, it would take a smarter man than me

  to find out what it was.

  2. There was nothing fundamentally wrong

  with her except that she would rather live in the

  country than the city.

  3. She had no definite suspicion about who had

  sent the anonymous letters or anyone’s motive for

  sending them.

  Wolfe said, “Try Miss Timms for a change.”

  I didn’t try to date Maryella for Saturday or Sunday, because Janet had told me they were all going to Saratoga for the weekend. Monday morning, I thought, was no time to start a romance, so I waited until afternoon to phone, got Maryella, and got the news. I went up to the plant rooms, where Wolfe was a sight to behold in his undershirt, cutting the tops from a row of vandas for propagation, and told him:

  “Bess Huddleston is dead.”

  “Let me alone,” he said peevishly. “I’m doing all I can. Someone will probably get another letter before long, and when-”

  “No, sir. No more letters. I am stating facts. Friday evening tetanus set in from that cut on her toe, and about an hour ago she died. Maryella’s voice was choked with emotion as she told me.”

  Wolfe scowled at me. “Tetanus?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That would have been a five thousand dollar fee.”

  “It would have been if you had seen fit to do a little work instead of-”

  “It was no good and you know it. I was waiting for another letter. File it away, including the letter to Mrs. Horrocks, to be delivered to her on request. I’m glad to be rid of it.”

  I wasn’t. Down in the office, as I checked over the folder, consisting of the Horrocks letter, the snapshot of Janet, a couple of reports I had made and some memos Wolfe had dictated, I felt as if I was leaving a ball game in the fourth inning with the score a tie. But it looked as if nothing could be done about it, and certainly there was no use trying to badger Wolfe. I phoned Janet to ask if there was anything I could do, and she told me in a weak tired voice that as far as she knew there wasn’t.

  According to the obit in the Times the next morning, the funeral service was to be Wednesday afternoon, at the Belford Memorial Chapel on 73rd Street, and of course there would be a big crowd, even in August, for Bess Huddleston’s last party. Cordially invited to meet death. I decided to go. Not merely, if I know myself, for curiosity or another look at Janet. It is not my custom to frequent memorial chapels to look at girls even if they’re good dancers. Call it a hunch. Not that I saw anything criminal, only something incredible. I filed past the casket with the throng because from a distance I had seen it and couldn’t believe it. But when I got close there it was. Eight black orchids that could have come from nowhere else in the world, and a card with his initials the way he scribbled them, “N.W.”

  When I got home, and Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six o’clock, I didn’t mention it. I decided it wasn’t advisable. I needed to devote some thought to it.

  It was that evening, Wednesday evening after the funeral, that I answered the doorbell, and who should I see on the stoop but my old colleague Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad. I hailed him with false enthusiasm and ushered him into the office, where Wolfe was making more marks on the map of Russia. They exchanged greetings, and Cramer sat in the red leather chair, took out a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his exposed surfaces, put a cigar between his lips and sank his teeth in it.

  “Your hair’s turning gray,” I observed. “You look as if you weren’t getting enough exercise. A brain-worker like you-”

  “God knows why you keep him,” he said to Wolfe.

  Wolfe grunted. “He saved my life once.”

  “Once!” I exclaimed indignantly. “Beginning-”

  “Shut up, Archie. What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  “You can tell me what you were doing for Bess Huddleston.”

  “Indeed.” Wolfe’s brows went up a shade. “You? The Homicide Bureau? Why do you want to know?”

  “Because a guy is making himself a pest down at Headquarters. Her brother. He says she was murdered.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes.”

  “Offering what evidence?”

  “None at all.”

  “Then why bother me about it? Or yourself either?”

  “Because we can’t shut him up. He’s even been to the Commissioner. And though he has no evidence, he has an argument. I’d like to tell you his argument.”

  Wolfe leaned back and sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Well. He started on us last Saturday, four days ago. She got tetanus the day before. I don’t need to tell you about that cut on her toe, since Goodwin was there-”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “I’ll bet you have. The brother, Daniel, said she couldn’t have got tetanus from that cut. He said it was a clean piece of glass that dropped into her slipper when the tray of glasses fell on the terrace. He saw it. And the slipper was a clean house slipper, nearly new and clean. And she hadn’t been walking around barefooted. He claimed there couldn’t possibly have been any tetanus germs in that cut, at least not enough to cause so violent an attack so soon. I sent a man up there Saturday night, but the doctor wouldn’t let him see her, and of course he had no evidence-”

  “Dr. Brady?”

  “Yes. But the brother kept after us, esp
ecially when she died, and yesterday morning I sent a couple of men up to rub it off. I want to ask you, Goodwin, what was the piece of glass like? The piece in her slipper that cut her?”

  “I knew you really came to see me,” I told him genially. “It was a piece from one of the thick blue glasses that they had for old-fashioneds. Several of them broke.”

  Cramer nodded. “So they all say. We sent the slippers to the laboratory, and they say no tetanus germs. Of course there was another possibility, the iodine and the bandage. We sent all the stuff on that shelf to the laboratory, and the gauze was sterile, and it was good iodine, so naturally there were no germs in it. Under the circum-”

  “Subsequent dressings,” Wolfe muttered.

  “No. The dressing Brady found on it when he was called up there Friday night was the one he had put on originally.”

  “Listen,” I put in, “I know. By God. That orangutan. He tickled her feet. He rubbed germs on her-”

  Cramer shook his head. “We went into that too. One of them suggested it-the nephew. That seems to be a possibility. It sounds farfetched to me, but of course it’s possible. Now what the doctor says. Brady.”

  “Excuse me,” Wolfe said. “You talked to those people.

  Had Miss Huddleston nothing to say to them before she died? Any of them?”

  “Not much. Do you know what tetanus does?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “It does plenty. Like strychnine, only worse because there are no periods of relaxation and it lasts longer. When Brady got there Friday night her jaw was already locked tight. He gave her avertin to relieve her, and kept it up till the end. When my man was there Saturday night she was bent doubje backwards. Sunday she told Brady through her teeth she wanted to tell people good-bye, and he took them in one at a time. I’ve got their statements. Nothing significant, what you’d expect. Of course she only said a few words to each one-she was in bad shape. Her brother tried to tell her that her approaching death wasn’t an accident, it was murder, but Brady and the nurse wouldn’t let him.”