Black Orchids Read online

  Black Orchids

  Rex Stout

  Black Orchids Rex Stout Series: Nero Wolfe [9] Published: 1992 Tags: Cozy Mystery, Vintage Mystery, Early 20th Century

  Cozy Mysteryttt Vintage Mysteryttt Early 20th Centuryttt

  SUMMARY: “It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore”.—The New York Times Book Review. Incomparable sleuth Nero Wolfe and his perennially hardy sidekick, Archie Goodwin, find themselves trying to weed out a garden-variety killer at the annual flower show.

  Rex Stout

  Black Orchids

  BLACK ORCHIDS

  Chapter 1

  Monday at the Flower Show, Tuesday at the Flower Show, Wednesday at the Flower Show. Me, Archie Goodwin. How’s that?

  I do not deny that flowers are pretty, but a million flowers are not a million times prettier than one flower. Oysters are good to eat, but who wants to eat a carload?

  I didn’t particularly resent it when Nero Wolfe sent me up there Monday afternoon and, anyway, I had been expecting it. After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn’t be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms on the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected. I was.

  When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six P.M. Monday and entered the office, I reported:

  “I saw them. It was impossible to snitch a sample.”

  He grunted, lowering himself into his chair. “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “Who said you did, but you expected me to. There are three of them in a glass case and the guard has his feet glued.”

  “What color are they?”

  “They’re not black.”

  “Black flowers are never black. What color are they?”

  “Well.” I considered. “Say you take a piece of coal. Not anthracite. Cannel coal.”

  “That’s black.”

  “Wait a minute. Spread on it a thin coating of open kettle molasses. That’s it.”

  “Pfui. You haven’t the faintest notion what it would look like. Neither have I.”

  “I’ll go buy a piece of coal and we’ll try it.”

  “No. Is the labellum uniform?”

  I nodded. “Molasses on coal. The labellum is large, not as large as aurea, about like truffautiana. Cepals lanceolate. Throat tinged with orange-”

  “Any sign of wilting?”

  “No.”

  “Go back tomorrow and look for wilting on the edges of the petals. You know it, the typical wilting after pollination. I want to know if they’ve been pollinated.”

  So I went up there again Tuesday after lunch. That evening at six I added a few details to my description and reported no sign of wilting.

  I sat at my desk, in front of his against the wall, and aimed a chilly stare at him.

  “Will you kindly tell me,” I requested, “why the females you see at a flower show are the kind of females who go to a flower show? Ninety per cent of them? Especially their legs? Does it have to be like that? Is it because, never having any flowers sent to them, they have to go there in order to see any? Or is it because-”

  “Shut up. I don’t know. Go back tomorrow and look for wilting.”

  I might have known, with his mood getting blacker every hour, all on account of three measly orchid plants, that he was working up to a climax. But I went again Wednesday, and didn’t get home until nearly seven o’clock. When I entered the office he was there at his desk with two empty beer bottles on the tray and pouring a third one into the glass.

  “Did you get lost?” he inquired politely.

  I didn’t resent that because I knew he half meant it. He has got to the point where he can’t quite understand how a man can drive from 35th Street and Tenth Avenue to 44th and Lexington and back again with nobody to lead the way. I reported no wilting, and sat at my desk and ran through the stuff he had put there, and then swiveled to face him and said:

  “I’m thinking of getting married.”

  His half-open lids didn’t move, but his eyes did, and I saw them.

  “We might as well be frank,” I said. “I’ve been living in this house with you for over ten years, writing your letters, protecting you from bodily harm, keeping you awake, and wearing out your tires and my shoes. Sooner or later one of my threats to get married will turn out not to be a gag. How are you going to know? How do you know this isn’t it?”

  He made a noise of derision and picked up his glass.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you’re enough of a psychologist to know what it means when a man is irresistibly impelled to talk about a girl to someone. Preferably, of course, to someone who is sympathetic. You can imagine what it means when I want to talk about her to you. What is uppermost in my mind is that this afternoon I saw her washing her feet.”

  He put the glass down. “So you went to a movie. In the afternoon. Did it occur-”

  “No, sir, not a movie. Flesh and bone and skin. Have you ever been to a flower show?”

  Wolfe closed his eyes and sighed.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “you’ve seen pictures of the exhibits, so you know that the millionaires and big firms do things up brown. Like Japanese gardens and rock gardens and roses in Picardy. This year Rucker and Dill, the seed and nursery company, have stolen the show. They’ve got a woodland glade. Bushes and dead leaves and green stuff and a lot of little flowers and junk, and some trees with white flowers, and a little brook with a pool and rocks; and it’s inhabited. There’s a man and a girl having a picnic. They’re there all day from eleven to six thirty and from eight to ten in the evening. They pick flowers. They eat a picnic lunch. They sit on the grass and read. They play mumblety-peg. At four o’clock the man lies down and covers his face with a newspaper and takes a nap, and the girl takes off her shoes and stockings and dabbles her feet in the pool. That’s when they crowd the ropes. Her face and figure are plenty good enough, but her legs are absolutely artistic. Naturally she has to be careful not to get her skirt wet, and the stream comes tumbling from the rocks into the pool. Speaking as a painter-”

  Wolfe snorted. “Pah! You couldn’t paint a-”

  “I didn’t say painting as a painter, I said speaking as a painter. I know what I like. The arrangement of lines into harmonious composition. It gets me. I like to study-”

  “She is too long from the knees down.”

  I looked at him in amazement.

  He wiggled a finger at a newspaper on the desk. “There’s a picture of her in the Post. Her name is Anne Tracy. She’s a stenographer in Rucker and Dill’s office. Her favorite dish is blueberry pie with ice cream.”

  “She is not a stenographer!” I was on my feet. “She’s a secretary! W. G. Dill’s!” I found the page in the Post. “A damn important job. I admit they look a little long here, but it’s a bad picture. Wrong angle. There was a better one in the Times yesterday, and an article-”

  “I saw it. I read it.”

  “Then you ought to have an inkling of how I feel.” I sat down again. “Men are funny,” I said philosophically. “That girl with that face and figure and legs has been going along living with her pop and mom and taking dictation from W. G. Dill, who looks like a frog in spite of being the president of the Atlantic Horticultural Society-he was around there today-and who knew about her or paid any attention to her? But put her in a public spot and have her take off her shoes and stockings and wiggle her toes in a man-made pool on the third floor of Grand Central Palace, and what happens? Billy Rose goes to look at her
. Movie scouts have to be chased off the grass of the woodland glade. Photographers engage in combat. Lewis Hewitt takes her out to dinner-”

  “Hewitt?” Wolfe opened his eyes and scowled at me. “Lewis Hewitt?”

  I knew that the sound of that name would churn his beer for him. Lewis Hewitt was the millionaire in whose greenhouse, on his Long Island estate, the black orchids had been produced-thereby creating in Wolfe an agony of envy that surpassed any of his previous childish performances.

  “Yep,” I said cheerfully. “Lew himself, in his two hundred dollar topcoat and Homburg and gloves made of the belly-skin of a baby gazelle fed on milk and honey, and a walking stick that makes your best Malacca look like a piece of an old fishing pole. I saw her go out with him less than an hour ago, just before I left. And pinned to her left shoulder was a black orchid! He must have cut it for her himself. She becomes the first female in captivity to wear a black orchid. And only last week she was typing with her lovely fingers, ‘Yours of the ninth received and contents noted.’”

  I grinned at him. “But Lew will have to get out the spray for the insects. Men are flocking in there who don’t know a stamen from a stigma. The guy having the picnic with her inside the ropes smirks fatuously. His name is Harry Gould and he is one of Dill’s gardeners. A gray-haired geezer that needs a shave gazes at her as if he was about to say his prayers-I’ve seen him twice. A wholesome young fellow with a serious chin wanders by and pretends he’s not looking at her. His name is Fred Updegraff. Updegraff Nurseries, Erie, Pennsylvania. They’ve got an exhibit not far off. And there’s a lot more, but chiefly there’s me. Your friend Lew is going to have me to contend with. She smiled at me today without meaning to, and I blushed from head to foot. My intentions are honorable but they are not vague. Look at that picture of her and then take a slant at this.” I lifted a heel to the corner of the desk and pulled my trouser leg up to the knee. “In your mind’s eye strip off the shoe and sock and garter and apply your knowledge of cross-pollination. What would be the result-”

  “Pfui,” Wolfe said. “Don’t scar the desk. You will return there tomorrow and look for edge-wilt, and you will be here at six o’clock.”

  But it didn’t work out that way. At lunch the next day his envy and curiosity finally foamed up to the climax. He put down his coffee cup, assumed the expression of a man prepared to brave all hardship or hazard for the sake of a Cause, and told me:

  “Please bring the sedan around. I’m going up there and look at those confounded freaks myself.”

  Chapter 2

  So Thursday was my fourth day at the Flower Show in a row. It was the biggest mob of the week, and getting Nero Wolfe through and up to the fourth floor where the orchids were was like a destroyer making a way through a mine field for a battleship. We were halted a couple of times by acquaintances who wanted to exchange greetings, and as we passed the Rucker and Dill woodland glade on the third floor Wolfe stopped to look it over. There was a line of spectators three deep all the way around the ropes. Harry and Anne were playing mumblety-peg. When a flash bulb made a flare she didn’t flicker an eyelash.

  “Look at her teeth when she smiles,” I said. “Look at her hair like fine-spun open kettle molasses. She was more self-conscious the first day or two. A year of this would spoil her. Look at the leaves on the peony bushes, turning yellow, pining away because she’ll be with them only one more day-”

  “They are not peonies. They are azaleas and laurel, and they have a disease.”

  “Call it a disease if you want to. They’re pining-”

  He had started off, and I nearly knocked three women down getting around in front of him for interference.

  At the orchid benches up on the fourth floor he disregarded everything else-though there was, for one thing, the finest display of B. thorntoni I had ever seen-and planted himself in front of the glass case. A card in the corner said, “Unnamed hybrid by Mr. Lewis Hewitt. The only three plants in existence.” They certainly were something different, and I had been through all the big establishments several times, not to mention the twenty thousand plants Wolfe had, with hundreds of varieties. I stood to one side and watched Wolfe’s face. He mumbled something to himself, and then just stood and looked, with his expanse of face five inches from the glass of the case. His emotions didn’t show, but from the twitching of a muscle on his neck I knew he was boiling inside. For a quarter of an hour he didn’t budge, not even when women bumped against him trying to get a peek at the orchids, though ordinarily he hates to have anyone touching him. Then he backed away and I thought he was through.

  “It’s hot in here,” he said, and was taking off his overcoat. I took it to hold for him.

  “Ah, Mr. Wolfe,” a voice said. “This is indeed a compliment! What do you think of them?”

  It was Lewis Hewitt. Wolfe shook hands with him. He had on another hat and topcoat and gloves, but the same walking stick as the day before-a golden-yellow Malacca with reddish-brown mottles. Any good appraiser would have said $830 as is, on the hoof. He was tall enough to look down at Wolfe with a democratic smile below his aristocratic nose.

  “They’re interesting,” Wolfe said.

  Interesting. Ha ha.

  “Aren’t they marvelous?” Hewitt beamed. “If I had time I’d take one from the case so you could have a good look, but I’m on my way upstairs to judge some roses and I’m already late. Will you be here a litffe later? Please do?-Hello, Wade. I’m running.”

  He went. The “Wade” was for a little guy who had come up while he was talking. As this newcomer exchanged greetings with Wolfe I regarded him with interest, for it was no other than W. G. Dill himself, the employer of my future wife. In many ways he was the exact opposite of Lewis Hewitt, for he looked up at Wolfe instead of down, he wore an old brown suit that needed pressing, and his sharp gray eyes gave the impression that they wouldn’t know how to beam.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” he was telling Wolfe. “I was at your house one day with Raymond Plehn-”

  “I remember. Certainly, Mr. Dill.”

  “I just saw Plehn downstairs and he told me you were here. I was going to phone you this afternoon. I wonder if you’d do something for me?”

  “That depends-”

  “I’ll explain. Let’s step aside away from this jostling.” They moved, and I followed suit. “Do you know anything about the Kurume yellows?”

  “I’ve heard of them.” Wolfe was frowning but trying to be courteous. “I’ve read of them in horticultural journals. A disease fatal to broad-leaved evergreens, thought to be fungus. First found two years ago on some Kurume azaleas imported from Japan by Lewis Hewitt. You had some later, I believe, and so did Watson in Massachusetts. Then Updegraff lost his entire plantation, several acres, of what he called rhodaleas.”

  “You do know about them.”

  “I remember what I read.”

  “Did you see my exhibit downstairs?”

  “I glanced at it as I passed.” Wolfe grimaced. “The crowd.I came to see these hybrids. That’s a fine group of Cypripe-dium pubescens you have. Very fine. The Fissipes-”

  “Did you see the laurel and azaleas?”

  “Yes. They look sick.”

  “They are sick. They’re dying. The Kurume yellows. The underside of the leaves shows the typical brown spots. Some scoundrel deliberately infected those plants, and I’d give a good deal to know who it was. I intend to know who it was!”

  Wolfe looked sympathetic, and he really was sympathetic. Between plant growers a fatal fungus makes a bond. “It’s too bad your exhibit was spoiled,” he said. “But why a personal devil? Why a deliberate miscreant?”

  “It was.”

  “Have you evidence?”

  “No. Evidence is what I want.”

  “My dear sir. You are a child beating the stick it tripped on. You had that disease once on your place. A nest of spores in a bit of soil-”

  Dill shook his head. “The disease was at my Long Island place
. These plants came from my place in New Jersey. The soil could not possibly have become contaminated.”

  “With fungi almost anything is possible. A tool taken from one place to the other, a pair of gloves-”

  “I don’t believe it.” Dill’s voice indicated that nothing was going to make him believe it. “With the care we take. I am convinced it was done deliberately and maliciously, to ruin my exhibit. And I’m going to know who it was. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars to find out for me.”

  Wolfe abandoned the ship. Not physically, but mentally. His face went bland and blank. “I don’t believe I could undertake it, Mr. Dill.”

  “Why not? You’re a detective, aren’t you? Isn’t that your business?”

  “It is.”

  “This is a job for a detective. Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t walk across the continent to take a swim in the Pacific Ocean. The effort and expense are out of proportion to the object sought. You say you have no evidence. Do you suspect anyone in particular?”

  “No. But I absolutely intend-”

  I butted in. I said to Wolfe, “I’ve got to go and judge some brussels sprouts,” and I beat it.

  I did have a destination in mind, but mostly I wanted to be somewhere else. What with a couple of lucrative cases we had handled since the first of the year, the budget was balanced for months to come, but even so it always gave me the nettles to hear Wolfe turn down a job, and I didn’t want to start riding him right there in front of Hewitt’s hybrids. To avoid the mob, I opened a door marked PRIVATE and descended a flight of stairs. This part was not open to the public. On the floor below I made my way through a jungle of packing cases and trees and bushes and spraying equipment and so on, and went along a corridor and turned right with it. This stretch of the corridor extended almost the length of the building, but I knew there was an exit halfway. Along the left wall were cluttered more trees and shrubs and paraphernalia, surplus from the exhibits, and along the right wall, which was the partition between the corridor and the main room, were doors with cards on them, all closed, leading into the exhibits themselves from the back. As I passed the one with a card tacked on it saying RUCKER AND DILL, I threw a kiss at it.