Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 09 - Black Orchids

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but left to enlist in the Navy, and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write free-lance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and as an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erie Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II, Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death, he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  The Hand in the Glove

  Double for Death

  Bad for Business

  The Broken Vase

  The Sound of Murder

  Red Threads

  The Mountain Cat Murders

  Introduction

  In the early seventies I found myself at an impasse with a character named Chip Harrison. I had written two books about him. In the first he had lost his innocence, and in the second he was sort of looking around trying to figure out what had become of it. I wanted to write more about him, having found his voice an engaging one, but I didn’t see how I could put the poor dope through another loss of innocence.

  Inspiration struck, as it now and then does. Instead of having him contend with problems of his own, I’d let him stick his nose into those of other people. I’d put him to work for a private detective. Then, like all private eyes, he could stay the same age forever, and I could write about him till the cows came home.

  His new employer, Leo Haig, had eked out a living in the Bronx as a small-time breeder of tropical fishes until a legacy allowed him to pursue a lifelong dream. He would become a private detective like his idol, Nero Wolfe.

  Haig, a devout mystery fan, is secure in the knowledge that Nero Wolfe actually exists, not in fiction but in fact, and that the many books about him are indeed the subtly fictionalized reports of actual cases, written by Archie Goodwin himself and published under the painfully transparent pen name of “Rex Stout.” (Look at the name itself, Haig says. Rex is Latin for king, Stout means fat, so what could the pseudonym be but a reference to the regal corpulence of the great detective?)

  Of course, Haig would tell you, Goodwin has fictionalized things. He provides a number of addresses for the legendary brownstone, any of which would fall somewhere in the Hudson River. He calls the newspaper the Gazette and has Archie go dancing at the Flamingo or chasing around to the Hotel Churchill.

  No doubt a man with a Wolfean concern for privacy would insist on such changes, he figures. The house is not on West Thirty-fifth Street at all, and very likely in another neighborhood altogether. Surely Wolfe’s name is not Wolfe, nor Goodwin’s Goodwin. But it is at least as certain that the two men exist, and Leo Haig lives in hope that, if he employs Nero Wolfe’s method and principles in his chosen occupation as private detective, someday he will get his reward. Someday the telephone will ring, and someday he will be summoned to that famous house. (Perhaps in the East Eighties? Haig rather thinks it might be in the East Eighties.) There he will dine on something exquisite—shad roe, perhaps, if it’s in season. And there, over postprandial coffee, Wolfe will provide the ultimate accolade.

  “Satisfactory,” he will say, inclining his head an eighth of an inch. “Satisfactory.”

  Leo Haig’s character came easy to me, perhaps because it has always been effortless for me to share his idéeAe fixe. Of course Nero Wolfe exists. Who could imagine a world without him?

  I know several men and women who are forever rereading the Nero Wolfe canon. They read other things as well, of course, but every month or so they’ll have another go at one of Rex Stout’s books. Since there are forty, it may take four or five years at this pace to get through the cycle, at which time they can start in again at the beginning.

  They do this not for the plots, which are serviceable, nor for the suspense, which is a good deal short of hairtrigger even on first reading. Nor, I shouldn’t think, are they hoping for fresh insight into the human condition. No, those of us who reread Rex Stout do so for the pure joy of spending a few hours in the most congenial household in American letters, and in the always engaging company of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

  The relationship of these two men, Wolfe and Goodwin, genius and man of action, is endlessly fascinating. One quickly comes to delight in Wolfe’s eccentricities—the orchids, the agoraphobia, the food and drink, the vast yellow pajamas, the refusal to countenance the use of “contact” as a verb. Ultimately, though, it is less these idiosyncracies than the pair’s nuances of character that keep us transfixed. We know these two, and it is a joy to see them simply being themselves.

  Rex Stout knew them, too, with such clarity that he was able to write the books almost effortlessly, in a matter
of weeks. His first drafts went to the printer with no need to change so much as a comma. They seem as flawless today, and utterly timeless. For all that the world has changed, for all that New York City has changed, for all that the English language itself has changed, the books don’t feel dated in the least. They are so wonderfully real within themselves that they allow us to forget what time it is outside.

  It always seemed to me that the very first books were a little labored, with Wolfe tending to declaim pompously at the slightest provocation. So it often is with series; it takes a while to find out what you’ve got hold of. It didn’t take very long at all for Stout to get a firm grasp, and he never let go. Black Orchids is vintage Wolfe, and long a particular favorite of mine. I especially like Wolfe’s greedy obstinacy in the matter of his fee, and the part where—

  Enough. Nero Wolfe needs no introduction, and has been encumbered with too much of one already. Read. Enjoy. And set the book aside when you’re done. In a couple of years you’ll want to read it again.

  —Lawrence Block

  Contents

  Black Orchids

  Cordially Invited to Meet Death

  Black Orchids

  I don’t know how many guesses there have been in the past year, around bars and dinner tables, as to how Nero Wolfe got hold of the black orchids. I have seen three different ones in print—one in a Sunday newspaper magazine section last summer, one in a syndicated New York gossip column a couple of months ago, and one in a press association dispatch, at the time that a bunch of the orchids unexpectedly appeared at a certain funeral service at the Belford Memorial Chapel.

  So here in this book are two separate Nero Wolfe cases, two different sets of people. The first is the low-down on how Wolfe got the orchids. The second tells how he solved another murder, but it leaves a mystery, and that’s what’s biting me. If anyone who knows Wolfe better than I do—but wait till you read it.

  Archie Goodwin

  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’ve 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.’”