Rex Stout: Black Orchids

“What’s that? Those aren’t your bags.”

“No, sir,” I agreed. “They are the property of an object I brought with me named Rose Lasher, who may help you hang onto those orchids. She is bereaved and hungry and I’m hungry. Shall I stay with her in the office—”

“Hungry? Bring her in here. There’s plenty.”

I went to the office and returned with her. She had stopped crying but sure was forlorn.

“Miss Lasher,” I said, “this is Nero Wolfe. He never discusses business at the table, so we’ll eat first and go into things later.” I held a chair for her.

“I don’t want to eat,” she said in a thin voice. “I can’t eat.”

She ate seven sausages, which was nothing against her grief. Fritz’s saucisse minuit would make Gandhi a gourmet.

And now,” Wolfe demanded, “what is Miss Lasher here for?”

Dinner was over and we were settled in the office. Wolfe was seated behind his desk, leaning back with his fingers laced over his sausage mausoleum, his eyes half closed. I was at my desk, and Rose was in a red leather chair facing Wolfe. The set of her lips didn’t indicate that the meal had made her one of us.

I recited particulars, briefly but completely.

“Indeed.” Wolfe inclined his head a sixteenth of an inch. “Satisfactory, Archie.” The head turned. “You must have a lot to tell, Miss Lasher. Tell it, please.”

She looked sullen. “Tell what?”

“Start at the end. Where did you hide in that corridor from half past three to half past four and who and what did you see?”

“I didn’t hide. I went out and went back and the second time I saw that man opening that door. Then I went—”

“No. That won’t do. You were waiting to intercept Mr. Gould when he came out, and you hid. The police won’t like it that you lied to them and gave them a false name and address and were running away. So I may not tell the police if you tell me the truth.”

“I wasn’t running away. I was merely going to visit a friend.”

It was certainly a job to steam her off the envelope. She stuck for ten minutes in spite of all Wolfe said, and she didn’t loosen up until after I brought the luggage from the dining room and went through it. I had to dig the keys out of her handbag, and at one point I thought she was going to start clawing and kicking, but finally she stopped squealing and only sat in the chair and made holes in me with her eyes.

I did it thoroughly and methodically. When I got through, the suitcase was nearly filled with female garments and accessories, mostly intimate, and piled on Wolfe’s desk was a miscellaneous collection not so female. Shirts and ties, three photographs of Harry Gould, a bunch of snapshots, a bundle of letters tied with string, the top one addressed to Rose, various other items, among them a large Manila envelope fastened with a clasp.

I opened the envelope and extracted the contents. There were only two things in it and neither of them made my heart jump. One was a garage job-card with grease smears on it. At the top was printed, “Nelson’s Garage, Salamanca, New York,” and judging from the list of repairs required the car must have had an argument with a mountain. It was dated 4–11–40. The other item was sheets of printed matter. I unfolded them. They had been torn from the Garden Journal , which I would have recognized from the page and type without the running head, and the matter was an article entitled “Kurume Yellows in America” by Lewis Hewitt. I lifted the brows and handed it to Wolfe. Then my eye caught something I had missed on the garage job-card, something written in pencil on the reverse side. It was a name, “Pete Arango,” and it was written in a small fine hand quite different from the scribbling on the face of the card. There was another sample of a similar small fine hand there in front of me, on the envelope at the top of the bundle addressed to Rose Lasher, and I untied the string and got out the letter and found that it was signed “Harry.”

I passed the outfit to Wolfe and he looked it over.

He grunted. “This will interest the police.” His eyes went to Rose. “Even more than your—”

“No!” she cried. She was wriggling. “You won’t... oh, for God’s sake, you mustn’t—”

“Where did you hide in that corridor?”

She unloaded. She had hid in the corridor, yes, from the time I saw her there until some time after she had opened the door of the exhibit to look in. She had hid behind the packing cases and shrubs against the rear wall of the corridor. The sound of commotion had alarmed her, and she had sneaked out and gone to the main room and pushed into the crowd around the exhibit and I had returned her bag to her, which she had dropped without knowing it.

What and whom had she seen while hiding in the corridor?

Nothing. Maybe a few people, she didn’t know who, passing by. Nothing and no one she remembered, except Fred Updegraff.

Of course she was lying. She must have seen Wolfe and Hewitt and me go by and me pick up the stick. The stick was there at the door that she was watching. And she must have seen someone leave the stick there, stoop down to pass the crook through the loop of the string, probably open the door to get hold of the loop which was ready inside, hidden among the foliage. But Wolfe was handicapped. He didn’t dare mention the stick. That was out. But boy, did he want her to mention it, and incidentally mention who had walked in there with it and left it there?

Didn’t he? He did. But she wouldn’t. She was stuck tight again, and I never saw Wolfe try harder and get nowhere. Finally he pulled the bluff of phoning Cramer, and even that didn’t budge her. Then he gave up and rang for Fritz to bring beer.

At that point the phone rang and I answered it, and heard a familiar voice:

“Archie? Saul Panzer. May I speak to Mr. Wolfe?”

Wolfe took it on his phone, and I learned that during my absence he had got hold of Saul and sent him to the Flower Show. After getting a report he told Saul to drop the line he was on and come to the office. He hung up and leaned back and heaved a sigh, and regarded Rose with no sign of esteem.

“That,” he said, “was a man I sent to collect facts about Mr. Gould. I’d rather get them from you. I’ll allow you until tomorrow to jog your memory about what you saw in that corridor this afternoon, but you’ll tell me about him now. We’ve got all night. How long had you known him?”

“About two years,” she said sullenly.

“Are you his wife? His widow?”

She flushed and her lips tightened. “No. He said he wasn’t the marrying kind. That’s what he said.”

“But he lived on Morrow Street with you?”

“No, he didn’t. He only came there. He had a room in one of the houses on the Dill place on Long Island. No one ever knew about Morrow Street — I mean no one out there.” She suddenly perked forward and her eyes flashed, and I was surprised at her spunk. “And no one’s going to know about it! You hear that? Not while I’m alive they’re not!”

“Do you have relatives on Long Island? Do your folks live there?”

“None of your business!”

“Perhaps not,” Wolfe conceded. “I wouldn’t want it to be. When and where did you meet Mr. Gould?”

She shut her mouth.

“Come,” Wolfe said sharply. “Don’t irritate me beyond reason. The next time I tell Mr. Goodwin to get Mr. Cramer on the phone it won’t be a bluff.”

She swallowed. “I was clerking in a store at Richdale and he — I met him there. That was nearly two years ago, when he was working at Hewitt’s.”

“Do you mean Lewis Hewitt’s.”

“Yes, the Hewitt estate.”

“Indeed. What did he do there?”