Rex Stout: Black Orchids

It was a little after midnight when the doorbell rang again, and I went to answer it and got an unpleasant surprise. There on the stoop was Johnny Keems. I never resented any of the other boys being called in to work on a case, and I didn’t actually resent Johnny either, only he gave me a pain in the back of my lap with his smirking around trying to edge in on my job. So I didn’t howl with delight at sight of him, and then I nearly did howl, not with delight, when I saw he wasn’t alone and what it was that kept him from being alone.

It was Anne Tracy standing behind him. And standing behind her was Fred Updegraff.

“Greetings,” I said, concealing my emotions, and they all entered. And the sap said to her, “This way, Miss Tracy,” and started for the office with her!

I stepped around and blocked him. “Some day,” I said, “you’ll skin your nose. Wait in the front room.”

He smiled at me the way he does. I waited until all three of them had gone through the door to the front room and it had closed behind them, and then returned to the office and told Wolfe:

“I didn’t know you had called out the army while I was gone. Visitors. The guy who wants my job and is welcome to it at any time, and my future wife, and the wholesome young fellow with the serious chin.”

“Ah,” Wolfe said. “That’s like Johnny. He should have phoned.” He grunted. He leaned back. His eyes rested on Rose an instant, then they closed, and his lips pushed out, and in, and out and in.

His eyes opened. “Bring them in here.”

“But—” Rose began, starting from her chair.

“It’s all right,” he assured her.

I wasn’t so darned sure it was all right, but it was him that wanted the black orchids, not me, so I obeyed orders, went to the front room by the connecting doors, and told them to come in. Johnny, who is a gentleman from his skin out, let Anne and Fred pass through ahead of him. She stopped in the middle of the room.

“How do you do,” Wolfe said politely. “Forgive me for not rising; I rarely do. May I introduce — Miss Rose Lasher, Miss Anne Tracy. By the way, Miss Lasher has just been telling me that you were engaged to marry Mr. Gould.”

“That’s a lie,” Anne said.

She looked terrible. At no time during the afternoon, when the turmoil had started or when Cramer had announced it was murder or when he had marched her out for examination, had she shown any sign of sag or yellow, but now she looked as if she had taken all she could. At least she did when she entered, and maybe that is why she reacted the way she did to Wolfe’s statement and got rough.

“Marry Harry Gould?” she said. “That isn’t true!” Her voice trembled with something that sounded like scorn but might have been anything.

Rose was out of her chair and was trembling all over. All right, I thought, Wolfe arranged for it and now he’ll get it. She’ll scratch Anne’s eyes out. I moved a step. But she didn’t. She even tried to control her voice.

“You bet it ain’t true!” she cried, and that was scorn. “Harry wasn’t marrying into your family! He wasn’t marrying any daughter of a thief!”

Anne gawked at her.

Rose spat. “You with your stuckup nose! Why ain’t your father in jail where he belongs? And you up there showing your legs like a ten-cent floozie—”

“Archie,” Wolfe said sharply. “Take her upstairs.”

Rose went on, not even hearing him. I got her suitcase in one hand and gripped her arm with the other and turned her around, and the idea of her nonmarrying Harry marrying another girl, in spite of his being dead, occupied her brain so that she kept right on spitting compliments without even knowing I was propelling her out of the room until we were in the hall. Then she went flat-footed and shut her mouth and glared at me.

“On up two flights,” I said. “Or I know how to carry you so you can’t bite.” I still had her arm. “Up we go, sister.”

She came. I took her into the spare room on the same floor as mine, switched on the lights, and put her suitcase on a chair.

I pointed. “Ten-cent bathroom there. Ten-cent bed there. You won’t be needed—”

She sat down on the bed and started to bawl.

I went down to the kitchen and told Fritz, “Lady guest in the south room. She has her own nightie, but would you mind seeing about towels and flowers in her room? I’m busy.”

Anne slept in my bed that night.

It went like this. When I got back to the office Anne was in my chair with her elbows on the desk and her hands covering her eyes. That was a favorite trick of Johnny’s, putting someone else in my chair. He hadn’t tried putting himself in it again since the day a couple of years back when I found him there looking at my notebook and sort of lost my temper.

Fred Updegraff was on a chair against the wall and Johnny was standing in front of Wolfe’s desk. Evidently Wolfe had made some pointed remarks, for Johnny didn’t look at all cocky.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying in a hurt tone, “but the Tracys live in humble circumstances and have no phone, so I used my best judgment—”

“You were at the Tracy home? Where is it?”

“In Richdale, Long Island, sir. My instructions were to investigate Anne Tracy. I learned that she lives in Richdale, where the Dill nurseries and offices are. You know she works there—”

“I was aware of that. Be brief.”

“Yes, sir. I went out to Richdale and made inquiries. I contacted a young woman — as you know, I am especially effective with young women—”

“Contact is not a verb and I said be brief.”

“Yes, sir. The last time you told me that I looked it up in the dictionary and I certainly don’t want to contradict you but it says contact is a verb. Transitive or intransitive.”

“Contact is not a verb under this roof.”

“Yes, sir. I learned that Miss Tracy’s father had worked at Dill’s for many years, up to about a year ago. He was assistant superintendent in charge of broad-leaved evergreens. Dill discovered he was kiting shipments and fired him.”

“Kiting shipments?”

“Yes, sir. On shipments to a big estate in Jersey, the Cullen place. He would ship two hundred rhododendrons instead of one hundred and collect from Cullen for the extra hundred personally, at half price. It amounted to several thousand dollars.”

Anne lifted her head and turned it and made a noise of protest.

“Miss Tracy says it was only sixteen hundred dollars,” Johnny said. “I’m telling you what I was told. People exaggerate, and this never was made public, and Tracy wasn’t arrested. He stole it to pay a specialist for fixing his son’s eyes, something wrong with his son’s eyes. He can’t get another job. His daughter was Dill’s secretary and still is. She gets fifty a week and pays back twenty on what her father stole, so I was told. She refuses to verify those figures.”

Wolfe looked at Anne.

“It doesn’t matter,” Anne said, looking at me. “Does it?”

“I suppose not,” Wolfe said, but if it’s wrong, correct it.”

“It’s wrong. I get twenty dollars a week and I pay back ten.”

“Good God,” I blurted, “you need a union.”

That was probably Freudian. Probably subconsciously I meant she needed a union with me. So I added hastily, “I mean a labor union. Twenty bucks a week!”

Johnny looked annoyed. He’s a conservative. “So of course that gave me an in. I went to Miss Tracy’s home and explained to her confidentially the hole she was in. That this murder investigation would put the police on to her father’s crime, and that she and Dill were compounding a felony, which is against the law, and that the police would have to be fixed or they’d all be in jail, and there was only one man I knew of who could fix it because he was on intimate terms with high police officials, and that was Mr. Nero Wolfe. I said she’d better come and see you immediately, and she came. It was nearly eleven o’clock and there was no train in from Richdale, so we took a taxi.”