Rex Stout: Black Orchids

Johnny shot me a glance, as much as to say, “Try and match that one.”

“How far is it to Richdale?” Wolfe demanded.

“From here? Oh, twenty-five miles.”

“How much was the taxi fare?”

“Eight dollars and forty cents counting the tip. The bridge—”

“Don’t put it on expense. Pay it yourself.”

“But — but, sir — Archie always brings people here—”

“Pay it yourself. You are not Archie. Thank God. One Archie is enough. I sent you to get facts, not Miss Tracy — certainly I didn’t send you to coerce her with preposterous threats and fables about my relations with the police. Go to the kitchen — no. Go home.”

“But, sir—”

“Go home. And for God’s sake quit trying to imitate Archie. You’ll never make it. Go home.”

Johnny went.

Wolfe asked the guests if they would like some beer and they shook their heads. He poured a glass for himself, drank some, wiped his lips, and leaned back.

“Then—” Anne began, but it got caught on the way out. She cleared her throat and swallowed, and tried again. “Then what he said — you said his threat was preposterous. You mean the police won’t do that — won’t arrest my father?”

“I couldn’t say, Miss Tracy. The police are unpredictable. Even so, that is highly improbable.” Wolfe’s eyes left her. “And you, Mr. Updegraff? By what bold stroke did Mr. Keems bring you along?”

“He didn’t bring me.” Fred stood up. “I came.”

“By pure coincidence? Or automatism?”

Fred moved forward and put a hand on the back of my chair, which Anne was still sitting in. “I’m protecting Miss Tracy.”

“Oh. From what?”

“From everything,” he said firmly. He appeared to have a tendency to talk too loud, and he looked more serious than ever, and the more serious he looked the younger he looked. At that moment he might even have passed for Anne’s younger brother, which was okay, since I had no objection if she wanted to be a sister to him.

“That’s quite a job,” Wolfe said. “Are you a friend of hers?”

“I’m more than a friend!” Fred declared defiantly. Suddenly he got as red as a peony. “I mean I — she let me take her home.”

“You were there when Mr. Keems arrived?”

“Yes. We had just got there. And I insisted on coming along. It sounded to me like a frame-up. I thought he was lying; I didn’t think he was working for you. It didn’t sound — I’ve heard my father talk about you. He met you once — you probably don’t remember—”

Wolfe nodded. “At the Atlantic States Exposition. How is he?”

“Oh, he’s — not very good.” Fred’s color was normal again. “He gave up when we lost the plantation of rhodaleas — he just sat down and quit. He had spent his whole life on it, and of course it was an awful wallop financially too. I suppose you know about it.”

“I read of it, yes. The Kurume yellows.” Wolfe was sympathetic but casual. “And by the way, someone told me, I forget who, that your father was convinced that his plantation was deliberately infected by Lewis Hewitt, out of pique — or was it Watson or Dill he suspected?”

“He suspected all of them.” Fred looked uncomfortable. “Everybody. But that was just — he was hardly responsible, it broke him up so. He had been holding back over thirty varieties, the best ones, for ten years, and was going to start distribution this spring. It was simply too much for Dad to take.”

Wolfe grunted. “It seems to be still on your mind too. Mr. Goodwin tells me you invaded Rucker and Dill’s exhibit this afternoon and made off with an infected twig. As a souvenir?”

“I—” Fred hesitated. “I guess that was dumb. Of course it’s still on my mind — it darned near ruined us. I wanted to test that twig and see if it was Kurume yellows that had somehow got into the exhibits.”

“And investigate the how?”

“I might have. I might have tried to.”

“You never traced the infection of your plantation?”

“No. We hadn’t had a thing for two years from any of the people that had had Kurume yellows, except a few Ilex crenata as a gift from Hewitt, and they were from nowhere near his infected area and we had them half a mile from the rhodaleas.” Fred gestured impatiently. “But that’s old prunings. What I was saying, I didn’t think you’d pull a trick like that on Miss Tracy.” A look came into his eyes. “Now I can take her back home.”

The look in his eye took me back to high school days. It was the hand-holding look. Flutter, my heart, bliss looms and ecstasy, I shall hold her little hand in mine! I looked at Anne with pride. A girl who could enkindle Lewis Hewitt to the extent of a black orchid and a dinner on Tuesday, and on Thursday forment the hand-holding hankering in a pure young peony-grower — a girl with a reach like that was something.

At that moment, I admit, she wasn’t so overwhelming. She looked pretty dilapidated. She said to Wolfe, “I have to be at the District Attorney’s office at ten in the morning. I said I would. I don’t mind them asking me questions about that — what happened there today — but what I’m afraid of now, I’m afraid they’ll ask me about my father. If they do, what am I going to say? Am I going to admit—” She stopped and her lip started to tremble and she put her teeth on it.

“You need a lawyer,” Fred declared. “I’ll get one. I don’t know any in New York—”

“I do,” Wolfe said. “Sit down, Mr. Updegraff.” His eyes moved to Anne. “There’s a bed here, Miss Tracy, and you’d better use it. You look tired. I doubt if the police will ask you about your father. If they do, don’t answer. Refer them to Mr. Dill. They’re much more apt to be inquisitive about your engagement to marry Mr. Gould.”

“But I wasn’t!”

“Apparently he thought you were.”

“But he couldn’t. He knew very well I didn’t like him! And he—” She stopped.

“He what?”

“I won’t say that. He’s dead.”

“Had he asked you to marry him?”

“Yes, he had.”

“And you refused?”

“Yes.”

“But you consented to perform that rustic charade at the Flower Show with him?”

“I didn’t know he was going to be in it — not when Mr. Dill asked me to do it, about two months ago, when he first thought of it. It was going to be another man, a young man in the office. Then Mr. Dill told me Harry Gould was going to do it. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t want to object because I couldn’t afford to offend — I mean Mr. Dill had been so kind about my father — not having him arrested and letting me pay it off gradually—”

“Call it kind if you want to,” Fred blurted indignantly. “My lord, your father had worked for him for twenty years!”

Wolfe ignored him. “Was Mr. Gould pestering you? About marrying him?”

“Not pestering me, no. I was—” Anne bit her lip. “I just didn’t like him.”

“Had you known him long?”

“Not very long. I’m in the office and he was outside. I met him, I don’t know, maybe three months ago.”

“Did your father know him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think they ever met. Father was — had left before Harry came to work there. Harry used to work on the Hewitt estate on the other side of Richdale.”

“So I understand. Do you know why he quit?”

“No, I didn’t know him then.”

“Have you any idea who killed him?”

“No,” she said.

I lifted a brow, not ostentatiously. She said it too quick and she shaded it wrong. There was enough change in tempo and tone to make it at least ten to one that she was telling a whopper. That was bad. Up to that everything had been wholesome and straightforward, and all of a sudden without any warning that big fly plopped in the milk. I cocked an eye at Fred, and of course he hadn’t caught it. But Wolfe had. His eyes had gone nearly shut.