Rex Stout: Black Orchids

“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.

Through the door further on I entered the main room. There was even more of a crowd than when Wolfe and I had passed by half an hour earlier. I dodged through the field as far as the rustic scene which had labels on the rope-posts reading UPDEGRAFF NURSERIES, ERIE, PENNA. The exhibits on this side were a series of peninsulas jutting into the main room, with aisles between them extending back to the partition, on which they were based. I skirted the band of spectators taking in the Updegraff arrangement and halted beside a runty specimen who was standing there by the rope scowling at the foliage.

“Hello, Pete,” I said.

He nodded and said hello.

I had met Pete day before yesterday. I didn’t really like him. In fact I disliked him. His eyes didn’t match and that, together with a scar on his nose, made him look unreliable. But he had been hospitable and made me at home around the place.

“Your peonies look nice,” I said socially.

Someone tittered on my left and made a remark which probably wasn’t intended for my ear but I have good ears. I turned and saw a pair of vintage Helen Hokinsons from Bronxville. I stared and compelled an eye.

“Yes, madam, peonies,” I said. “What’s a Cymbidium miranda? You don’t know. I’ve known that since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. What’s a Phalaenopsis? Do you know?”

“No, I don’t, but I know those are rhododendrons. Peonies! Come, Alice.”

I watched them waddle off and turned back to Pete. “Excuse me for chasing your audience, but it’s none of her business if I prefer to call them peonies. What were you scowling at? Looking for the Kurume yellows?”

His head jerked around at me. “What about the Kurume yellows?” he demanded.

“Nothing. Just conversation. I heard Dill saying his woodland glade has got it and I wondered if it was spreading. You don’t need to look at me like that. I haven’t got it.”

His left eye blinked but the off-color one didn’t. “When did you hear Dill say that?”

“Just a while ago.”

“So. What I suspected.” He stretched himself as high as he could up on his toes, looking in all directions at the throng. “Did you see my boss?”

“No. I just came—”

Pete darted off. Apparently I had started something. But he went off to the left, towards the front, so I didn’t follow him. I turned right, past a rose garden and a couple of other exhibits to Rucker and Dill’s.

The crowd was about the same as before; it was only a quarter past three and they wouldn’t begin surging against the ropes until four o’clock, when Harry would lie down for a nap and Anne would take off her shoes and stockings, positively never seen before at a flower show in the history of the world. I got behind some dames not tall enough to obstruct the view. Mumblety-peg was over, and Harry was making a slingshot and Anne was knitting. What she was working on didn’t look as if it might be something I would be able to use, but anyway what I was interested in was her and not her output, which is a normal and healthy attitude during courtship. She sat there on the grass knitting as if there were no one within miles. Harry was nothing like as good an actor as she was. He didn’t look at the spectators’ faces, and of course he said nothing, since it was all pantomime and neither of them ever spoke, but by movements and glances he gave it away that he was conscious of the audience every minute.

Naturally I was jealous of him, but aside from that he impressed me as a good deal of a wart. He was about my age and he put something on his hair to make it slick. His hair and eyes were dark and he smirked. Also he was cocky. One reason I had picked Anne was that while they were eating lunch Tuesday Harry had put his hand on her arm and she had pulled away, and it wasn’t an invitation to try it again. There had been further indications that she was resolved to keep herself innocent and unsullied for me, though of course she had no way of knowing that it was for me until I got a chance to speak to her. I admit her letting Hewitt decorate her with orchids and take her to dinner had been a bitter pill to swallow, but after all I had no right to expect her to be too spiritual to eat, with her legs.

All of a sudden Harry jumped to his feet and yelled, “Hey!”

It was the first word I had ever heard him utter.

Everyone, including me, looked in the direction of his stare.

“You, Updegraff!” Harry yelled. “Get out of that!”

It was the wholesome young man with the serious chin who had been identified for me as Pete’s boss, Fred Updegraff, by Pete himself. At the right corner where the exhibit ended at the partition, he had straddled the rope, stretched an arm and snipped off a peony twig or maybe laurel with a pruning shears, picked up the twig, and was making off with it.

“I’ll report that!” Harry yelled.

The crowd muttered and ejaculated with indignation, and for a second I thought we might see a lynching as an added attraction for the most dramatic flower show on record, but all that happened was that two women and a man trotted after Updegraff and started remonstrating with him as he kept going. Believe it or not, Anne never looked up and didn’t miss a stroke with her needles. A born actress.