Rex Stout: Black Orchids

He wasn’t there.

He was gone. The two pots were there on the floor, but he wasn’t anywhere.

The damn hippopotamus, I thought. He’ll get lost. He’ll be kidnapped. He’ll fall in a hole. He’ll catch cold.

I went back down to the men’s room on the second floor and yelled his name in front of the private apartments, but no soap. I went up to the fourth, to the orchid benches. No. I went down to the ground floor and out the main exit and to where I had parked the car on 46th Street, but he wasn’t in it. It was trying to snow in March gusts. I spat at a snowflake as it sailed by. Our little Nero, I thought, out on such a night and no coat. The bag fat flumpus. I’ll put salt on his grapefruit. It was a quarter past five.

I stood and applied logic to it. Had he taken a taxi home? Not the way he hated taxis. What, as I had left him standing there, what had been his most burning desires? That was easy. To shoot me, to sit down, and to drink beer. He couldn’t shoot me because I wasn’t there. Where might he have found a chair?

I went back and paid four bits to get in again, mounted one flight, and made my way across the grain of the traffic to the corner of the room where a door said OFFICE. People were standing around, and one of them plucked at my sleeve as I put my hand on the knob, and I recognized him. It was the gray-haired geezer I had seen on previous days looking at Anne from a distance as if he was saying his prayers. He looked worried under an old felt hat, and his fingers on my sleeve were trembling.

“Please,” he said, “if you’re going in there will you please give this to Miss Anne Tracy?”

“Is she in there?”

“Yes, she went in — I saw her go in—”

I took the folded piece of paper and said I’d see that Miss Tracy got it, opened the door and entered, and was in an anteroom containing a tired-looking woman at a desk. I smiled at her irresistibly to keep her quiet, unfolded the piece of paper, and read what it said.

Dear daughter,

I hope there is no serious trouble. I am outside here.

If there is anything I can do let me know.

It was written with a pencil on cheap white paper. I folded it up again, thinking that one of the first jobs to tackle would be to buy my father-in-law a new hat.

“Do you want something?” the woman at the desk asked in a sad and skeptical tone. I told her I had an important message for Miss Anne Tracy, and she opened her mouth and then decided not to use it any more and motioned to one of three doors. I opened it and passed through, and the first thing I saw was Nero Wolfe sitting in a chair almost big enough for him, with a tray on a table beside him holding four beer bottles, and a glass in his hand.

You can’t beat logic.

On another chair right in front of him, facing him, was Anne. Propped against a desk at the left was Lewis Hewitt. A man I didn’t know was at another desk writing something, and another one was standing by a window with Fred Updegraff.

Wolfe saw me enter. I saw him see me. But he went on talking to Anne without dropping a stitch:

“... a matter of nerves, yes, but primarily it depends on oxygenation of the blood. The most remarkable case of self-control I ever saw was in Albania in 1915, displayed by a donkey, I mean a four-legged donkey, which toppled over a cliff—”

I was standing by him. “Excuse me,” I said icily. “For you, Miss Tracy.” I extended the paper.

She looked up at me, looked at the paper, took it, unfolded it, and read it.

“Oh,” she said. She glanced around and looked up at me again. “Where is he?”

“Outside.”

“But I...” Her brow wrinkled. “Would you tell him... no... I’ll go...”

She got up and started for the door. I went to open it for her, saw that Hewitt had the same intention, quickened my step, beat him to the knob, and swung it open. Anne was walking through, and then she wasn’t. A man barging through from the other side ran smack into her and nearly knocked her over, and I grabbed her arm to help her get her balance. I beat Hewitt to that too.

“Pardon me,” the intruder said. His eyes swept the room and everything in it and went back to Anne. “Are you Anne Tracy?”

“She is Miss Anne Tracy,” Hewitt said, “and that is scarcely the way—”

Anne was sidling by to get to the door. The man put an arm out to stop her.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to see my father.”

“Where is he?”

Another arm got in on it. Fred Updegraff arrived and his hand came out and contacted the intruder’s ribs and gave a healthy shove.

“Learn some manners,” he said gruffly. “What business is—”

“Permit me,” I interposed. “This is Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad.” I indicated another man on the door sill. “And Sergeant Purley Stebbins.”

“Even so,” Lewis Hewitt said in a tone of displeasure. “It is scarcely necessary to restrain Miss Tracy by force. She merely wishes to speak with her father. I am Lewis Hewitt, Inspector. May I ask—”

“Where is your father?”

“Just outside the door,” I said.

“Go with her, Purley. All right, Miss Tracy. Come back in here, please.”

Purley went out at her heels. That cleared the doorway for another man to enter, W. G. Dill. His lips were in a thinner line than ever, and without looking at anybody or saying anything he crossed to a chair by the rear wall and sat down.

“Hello, Wolfe,” Cramer said.

“How do you do, Inspector.” With only two grunts, one under par, Wolfe got to his feet and moved forward. “Come, Archie. We’ll only be in the way.”

“No,” Cramer said meaningly.

“No?” Wolfe halted. “No what?”

“Goodwin won’t be in the way. On the contrary. At least until I get through with him.”

“He’s going to drive me home.”

“Not now he isn’t.”

“May I ask what this is all about?” Hewitt was still displeased. “This surveillance of Miss Tracy? This attitude—”

“Certainly, Mr. Hewitt. Sit down.” Cramer waved at chairs, of which there were plenty. “Everybody sit down. This is going to be — ah, Miss Tracy, did you find your father? Good. Pull that chair around for Miss Tracy, Purley. Sit down, Goodwin.”

I attended to the chair for Anne myself, then turned to face the Inspector.

“No, thanks. I’m nervous.”

“You are,” Cramer growled. “The day you’re nervous I’ll shave with a butter knife. How did you know that man had been shot in the top of the head when you called me on the phone?”

Some of them made noises, but Anne didn’t. Her head jerked up and her nostrils tightened, but that was all. I admired her more all the time. Hewitt exclaimed, “Shot!” and Fred Updegraff demanded, “What man?”

“Harry Gould,” I told him. I grinned at Cramer. “As you see, I didn’t blab around. I saved it for you—”

“How did you know?”

“Good heavens,” Hewitt said blankly. He rose half out of his chair and then dropped back again.

“It was nothing to write home about,” I said. “I looked at his face and he looked dead. I smelled cordite. I saw a jagged hole in the moss at the back of his head, and the moss was puffed out. I couldn’t see the top of his head from where I was, but I felt of it, and my finger went in a hole. By the way, don’t build a theory from some blood on the grass about where his knees were. I wiped my finger there.”

I saw Anne gulp.

“Confound you,” Wolfe said angrily, “I might have known.”

“Why did you go to him in the first place?” Cramer demanded. “You climbed the ropes and ran to him. Why did you do that?”

“Because he didn’t move when Miss Tracy threw water on him, and because I had already noticed that his leg and foot were twisted in an unnatural position.”