Stout, Rex - Black Orchids

by Black Orchids (lit)

  "Yes, I think I know. No, I do know."

  "Then why, madam, are you annoying me?"

  "Because I can't prove it. And she denies it."

  "Indeed." Wolfe shot a sharp glance at her. "You seem to be less intelligent than you look. If, having no proof, you charged her with it."

  "Did I say charged her with it? I didn't. I discussed it with her, and also with Maryella, and my nephew, and Dr. Brady, and my brother. I asked them questions. I saw I couldn't handle it. So I came to you."

  "By elimination-the culprit is Miss Nichols."

  "Yes."

  Wolfe was frowning. "But you have no proof. What do you have?"

  "I have-a feeling."

  "Pfui. Based on what?"

  "I know her."

  "You do." Wolfe continued to frown, and his lips pushed out, once, and in again. "By divination? Phrenology? What specific revelations of her character have you observed? Does she pull chairs from under people?"

  "Cut the glitter," Bess Huddleston snapped, frowning back at him. "You know quite well what I mean. I say I know her, that's all. Her eyes, her voice, her manner-"

  "I see. Flatly, you don't like her. She must be either remarkably stupid or extremely clever, to have used her own stationery for anonymous letters. Had you thought of that?"

  "Certainly. She is clever."

  "But knowing she did this, you keep her in your employ, in your house?"

  "Of course I do. If I discharged her, would that stop her?"

  "No. But you say you think her guilty because you know her. That means you knew a week ago, a month ago, a year ago that she was the sort of person who would do this sort of thing. Why didn't you get rid of her?"

  "Because I-" Bess Huddleston hesitated. "What difference does that make?" she demanded.

  "It makes a big difference to me, madam. You've hired me to investigate the source of those letters. I am doing so now. I am considering the possibility that you sent them yourself."

  Her eyes flashed at him. "I? Nonsense."

  "Then answer me." Wolfe was imperturbable. "Since you knew what Miss Nichols was like, why didn't you fire her?"

  "Because I needed her. She's the best assistant I've ever had. Her ideas are simply . . . take the Stryker dwarf and giant party . . . that was her idea . . . this is confidential . . . some of my biggest successes . . ."

  "I see. How long has she worked for you?"

  "Three years."

  "Do you pay her adequately?"

  "Yes. I didn't, but I do now. Ten thousand a year."

  "Then why does she want to ruin you? Just cussedness? Or has she got it in for you?"

  "She has-she thinks she has a grievance."

  "What about?"

  "Something . . ." Bess Huddleston shook her head. "That's of no importance. A private matter. It wouldn't help you any. I am willing to pay your bill for finding out who sent those letters and getting proof."

  "You mean you will pay me for fastening the guilt on Miss Nichols."

  "Not at all. On whoever did it."

  "No matter who it is?"

  "Certainly."

  "But you're sure it's Miss Nichols."

  "I am not sure. I said I have a feeling." Bess Huddleston stood up and picked up her handbag from Wolfe's desk. "I have to go. Can you come up to my place tonight?"

  "No. Mr.-"

  "When can you come?"

  "I can't. Mr. Goodwin can go-" Wolfe stopped himself. "No. Since you have already discussed it with all of those people, I'd like to see them. First the young women. Send them down here. I'll be free at six o'clock. This is a nasty job and I want to get it over with."

  "My God," Bess Huddleston said, her eyes snapping at him, "you would have made a wonderful party! If I could sell it to the Crowthers I could make it four thousand- only there won't be many more parties for me if we don't get these letters stopped. I'll phone the girls-“

  "Here's a phone," I said.

  She made the call, gave instructions to one she called Maryella, and departed in a rush.

  When I returned to the office after seeing the visitor to the door, Wolfe was out of his chair. There was nothing alarming about that, since it was one minute to four and therefore time for him to go up to the orchids, but what froze me in my tracks was the sight of him stooping over, actually bending nearly double, with his hand in my waste-basket.

  He straightened up.

  "Did you hurt yourself?" I inquired anxiously.

  Ignoring that, he moved nearer the window to inspect an object he held between his thumb and forefinger. I stepped over and he handed it to me and I took a squint at it. It was a snapshot of a girl's face, nothing special to my taste, trimmed off so it was six-sided in shape and about the size of a half dollar.

  "Want it for your album?" I asked him.

  He ignored that too. "There is nothing in the world," he said, glaring at me as if I had sent him an anonymous letter, "as indestructible as human dignity. That woman makes money killing time for fools. With it she pays me for rooting around in mud. Half of my share goes for taxes which are used to make bombs to blow people to pieces. Yet I am not without dignity. Ask Fritz, my cook. Ask Theodore, my gardener. Ask you, my-"

  "Right hand."

  "No."

  "Prime minister."

  "No."

  "Pal."

  "No!"

  "Accomplice, flunkey, Secretary of War, hireling, comrade . . ." He was on his way out to the elevator. I tossed the snapshot onto my desk and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  Chapter 2

  You're late," I told the girls reproachfully as I showed them into the office. "Mr. Wolfe supposed you would be here at six o'clock, when he comes down from the plant rooms, and it's twenty after. Now he's gone to the kitchen and started operations on some corned beef hash."

  They were sitting down and I was looking them over.

  "You mean he's eating corned beef hash?" Maryella Timms asked.

  "No. That comes later. He's concocting it."

  "It's my fault," Janet Nichols said. "I didn't get back until after five, and I was in riding clothes and had to change. I'm sorry."

  She didn't look much like a horseback rider. Not that she was built wrong, she had a fairly nice little body, with good hips, but her face was more of a subway face than a bridle-path face. Naturally I had been expecting something out of the ordinary, one way or another, since according to Bess Huddleston she was an anonymous letter writer and had thought up the Stryker dwarf and giant party, and to tell the truth I was disappointed. She looked more like a school teacher-or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she looked like what a school teacher looks like before the time comes that she absolutely looks like a school teacher and nothing else.

  Maryella Timms, on the other hand, was in no way disappointing, but she was irritating. Her hair started far back above the slant of her brow, and that made her brow look even higher and broader than it was, and noble and spiritual. But her eyes were very demure, which didn't fit. If you're noble and spiritual you don't have to be demure. There's no point in being demure unless there's something on your mind to be demure about. Besides, there was her accent. Cawned beef ha-a-sh. I am not still fighting the Civil War, and anyway my side won, but these Southern belles-if it sounds like a deliberate come-on to me then it does. I was bawn and braht up in the Nawth.

  "I'll see if I can pry him loose," I said, and went to the hall and through to the kitchen.

  The outlook was promising for getting Wolfe to come and attend to business, because he had not yet got his hands in the hash. The mixture, or the start of it, was there in a bowl on the long table, and Fritz, at one side of the table, and Wolfe, at the other, were standing there discussing it. They looked around at me as I would expect to be looked at if I busted into a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

  "They're here," I announced. "Janet and Maryella."

  From the expression on his face as his mouth opened it was a safe bet that
Wolfe was going to instruct me to tell them to come back tomorrow, but he didn't get it out. I heard a door open behind me and a voice floated past:

  "Ah heah yawl makin' cawned beef ha-a-sh. . . ."

  That's the last time I try to reproduce it.

  The owner of the voice floated past me too, right up beside Wolfe. She leaned over to peer into the bowl.

  "Excuse me," she said, which I couldn't spell the way

  she said it anyhow, "but corned beef hash is one of my specialties. Nothing in there but meat, is there?"

  "As you see," Wolfe grunted.

  "It's ground too fine," Maryella asserted.

  Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz's cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life's toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone. To tone down the corned flavor and yet preserve its unique quality, to remove the curse of its dryness without making it greasy- the theories and experiments had gone on for years. He scowled at her, but he didn't order her out.

  "This is Miss Timms," I said. "Mr. Wolfe. Mr. Brenner. Miss Nichols is in-"

  "Ground too fine for what?" Wolfe demanded truculently. "This is not a tender fresh meat, with juices to lose-"

  "Now you just calm down." Maryella's hand was on his arm. "It's not ruined, only it's better if it's coarser. That's far too much potatoes for that meat. But if you don't have chitlins you can't-"

  "Chitlins!" Wolfe bellowed.

  Maryella nodded. "Fresh pig chitlins. That's the secret of it. Fried shallow in olive oil with onion juice-"

  "Good heavens!" Wolfe was staring at Fritz. "I never heard of it. It has never occurred to me. Fritz? Well?"

  Fritz was frowning thoughtfully. "It might go," he conceded. "We can try it. As an experiment."

  Wolfe turned to me in swift decision. "Archie, call up Kretzmeyer and ask if he has pig chitlins. Two pounds."

  "You'd better let me help," Maryella said. "It's sort of tricky. . . ."

  That was how I came to get so well acquainted with Janet that first day. I thought I might as well have company driving down to the market for chitlins, and Maryella was glued to Wolfe, and as far as that's concerned Wolfe was glued to her for the duration of the experiment, so I took Janet along. By the time we got back to the house I had decided she was innocent in more ways than one, though I admit that didn't mean much, because it's hard for me to believe that anyone not obviously a hyena could pull a trick like anonymous letters. I also admit there wasn't much sparkle to her, and she seemed to be a little absent-minded when it came to conversation, but under the circumstances that wasn't surprising, if she knew why she had been told to go to Nero Wolfe's office, as she probably did.

  I delivered the chitlins to the hash artists in the kitchen and then joined Janet in the office. I had been telling her about orchid hybridizing on the way back uptown, and when I went to my desk to get a stack of breeding cards I was going to show her, I noticed something was missing. So I gave her the cards to look at and excused myself and returned to the kitchen, and asked Wolfe if anyone had been in the office during my absence. He was standing beside Maryella, watching Fritz arrange the chitlins on a cutting board, and all I got was a growl.

  "None of you left the kitchen?" I insisted.

  "No," he said shortly. "Why?"

  "Someone ate my lollipop," I told him, and left him with his playmates and returned to the office. Janet was sitting with the cards in her lap, going through them. I stood in front of her and inquired amiably:

  "What did you do with it?"

  She looked up at me. That way, with her head tilted up, from that angle, she looked kind of pretty.

  "What did I-what?"

  "That snapshot you took from my desk. It's the only picture I've got of you. Where did you put it?"

  "I didn't-" Her mouth closed. "I didn't!" she said defiantly.

  I sat down and shook my head at her. "Now listen," I said pleasantly. "Don't lie to me. We're comrades. Side by side we have sought the chitlin in its lair. The wild boar chitlin. That picture is my property and I want it. Let's say it fluttered into your bag. Look in your bag."

  "It isn't there." With a new note of spunk in her voice, and a new touch of color on her cheeks, she was more of a person. Her bag was beside her on the chair, and her left hand was clutching it.

  "Then I'll look in your bag." I started for her.

  "No!" she said. "It isn't there!" She put a palm to her stomach. "It's here."

  I stopped short, thinking for a second she had swallowed it. Then I returned to my chair and told her, "Okay. You will now return it. You have three alternatives. Either dig it out yourself, or I will, or I'll call in Maryella and hold you while she does. The first is the most ladylike. I'll turn my back."

  "Please." She kept her palm against her stomach. "Please! It's my picture!"

  "It's a picture of you, but it's not your picture."

  "Miss Huddleston gave it to you."

  I saw no point in denying the obvious. "Say she did."

  "And she told you . . . she . . . she thinks I sent those awful letters! I know she does!"

  "That," I said firmly, "is another matter which the boss is handling. I am handling the picture. It is probably of no importance except as a picture of the girl who thought up the Stryker dwarf and giant party. If you ask Mr. Wolfe for it he'll probably give it to you. It may even be that Miss Huddleston stole it; I don't know. She didn't say where she got it. I do know that you copped it from my desk and I want it back. You can get another one, but I can't. Shall I call Maryella?" I turned my head and looked like a man about to let out a yell.

  "No!" she said, and got out of her chair and turned her back and went through some contortions. When she handed me the snapshot I tucked it under a paperweight on Wolfe's desk and then went to help her collect the breeding cards from the floor where they had tumbled from her lap.

  "Look what you did," I told her, "mixed them all up. Now you can help me put them in order again. . . ."

  It looked for a minute as if tears were going to flow, but they didn't. We spent an hour together, not exactly jolly, but quite friendly. I avoided the letter question, because I didn't know what line Wolfe intended to take.

  When he finally got at it there was no line to it. That was after nine o'clock, when we assembled in the office after the hash and trimmings had been disposed of. The hash was okay. It was good hash. Wolfe had three helpings, and when he conversed with Maryella, as he did through most of the meal, he was not only sociable but positively respectful. There was an unpleasant moment at the beginning, when Janet didn't take any hash and Fritz was told to slice some ham for her, and Maryella told her resentfully:

  "You won't eat it because I cooked it."

  Janet protested that that wasn't so, she just didn't like corned beef.

  In the office, afterwards, it became apparent that there was no love lost between the secretary and the assistant party-arranger. Not that either accused the other of writing the poison-pen letters; there were no open hostilities, but a few glances I observed when I looked up from my notebook, and tones of voice when they addressed each other, sounded as if there might be quite a blaze if somebody touched a match to it. Wolfe didn't get anything, as far as I could see, except a collection of unimportant facts. Both the girls were being discreet, to put it mildly. Bess Huddleston, according to them, was a very satisfactory employer. They admitted that her celebrated eccentricities made things difficult sometimes, but they had no kick coming. Janet had worked for her three years, and Maryella two, and they hadn't the slightest idea who could have sent those dreadful letters, and Bess Huddleston had no enemies that they knew of ... oh, of course, she had hurt some people's feelings, but what did that amount to, and there were scores of people who could have got at Janet's stationery during the past months but they couldn't imagine who, and so forth and so on. Yes, they had known Mrs. Jervis Horrocks' dau
ghter, Helen; she had been a close friend of Maryella's. Her death had been a shock. And yes, they knew Dr. Alan Brady quite well. He was fashionable and successful and had a wonderful reputation for his age. He often went horseback riding with one of them or with Bess Huddleston. Riding academy? No, Bess Huddleston kept horses in her stable at her place at Riverdale, and Dr. Brady would come up from the Medical Center when he got through in the afternoon-it was only a ten-minute drive.

  And Bess Huddleston had never been married, and her brother Daniel was some kind of a chemist, not in society, very much not, who showed up at the house for dinner about once a week; and her nephew, Larry, well, there he was, that was all, a young man living there and getting paid for helping his aunt in her business; and there were no other known relatives and no real intimates, except that Bess Huddleston had hundreds of intimates of both sexes and all ages. . . .

  It went on for nearly two hours.

  After seeing them out to their car-I noticed Maryella was driving-I returned to the office and stood and watched Wolfe down a glass of beer and pour another one.

  "That picture of the culprit," I said, "is there under your paperweight if you want it. She did. I mean she wanted it. In my absence she swiped it and hid it in a spot too intimate to mention in your presence. I got it back-no matter how. I expected her to ask you for it, but she didn't. And if you think you're going to solve this case by-"

  "Confound the case." Wolfe sighed clear to the beer he had swallowed. "I might have known better. Tomorrow go up there and look around. The servants, I suppose. Make sure of the typewriter. The nephew. Talk with him and decide if I must see him; if so, bring him. And get Dr. Brady here. After lunch would be best."

  "Sure," I said sarcastically.

  "Around two o'clock. Please get your notebook and take a letter. Get it off tonight, special delivery. To Professor Martingale of Harvard. Dear Joseph. I have made a remarkable discovery, comma, or rather, comma, have had one communicated to me. You may remember our discussion last winter regarding the possibility of using pig chitlins in connection with . . ."

  Chapter 3

  Ever since an incident that occurred when Wolfe sent me on an errand in February, 1935,1 automatically ask myself, when leaving the office on a business chore, do I take a gun? I seldom do; but if I had done so that Tuesday afternoon I swear I would have found use for it. As sure as my name is Archie and not Archibald, I would have shot that goddamn orangutan dead in his tracks.