Black Orchids

by Rex Stout

  Bess Huddleston handed an envelope to Wolfe. “Look at that. What do you think of that?”

  Wolfe looked at the envelope, front and back, took from it a sheet of paper which he unfolded and looked at, and passed them over to me.

  “This is confidential,” Bess Huddleston said.

  “So is Mr. Goodwin,” Wolfe said dryly.

  I examined the exhibits. The envelope, stamped and postmarked and slit open, was addressed on a typewriter:

  Mrs. Jervis Horrocks

  902 East 74th Street

  New York City

  The sheet of paper said, also typewritten:

  Was it ignorance or something else that caused Dr.

  Brady to prescribe the wrong medicine for your

  daughter? Ask Bess Huddleston. She can tell you if

  she will. She told me. |

  There was no signature. I handed the sheet and envelope back to Wolfe.

  Bess Huddleston used her handkerchief on her forehead and throat again. “There was another one,” she said, looking at Wolfe but her eyes making me feel she was looking at me, “but I haven’t got it. That one, as you see, is postmarked Tuesday, August 12th, six days ago. The other one was mailed a day earlier, Monday, the 11th, aweek ago today. Typewritten, just like that. I’ve seen it. It was sent to a very rich and prominent man, and it said-I’ll repeat it. It said: ‘Where and with whom does your wife spend most of her afternoons? If you knew you would be surprised. My authority for this is Bess Huddleston. Ask her.’ The man showed it to me. His wife is one of my best-”

  “Please.” Wolfe wiggled a finger at her. “Are you consulting me or hiring me?”

  “I’m hiring you. To find out who sent those things.”

  “It’s a mean kind of a job. Often next to impossible. Nothing but greed could induce me to tackle it.”

  “Certainly.” Bess Huddleston nodded impatiently. “I know how to charge too. I expect to get soaked. But where will I be if this isn’t stopped and stopped quick?”

  “Very well. Archie, your notebook.”

  I got it out and got busy. She reeled it off to me while Wolfe rang for beer and then leaned back and closed his eyes. But he opened one of them halfway when he heard her telling me about the stationery and the typewriter. The paper and envelopes of both the anonymous letters, she said, were the kind used for personal correspondence by a girl who worked for her as her assistant in party-arranging, named Janet Nichols; and the letters and envelopes had been typed on a typewriter that belonged to Bess Huddleston herself which was used by another girl who worked for her as her secretary, named Maryella Timms. Bess Huddleston had done no comparing with a magnifying glass, but it looked like the work of that typewriter. Both girls lived with her in her house at Riverdale, and there was a large box of that stationery in Janet Nichols’ room.

  Then if not one of the girls—one of the girls? Wolfe muttered, “Facts, Archie.” Servants? No use to bother about the servants, Bess Huddleston said; no servant ever stayed with her long enough to develop a grudge. I passed it with a nod having read about the alligators and bears and other disturbing elements in newspaper and magazine pieces. Did anyone else live in the house? Yes, a nephew, Lawrence Huddleston, also on the payroll as an assistant party-arranger, but, according to Aunt Bess, not on any account to be suspected. That all? Yes. Any persons sufficiently intimate with the household to have had access to the typewriter and Janet Nichols’ stationery?

  Certainly, as possibilities, many people.

  Wolfe grunted impolitely. I asked, for another fact, what about the insinuations in the anonymous letters? The wrong medicine and the questionable afternoons? Bess Huddleston’s black eyes snapped at me. She knew nothing about those things. And anyway, they were irrelevant. The point was that some malicious person was trying to ruin her by spreading hints that she was blabbing guilty secrets about people, and whether the secrets happened to be true or not had nothing to do with it. Okay, I told her, forget about where Mrs. Rich Man spends her afternoons, maybe at the ball game, but as a matter of record did Mrs. Jervis Horrocks have a daughter, and had she been sick, and had Dr. Brady attended her? Yes, Bess Huddleston said impatiently, Mrs. Horrocks’ daughter had died a month ago and Dr. Brady had been her doctor. Died of what? Tetanus. How had she got tetanus? By scratching her arm on a nail in a riding-academy stable.

  Wolfe muttered, “There is no wrong medicine-”

  “It was terrible,” Bess Huddleston interrupted, “but it has nothing to do with this. I’m going to be late for my appointment with the Mayor. This is perfectly simple. Someone wanted to ruin me and conceived this filthy way of doing it, that’s all. It has to be stopped, and if you’re as smart as you’re supposed to be, you can stop it. Of course, I ought to tell you, I know who did it.”

  I cocked my head at her. Wolfe’s eyes opened wide.

  “What? You know?”

  “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 wastebasket.

  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.”