I don’t know how many guesses there have been in the past year, around bars and dinner tables, as to how Nero Wolfe got hold of the black orchids. I have seen three different ones in print — one in a Sunday newspaper magazine section last summer, one in a syndicated New York gossip column a couple of months ago, and one in a press association dispatch, at the time that a bunch of the orchids unexpectedly appeared at a certain funeral service at the Belford Memorial Chapel.

So here in this book are two separate Nero Wolfe cases, two different sets of people. The first is the low-down on how Wolfe got the orchids. The second tells how he solved another murder, but it leaves a mystery, and that’s what’s biting me. If anyone who knows Wolfe better than I do — but wait till you read it.

Archie Goodwin

Chapter 1

Monday at the Flower Show, Tuesday at the Flower Show, Wednesday at the Flower Show. Me, Archie Goodwin. How’s that?

I do not deny that flowers are pretty, but a million flowers are not a million times prettier than one flower. Oysters are good to eat, but who wants to eat a carload?

I didn’t particularly resent it when Nero Wolfe sent me up there Monday afternoon and, anyway, I had been expecting it. After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn’t be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms on the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected. I was.

When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six P.M. Monday and entered the office, I reported:

“I saw them. It was impossible to snitch a sample.”

He grunted, lowering himself into his chair. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“Who said you did, but you expected me to. There are three of them in a glass case and the guard has his feet glued.”

“What color are they?”

“They’re not black.”

“Black flowers are never black. What color are they?”

“Well.” I considered. “Say you take a piece of coal. Not anthracite. Cannel coal.”

“That’s black.”

“Wait a minute. Spread on it a thin coating of open kettle molasses. That’s it.”

“Pfui. You haven’t the faintest notion what it would look like. Neither have I.”

“I’ll go buy a piece of coal and we’ll try it.”

“No. Is the labellum uniform?”

I nodded. “Molasses on coal. The labellum is large, not as large as aurea, about like truffautiana. Cepals lanceolate. Throat tinged with orange—”

“Any sign of wilting?”

“No.”

“Go back tomorrow and look for wilting on the edges of the petals. You know it, the typical wilting after pollination. I want to know if they’ve been pollinated.”

So I went up there again Tuesday after lunch. That evening at six I added a few details to my description and reported no sign of wilting.

I sat at my desk, in front of his against the wall, and aimed a chilly stare at him.

“Will you kindly tell me,” I requested, “why the females you see at a flower show are the kind of females who go to a flower show? Ninety per cent of them? Especially their legs? Does it have to be like that? Is it because, never having any flowers sent to them, they have to go there in order to see any? Or is it because—”

“Shut up. I don’t know. Go back tomorrow and look for wilting.”

I might have known, with his mood getting blacker every hour, all on account of three measly orchid plants, that he was working up to a climax. But I went again Wednesday, and didn’t get home until nearly seven o’clock. When I entered the office he was there at his desk with two empty beer bottles on the tray and pouring a third one into the glass.

“Did you get lost?” he inquired politely.

I didn’t resent that because I knew he half meant it. He has got to the point where he can’t quite understand how a man can drive from 35th Street and Tenth Avenue to 44th and Lexington and back again with nobody to lead the way. I reported no wilting, and sat at my desk and ran through the stuff he had put there, and then swiveled to face him and said:

“I’m thinking of getting married.”

His half-open lids didn’t move, but his eyes did, and I saw them.

“We might as well be frank,” I said. “I’ve been living in this house with you for over ten years, writing your letters, protecting you from bodily harm, keeping you awake, and wearing out your tires and my shoes. Sooner or later one of my threats to get married will turn out not to be a gag. How are you going to know? How do you know this isn’t it?”

He made a noise of derision and picked up his glass.

“Okay,” I said. “But you’re enough of a psychologist to know what it means when a man is irresistibly impelled to talk about a girl to someone. Preferably, of course, to someone who is sympathetic. You can imagine what it means when I want to talk about her to you. What is uppermost in my mind is that this afternoon I saw her washing her feet.”

He put the glass down. “So you went to a movie. In the afternoon. Did it occur—”

“No, sir, not a movie. Flesh and bone and skin. Have you ever been to a flower show?”

Wolfe closed his eyes and sighed.

“Anyway,” I went on, “you’ve seen pictures of the exhibits, so you know that the millionaires and big firms do things up brown. Like Japanese gardens and rock gardens and roses in Picardy. This year Rucker and Dill, the seed and nursery company, have stolen the show. They’ve got a woodland glade. Bushes and dead leaves and green stuff and a lot of little flowers and junk, and some trees with white flowers, and a little brook with a pool and rocks; and it’s inhabited. There’s a man and a girl having a picnic. They’ve there all day from eleven to six thirty and from eight to ten in the evening. They pick flowers. They eat a picnic lunch. They sit on the grass and read. They play mumblety-peg. At four o’clock the man lies down and covers his face with a newspaper and takes a nap, and the girl takes off her shoes and stockings and dabbles her feet in the pool. That’s when they crowd the ropes. Her face and figure are plenty good enough, but her legs are absolutely artistic. Naturally she has to be careful not to get her skirt wet, and the stream comes tumbling from the rocks into the pool. Speaking as a painter—”

Wolfe snorted. “Pah! You couldn’t paint a—”

“I didn’t say painting as a painter, I said speaking as a painter. I know what I like. The arrangement of lines into harmonious composition. It gets me. I like to study—”

“She is too long from the knees down.”

I looked at him in amazement.

He wiggled a finger at a newspaper on the desk. “There’s a picture of her in the Post. Her name is Anne Tracy. She’s a stenographer in Rucker and Dill’s office. Her favorite dish is blueberry pie with ice cream.”

“She is not a stenographer!” I was on my feet. “She’s a secretary! W. G. Dill’s!” I found the page in the Post. “A damn important job. I admit they look a little long here, but it’s a bad picture. Wrong angle. There was a better one in the Times yesterday, and an article—”

“I saw it. I read it.”

“Then you ought to have an inkling of how I feel.” I sat down again. “Men are funny,” I said philosophically. “That girl with that face and figure and legs has been going along living with her pop and mom and taking dictation from W. G. Dill, who looks like a frog in spite of being the president of the Atlantic Horticultural Society — he was around there today — and who knew about her or paid any attention to her? But put her in a public spot and have her take off her shoes and stockings and wiggle her toes in a man-made pool on the third floor of Grand Central Palace, and what happens? Billy Rose goes to look at her. Movie scouts have to be chased off the grass of the woodland glade. Photographers engage in combat. Lewis Hewitt takes her out to dinner—”

“Hewitt?” Wolfe opened his eyes and scowled at me. “Lewis Hewitt?”

I knew that the sound of that name would churn his beer for him. Lewis Hewitt was the millionaire in whose greenhouse, on his Long Island estate, the black orchids had been produced — thereby creating in Wolfe an agony of envy that surpassed any of his previous childish performances.

“Yep,” I said cheerfully. “Lew himself, in his two hundred dollar topcoat and Homburg and gloves made of the belly-skin of a baby gazelle fed on milk and honey, and a walking stick that makes your best Malacca look like a piece of an old fishing pole. I saw her go out with him less than an hour ago, just before I left. And pinned to her left shoulder was a black orchid! He must have cut it for her himself. She becomes the first female in captivity to wear a black orchid. And only last week she was typing with her lovely fingers, ‘Yours of the ninth received and contents noted.’”

I grinned at him. “But Lew will have to get out the spray for the insects. Men are flocking in there who don’t know a stamen from a stigma. The guy having the picnic with her inside the ropes smirks fatuously. His name is Harry Gould and he is one of Dill’s gardeners. A gray-haired geezer that needs a shave gazes at her as if he was about to say his prayers — I’ve seen him twice. A wholesome young fellow with a serious chin wanders by and pretends he’s not looking at her. His name is Fred Updegraff. Updegraff Nurseries, Erie, Pennsylvania. They’ve got an exhibit not far off. And there’s a lot more, but chiefly there’s me. Your friend Lew is going to have me to contend with. She smiled at me today without meaning to, and I blushed from head to foot. My intentions are honorable but they are not vague. Look at that picture of her and then take a slant at this.” I lifted a heel to the corner of the desk and pulled my trouser leg up to the knee. “In your mind’s eye strip off the shoe and sock and garter and apply your knowledge of cross-pollination. What would be the result—”

“Pfui,” Wolfe said. “Don’t scar the desk. You will return there tomorrow and look for edge-wilt, and you will be here at six o’clock.”

But it didn’t work out that way. At lunch the next day his envy and curiosity finally foamed up to the climax. He put clown his coffee cup, assumed the expression of a man prepared to brave all hardship or hazard for the sake of a Cause, and told me:

“Please bring the sedan around. I’m going up there and look at those confounded freaks myself.”

Chapter 2

So Thursday was my fourth day at the Flower Show in a row. It was the biggest mob of the week, and getting Nero Wolfe through and up to the fourth floor where the orchids were was like a destroyer making a way through a mine field for a battleship. We were halted a couple of times by acquaintances who wanted to exchange greetings, and as we passed the Rucker and Dill woodland glade on the third floor Wolfe stopped to look it over. There was a line of spectators three deep all the way around the ropes. Harry and Anne were playing mumbletypeg. When a flash bulb made a flare she didn’t flicker an eyelash.

“Look at her teeth when she smiles,” I said. “Look at her hair like fine-spun open kettle molasses. She was more self-conscious the first day or two. A year of this would spoil her. Look at the leaves on the peony bushes, turning yellow, pining away because she’ll be with them only one more day—”

“They are not peonies. They are azaleas and laurel, and they have a disease.”

“Call it a disease if you want to. They’re pining—”

He had started off, and I nearly knocked three women down getting around in front of him for interference.

At the orchid benches up on the fourth floor he disregarded everything else — though there was, for one thing, the finest display of B. thorntoni I had ever seen — and planted himself in front of the glass case. A card in the corner said, “Unnamed hybrid by Mr. Lewis Hewitt. The only three plants in existence.” They certainly were something different, and I had been through all the big establishments several times, not to mention the twenty thousand plants Wolfe had, with hundreds of varieties. I stood to one side and watched Wolfe’s face. He mumbled something to himself, and then just stood and looked, with his expanse of face five inches from the glass of the case. His emotions didn’t show, but from the twitching of a muscle on his neck I knew he was boiling inside. For a quarter of an hour he didn’t budge, not even when women bumped against him trying to get a peek at the orchids, though ordinarily he hates to have anyone touching him. Then he backed away and I thought he was through.

“It’s hot in here,” he said, and was taking off his overcoat. I took it to hold for him.

“Ah, Mr. Wolfe,” a voice said. “This is indeed a compliment! What do you think of them?”

It was Lewis Hewitt. Wolfe shook hands with him. He had on another hat and topcoat and gloves, but the same walking stick as the day before — a golden-yellow Malacca with reddish-brown mottles. Any good appraiser would have said $830 as is, on the hoof. He was tall enough to look down at Wolfe with a democratic smile below his aristocratic nose.

“They’re interesting,” Wolfe said.

Interesting. Ha ha.

“Aren’t they marvelous?” Hewitt beamed. “If I had time I’d take one from the case so you could have a good look, but I’m on my way upstairs to judge some roses and I’m already late. Will you be here a little later? Please do? — Hello, Wade. I’m running.”

He went. The “Wade” was for a little guy who had come up while he was talking. As this newcomer exchanged greetings with Wolfe I regarded him with interest, for it was no other than W. G. Dill himself, the employer of my future wife. In many ways he was the exact opposite of Lewis Hewitt, for he looked up at Wolfe instead of down, he wore an old brown suit that needed pressing, and his sharp gray eyes gave the impression that they wouldn’t know how to beam.

“You probably don’t remember me,” he was telling Wolfe. “I was at your house one day with Raymond Plehn—”

“I remember. Certainly, Mr. Dill.”

“I just saw Plehn downstairs and he told me you were here. I was going to phone you this afternoon. I wonder if you’d do something for me?”

“That depends—”

“I’ll explain. Let’s step aside away from this jostling.” They moved, and I followed suit. “Do you know anything about the Kurume yellows?”

“I’ve heard of them.” Wolfe was frowning but trying to be courteous. “I’ve read of them in horticultural journals. A disease fatal to broad-leaved evergreens, thought to be fungus. First found two years ago on some Kurume azaleas imported from Japan by Lewis Hewitt. You had some later, I believe, and so did Watson in Massachusetts. Then Updegraff lost his entire plantation, several acres, of what he called rhodaleas.”

“You do know about them.”

“I remember what I read.”

“Did you see my exhibit downstairs?”

“I glanced at it as I passed.” Wolfe grimaced. “The crowd. I came to see these hybrids. That’s a fine group of Cypripedium pubescens you have. Very fine. The Fissipes—”

“Did you see the laurel and azaleas?”

“Yes. They look sick.”

“They are sick. They’re dying. The Kurume yellows. The underside of the leaves shows the typical brown spots. Some scoundrel deliberately infected those plants, and I’d give a good deal to know who it was. I intend to know who it was!”

Wolfe looked sympathetic, and he really was sympathetic. Between plant growers a fatal fungus makes a bond. “It’s too bad your exhibit was spoiled,” he said. “But why a personal devil? Why a deliberate miscreant?”

“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.

My watch said 3:25. It would be over half an hour before the big scene started, and I didn’t dare leave Wolfe alone that long in a strange place, so I regretfully dragged myself away. Retracing my steps, I kept an eye out for Pete, thinking to tell him that his boss had resorted to crime, but he wasn’t visible. Taking the corridor again as a short cut, I saw it was inhabited by a sample who didn’t strike me as the flower show type, either for backstage or out front. She was standing there not far from the door with the RUCKER AND DILL card on it, a fancy little trick in a gray coat with 14th Street squirrel on the collar, with a little blue hat and a blue leather handbag under her arm, and as I approached she looked at me with an uneasy eye and a doubtful smile.

I asked her, “You lost, sister?”

“No,” she said, and the smile got confident. “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Me?”

“Nothing like you.”

“That’s good. It could have been me a week ago, but now I’m booked.”

I went on.

Upstairs I found that Wolfe had stayed put, and W. G. Dill was still with him. Apparently the question of tracking down the gazook who had spoiled Dill’s exhibit had been settled one way or the other, for they were arguing about inoculated peat and sterile flasks for germination. I sat down on a vacant spot on a bench. After a while Dill departed and Wolfe went back to the glass case and started peering again, and a few minutes later here came Lewis Hewitt, with his topcoat over his arm. He glanced around as if he was looking for something and asked Wolfe:

“Did I leave my stick here?”

“I haven’t seen it. Archie?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn it,” Hewitt said. “I do leave sticks around, but I wouldn’t like to lose that one. Well. Do you want to inspect one of those beauties?”

“Very much. Even without an inspection, I’d like to buy one.”

“I imagine you would.” Hewitt chuckled. “Plehn offered ten thousand for one the other day.” He took a key from his pocket and leaned over the case. “I’m afraid I’m going to be regarded as a miser, but I can’t bear to let one go.”

“I’m not a commercial grower,” Wolfe said ingratiatingly. “I’m an amateur like you.”

“I know,” Hewitt conceded, lifting out one of the pots as if it was made of star bubbles and angels’ breath, “but, my dear fellow, I simply couldn’t part with one.”

From there on the scene was painful. Wolfe was so damn sweet to him I had to turn my head away to conceal my feelings. He flattered him and yessed him and smiled at him until I expected any minute to hear him offer to dust off his shoes, and the worst of it was, it was obvious he wasn’t getting anywhere and wasn’t going to. When Hewitt went on and on with a discourse about ovules and pollen tubes, Wolfe beamed at him as if he was fascinated and, finally, when Hewitt offered to present him with a couple of C. hassellis, Wolfe thanked him as if they were just what he asked Santa Claus for, though he had twenty specimens as good or better under his own glass. At a quarter past four I began to fidget. Not only would I have liked to give Wolfe a kick in the fundament for being such a sap, but also I wanted to conduct him past the woodland glade and prove to him that he was wrong when he said my affianced was too long from the knees down, and the big scene would end at four thirty, when Anne would flip water out of the pool onto her co-picnicker to wake him from his nap. That always got a big laugh.

So I was relieved when they started off. Ordinarily Wolfe would have had me carry the two pots of C. hassellis, but he toted them himself, one in each hand, to show Hewitt how precious he thought they were. The big toadeater. But the worst was yet to come. We went by the back stairs, and, at my suggestion, along the corridor on the floor below, and there on the floor at the base of the door to Rucker and Dill’s exhibit, I saw an object I recognized. I halted and told Hewitt:

“There’s your cane.”

Hewitt stood and looked at it and demanded, “How in the name of heaven did it get there?”

And by gum, Wolfe told me to pick it up for him! I should have resigned on the spot, but I didn’t want to make a scene in front of Hewitt, so I stopped and grabbed it. There was a piece of green string looped on the crook and I brushed it off and extended the crook end toward Hewitt, controlling an impulse to jab him in the ribs. He thanked me democratically and we went on.

“Curious,” Hewitt said. “I certainly didn’t leave it there. Very odd.”

A door ahead of us opened and a man emerged. The door had a card on it, UPDEGRAFF NURSERIES, and the man was the twig-snitcher, Fred Updegraff. At sight of us he stopped, and stood there as we went by. A little farther on, after passing two more doors with exhibitors’ cards on them, I swerved to one that wasn’t labeled and turned the knob and opened it.

“Where are you going?” Wolfe demanded.

“The water nymph. The pool episode. I thought you might—”

“Bosh. That bedlam—”

“It’s really worth seeing,” Hewitt declared. “Charming. Perfectly charming. Really delightful. I’ll come too.”

He headed for the door I was holding open, and Wolfe followed him like an orderly after a colonel, his hands full of potted plants. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been disgusting. I kept in front so as not to have to look at him.

At the glade the audience was five and six deep around the ropes to the point on either side where the bushes were in the way, but all three of us were tall enough to get a good view. Anne was putting on a swell performance, dabbling with her toes and swishing around. Her knees were beautiful. I was proud of her. Harry was stretched out in the usual spot for his nap, his head on a grassy mound alongside the rocks and bushes, with a newspaper over his face. The audience was chattering. Anne kicked water onto a cluster of flowers that hung over the pool, and glistening drops fell from the petals.

“Charming,” Hewitt said.

“Delightful,” Wolfe said. “Archie, will you kindly take these plants? Be very careful—”

Pretending not to hear him, I moved off to the right. Partly I thought he needed some ignoring, but also I wanted to get a better look at Harry’s right leg and foot. They were twisted into a strange and unnatural position for a man pretending to take a nap. I stretched tiptoe to get a good look over heads and hats and decided that either his shoe hurt him or he was doing a yogi leg exercise, and went back to Anne just as she took another glance at her wrist watch. She swished once more, swung her feet out of the pool, cast a mischievous eye on her companion, reached into the pool with her cupped hand, and sloshed water over Harry’s shirt. The audience screeched with glee.

But Harry didn’t take his cue. He was supposed to jerk himself up and blink and look mad, but he didn’t move. Anne stared at him in astonishment. Someone called:

“Douse him again!”

I had a quick hunch it wasn’t funny, with his leg twisted like that. Pushing through to the front, I got over the rope. As I started across the grass a guard yelled at me, and so did some of the spectators, but I kept going and was bent over Harry when the guard grabbed my arm.

“Hey, you—”

“Shut up.” I shook him off and lifted the newspaper enough to see Harry’s face, and after one glimpse dropped the paper back over it. As I did that I sniffed. I thought I smelled something, a faint something that I recognized.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” a voice above me asked.

It was the first time I had ever heard Anne’s voice, but I didn’t reply or look up at her because I was seeing something about the moss which clung to the face of the rocks just back of Harry’s head. On account of the shrubs and rocks I couldn’t get around to see the top of his head, so I reached a hand to feel of it, and the end of my finger went right into a hole in his skull, away in, and it was like sticking your finger into a warm apple pie. I pulled away and started wiping my finger off on the grass, and realized with a shock that the two white things there were Anne’s bare feet. I nearly got blood on them.

Chapter 3

I stood up and told Anne, “Put on your shoes and stockings.”

“What—”

“Do as I tell you.” I had the guard by the sleeve and stabbed into his sputtings, “Get a cop.” By the way his mouth fell open I saw he was too dumb even for something as simple as that without a fireside chat, so I turned to call to Hewitt and there was Fred Updegraff inside the ropes headed for us. His eyes were on Anne, but when I intercepted him and told him to get a cop he about-faced without a word and went. Wolfe’s voice barked above the din:

“What the devil are you doing in there?”

I ignored him again and raised my voice to address the multitude: “Ladies and gentlemen. That’s all for today. Mr. Gould has had an attack. If you’re sensible you’ll go and look at flowers. If you’re morbid or have got the itch you’ll stay where you are — outside the ropes—”

A flash bulb flared at the left. Sympathetic murmurs arose, but they seemed to be a hundred percent morbid. At the right a guy with a camera came diving under the rope, but that was something for which arrangements had already been made inside the guard’s head and he responded promptly and adequately. I was gratified to see that Anne appeared to have a modicum of wits. She must have seen the color of what I had wiped from my finger, but she was sitting on the grass getting her feet shod, hastily but efficiently.

“Archie!” Wolfe’s voice came in his most menacing tone. I knew what was eating him. He wanted me to get out of there and drive him home, and he thought I was showing off, and he knew I was sore. As he called my name again I turned my back on him to welcome the law. A big flatfoot with no neck shoved through the crowd to the rope and got over it and strode across the grass. I blocked his way at Harry’s feet.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked gruffly.

I moved aside and let him pass. He stopped and got a corner of the newspaper and jerked it off.

“Archie!” Wolfe bellowed.

Some of the spectators could see Harry’s face and they were reacting. The ropes were bellied in, taut, with the pressure from behind. The guard was charging across the grass at them and Anne was on her feet again and Fred Updegraff was there.

“Hell, he’s dead,” the cop said.

“You guessed it,” I conceded. “Shall I get some help?”

“Go ahead.”

I won’t say that I already knew things I didn’t know, but I already had stirrings above the ears and, besides, I didn’t want Wolfe to bust a lung, so I went that way and found him standing with Hewitt a few paces to the rear of the throng.

“Hold everything,” I muttered to him.

“Confound you—”

“I said hold everything.” I cantered off to the phone booths at the front of the room, parted with a nickel and dialed a number and got connected with Extension 19, gave my name and asked for Inspector Cramer. His voice came:

“What do you want?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m helping with the chores. Wolfe and I are up at the Flower Show—”

“I’m busy!”

“Okay. Now you’re busier. Rucker and Dill’s exhibit, third floor, Flower Show. Man murdered. Shot through the top of the head. Lying there on the grass guarded by one bull-necked bull who will never be an inspector. That’s all.”

“Wait a min—”

“Can’t. I’m busy.”

I slid out of the booth and dodged through the traffic back across the room. In that short time the mob surrounding the glade had doubled in size. A glance showed me that the cop and the guard had got reinforcements and Anne and Fred Updegraff were not in sight, and Wolfe and Hewitt had retreated to the other side of the rose garden next door. W. G. Dill was with them. Wolfe glared at me as I approached. He was still hanging onto those measly plants and was speechless with rage.

“... feel a sort of responsibility,” Hewitt was saying. “I am Honorary Chairman of the Committee. I don’t like to shirk responsibility, but what can I do — just look at them—”

“That policeman,” Dill said. “Imbecile. Wouldn’t let me in my own exhibit. Broke my shoulder blade. It feels like it.” He worked his shoulder up and down, grimacing. “There’s the doctor — no—”

“A doctor won’t help any. He’s dead.”

They looked at me. Dill stopped working his shoulder. “Dead? Dead!” He darted off and burrowed into the crowd.

“You said he had an attack,” Hewitt regarded me accusingly. “How can he be dead? What did he die of?”

“He ceased breathing.”

“Archie,” Wolfe said in his most crushing tone. “Stop that. I asked you an hour ago to take these plants. Take them, and take me home.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the plants. “But I can’t leave yet. I’m looking—”

“Good heavens,” Hewitt said. “What a calamity... poor Dill... I must see... excuse me...” He marched off towards the main stair.

At that instant I caught sight of an object I had been halfway expecting to see. I only got a glimpse of the gray coat with its collar of 14th Street squirrel, for she came from the other side and disappeared into the crowd. I put the pots on the floor at the edge of the rose garden and dashed off before Wolfe could say a word. I didn’t care how sore it made him because he had it coming to him after his degrading performance with Hewitt, but I admit I glanced back over my shoulder as I went to see if he was throwing something. His face was purple. I’ll bet he lost ten pounds that afternoon.

I skirted the throng and went into it on the other side. In a minute I saw her, squirming through to the front. I took it easy working through to her because I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, and, getting right behind her, saw that the blue leather bag was under her right arm. I shifted Wolfe’s coat to my own right arm and under its cover got my fingers on the end of the bag and pulled gently. It started coming, and she was so interested in what she was trying to see around the people still in front of her that she didn’t notice it even when the bag was out from under her arm and safely under Wolfe’s coat. I kept an eye on her as I backed out, apologizing to the flower lovers as I went, and as soon as I was in the clear turned and made for the stairs.

In the men’s room on the second floor I spent a nickel to achieve privacy and sat down and opened the bag, which was monogrammed “RL.” It inventoried about as usual, handkerchief and compact and purse and so on, but it also had what I was after, her name and address. They were on an envelope addressed to Miss Rose Lasher, 326 Morrow Street, New York City, which checked with the RL on the bag. I copied it in my notebook. The letter inside was from Ellie and explained why she hadn’t paid back the two dollars. And another item was more than I had bargained for. It was a clipping from the Gazette of a picture of Harry and Anne playing mumblety-peg. It had cut edges, not torn, and was neatly folded.

I put everything back in, went back to the third floor, worked my way into the crowd, not taking it so easy this time, found her in the front row against the rope, and put my hand on her shoulder. Her head twisted around.

“Will you please—” she began indignantly.

“Okay, sister. It’s me. Here’s your bag.”

“My bag!”

“You dropped it and I risked life and limb to get it. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Sure it’s mine!” She grabbed it.

“Say think you.”

She mumbled something and was through with me. I glanced at the scene. The cast had been augmented. The contents of two radio police cars, four of them in uniform, were there in the glade, one of them standing at Harry’s feet watching a doctor, who was on his knees applying a stethoscope. W. G. Dill stood at the cop’s side, his hands in his pockets, scowling. There was no sign that anyone had got interested in the moss on the rocks. I backed out again without bruising anyone seriously and circled around to the rose garden to rejoin Wolfe.

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. Your father .

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.”

“Why did you notice that?”

“Ah,” I said, “now you’ve got me. I give up. I’m trapped. Why does anybody notice anything?”

“Especially a nervous man like you,” he said sarcastically. “What were you doing there? Why did you come here?”

“I brought Mr. Wolfe.”

“Did he come here on a case?”

“You know damn well he didn’t. He never goes anywhere on a case. He came to look at flowers.”

“Why were you there at that particular exhibit?”

“For the same reason that other people were. To watch Miss Tracy dabble her feet in the pool.”

“Did you know Miss Tracy? Or Gould?”

“No.”

“Did you, Wolfe?”

“No,” Wolfe said.

Cramer resumed with me. “And smelling the cordite and seeing the hole in the moss and feeling the one in his head, how did you figure someone had shot him? By lying hidden in the bushes and aiming through a crack in the rocks?”

“Now have a heart, Inspector.” I grinned at him. “If you’re not careful you’ll trap me again. At the moment I didn’t do much figuring, but that was over an hour ago and you know what my brain is when it gets started. Gould took his nap at the same hour each day, and he put his head in exactly the same spot—”

“How do you know that?”

“Mr. Wolfe has been sending me here to look at orchids. That’s a matter I’d rather not dwell on. The pile of rocks was only eight or nine inches from his head. Place a gun among the rocks at the right height, wedge it in, aimed the right way, and replace the moss. The rocks and the moss would muffle the report so that no one would notice it in that big noisy room — or what if they did notice it? Fasten a string to the trigger — make it green string so it won’t be seen among the foliage. At the proper time, which will be anywhere between four and four thirty, pull the string.”

“Pull the string how? From where?”

“Oh, suit yourself.” I waved a hand. “Hide in the bushes and after you’ve pulled it sneak out the door at the back of the exhibit that leads to the corridor. Or if the string’s long enough, run it through the crack at the bottom of the door and then you can pull it from the corridor, which would be safer. Or if you want to be fancy, tie the string to the doorknob and it will be pulled by whoever opens the door from the corridor side. Or if you want to be still fancier, run the string around the trunk of a bush and have its end a loop dangling into the pool, and take off your shoes and stockings and swish your feet around in the pool, and catch the loop with your toes and give it a jerk, and who would ever suspect—”

“That’s a lie!”

That blurted insult came from Fred Updegraff. He confronted me, and his chin was not only serious, it was bigoted, and anyone might have thought I was a caterpillar eating his best peony.

“Nonsense!” came another blurt, from W. G. Dill, who didn’t leave his chair.

“It seems to me—” Lewis Hewitt began sarcastically.

“Pooh,” I said. “You cavaliers. I wouldn’t harm a hair of her head. Don’t you suppose the Inspector had thought of that? I know how his mind works—”

“Can it,” Cramer growled. “The way your mind works.” His eyes were narrowed at me. “We’ll discuss that a little later, when I’m through with Miss Tracy. The gun was wedged among the rocks and covered with the moss, and the string was tied to the trigger, and the string was green, so you’re quite a guesser—”

“How long was the string?”

“Long enough to reach. What else do you know?”

I shook my head. “If you can’t tell guessing from logic—”

“What else do you know?”

“Nothing at present.”

“We’ll see.” Cramer looked around. “If there’s a room where I can go with Miss Tracy—”

The man who had been writing at a desk stood up. “Certainly, Inspector. That door there—”