The look in his eye took me back to high school days. It was the hand-holding look. Flutter, my heart, bliss looms and ecstasy, I shall hold her little hand in mine! I looked at Anne with pride. A girl who could enkindle Lewis Hewitt to the extent of a black orchid and a dinner on Tuesday, and on Thursday forment the hand-holding hankering in a pure young peony-grower — a girl with a reach like that was something.
At that moment, I admit, she wasn’t so overwhelming. She looked pretty dilapidated. She said to Wolfe, “I have to be at the District Attorney’s office at ten in the morning. I said I would. I don’t mind them asking me questions about that — what happened there today — but what I’m afraid of now, I’m afraid they’ll ask me about my father. If they do, what am I going to say? Am I going to admit—” She stopped and her lip started to tremble and she put her teeth on it.
“You need a lawyer,” Fred declared. “I’ll get one. I don’t know any in New York—”
“I do,” Wolfe said. “Sit down, Mr. Updegraff.” His eyes moved to Anne. “There’s a bed here, Miss Tracy, and you’d better use it. You look tired. I doubt if the police will ask you about your father. If they do, don’t answer. Refer them to Mr. Dill. They’re much more apt to be inquisitive about your engagement to marry Mr. Gould.”
“But I wasn’t!”
“Apparently he thought you were.”
“But he couldn’t. He knew very well I didn’t like him! And he—” She stopped.
“He what?”
“I won’t say that. He’s dead.”
“Had he asked you to marry him?”
“Yes, he had.”
“And you refused?”
“Yes.”
“But you consented to perform that rustic charade at the Flower Show with him?”
“I didn’t know he was going to be in it — not when Mr. Dill asked me to do it, about two months ago, when he first thought of it. It was going to be another man, a young man in the office. Then Mr. Dill told me Harry Gould was going to do it. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t want to object because I couldn’t afford to offend — I mean Mr. Dill had been so kind about my father — not having him arrested and letting me pay it off gradually—”
“Call it kind if you want to,” Fred blurted indignantly. “My lord, your father had worked for him for twenty years!”
Wolfe ignored him. “Was Mr. Gould pestering you? About marrying him?”
“Not pestering me, no. I was—” Anne bit her lip. “I just didn’t like him.”
“Had you known him long?”
“Not very long. I’m in the office and he was outside. I met him, I don’t know, maybe three months ago.”
“Did your father know him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think they ever met. Father was — had left before Harry came to work there. Harry used to work on the Hewitt estate on the other side of Richdale.”
“So I understand. Do you know why he quit?”
“No, I didn’t know him then.”
“Have you any idea who killed him?”
“No,” she said.
I lifted a brow, not ostentatiously. She said it too quick and she shaded it wrong. There was enough change in tempo and tone to make it at least ten to one that she was telling a whopper. That was bad. Up to that everything had been wholesome and straightforward, and all of a sudden without any warning that big fly plopped in the milk. I cocked an eye at Fred, and of course he hadn’t caught it. But Wolfe had. His eyes had gone nearly shut.
He started after her. He kept it polite and friendly, but he went at her from every angle and direction. And for the second time that night he got the can sent back empty by a juvenile female. After a solid hour of it he didn’t have even a hint of what it was she was keeping tucked away under her hair, whether it was a suspicion or a fact or a deduction she had made from a set of circumstances. Neither did I. But she was sitting on some kind of lid, and she was smart enough to see that Wolfe knew it and was trying to jostle her off.
It was half past one when Fred Updegraff looked at his watch and stood up again and said it was late and he would take Miss Tracy home.
Wolfe shook his head. “She’s exhausted and it’s twenty-five miles and there are no trains. She can sleep here. I want to speak to her in the morning before she goes to the District Attorney’s office. Archie, will you please see that the north room is in order?”
That meant my room and my bed. Anne started to protest, but not with much spirit, and I went and got Fritz and took him upstairs with me to help change sheets and towels. As I selected a pajama suit for her from the drawer, tan with brown stripes, and put it on the turned down sheet, I reflected that things were moving pretty fast, considering that it was less than ten hours since she had first spoken to me and we never had actually been introduced. Fritz took my sheets and pillow and a blanket downstairs and I went up one flight to the plant rooms and cut three black orchids, one from each plant, and returned and put them in a vase on the bed table. Hewitt had given her one.
On my way downstairs I stopped at the door to the south room and listened. No sound. I tried the door; it was bolted on the inside. I knocked, not very loud. Rose’s voice came:
“Who is it?”
“Clark Gable,” I called. “Good night, Ruby.”
In the lower hall I met Anne coming out of the office, escorted by Fritz. I suppose it would have been more genteel to take her up myself, but it would have been a temptation to get sentimental there among my own furniture, so I told her good night and let her go. In the office Wolfe was alone, in his chair with his arms folded and his chin down; evidently Fred had departed. I began taking cushions from the couch and tossing them into a corner, getting ready to fix my bed.
“Two of them,” Wolfe growled.
“Two of what?”
“Women. Nannygoats.”
“Not Anne. She’s more like a doe. More like a gazelle.”
“Bah.”
“More like a swan.” I flipped a sheet over the couch and tucked it in. “I put three black orchids at her bedside. One from each plant.”
“I told Theodore to put them in the fumigating room.”
“He did. That’s where I found them.” I spread the blanket. “I thought we might as well get all the pleasure we can out of them before they’re returned to Hewitt.”
“They’re not going to be returned.”
“Oh, I expect they are.” I hung my coat and vest over a chair and sat down to take off my shoes. “It seems a pity. Two girls up there in bed, and if you knew what they know, or probably what either one of them knows, you’d have it sewed up. Rose actually saw the murderer set the trap. I don’t know what Anne saw or heard, but she sure does. It’s a darned shame. With all your finesse...” I got my pants off. “...all your extraordinary gifts...” I removed my shirt. “...all your acknowledged genius, your supreme talent in the art of inquest...”
He got up and stalked from the room without a word. I called a cheery good night after him but heard no reply, and after performing a few bedtime chores such as bolting the front door, I laid me down to sleep.
I overdid it. With the house full of company, I intended to be up and about bright and early, but when something jangled my brain alive and I realized it was the phone ringing, I opened my eyes and glanced at my wrist and saw it was after eight o’clock. It was Saul Panzer on the phone calling from Salamanca. I put him through to Wolfe’s room and was told by Wolfe that no record would be required, which was his polite way of telling me to hang up, so I did. A trip to Fritz in the kitchen got me the information that Wolfe already had his breakfast tray, and so did Anne and Rose. I washed and dressed in a hurry, returned to the kitchen for my morning refreshment of grapefruit, ham and eggs, muffins and coffee, and was finishing my second cup when the doorbell rang. Fritz was upstairs at the moment, so I went for it, and through the glass panel saw it was Inspector Cramer, unattended.