Free Black Orchids by Rex Stout Page A

that-won’t arrest my father?”
    “I couldn’t say, Miss Tracy. The police are unpredictable. Even so, that is highly improbable.” Wolfe’s eyes left her. “And you, Mr. Updegraff? By what bold stroke did Mr. Keems bring you along?”
    “He didn’t bring me.” Fred stood up. “I came.”
    “By pure coincidence? Or automatism?”
    Fred moved forward and put a hand on the back of my chair, which Anne was still sitting in. “I’m protecting Miss Tracy.”
    “Oh. From what?”
    “From everything,” he said firmly. He appeared to have a tendency to talk too loud, and he looked more serious than ever, and the more serious he looked the younger he looked. At that moment he might even have passed for Anne’s younger brother, which was okay, since I had no objection if she wanted to be a sister to him.
    “That’s quite a job,” Wolfe said. “Are you a friend of hers?”
    “I’m more than a friend!” Fred declared defiantly. Suddenly he got as red as a peony. “I mean I-she let me take her home.”
    “You were there when Mr. Keems arrived?”
    “Yes. We had just got there. And I insisted on coming along. It sounded to me like a frame-up. I thought he was lying; I didn’t think he was working for you. It didn’t sound-I’ve heard my father talk about you. He met you once-you probably don’t remember-“
    Wolfe nodded. “At the Atlantic States Exposition. How is he?”
    “Oh, he’s-not very good.” Fred’s color was normal again. “He gave up when we lost the plantation of rhodaleas-he just sat down and quit. He had spent his whole life on it, and of course it was an awful wallop financially too. I suppose you know about it.”
    “I read of it, yes. The Kurume yellows.” Wolfe was sympathetic but casual. “And by the way, someone told me, I forget who, that your father was convinced that his plantation was deliberately infected by Lewis Hewitt, out of pique-or was it Watson or Dill he suspected?”
    “He suspected all of them.” Fred looked uncomfortable. “Everybody. But that was just-he was hardly responsible, it broke him up so. He had been holding back over thirty varieties, the best ones, for ten years, and was going to start distribution this spring. It was simply too much for Dad to take.”
    Wolfe grunted. “It seems to be still on your mind too. Mr. Goodwin tells me you invaded Rucker and Dill’s exhibit this afternoon and made off with an infected twig. As a souvenir?”
    “I-” Fred hesitated. “I guess that was dumb. Of course it’s still on my mind-it darned near ruined us. I wanted to test that twig and see if it was Kurume yellows that had somehow got into the exhibits.”
    “And investigate the how?”
    “I might have. I might have tried to.”
    “You never traced the infection of your plantation?”
    “No. We hadn’t had a thing for two years from any of the people that had had Kurume yellows, except a few Ilex crenata as a gift from Hewitt, and they were from nowhere near his infected area and we had them half a mile from the rhodaleas.” Fred gestured impatiently. “But that’s old prunings. What I was saying, I didn’t think you’d pull a trick like that on Miss Tracy.” A look came into his eyes. “Now I can take her back home.”
    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