Free Black Orchids by Rex Stout Page B

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 fears!”
    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