Black Orchids Read Online Free PDF Page A

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