Black Orchids
Rex Stout
 Millionaire orchid fancier Lewis Hewitt has hybridized three black orchid plants in his Long Island greenhouse. Wolfe is wild to have one, so he and Archie visit New York's annual flower show, where Hewitt's orchids are on exhibit. One of the other exhibits features a daily performance by a young couple miming a summer picnic. The woman, Anne Tracy, attracts the attentions of Archie, Lewis Hewitt, Billy Rose and a young exhibitor named Fred Updegraff. During Wolfe's visit to the show, Anne's picnic partner Harry Gould is killed, shot in the head by a gun concealed in the foliage. The gun's trigger is attached to a long string that reaches to a hallway well behind the exhibit. After a little inquiry, Wolfe shows Hewitt how his expensive Malacca cane was used to pull the string, thus the gun's trigger, and thus to kill Gould. Hewitt is horrified by the prospect of the publicity that would ensue should his part in the shooting, however indirect and unwitting, become known. Wolfe offers Hewitt this arrangement: in exchange for all three black orchid plants, the only ones in existence, Wolfe will solve the murder and deliver the criminal to the police, without publicly disclosing Hewitt's connection to the crime. Hewitt terms it blackmail, but submits. Earlier, Archie had noticed a woman waiting in the hallway behind the exhibit, at around the time that the murderer would have been deploying the string. He now finds her in the crowd that's gawking at the murder scene. In an act of detection that would strain the credulity of someone who was striving to maintain a neutral point of view, Archie steals her handbag, removes it to the men's room, searches it for identification, and learns her name (Rose Lasher) and address. He returns the handbag to her – all without Miss Lasher or anyone else noticing. The police want to know more about her and, finishing their questions, they let her go — but surreptitiously follow her. The police lose her trail but Archie knows her home address, where she has been living with Harry Gould. He arrives at Miss Lasher's apartment just as she is about to flee the city, and takes her to Wolfe's house. There Archie searches her suitcase and finds some printed matter that Rose cannot or will not explain: a clipping of an article by Lewis Hewitt on Kurume yellows, a plant disease that is fatal to broadleaf evergreens; a postcard to Rose from Harry, postmarked Salamanca, New York (in the western part of the state); and a work order from a garage, also in Salamanca. Wolfe gets Miss Lasher to discuss some of Gould's unsavory qualities. Wolfe learns that although Gould was employed as a gardener, he suddenly acquired a bank account containing several thousand dollars and what Miss Lasher terms "a big roll of bills." From his general awareness of horticultural events, Wolfe knows that an attack of Kurume yellows devastated a plantation of a new hybrid of broadleaf evergreens, about eighty miles west of Salamanca and owned by Updegraff Nurseries. Weighing all this information, Wolfe concludes that Gould had known the Updegraff plantation had been deliberately infected, and was blackmailing the miscreant – who then killed Gould. Wolfe gathers the main players in an appropriate location – his plant rooms, specifically the fumigating room – and exposes the murderer's identity. Wolfe therefore keeps the black orchids, which subsequently have a cameo role in the second novella in this collection, "Cordially Invited to Meet Death."