The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

Vraiment. I'm glad you told me so I can get things in. Is it a boy?

Yes. It looks like him.

Good. Do you know what I will do? He returned to the range and gestured with the cake turner. I will put cinnamon in everything!

I disapproved and we debated it.

Instead of waiting until Wolfe came down, to report the development, after I had done the morning chores in the office opening the mail, dusting, emptying the wastebaskets, removing sheets from the desk calendars, putting fresh water in the vase on Wolfe's desk I mounted the three flights to the plant rooms. June is not the best show-off month for a collection of orchids, especially not for one like Wolfe's, with more than two hundred varieties. The first room, the tropical, had only a few splotches of color; the next one, the intermediate, was more flashy but nothing like March; the third one, the cool, had more flowers but they're not so gaudy. In the last one, the potting room, Wolfe was at the bench with Theodore Horstmann, inspecting the nodes on a pseudo-bulb. As I approached he turned his head and growled, Well? He is supposed to be interrupted up there only in an emergency.

Nothing urgent, I said. Just to tell you that I'm taking a Cypripedium lawrenceanum hyeanum one flower. To wear. A woman phoned about buttons, and when I meet her at twelve-thirty it will mark me.

When will you leave?

A little before noon. I'll stop at the bank on the way to deposit a check.

Very well. He resumed the inspection. Too busy for questions. I went and got the posy and on down. When he came down at eleven he asked for a verbatim report and got it, and had one question: What about her? I told him his guess was as good as mine, say one chance in ten that she really had it, and when I said I might as well leave sooner and get the overalls from Hirsh and have them with me, he approved.

So when I took post near the newsstand in the lobby of the Chanin Building, a little ahead of time, having learned from the directory that Quinn and Coffin was on the ninth floor, I had the paper bag. That kind of waiting is different, with faces to watch coming and going, male and female, old and young, sure and saggy. About half of them looked as if they needed either a doctor or a lawyer or a detective, including the one who stopped in front of me with her head tilted back. When I said, Miss Epps? she nodded.

I'm Archie Goodwin. Shall we go downstairs? I have reserved, a table.

She shook her head. I always eat lunch alone.