Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 138, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 821 & 822, September/October 2011

A Wolfe in Chic Clothing by Loren D. Estleman

The Boston Globe has said of Loren D. Estleman that he’s “a writer of a sort increasingly rare... so given to his work as to spontaneously combust to genius.” EQMM agrees; there are touches of brilliance in almost everything this extraordinarily versatile writer writes. The series to which this new story belongs is Mr. Estleman’s homage to Rex Stout, and it stands out, in part, due to its quietly witty prose. For something more in the hardboiled line by the Michigan author, see his new Amos Walker P.I. novel, Infernal Angels.

I saw it coining the minute the little boob took Too Many Cooks down from the shelf. I just didn’t know what lunatic form it would take this time.

He kept all his first-edition Nero Wolfes, bound for him in green cloth — his favorite color — within easy reach because he never made a move without consulting the Gospel According to Archie Goodwin. He’d cracked that nut ten thousand times, but always managed to pick out something fresh to nibble on.

If you’re familiar with the series, you know Wolfe is a fat eccentric genius who solves baffling mysteries (usually of the murder sort) when he isn’t busy growing orchids or eating ritzy food prepared by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Claudius Lyon — who wasn’t born with that name but picked it up because it’s Nero Wolfe inside out, more or less — is just as fat, and eccentric enough for both of them, but as to genius — well, there’s a fine line between it and goofy. He’s also a good foot shorter, a fact he failed to consider when he bought his Wolfe-ish townhouse in Brooklyn and filled it with furniture built to his idol’s scale. As a result, the big green leather chair behind the Uruguayan fruitwood desk swallows him up when he sits in it and his teeny feet swing six inches short of the floor.

Nevertheless, he sits in it four hours every weekday, two in the morning and two in the late afternoon, because that’s what Wolfe does. The rest of the day he spends with his tomatoes in the plant room on the roof and feeding his fat face with brisket and gefilte cooked by Gus, who is regarded as the finest kosher chef in the five boroughs — regarded by Gus, anyway. I can barely stomach the stuff myself, but it’s better than what they feed you in Sing Sing, and it’s part of my salary.

Lyon isn’t nearly as busy a detective as Wolfe, which is swell by me on account of the royalties he gets from an invention of his dead father’s pays the bills. He doesn’t charge for his services anyway. He can’t, without a private investigator’s license and with Captain Stoddard chomping at the bit to bust him the minute a dollar appears in his chubby little fist for a feat of detection. Stoddard’s the meanest man in the Brooklyn P.D., an institution that never recruited anyone on the basis of genteel good manners.

Me, I’m only here because my name is Arnie Woodbine. I type ten errors a minute and the best deduction I ever made put me in the joint for the second time, but when you say the name fast it sounds kind of like Archie Goodwin, who takes notes and does the heavy lifting for Wolfe and writes about his boss’s exploits for suety little bookworms like Lyon to read.

Too Many Cooks takes the fat Manhattan genius on a rare train trip to a chefs’ convention, which, of course, leads to murder or Goodwin wouldn’t have bothered to publish the account. Wolfe never leaves his brownstone on business, but will do so for recreation if it has anything to do with orchids or haute cuisine. So this time the story gave Lyon the bright idea that he needed to do the same. How could anyone take his loony masquerade seriously if he didn’t do everything his role model did, straight down the line?

The catch was, growing orchids is beyond his abilities, and there are no tomato-growing shows because they would be as boring as his shift in the plant room, which he uses to sneak a few chapters of Trixie Belden and the Bobbsey Twins. Any quadruple amputee with the IQ of a TV weather girl can turn a tomato seed into a tomato. As for preparing food for dining, Lyon can’t make a sandwich. Those things stumped him for a while. He sat dandling his sausage-shaped legs under the big desk, pouting like a fat baby making up its mind where to throw its bowl of strained kale. Which bothered me, because without a client or a whodunit to distract him I couldn’t risk adding a zero to my pay-check with him there in the room.

This went on for an hour after he put down the book. I went out for the mail, and when I came back with his copies of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Shoots & Sprouts (“Ketchup vs. Catsup: The Controversy Escalates”), I found him foraging deep in one ear with a chunky forefinger. That gesture was his version of Wolfe pushing his lips in and out to indicate he’d untied a knotty problem after much deliberation.

“Arnie,” he said, fastidiously wiping his finger with a green silk handkerchief, “where do you stand in regard to the opera?”

“A block away. Farther if I’m driving. Why, fixing to snag a hat with horns and pigtails and waddle into the chorus?” Actually I can take the music or leave it, galloping hippos and all, but I got pinched once picking pockets in the lobby of the Met, and my mug was taped to every ticket booth in town.

“I’ve never given it much consideration myself. Goodwin hardly ever mentions the subject, so I must infer it presents no diversion to his employer.” Yeah, he talks like that. I went online so many times to figure out what he was getting at, the Internet stopped taking my calls. Goodwin, I hear, is on his third Webster’s Second. “However, one adjusts as necessary.”

I made my face discreet. He encouraged me to needle him, like you-know-who does you-know-who, but rubbing it in about botany and vittles would be doing the polka on thin ice. His pudgy kisser screwed tight and turned purple when he got sore; no sight to take to lunch.

“I’ll see what’s playing.” I sat down at my desk and turned on the monitor.

“That would be placing the conveyance in reverse order with the equine. Call my tailor.”

“You have a tailor?” He dresses good, give or take an untucked shirttail, in three-piece suits and a tie, after His Portliness, but I assumed he did his shopping in the Husky Boy section at Skinnerman’s. At the time I hadn’t been with him long enough for him to split his britches and require a replacement.

“Certainly. I’m not a cowpuncher. Krekor Messassarian, spelled the way it sounds. He’s in the Brooklyn directory.”

Again to spare me the spectacle of that angry Gerber face I refrained from pointing out that the Yellow Pages is a dandy place to look up somebody from 1993, and opened it. Messassarian wasn’t as hard to find as I’d thought; I slid my finger down that column under Clothing and Alterations until I came to a name that ran smack into the margin.

I got him right away. The heavily accented voice walked me through the pronunciation of his name and agreed to come by that evening for dinner and a first fitting.

He turned out to be an Armenian of seventy or a hundred, with bloodhound features and spectacles as thick as glass ashtrays. The badge of his profession, a length of yellow tape measure, hung around his neck. He smelled like a canvas dropcloth that had been left out on the back porch for a year. Messassarian takes too long to write, so I’ll just call him Musty.

His head bent close to his blintz to see what he was eating. I couldn’t imagine how he handled a bitty thing like a needle. Lyon said he wanted a full-dress suit with all the trimmings: white tie, silk hat, and cape with a white satin lining. If the opera scheme didn’t pan out, he could always put on the getup and argue Home Rule for Ireland with Queen Victoria. In the front room I helped out by taking Musty’s dog-eared memorandum book while he measured and recorded the dimensions, which were fantastic. The circumference was the same as the height and the inseam was my collar size. A few dozen more bagels with a shmear and a case of cream sodas and Lyon could go to the Summer Olympics as the beach volleyball.

The old tailor made miserable noises as he went about his business. I guessed it was all the kneeling and squatting and stooping and having to get back up, or maybe it was his way of humming on the job; but Lyon, who knew him better, noticed it, too, and inquired about his health.

“Fit as fiddles,” the other assured him, and that seemed to end the conversation on the subject. Then he stopped in the middle of measuring for armholes and said, “I am robbed.”

Lyon started, chins quivering. “I was under the impression my account was up to date.”

“Oh, not by you, Mister Clod.” I swear that’s what he called him. I don’t doctor these reports. “Someone in my own shop is the culprit. He — or she — has made off with the rarest coin in my collection.”

That put the kibosh on that fitting. Aida and tomatoes and even the fancy dining, look out! When a mystery reared its big black question-mark-shaped head, everything else was window dressing. As I said, I’m not convinced science would thank Lyon for willing his brain to it, but the only time he didn’t seem like just a cheap knockoff was when he had a Gordian knot to sink his fat little fingers into. We adjourned to the office, where Musty sat in the big orange leather chair reserved for the guest of honor while his host squirmed happily on the other side, gulping cream soda and burping a merry little tune.

The Armenian, we found out, liked to fool around with obsolete hard currency when he wasn’t cutting out suits. He had, he flattered himself, one of the best collections in three counties, exhibited at shows, and two years ago had been named to the Numismatists Hall of Fame by Jingle, the magazine of the trade.

“I must confess,” he confessed, with another little groan, “to carelessness on occasion. Many is the time I’ve neglected to return a coin to its case after taking it out for examination or to show to a colleague, and have panicked upon this discovery until the item resurfaced among a jumble of lesser coins on my work table. I am struggling to eliminate this fault.”

“Phooey.” Try as he had, the little poseur had never been able to duplicate the Master’s Pfui; each attempt peppered his blotter with spit, so he’d given it up as unsightly and unsanitary. “An overmeticulous man is twice as likely as a slovenly one to make a catastrophic mistake. Please continue.”

The coin that had gone astray this time was a doozy: the only known surviving shekel minted in the first century B.C. by one Axolotl II — the Great, was the moniker historians had hung on him. He was a Persian king who had ordered it to be issued to commemorate some great victory or other over a province in China.

“In gold, natch,” I interjected, and got Lyon’s peeved-baby look for the effort. I bent over my scratch pad to record the proceedings.

“Zinc, actually.” Musty kept his gaze on Lyon. “The material is not so important as the historical value. A most unusual design, no larger than a nickel, but pierced above and below and to each side of Axolotl’s embossed profile, representing the four directions of the compass. To the East, the wisdom of the Orient; to the North, the ferocity of the barbarian hordes; to the West, the might of imperial Rome; and to the South, the culture of ancient Greece. Legend says the king was going blind, and decreed the coin contain these tactile features that he might still appreciate its significance by touch. I am myself nearsighted, which may explain my interest.”

“Splendid. Our mints are more concerned with befuddling potential counterfeiters than celebrating man’s accomplishments.”

“What’s this doodad worth?” I asked.

“Thousands. It’s the biggest investment I ever made.”

I checked this notation. I had as good a chance of laying hands on it as anyone, and I knew a fence who dealt in coins.

Musty groaned again. “It is the old story. When I saw the case was empty, I naturally assumed I’d blundered again and that it would resurface. I’d had it out recently for cataloguing, so that appeared probable. Yet a number of thorough searches of the shop have failed to turn it up.”

“Have you consulted the police?” Lyon’s reedy tenor always climbs to a squeak when he refers to the authorities. They represent Captain Stoddard in his mind, and he’s even more afraid of that particular paid-up member of the barbarian hordes than I am; and I’m the expert on life in the cooler.

“I am tom as to whether I should. My people have been with me a long time, and I should not wish to subject them to the humiliation of questioning.”

I made a mental note to remember Krekor Messassarian. If my billet with Lyon ever blew up, I couldn’t think of a better sheep to fleece.

Lyon excavated his diamond-and-platinum watch from its vest pocket and folds of fat; the best dip in the state could lose fingers trying to lift it if the pigeon moved wrong. I’d had my eye on it myself, but I doubted I could fool him with a tin ringer. Anyway, he was a chicken you could pluck from here to Easy Street if you avoided flash.

“It’s late, and I have a morning appointment to show a prime specimen of Eastern Plum to an official with the Knickerbocker Tomato Council, which may name the species in my honor.” This was news to me, and therefore a bald-faced lie, as I was in charge of all communications into and out of the townhouse. Never underestimate the capacity of a little round speck in the firmament to pump himself up into a prize ass. “Please provide Mr. Woodbine with the particulars, including the names of all the members of your staff, and he will conduct a discreet inquiry in the morning.”

He hopped down from his chair and circled the desk to offer a puffy little hand. This was the supreme tribute, as in imitation of his personal deity he seldom made physical contact with others of his genus. Musty’s reaction was transparent and unappreciative; it was like kneading dough. Lyon entered his private elevator, whose gears hawked and spat and started pulling him up hand over hand to his bedroom.

I spent a quarter-hour wheedling the names and known history of the people who worked for him out of the sap — the old tailor, I mean; it doesn’t do to tip one’s mitt in front of a pumpkin ripe for the thumping — at the end of which he fingered his tape measure, adjusted the twin aquariums he wore over his eyes, and said, “You will be discreet? People think tailors are relics nowadays. The men’s store at Skinnerman’s offers better benefits, and doesn’t care whether a seam is stitched by hand or fused with glue. I wouldn’t know how to replace them if they’re offended enough to resign.”

“Trust me, Mus — Mr. Messassarian,” I said. Hadn’t I sold a venture capitalist his own boat, with his bottle of Asti Spumante still chilling in the refrigerator? “They’ll think I’m there to tell ’em they won the Irish Sweepstakes.”

He went out the front door with a puzzled expression on his long weary face. Sometimes I lay it on as thick as a thirty-dollar steak. Lyon is such an easy mark I’m in danger of losing my fine edge. A man needs a challenge if he’s going to hold his own on the pro circuit.

Bright and early the next morning I was in the Brooklyn garment district, which looks a lot like the New York original of times gone by, with workers pushing carts of suits, coats, and dresses hanging from rails across the street any old where in the block and displays of irregulars in front of cut-rate shops and gaggles of colorful characters pretending to chew the fat on the corners while waiting for something to fall off the back of a truck. Very early Runyon. Messassarian & Sons operated out of a walk-up with an open flight of stairs with advertisements stenciled on the risers offering alterations and merchandise. From the age of the layout I figured Krekor Messassarian was one of the original sons.

The room took up an entire floor, with bolts of material on racks and a cutting table the size of an indoor swimming pool littered with paper patterns and pieces of fabric and big shears and thousands of pins glittering under strong overhead lights. There was a unisex changing booth behind a curtain and a platform in front of a three-way mirror where the customer du jour could stand and keep an eye on what the tailors were doing with his inseam.

“Just routine,” Musty said, introducing me to his staff. “For the insurance. Just routine.” If I was the one who’d copped the coin I’d have been diving for the fire escape the third time he said it was just routine. They all gave me the fish-eye and went on about their work while the boss showed me the locked cabinet where he kept his collection, with a little shelf built under it for spreading it out and examining it under a strong glass. There were loose coins on the shelf he said were no great shakes, mixed up with needles and other gear that had wandered away from the work area. The cabinet lock was a Taft. I could have picked it with an uncooked noodle.

He had a picture of the missing piece. The Persian king was a weak-chinned jasper with a hoop in his ear. He looked like a female impersonator.

I’d Googled him. He’d gone to war with Rome and lost, the northern barbarians had kicked his butt, and he’d managed to get the Chinese province to sue for peace because the emperor was too busy fighting off the Mongols to give him any time. He spent half his life as a hostage held for tribute and had choked to death on a fig. The way I saw it, “Axolotl the Adequate” suited him better. But his coin was worth, well, a king’s ransom.

Messassarian had three people on staff: a nephew named Norman Pears, shaped like his surname, who at middle age looked a little less like a bloodhound than his uncle, but he had thirty years to catch up; Constance Ayers, his bookkeeper, who wouldn’t do any harm to an evening gown and a good set of highlights, but whose mannish suit and mousy brown bun took her down to a seven; and Aurelius Gaglan, a master tailor, who was nearly as old as his employer but dressed better, an advertisement for the concern in a fawn flannel suit shaped to his narrow frame, with a fine head of black hair with white sidewalls.

Musty had given me the lowdown on them all the night before. He’d hesitated a bit over Miss Ayers, and when I pressed him he’d admitted she had money troubles, something to do with a deadbeat ex-husband who had left her with bills to pay.

“I have no reason to suspect her, however,” he’d added quickly. “She’s been with me for years, and her accounts always balance to the penny. If she were tempted, she could have robbed me blind, without risking so blatant a theft.”

But I know a little something about temptation and opportunity, so I saved her for dessert. I set up my interrogation in Musty’s office, a pebbled-glass cubicle in a corner out of earshot of the others if we kept our voices low. From behind a desk heaped with books of bound fabric samples, I started with Norman Pears.

“I don’t care a jot for Uncle Krekor’s little bits of metal.” He slumped in the visitor’s chair with his knees open and his little pot belly nesting between his thighs. “For one thing, I’m not into collecting anything, and for another, I’m set to inherit when he shoves off. The business isn’t much, but if you’re any sort of detective you can tell he’s never spent a nickel more on it or himself than he had to. A careful man could live comfortably on what he’s put away for the rest of his life.”

Musty had told me Pears was in his will; he was his only family. “Maybe you couldn’t wait. Does not collecting anything include debts?”

“You mean is there a shylock or a bookie in my closet? If there is, you’ll find him, if you’re any sort of detective.”

That was the second time around for that dig. I didn’t like the creep, but then I don’t have much in common with anyone who doesn’t have a shylock or a bookie in his closet. “Okey-doke. Shoo in Mr. Gaglan.”

The tailor was a gentleman, which meant he kept his opinion of my fused-not-stitched seams to himself and the expression on his face. This one collected suits, but since he got the material at cost and did his own fittings they weren’t really an extravagance. He was a widower who lived in a furnished room and said he made more money working in the shop than he needed. I wanted even more for him to be guilty than Pears based on that.

Miss Ayers couldn’t afford to collect anything. She was so high-strung I wanted to marry her myself just so I could have the pleasure of dumping her.

“I’m the most honest person in the world! I’m so honest I think everyone else is honest, too, which is why I’m in this fix.”

“What fix is that?”

“Owing more than I can ever pay. I know Mr. Messassarian told you. He has no right to share my personal troubles with a stranger.”

“If you’re so sore about it, you shouldn’t have shared them with him.”

“I needed to confide in someone, and he’s so absent-minded I never thought he’d remember we had the conversation.”

“Maybe you thought he’d forget he ever had that coin.”

She jumped up and left, making a noise like a cat on helium.

“It’s her,” I told Lyon. “When I sat her down I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, but she managed to talk me into it. If she takes the stand in her defense the judge will tack on twenty years for something they were trying next-door.”

He was pouting again. Entering the tomato room without knocking, I’d caught him peeking at the ending of The Haunted Mill when he should have been fertilizing the beefsteaks. “You’ve already implicated Norman Pears and Aurelius Gaglan. You’re no Archie Goodwin.”

“I’m glad you admit it. It’s the first step to coming clean and saying you’re not Nero Wolfe.”

“Stop being nonsensical. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t make the same dismal case against three people.”

“Maybe they’re all in it together.”

He took off his apron. It said CHEFS DO IT THREE TIMES A DAY. It was the last time he’d made me do his damn shopping. “Office hours approach. When we get there, be good enough to provide me with a complete description of the establishment.”

I took the stairs and beat him; the elevator is as reliable as Lyon is a horticulturist. He heard my report, guzzling cream soda and kicking his feet, then looked at the picture Musty had given me of the coin. He put it down and massaged his brain through his ear. Then he told me to get the tailor on the phone. I listened on the extension, wrote down some names and numbers, and dialed the first before he could give me my marching orders. That annoyed him more than my outracing the elevator, because he hated not being ahead of everyone else no matter what.

There were four, all men. He spoke to them not quite in order, one of the lines being busy so he had to try again after consulting with the next name on the list. That got his goat too, on account of that kind of thing never seems to happen to Wolfe. The conversations were brief. He hit pay dirt on the fourth, which would have been the third if the party hadn’t been yakking with someone else the first time he tried, but by then he was in too good a mood to throw a tantrum over it.

I put the kibosh on that by using the phone again.

“Who the devil are you calling?”

“The liquor store. We’re out of gin and I know how you get when a guest asks for something and you can’t give it to him.”

“Who said anything about inviting a guest?”

“No one had to. This is the point in the story where the fat detective hauls all the suspects into his office and exposes his gray matter.”

“Put the phone down!”

I hung up. I’m an embezzler, not insubordinate.

He bellowed for Gus, who came shuffling in wearing his rusty tailcoat. “Was it something?” he asked.

“How is our supply of spirits?”

“Gin we don’t got.”

Lyon thanked him and sent him back to the kitchen. Then he turned to me. “Call the liquor store.”

He waited in the front room working Minute Mysteries in Gus’s collection of Cooking for Schlemiels until showtime. It tore him up not being able to make his entrance directly from the elevator like the other tub of lard, but at the last shindig it had gotten stuck and the fire department had to be called, so until we found a repairman as old as the installation he wasn’t risking any more such embarrassment in front of company.

I put Messassarian, Pears, Gaglan, and Constance Ayers in green chairs and gave the big orange one to a doughy jasper named Homer Sayles, owner of Homer Sayles Home Sales. That mark of distinction puzzled the others, who had been no less surprised to see him at all at that address. Everyone recognized him and greeted him by name.

I was happy on a couple of counts. For once I knew what Lyon had up his sleeve besides flab. It had come out during that last phone call, and since Wolfe never did his own dialing, his protégé couldn’t break training just to keep me in the dark. The absence of Captain Stoddard contributed to my air of well-being; this one was outside his jurisdiction, so he didn’t have an excuse to show up and make us wet ourselves when he yelled.

Lyon came in carrying the prop tomato plant for his desk, made a little bow like a toy ducking bird, and hopped onto his chair. His can of soda was waiting. He popped the top, filled a Betty Rubble glass, and passed a little wind.

“I’ve invited Mr. Sayles, who is germane to the matter at hand,” he said, fanning the air with his green handkerchief. “You’ll remember, Mr. Messassarian, that his was one of the names you mentioned when I called to ask about the customers who came to pick up their suits the day Axolotl the Great’s coin went missing.”

The Armenian slid his thick bifocals up and down his long nose, playing miniature trombone. “Yes, but as I told you, all those men are above suspicion.”

“Phooey. However, all four of the men you named are, to flatter your gullible turn of phrase, above suspicion in this matter. So are Mr. Pears, Mr. Gaglan, and Miss Ayers. In fact, Mr. Messassarian, you are the only person present who is not.”

Musty dropped his teeth. I’m not batting around a cliché. They bounced off the Yugoslavian rug and landed under his chair, where I had to get down on my hands and knees to snare them. After that he sat nervously clacking together the uppers and lowers.

“I was inclined at first to suspect Miss Ayers. Of all of you, her finances are the worst, and she became positively hysterical during her interview with Mr. Woodbine. But she is a woman, and therefore given to inexplicable displays of emotion.”

The bookkeeper illustrated his point by taking off a shoe and throwing it at him. He squeaked and ducked. Her heel struck Andy Warhol’s tomato soup can on the wall behind Lyon’s head, cracking the glass in the frame. He wiped his face with the hanky and continued.

“Mr. Pears was my next choice. He stands to inherit, and I’m convinced he has no interest in coins, but he made an unfavorable impression on Mr. Woodbine, whose character judgment is sound. But that was inconclusive.”

The roly-poly fraud was making it up as he went along; I’d been arrested twice by policewomen who looked like perfectly respectable hookers. But any sort of character judgment would look uncanny next to his. He’d hired me.

“I had high hopes for Mr. Gaglan. He appears to have no motive and is well-bred, which as we all know predisposes him toward guilt. The culprit is always the least likely suspect. I cite Agatha Christie, Philo Vance, and Mathilda Pearl Worthwhistle for establishing precedent and upholding it. Mrs. Worthwhistle’s The Corpse Blew a Raspberry is — but I digress.”

Norman Pears’s little pot belly quivered. “So by eliminating everyone else in the shop, you arrived at the conclusion that it has to be Uncle Krekor. What a demented polyp you are.”

Lyon did a fine job of imitating Wolfe’s immunity to insult, by which I mean he didn’t actually burst out crying, just looked like he was about to. I don’t know I’d blame him if he did. I’ve had hemorrhoids I got along with better than Pears, but calling Lyon a demented polyp was hitting it square on the head. A furious clacking from the direction of Messassarian’s lap indicated he agreed.

“You haven’t said why Mr. Sayles is here.” The Ayers woman had her shoe back on, but the way the broken heel wobbled when she crossed her legs drew a picture of her sense of composure.

“The reason I asked him to join us is he was fitted by Mr. Messassarian for a tuxedo. The three other customers who claimed their purchases that day were fitted for ordinary business suits.”

Aurelius Gaglan had a polite, quizzical smile on his mild face. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Mr. Sayles is to be honored by the Brooklyn Real Property Association as its Realtor of the Year. The banquet is not until next week, and since he has faith in his tailor, he saw no reason to don it until that evening.

“On the telephone I asked him the same three questions I’d asked the others. One: Have you examined the suit? Two: Have you noticed anything unusual about it? Three: Would you examine it now, purely to satisfy my curiosity? Mr. Sayles was the only man who answered no to question number one.”

Miss Ayers said, “If you don’t start making sense soon, I’ll throw the other shoe.”

He cringed and stepped on the gas. “This is a picture of the coin. Had I seen it yesterday, this meeting would not have been necessary.”

I took the photo from him and handed it to Gaglan, whose polite smile broadened when he saw it. He passed it to the woman. She squealed and giggled. Pears snatched it from her, looked, said, “Oh, for hell’s sake,” and gave it to his uncle. Musty put his teeth back in, hemp fibers and all, peered through his lenses, shook his head, and gave me the expression of a hound dog that had lost the scent.

Lyon focused on Homer Sayles. “You brought it as I asked?” The Realtor of the Year nodded briskly and spoke for the first time. “I gave it to Mr. Woodbine.”

I went out and brought it back from the hall closet on its hanger. On the boss’s instructions I unzipped the vinyl carrier and showed them all the sleek black dinner jacket with Axolotl’s profile stitched in place where the second button belonged.

The tailor fingered it, almost touching it with his nose. He muttered a word that was shorter than his name but had just as many esses in it. I recorded it phonetically on my pad.

“The presence of four holes revealed little, in description,” Lyon said. “Visually, the evidence was suggestive. To avoid a repetition of the mistake, I advise you to make an appointment with your ophthalmologist for a new eyeglass prescription, and take steps to reorganize and separate your vocation from your avocation.”

“Splendid. Arnie, write Mr. Messassarian a check. Include a bonus of five percent.”

I guess when he saw himself in his mirror all decked out in cutaway, cloak, and top hat, Lyon saw Fred Astaire looking back. I saw the little man on the Monopoly box, only fatter.

“For you, no charge,” the Armenian said. “You have saved me a fortune and restored my faith in the integrity of my staff.”

“I cannot accept. That would constitute payment for my investigative services and bring down the wrath of Mr. Stoddard.” He shivered a little.

As for me, I blew my nest egg when Persian Boy ran dead last at Belmont. So I was still working for Claudius Lyon and had to hide my face from Security when we saw Carmen at the Met.