Enough Rope

Death of the Mallory Queen

“I am going to be murdered,” Mavis Mallory said, “and I want you to do something about it.”

Haig did something, all right. He spun around in his swivel chair and stared into the fish tank. There’s a whole roomful of tanks on the top floor, and other aquariums, which he wishes I would call aquaria, scattered throughout the house.

(Well, not the whole house. The whole house is a carriage house on West Twentieth Street, and on the top two floors live Leo Haig and Wong Fat and more tropical fish than you could shake a jar of tubifex worms at, but the lower two floors are still occupied by Madam Juana and her girls. How do you say filles de joie in Spanish, anyway? Never mind. If all of this sounds a little like a cut-rate, low-rent version of Nero Wolfe’s establishment on West Thirty-fifth Street, the similarity is not accidental. Haig, you see, was a lifelong reader of detective fiction, and a penny-ante breeder of tropical fish until a legacy made him financially independent. And he was a special fan of the Wolfe canon, and he thinks that Wolfe really exists, and that if he, Leo Haig, does a good enough job with the cases that come his way, sooner or later he might get invited to dine at the master’s table.)

“Mr. Haig—”

“Huff,” Haig said.

Except that he didn’t exactly say huff. He went huff. He’s been reading books lately by Sondra Ray and Leonard Orr and Phil Laut, books on rebirthing and physical immortality, and the gist of it seems to be that if you do enough deep circular breathing and clear out your limiting deathist thoughts, you can live forever. I don’t know how he’s doing with his deathist thoughts, but he’s been breathing up a storm lately, as if air were going to be rationed any moment and he wants to get the jump on it.

He huffed again and studied the rasboras, which were the fish that were to-and-froing it in the ten-gallon tank behind his desk. Their little gills never stopped working, so I figured they’d live forever, too, unless their deathist thoughts were lurking to do them in. Haig gave another huff and turned around to look at our client.

She was worth looking at. Tall, willowy, richly curved, with a mane of incredible red hair. Last August I went up to Vermont, toward the end of the month, and all the trees were green except here and there you’d see one in the midst of all that green that had been touched by an early frost and turned an absolutely flaming scarlet, and that was the color of Mavis Mallory’s hair. Haig’s been quoting a lot of lines lately about the rich abundance of the universe we live in, especially when I suggest he’s spending too much on fish and equipment, and looking at our client I had to agree with him. We live in an abundant world, all right.

“Murdered,” he said.

She nodded.

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you want me to prevent it.”

“No.”

His eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

“How could you prevent it?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I understand you’re a genius, but what defense could you provide against a determined killer? You’re not exactly the physical type.”

Haig, who has been described as looking like a basketball with an Afro, huffed in reply. “My own efforts are largely in the cerebral sphere,” he admitted. “But my associate, Mr. Harrison, is physically resourceful as well, and—” he made a tent of his fingertips “—still, your point is well taken. Neither Mr. Harrison nor I are bodyguards. If you wish a bodyguard, there are larger agencies which—”

But she was shaking her head. “A waste of time,” she said. “The whole Secret Service can’t protect a president from a lone deranged assassin. If I’m destined to be murdered, I’m willing to accede to my destiny.”

“Huff,” Haig huffed.

“What I want you to do,” she said, “and Mr. Harrison, of course, except that he’s so young I feel odd calling him by his last name.” She smiled winningly at me. “Unless you object to the familiarity?”

“Call me Chip,” I said.

“I’m delighted. And you must call me Mavis.”

“Huff.”

“Who wants to murder you?” I asked.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “It sometimes seems to me that everyone does. It’s been four years since I took over as publisher of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine upon my father’s death, and you’d be amazed how many enemies you can make in a business like this.”

Haig asked if she could name some of them.

“Well, there’s Abner Jenks. He’d been editor for years and thought he’d have a freer hand with my father out of the picture. When I reshuffled the corporate structure and created Mavis Publications, Inc., I found out he’d been taking kickbacks from authors and agents in return for buying their stories. I got rid of him and took over the editorial duties myself.”

“And what became of Jenks?”

“I pay him fifty cents a manuscript to read slush pile submissions. And he picks up some freelance work for other magazines as well, and he has plenty of time to work on his own historical novel about the Venerable Bede. Actually,” she said, “he ought to be grateful to me.”

“Indeed,” Haig said.

“And there’s Darrell Crenna. He’s the owner of Mysterious Ink, the mystery bookshop on upper Madison Avenue. He wanted Dorothea Trill, the Englishwoman who writes those marvelous gardening mysteries, to do a signing at his store. In fact he’d advertised the appearance, and I had to remind him that Miss Trill’s contract with Mavis Publications forbids her from making any appearances in the States without our authorization.”

“Which you refused to give.”

“I felt it would cheapen the value of Dorothea’s personal appearances to have her make too many of them. After all, Crenna talked an author out of giving a story to Mallory’s on the same grounds, so you could say he was merely hoist with his own petard. Or strangled by his own clematis vine, like the woman in Dorothea’s latest.” Her face clouded. “I hope I haven’t spoiled the ending for you?”

“I’ve already read it,” Haig said.

“I’m glad of that. Or I should have to add you to the list of persons with a motive for murdering me, shouldn’t I? Let me see now. Lotte Benzler belongs on the list. You must know her shop. The Murder Store?”

Haig knew it well, and said so. “And I trust you’ve supplied Ms. Benzler with an equally strong motive? Kept an author from her door? Refused her permission to reprint a story from Mallory’s in one of the anthologies she edits?”

“Actually,” our client said, “I fear I did something rather more dramatic than that. You know Bart Halloran?”

“The creator of Rocky Sledge, who’s so hard-boiled he makes Mike Hammer seem poached? I’ve read him, of course, but I don’t know him.”

“Poor Lotte came to know him very well,” Mavis Mallory purred, “and then I met dear Bart, and then it was I who came to know him very well.” She sighed. “I don’t think Lotte has ever forgiven me. All’s fair in love and publishing, but some people don’t seem to realize it.”

“So there are three people with a motive for murdering you.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are more than three. Let’s not forget Bart, shall we? He was able to shrug it off when I dropped him, but he took it harder when his latest got a bad review in Mallory’s. But I thought Kiss My Gat was a bad book, and why should I say otherwise?” She sighed again. “Poor Bart,” she said. “I understand his sales are slipping. Still, he’s still a name, isn’t he? And he’ll be there Friday night.”

“Indeed?” Haig raised his eyebrows. He’s been practicing in front of the mirror, trying to raise just one eyebrow, but so far he hasn’t got the knack of it. “And just where will Mr. Halloran be Friday night?”

“Where they’ll all be,” Mavis Mallory said. “At Town Hall, for the panel discussion and reception to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine. Do you know, I believe everyone with a motive to murder me will be gathered together in one room?” She shivered happily. “What more could a mystery fan ask for?”

“Don’t attend,” Haig said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him. “I’m Mavis Mallory of Mavis Publications. I am Mallory’s — in fact I’ve been called the Mallory Queen. I’ll be chairing the panel discussion and hosting the celebration. How could I possibly fail to be present?”

“Then get bodyguards.”

“They’d put such a damper on the festivities. And I already told you they’d be powerless against a determined killer.”

“Miss Mallory—”

“And please don’t tell me to wear a bulletproof vest. They haven’t yet designed one that flatters the full-figured woman.”

I swallowed, reminded again that we live in an abundant universe. “You’ll be killed,” Haig said flatly.

“Yes,” said our client, “I rather suspect I shall. I’m paying you a five thousand dollar retainer now, in cash, because you might have a problem cashing a check if I were killed before it cleared. And I’ve added a codicil to my will calling for payment to you of an additional twenty thousand dollars upon your solving the circumstances of my death. And I do trust you and Chip will attend the reception Friday night? Even if I’m not killed, it should be an interesting evening.”

“I have read of a tribe of Africans,” Haig said dreamily, “who know for certain that gunshot wounds are fatal. When one of their number is wounded by gunfire, he falls immediately to the ground and lies still, waiting for death. He does this even if he’s only been nicked in the finger, and, by the following morning, death will have inevitably claimed him.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Has it got anything to do with the Mallory Queen?”

“It has everything to do with her. The woman—” he huffed again, and I don’t think it had much to do with circular breathing “—the damnable woman is convinced she will be murdered. It would profoundly disappoint her to be proved wrong. She wants to be murdered, Chip, and her thoughts are creative, even as yours and mine. In all likelihood she will die on Friday night. She would have it no other way.”

“If she stayed home,” I said. “If she hired bodyguards—”

“She will do neither. But it would not matter if she did. The woman is entirely under the influence of her own death urge. Her death urge is stronger than her life urge. How could she live in such circumstances?”

“If that’s how you feel, why did you take her money?”

“Because all abundance is a gift from the universe,” he said loftily. “Further, she engaged us not to protect her but to avenge her, to solve her murder. I am perfectly willing to undertake to do that.” Huff. “You’ll attend the reception Friday night, of course.”

“To watch our client get the axe?”

“Or the dart from the blowpipe, or the poisoned cocktail, or the bullet, or the bite from the coral snake, or what you will. Perhaps you’ll see something that will enable us to solve her murder on the spot and earn the balance of our fee.”

“Won’t you be there? I thought you’d planned to go.”

“I had,” he said. “But that was before Miss Mallory transformed the occasion from pleasure to business. Nero Wolfe never leaves his house on business, and I think the practice a sound one. You will attend in my stead, Chip. You will be my eyes and my legs. Huff.”

I was still saying things like Yes, but when he swept out of the room and left for an appointment with his rebirther. Once a week he goes all the way up to Washington Heights, where a woman named Lori Schneiderman gets sixty dollars for letting him stretch out on her floor and watching him breathe. It seems to me that for that kind of money he could do his huffing in a bed at the Plaza Hotel, but what do I know?

He’d left a page full of scribbling on his desk and I cleared it off to keep any future clients from spotting it. I, Leo, am safe and immortal right now, he’d written five times. You, Leo, are safe and immortal right now, he’d written another five times. Leo is safe and immortal right now, he’d written a final five times. This was how he was working through his unconscious death urge and strengthening his life urge. I tell you, a person has to go through a lot of crap if he wants to live forever.

Friday night found me at Town Hall, predictably enough. I wore my suit for the occasion and got there early enough to snag a seat down front, where I could keep a private eye on things.

There were plenty of things to keep an eye on. The audience swarmed with readers and writers of mystery and detective fiction, and if you want an idea of who was in the house, just write out a list of your twenty-five favorite authors and be sure that seventeen or eighteen of them were in the house. I saw some familiar faces, a woman who’d had a long run as the imperiled heroine of a Broadway suspense melodrama, a man who’d played a police detective for three years on network television, and others whom I recognized from films or television but couldn’t place out of context.

On stage, our client Mavis Mallory occupied the moderator’s chair. She was wearing a strapless and backless floor-length black dress, and in combination with her creamy skin and fiery hair, its effect was dramatic. If I could have changed one thing it would have been the color of the dress. I suppose Haig would have said it was the color of her unconscious death urge.

Her panelists were arranged in a semicircle around her. I recognized some but not others, but before I could extend my knowledge through subtle investigative technique, the entire panel was introduced. The members included Darrell Crenna of Mysterious Ink and Lotte Benzler of The Murder Store. The two sat on either side of our client, and I just hoped she’d be safe from the daggers they were looking at each other.

Rocky Sledge’s creator, dressed in his standard outfit of chinos and a T-shirt with the sleeve rolled to contain a pack of unfiltered Camels, was introduced as Bartholomew Halloran. “Make that Bart,” he snapped. If you know what’s good for you, he might have added.

Halloran was sitting at Mavis Mallory’s left. A tall and very slender woman with elaborately coiffed hair and a lorgnette sat between him and Darrell Crenna. She turned out to be Dorothea Trill, the Englishwoman who wrote gardening mysteries. I always figured the chief gardening mystery was what to do with all the zucchini. Miss Trill seemed a little looped, but maybe it was the lorgnette.

On our client’s other side, next to Lotte Benzler, sat a man named Austin Porterfield. He was a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at New York University, and he’d recently published a rather learned obituary of the mystery story in the New York Review of Books. According to him, mystery fiction had drawn its strength over the years from the broad base of its popular appeal. Now other genres had more readers, and thus mystery writers were missing the mark. If they wanted to be artistically important, he advised them, then get busy producing Harlequin romances and books about nurses and stewardesses.

On Mr. Porterfield’s other side was Janice Cowan, perhaps the most prominent book editor in the mystery field. For years she had moved from one important publishing house to another, and at each of them she had her own private imprint. “A Jan Cowan Novel of Suspense” was a good guarantee of literary excellence, whoever happened to be Miss Cowan’s employer that year.

After the last of the panelists had been introduced, a thin, weedy man in a dark suit passed quickly among the group with a beverage tray, then scurried off the stage. Mavis Mallory took a sip of her drink, something colorless in a stemmed glass, and leaned toward the microphone. “What Happens Next?” she intoned. “That’s the title of our little discussion tonight, and it’s a suitable title for a discussion on this occasion. A credo of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine has always been that our sort of fiction is only effective insofar as the reader cares deeply what happens next, what takes place on the page he or she has yet to read. Tonight, though, we are here to discuss what happens next in mystery and suspense fiction. What trends have reached their peaks, and what trends are swelling just beyond the horizon.”

She cleared her throat, took another sip of her drink. “Has the tough private eye passed his prime? Is the lineal descendant of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe just a tedious outmoded macho sap?” She paused to smile pleasantly at Bart Halloran, who glowered back at her. “Conversely, has the American reader lost interest forever in the mannered English mystery? Are we ready to bid adieu to the body in the library, or—” she paused for an amiable nod at the slightly cockeyed Miss Trill “—the corpse in the formal gardens?

“Is the mystery, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead as a literary genre? One of our number—” and a cheerless smile for Professor Porterfield “—would have us all turn to writing Love’s Saccharine Savagery and Penny Wyse, Stockyard Nurse. Is the mystery bookshop, a store specializing in our brand of fiction, an idea whose time has come — and gone? And what do book publishers have to say on this subject? One of our number has worked for so many of them; she should be unusually qualified to comment.”

Mavis certainly had the full attention of her fellow panelists. Now, to make sure she held the attention of the audience as well, she leaned forward, a particularly arresting move given the nature of the strapless, backless black number she was more or less wearing. Her hands tightened on the microphone.

“Please help me give our panel members full attention,” she said, “as we turn the page to find out—” she paused dramatically “—What Happens Next!”

What happened next was that the lights went out. All of them, all at once, with a great crackling noise of electrical failure. Somebody screamed, and then so did somebody else, and then screaming became kind of popular. A shot rang out. There were more screams, and then another shot, and then everybody was shouting at once, and then some lights came on.

Guess who was dead.

That was Friday night. Tuesday afternoon, Haig was sitting back in his chair on his side of our huge old partners’ desk. He didn’t have his feet up — I’d broken him of that habit — but I could see he wanted to. Instead he contented himself with taking a pipe apart and putting it back together again. He had tried smoking pipes, thinking it a good mannerism for a detective, but it never took, so now he fiddles with them. It looks pretty dumb, but it’s better than putting his feet up on the desk.

“I don’t suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here,” he said.

They weren’t wondering. They all knew, all of the panelists from the other night, plus two old friends of ours, a cop named Gregorio who wears clothes that could never be purchased on a policeman’s salary, and another cop named Seidenwall, who wears clothes that could. They knew they’d been gathered together to watch Leo Haig pull a rabbit out of a hat, and it was going to be a neat trick because it looked as though he didn’t even have the hat.

“We’re here to clear up the mysterious circumstances of the death of Mavis Mallory. All of you assembled here, except for the two gentlemen of the law, had a motive for her murder. All of you had the opportunity. All of you thus exist under a cloud of suspicion. As a result, you should all be happy to learn that you have nothing to fear from my investigation. Mavis Mallory committed suicide.”

“Suicide!” Gregorio exploded. “I’ve heard you make some ridiculous statements in your time, but that one grabs the gateau. You have the nerve to sit there like a toad on a lily pad and tell me the redheaded dame killed herself?”

“Nerve?” Haig mused. “Is nerve ever required to tell the truth?”

“Truth? You wouldn’t recognize the truth if it dove into one of your fish tanks and swam around eating up all the brine shrimp. The Mallory woman got hit by everything short of tactical nuclear weapons. There were two bullets in her from different guns. She had a wavy-bladed knife stuck in her back and a short dagger in her chest, or maybe it was the other way around. The back of her skull was dented by a blow from a blunt instrument. There was enough rat poison in her system to put the Pied Piper out of business, and there were traces of curare, a South American arrow poison, in her martini glass. Did I leave something out?”

“Her heart had stopped beating,” Haig said.

“Is that a fact? If you ask me, it had its reasons. And you sit there and call it suicide. That’s some suicide.”

Haig sat there and breathed, in and out, in and out, in the relaxed, connected breathing rhythm that Lori Schneiderman had taught him. Meanwhile they all watched him, and I in turn watched them. We had them arranged just the way they’d been on the panel, with Detective Vincent Gregorio sitting in the middle where Mavis Mallory had been. Reading left to right, I was looking at Bart Halloran, Dorothea Trill, Darrell Crenna, Gregorio, Lotte Benzler, Austin Porterfield, and Janice Cowan. Detective Wallace Seidenwall sat behind the others, sort of off to the side and next to the wall. If this were novel length I’d say what each of them was wearing and who scowled and who looked interested, but Haig says there’s not enough plot here for a novel and that you have to be more concise in short stories, so just figure they were all feeling about the way you’d feel if you were sitting around watching a fat little detective practice rhythmic breathing.

“Some suicide,” Haig said. “Indeed. Some years ago a reporter went to a remote county in Texas to investigate the death of a man who’d been trying to expose irregularities in election procedures. The coroner had recorded the death as suicide, and the reporter checked the autopsy and discovered that the deceased had been shot six times in the back with a high-powered rifle. He confronted the coroner with this fact and demanded to know how the man had dared call the death suicide.

“ ‘Yep,’ drawled the coroner. ‘Worst case of suicide I ever saw in my life.’ ”

Gregorio just stared at him.

“So it is with Miss Mallory,” Haig continued. “Hers is the worst case of suicide in my experience. Miss Mallory was helplessly under the influence of her own unconscious death urge. She came to me, knowing that she was being drawn toward death, and yet she had not the slightest impulse to gain protection. She wished only that I contract to investigate her demise and see to its resolution. She deliberately assembled seven persons who had reason to rejoice in her death, and enacted a little drama in front of an audience. She—”

“Six persons,” Gregorio said, gesturing to the three on either side of him. “Unless you’re counting her, or unless all of a sudden I got to be a suspect.”

Haig rang a little bell on his desk top, and that was Wong Fat’s cue to usher in a skinny guy in a dark suit. “Mr. Abner Jenks,” Haig announced. “Former editor of Mallory’s Mystery Magazine, demoted to slush reader and part-time assistant.”

“He passed the drinks,” Dorothea Trill remembered. “So that’s how she got the rat poison.”

“I certainly didn’t poison her,” Jenks whined. “Nor did I shoot her or stab her or hit her over the head or—”

Haig held up a hand. There was a pipe stem in it, but it still silenced everybody. “You all had motives,” he said. “None of you intended to act on them. None of you planned to make an attempt on Miss Mallory’s life. Yet thought is creative and Mavis Mallory’s thoughts were powerful. Some people attract money to them, or love, or fame. Miss Mallory attracted violent death.”

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” Gregorio said. “You’re saying she wanted to die, and that’s fine, but it’s still a crime to give her a hand with it, and that’s what every single one of them did. What’s that movie, something about the Orient Express, and they all stab the guy? That’s what we got here, and I think what I gotta do is book ’em all on a conspiracy charge.”

“That would be the act of a witling,” Haig said. “First of all, there was no conspiracy. Perhaps more important, there was no murder.”

“Just a suicide.”

“Precisely,” said Haig. Huff. “In a real sense, all death is suicide. As long as a man’s life urge is stronger than his death urge, he is immortal and invulnerable. Once the balance shifts, he has an unbreakable appointment in Samarra. But Miss Mallory’s death is suicide in a much stricter sense of the word. No one else tried to kill her, and no one else succeeded. She unquestionably created her own death.”

“And shot herself?” Gregorio demanded. “And stuck knives in herself, and bopped herself over the head? And—”

“No,” Haig said. Huff. “I could tell you that she drew the bullets and knives to herself by the force of her thoughts, but I would be wasting my—” huff! “—breath. The point is metaphysical, and in the present context immaterial. The bullets were not aimed at her, nor did they kill her. Neither did the stabbings, the blow to the head, the poison.”

“Then what did?”

“The stopping of her heart.”

“Well, that’s what kills everyone,” Gregorio said, as if explaining something to a child. “That’s how you know someone’s dead. The heart stops.”

Haig sighed heavily, and I don’t know if it was circular breathing or resignation. Then he started telling them how it happened.

“Miss Mallory’s death urge created a powerful impulse toward violence,” he said. “All seven of you, the six panelists and Mr. Jenks, had motives for killing the woman. But you are not murderous people, and you had no intention of committing acts of violence. Quite without conscious intent, you found yourselves bringing weapons to the Town Hall event. Perhaps you thought to display them to an audience of mystery fans. Perhaps you felt a need for a self-defense capability. It hardly matters what went through your minds.

“All of you, as I said, had reason to hate Miss Mallory. In addition, each of you had reason to hate one or more of your fellow panel members. Miss Benzler and Mr. Crenna are rival booksellers; their cordial loathing for one another is legendary. Mr. Halloran was romantically involved with the panel’s female members, while Mr. Porterfield and Mr. Jenks were briefly, uh, closeted together in friendship. Miss Trill had been very harshly dealt with in some writings of Mr. Porterfield. Miss Cowan had bought books by Mr. Halloran and Miss Trill, then left the books stranded when she moved on to another employer. I could go on, but what’s the point? Each and every one of you may be said to have had a sound desire to murder each and every one of your fellows, but in the ordinary course of things nothing would have come of any of these desires. We all commit dozens of mental murders a day, yet few of us ever dream of acting on any of them.”

“I’m sure there’s a point to this,” Austin Porterfield said.

“Indeed there is, sir, and I am fast approaching it. Miss Mallory leaned forward, grasping her microphone, pausing for full dramatic value, and the lights went out. And it was then that knives and guns and blunt instruments and poison came into play.”

The office lights dimmed as Wong Fat operated a wall switch. There was a sharp intake of breath, although the room didn’t get all that dark, and there was a balancing huff from Haig. “The room went dark,” he said. “That was Miss Mallory’s doing. She chose the moment, not just unconsciously, but with knowing purpose. She wanted to make a dramatic point, and she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

“As soon as those lights went out, everyone’s murderous impulses, already stirred up by Mavis Mallory’s death urge, were immeasurably augmented. Mr. Crenna drew a Malayan kris and moved to stab it into the heart of his competitor, Miss Benzler. At the same time, Miss Benzler drew a poniard of her own and circled around to direct it at Mr. Crenna’s back. Neither could see. Neither was well oriented. And Mavis Mallory’s unconscious death urge drew both blades to her own body, even as it drew the bullet Mr. Porterfield meant for Mr. Jenks, the deadly blow Mr. Halloran meant for Cowan, the bullet Miss Cowan intended for Miss Trill, and the curare Miss Trill had meant to place in Mr. Halloran’s glass.

“Curare, incidentally, works only if introduced into the bloodstream; it would have been quite ineffective if ingested. The rat poison Miss Mallory did ingest was warfarin, which would ultimately have caused her death by internal bleeding; it was in the glass when Abner Jenks served it to her.”

“Then Jenks tried to kill her,” Gregorio said.

Haig shook his head. “Jenks did not put the poison in the glass,” he said. “Miss Lotte Benzler had placed the poison in the glass before Miss Mallory picked it up.”

“Then Miss Benzler—”

“Was not trying to kill Miss Mallory either,” Haig said, “because she placed the poison in the glass she intended to take for herself. She had previously ingested a massive dose of Vitamin K, a coagulant which is the standard antidote for warfarin, and intended to survive a phony murder attempt on stage, both to publicize The Murder Store and to discredit her competitor, Mr. Crenna. At the time, of course, she’d had no conscious intention of sticking a poniard into the same Mr. Crenna, the very poniard that wound up in Miss Mallory.”

“You’re saying they all tried to kill each other,” Gregorio said. “And they all killed her instead.”

“But they didn’t succeed.”

“They didn’t? How do you figure that? She’s dead as a bent doornail.”

“She was already dead.”

“How?”

“Dead of electrocution,” Haig told him. “Mavis Mallory put out all the lights in Town Hall by short-circuiting the microphone. She got more than she bargained for, although in a sense it was precisely what she’d bargained for. In the course of shorting out the building’s electrical system, she herself was subjected to an electrical charge that induced immediate and permanent cardiac arrest. The warfarin had not yet had time to begin inducing fatal internal bleeding. The knives and bullets pierced the skin of a woman who was already dead. The bludgeon crushed a dead woman’s skull. Miss Mallory killed herself.”

Wong Fat brought the lights up. Gregorio blinked at the brightness. “That’s a pretty uncertain way to do yourself in,” he said. “It’s not like she had her foot in a pail of water. You don’t necessarily get a shock shorting out a line that way, and the shock’s not necessarily a fatal one.”

“The woman did not consciously plan her own death,” Haig told him. “An official verdict of suicide would be of dubious validity. Accidental death, I suppose, is what the certificate would properly read.” He huffed mightily. “Accidental death! As that Texas sheriff would say, it’s quite the worst case of accidental death I’ve ever witnessed.”

And that’s what it went down as, accidental death. No charges were ever pressed against any of the seven, although it drove Gregorio crazy that they all walked out of there untouched. But what could you get them for? Mutilating a corpse? It would be hard to prove who did what, and it would be even harder to prove that they’d been trying to kill each other. As far as Haig was concerned, they were all acting under the influence of Mavis Mallory’s death urge, and were only faintly responsible for their actions.

“The woman was ready to die, Chip,” he said, “and die she did. She wanted me to solve her death and I’ve solved it, I trust to the satisfaction of the lawyers for her estate. And you’ve got a good case to write up. It won’t make a novel, and there’s not nearly enough sex in it to satisfy the book-buying public, but I shouldn’t wonder that it will make a good short story. Perhaps for Mallory’s Mystery Magazine, or a publication of equal stature.”

He stood up. “I’m going uptown,” he announced, “to get rebirthed. I suggest you come along. I think Wolfe must have been a devotee of rebirthing, and Archie as well.”

I asked him how he figured that.

“Rebirthing reverses the aging process,” he explained. “How else do you suppose the great detectives manage to endure for generations without getting a day older? Archie Goodwin was a brash young man in Fer-de-lance in nineteen thirty-four. He was still the same youthful wisenheimer forty years later. I told you once, Chip, that your association with me would make it possible for you to remain eighteen years old forever. Now it seems that I can lead you not only to the immortality of ink and paper but to genuine physical immortality. If you and I work to purge ourselves of the effects of birth trauma, and if we use our breath to cleanse our cells, and if we stamp out deathist thoughts once and forever—”

“Huh,” I said. But wouldn’t you know it? It came out huff.

As Dark as Christmas Gets

It was 9:54 in the morning when I got to the little bookshop on West Fifty-sixth Street. Before I went to work for Leo Haig I probably wouldn’t have bothered to look at my watch, if I was even wearing one in the first place, and the best I’d have been able to say was it was around ten o’clock. But Haig wanted me to be his legs and eyes, and sometimes his ears, nose, and throat, and if he was going to play in Nero Wolfe’s league, that meant I had to turn into Archie Goodwin, for Pete’s sake, noticing everything and getting the details right and reporting conversations verbatim.

Well, forget that last part. My memory’s getting better — Haig’s right about that part — but what follows won’t be word for word, because all I am is a human being. If you want a tape recorder, buy one.

There was a lot of fake snow in the window, and a Santa Claus doll in handcuffs, and some toy guns and knives, and a lot of mysteries with a Christmas theme, including the one by Fredric Brown where the murderer dresses up as a department store Santa. (Someone pulled that a year ago, put on a red suit and a white beard and shot a man at the corner of Broadway and Thirty-seventh, and I told Haig how ingenious I thought it was. He gave me a look, left the room, and came back with a book. I read it — that’s what I do when Haig hands me a book — and found out Brown had had the idea fifty years earlier. Which doesn’t mean that’s where the killer got the idea. The book’s long out of print — the one I read was a paperback, and falling apart, not like the handsome hardcover copy in the window. And how many killers get their ideas out of old books?)

Now if you’re a detective yourself you’ll have figured out two things by now — the bookshop specialized in mysteries, and it was the Christmas season. And if you’d noticed the sign in the window you’d have made one more deduction, i.e., that they were closed.

I went down the half flight of steps and poked the buzzer. When nothing happened I poked it again, and eventually the door was opened by a little man with white hair and a white beard — all he needed was padding and a red suit, and someone to teach him to be jolly. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid we’re closed. It’s Christmas morning, and it’s not even ten o’clock.”

“You called us,” I said, “and it wasn’t even nine o’clock.”

He took a good look at me, and light dawned. “You’re Harrison,” he said. “And I know your first name, but I can’t—”

“Chip,” I supplied.

“Of course. But where’s Haig? I know he thinks he’s Nero Wolfe, but he’s not gone housebound, has he? He’s been here often enough in the past.”

“Haig gets out and about,” I agreed, “but Wolfe went all the way to Montana once, as far as that goes. What Wolfe refused to do was leave the house on business, and Haig’s with him on that one. Besides, he just spawned some unspawnable cichlids from Lake Chad, and you’d think the aquarium was a television set and they were showing Midnight Blue.”

“Fish.” He sounded more reflective than contemptuous. “Well, at least you’re here. That’s something.” He locked the door and led me up a spiral staircase to a room full of books, and full as well with the residue of a party. There were empty glasses here and there, hors d’oeuvres trays that held nothing but crumbs, and a cut-glass dish with a sole remaining cashew.

“Christmas,” he said, and shuddered. “I had a houseful of people here last night. All of them eating, all of them drinking, and many of them actually singing.” He made a face. “I didn’t sing,” he said, “but I certainly ate and drank. And eventually they all went home and I went upstairs to bed. I must have, because that’s where I was when I woke up two hours ago.”

“But you don’t remember.”

“Well, no,” he said, “but then what would there be to remember? The guests leave and you’re alone with vague feelings of sadness.” His gaze turned inward. “If she’d stayed,” he said, “I’d have remembered.”

“She?”

“Never mind. I awoke this morning, alone in my own bed. I swallowed some aspirin and came downstairs. I went into the library.”

“You mean this room?”

“This is the salesroom. These books are for sale.”

“Well, I figured. I mean, this is a bookshop.”

“You’ve never seen the library?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned to open a door and lead me down a hallway to another room twice the size of the first. It was lined with floor-to-ceiling hardwood shelves, and the shelves were filled with double rows of hardcover books. It was hard to identify the books, though, because all but one section was wrapped in plastic sheeting.

“This is my collection,” he announced. “These books are not for sale. I’ll only part with one if I’ve replaced it with a finer copy. Your employer doesn’t collect, does he?”

“Haig? He’s got thousands of books.”

“Yes, and he’s bought some of them from me. But he doesn’t give a damn about first editions. He doesn’t care what kind of shape a book is in, or even if it’s got a dust jacket. He’d as soon have a Grosset reprint or a book-club edition or even a paperback.”

“He just wants to read them.”

“It takes all kinds, doesn’t it?” He shook his head in wonder. “Last night’s party filled this room as well as the salesroom. I put up plastic to keep the books from getting handled and possibly damaged. Or — how shall I put this?”

Any way you want, I thought. You’re the client.

“Some of these books are extremely valuable,” he said. “And my guests were all extremely reputable people, but many of them are good customers, and that means they’re collectors. Ardent, even rabid collectors.”

“And you didn’t want them stealing the books.”

“You’re very direct,” he said. “I suppose that’s a useful quality in your line of work. But no, I didn’t want to tempt anyone, especially when alcoholic indulgence might make temptation particularly difficult to resist.”

“So you hung up plastic sheets.”

“And came downstairs this morning to remove the plastic, and pick up some dirty glasses and clear some of the debris. I puttered around. I took down the plastic from this one section, as you can see. I did a bit of tidying. And then I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

He pointed to a set of glassed-in shelves, on top of which stood a three-foot row of leather-bound volumes. “There,” he said. “What do you see?”

“Leatherbound books, but—”

“Boxes,” he corrected. “Wrapped in leather and stamped in gold, and each one holding a manuscript. They’re fashioned to look like finely-bound books, but they’re original manuscripts.”

“Very nice,” I said. “I suppose they must be very rare.”

“They’re unique.”

“That too.”

He made a face. “One of a kind. The author’s original manuscript, with corrections in his own hand. Most are typed, but the Elmore Leonard is handwritten. The Westlake, of course, is typed on that famous Smith-Corona manual portable of his. The Paul Kavanagh is the author’s first novel. He only wrote three, you know.”

I didn’t, but Haig would.

“They’re very nice,” I said politely. “And I don’t suppose they’re for sale.”

“Of course not. They’re in the library. They’re part of the collection.”

“Right,” I said, and paused for him to continue. When he didn’t I said, “Uh, I was thinking. Maybe you could tell me...”

“Why I summoned you here.” He sighed. “Look at the boxed manuscript between the Westlake and the Kavanagh.”

“Between them?”

“Yes.”

“The Kavanagh is Such Men Are Dangerous,” I said, “and the Westlake is Drowned Hopes. But there’s nothing at all between them but a three-inch gap.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“As Dark as It Gets,” I said. “By Cornell Woolrich.”

Haig frowned. “I don’t know the book,” he said. “Not under that title, not with Woolrich’s name on it, nor William Irish or George Hopley. Those were his pen names.”

“I know,” I said. “You don’t know the book because it was never published. The manuscript was found among Woolrich’s effects after his death.”

“There was a posthumous book, Chip.”

“Into the Night,” I said. “Another writer completed it, writing replacement scenes for some that had gone missing in the original. It wound up being publishable.”

“It wound up being published,” Haig said. “That’s not necessarily the same thing. But this manuscript, As Dark—”

“As It Gets. It wasn’t publishable, according to our client. Woolrich evidently worked on it over the years, and what survived him incorporated unresolved portions of several drafts. There are characters who die early on and then reappear with no explanation. There’s supposed to be some great writing and plenty of Woolrich’s trademark paranoid suspense, but it doesn’t add up to a book, or even something that could be edited into a book. But to a collector—”

“Collectors,” Haig said heavily.

“Yes, sir. I asked what the manuscript was worth. He said, ‘Well, I paid five thousand dollars for it.’ That’s verbatim, but don’t ask me if the thing’s worth more or less than that, because I don’t know if he was bragging that he was a big spender or a slick trader.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Haig said. “The money’s the least of it. He added it to his collection and he wants it back.”

“And the person who stole it,” I said, “is either a friend or a customer or both.”

“And so he called us and not the police. The manuscript was there when the party started?”

“Yes.”

“And gone this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And there were how many in attendance?”

“Forty or fifty,” I said, “including the caterer and her staff.”

“If the party was catered,” he mused, “why was the room a mess when you saw it? Wouldn’t the catering staff have cleaned up at the party’s end?”

“I asked him that question myself. The party lasted longer than the caterer had signed on for. She hung around herself for a while after her employees packed it in, but she stopped working and became a guest. Our client was hoping she would stay.”

“But you just said she did.”

“After everybody else went home. He lives upstairs from the bookshop, and he was hoping for a chance to show her his living quarters.”

Haig shrugged. He’s not quite the misogynist his idol is, but he hasn’t been at it as long. Give him time. He said, “Chip, it’s hopeless. Fifty suspects?”

“Six.”

“How so?”

“By two o’clock,” I said, “just about everybody had called it a night. The ones remaining got a reward.”

“And what was that?”

“Some fifty-year-old Armagnac, served in Waterford pony glasses. We counted the glasses, and there were seven of them. Six guests and the host.”

“And the manuscript?”

“Was still there at the time, and still sheathed in plastic. See, he’d covered all the boxed manuscripts, same as the books on the shelves. But the cut-glass ship’s decanter was serving as a sort of bookend to the manuscript section, and he took off the plastic to get at it. And while he was at it he took out one of the manuscripts and showed it off to his guests.”

“Not the Woolrich, I don’t suppose.”

“No, it was a Peter Straub novel, elegantly handwritten in a leatherbound journal. Straub collects Chandler, and our client had traded a couple of Chandler firsts for the manuscript, and he was proud of himself.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“But the Woolrich was present and accounted for when he took off the plastic wrap, and it may have been there when he put the Straub back. He didn’t notice.”

“And this morning it was gone.”

“Yes.”

“Six suspects,” he said. “Name them.”

I took out my notebook. “Jon and Jayne Corn-Wallace,” I said. “He’s a retired stockbroker, she’s an actress in a daytime drama. That’s a soap opera.”

“Piffle.”

“Yes, sir. They’ve been friends of our client for years, and customers for about as long. They were mystery fans, and he got them started on first editions.”

“Including Woolrich?”

“He’s a favorite of Jayne’s. I gather Jon can take him or leave him.”

“I wonder which he did last night. Do the Corn-Wallaces collect manuscripts?”

“Just books. First editions, though they’re starting to get interested in fancy bindings and limited editions. The one with a special interest in manuscripts is Zoltan Mihalyi.”

“The violinist?”

Trust Haig to know that. I’d never heard of him myself. “A big mystery fan,” I said. “I guess reading passes the time on those long concert tours.”

“I don’t suppose a man can spend all his free hours with other men’s wives,” Haig said. “And who’s to say that all the stories are true? He collects manuscripts, does he?”

“He was begging for a chance to buy the Straub, but our friend wouldn’t sell.”

“Which would make him a likely suspect. Who else?”

“Philip Perigord.”

“The writer?”

“Right, and I didn’t even know he was still alive. He hasn’t written anything in years.”

“Almost twenty years. More Than Murder was published in 1980.”

Trust him to know that, too. “Anyway,” I said, “he didn’t die. He didn’t even stop writing. He just quit writing books. He went to Hollywood and became a screenwriter.”

“That’s the same as stopping writing,” Haig reflected. “It’s very nearly the same as being dead. Does he collect books?”

“No.”

“Manuscripts?”

“No.”

“Perhaps he wanted the manuscripts for scrap paper,” Haig said. “He could turn the pages over and write on their backs. Who else was present?”

“Edward Everett Stokes.”

“The small-press publisher. Bought out his partner, Geoffrey Poges, to became sole owner of Stokes-Poges Press.”

“They do limited editions, according to our client. Leather bindings, small runs, special tip-in sheets.”

“All well and good,” he said, “but what’s useful about Stokes-Poges is that they issue a reasonably priced trade edition of each title as well, and publish works otherwise unavailable, including collections of short fiction from otherwise uncollected writers.”

“Do they publish Woolrich?”

“All his work has been published by mainstream publishers, and all his stories collected. Is Stokes a collector himself?”

“Our client didn’t say.”

“No matter. How many is that? The Corn-Wallaces, Zoltan Mihalyi, Philip Perigord, E. E. Stokes. And the sixth is—”

“Harriet Quinlan.”

He looked puzzled, then nodded in recognition. “The literary agent.”

“She represents Perigord,” I said, “or at least she would, if he ever went back to novel-writing. She’s placed books with Stokes-Poges. And she may have left the party with Zoltan Mihalyi.”

“I don’t suppose her client list includes the Woolrich estate. Or that she’s a rabid collector of books and manuscripts.”

“He didn’t say.”

“No matter. You said six suspects, Chip. I count seven.”

I ticked them off. “Jon Corn-Wallace. Jayne Corn-Wallace. Zoltan Mihalyi. Philip Perigord. Edward Everett Stokes. Harriet Quinlan. Isn’t that six? Or do you want to include our client, the little man with the palindromic first name? That seems farfetched to me, but—”

“The caterer, Chip.”

“Oh. Well, he says she was just there to do a job. No interest in books, no interest in manuscripts, no real interest in the world of mysteries. Certainly no interest in Cornell Woolrich.”

“And she stayed when her staff went home.”

“To have a drink and be sociable. He had hopes she’d spend the night, but it didn’t happen. I suppose technically she’s a suspect, but—”

“At the very least she’s a witness,” he said. “Bring her.”

“Bring her?”

He nodded. “Bring them all.”

It’s a shame this is a short story. If it were a novel, now would be the time for me to give you a full description of the off-street carriage house on West Twentieth Street, which Leo Haig owns and where he occupies the top two floors, having rented out the lower two stories to Madam Juana and her All-Girl Enterprise. You’d hear how Haig had lived for years in two rooms in the Bronx, breeding tropical fish and reading detective stories, until a modest inheritance allowed him to set up shop as a poor man’s Nero Wolfe.

He’s quirky, God knows, and I could fill a few pleasant pages recounting his quirks, including his having hired me as much for my writing ability as for my potential value as a detective. I’m expected to write up his cases the same way Archie Goodwin writes up Wolfe’s, and this case was a slam-dunk, really, and he says it wouldn’t stretch into a novel, but that it should work nicely as a short story.

So all I’ll say is this. Haig’s best quirk is his unshakable belief that Nero Wolfe exists. Under another name, of course, to protect his inviolable privacy. And the legendary brownstone, with all its different fictitious street numbers, isn’t on West 35th Street at all but in another part of town entirely.

And someday, if Leo Haig performs with sufficient brilliance as a private investigator, he hopes to get the ultimate reward — an invitation to dinner at Nero Wolfe’s table.

Well, that gives you an idea. If you want more in the way of background, I can only refer you to my previous writings on the subject. There have been two novels so far, Make Out With Murder and The Topless Tulip Caper, and they’re full of inside stuff about Leo Haig. (There were two earlier books from before I met Haig, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, but they’re not mysteries and Haig’s not in them. All they do, really, is tell you more than you’d probably care to know about me.)

Well, end of commercial. Haig said I should put it in, and I generally do what he tells me. After all, the man pays my salary.

And, in his own quiet way, he’s a genius. As you’ll see.

“They’ll never come here,” I told him. “Not today. I know it will always live in your memory as The Day the Cichlids Spawned, but to everybody else it’s Christmas, and they’ll want to spend it in the bosoms of their families, and—”

“Not everyone has a family,” he pointed out, “and not every family has a bosom.”

“The Corn-Wallaces have a family. Zoltan Mihalyi doesn’t, but he’s probably got somebody with a bosom lined up to spend the day with. I don’t know about the others, but—”

“Bring them,” he said, “but not here. I want them all assembled at five o’clock this afternoon at the scene of the crime.”

“The bookshop? You’re willing to leave the house?”

“It’s not entirely business,” he said. “Our client is more than a client. He’s a friend, and an important source of books. The reading copies he so disdains have enriched our own library immeasurably. And you know how important that is.”

If there’s anything you need to know, you can find it in the pages of a detective novel. That’s Haig’s personal conviction, and I’m beginning to believe he’s right.

“I’ll pay him a visit,” he went on. “I’ll arrive at 4:30 or so, and perhaps I’ll come across a book or two that I’ll want for our library. You’ll arrange that they all arrive around five, and we’ll clear up this little business.” He frowned in thought. “I’ll tell Wong we’ll want Christmas dinner at eight tonight. That should give us more than enough time.”

Again, if this were a novel, I’d spend a full chapter telling you what I went through getting them all present and accounted for. It was hard enough finding them, and then I had to sell them on coming. I pitched the event as a second stage of last night’s party — their host had arranged, for their entertainment and edification, that they should be present while a real-life private detective solved an actual crime before their very eyes.

According to Haig, all we’d need to spin this yarn into a full-length book would be a dead body, although two would be better. If, say, our client had wandered into his library that morning to find a corpse seated in his favorite chair, and the Woolrich manuscript gone, then I could easily stretch all this to sixty thousand words. If the dead man had been wearing a deerstalker cap and holding a violin, we’d be especially well off; when the book came out, all the Sherlockian completists would be compelled to buy it.

Sorry. No murders, no Baker Street Irregulars, no dogs barking or not barking. I had to get them all there, and I did, but don’t ask me how. I can’t take the time to tell you.

“Now,” Zoltan Mihalyi said. “We are all here. So can someone please tell me why we are all here?” There was a twinkle in his dark eyes as he spoke, and the trace of a knowing smile on his lips. He wanted an answer, but he was going to remain charming while he got it. I could believe he swept a lot of women off their feet.

“First of all,” Jeanne Botleigh said, “I think we should each have a glass of eggnog. It’s festive, and it will help put us all in the spirit of the day.”

She was the caterer, and she was some cupcake, all right. Close-cut brown hair framed her small oval face and set off a pair of China-blue eyes. She had an English accent, roughed up some by ten years in New York, and she was short and slender and curvy, and I could see why our client had hoped she would stick around.

And now she’d whipped up a batch of eggnog, and ladled out cups for each of us. I waited until someone else tasted it — after all the mystery novels Haig’s forced on me, I’ve developed an imagination — but once the Corn-Wallaces had tossed off theirs with no apparent effect, I took a sip. It was smooth and delicious, and it had a kick like a mule. I looked over at Haig, who’s not much of a drinker, and he was smacking his lips over it.

“Why are we here?” he said, echoing the violinist’s question. “Well, sir, I shall tell you. We are here as friends and customers of our host, whom we may be able to assist in the solution of a puzzle. Last night all of us, with the exception of course of myself and my young assistant, were present in this room. Also present was the original manuscript of an unpublished novel by Cornell Woolrich. This morning we were all gone, and so was the manuscript. Now we have returned. The manuscript, alas, has not.”

“Wait a minute,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. “You’re saying one of us took it?”

“I say only that it has gone, sir. It is possible that someone within this room was involved in its disappearance, but there are diverse other possibilities as well. What impels me, what has prompted me to summon you here, is the likelihood that one or more of you knows something that will shed light on the incident.”

“But the only person who would know anything would be the person who took it,” Harriet Quinlan said. She was what they call a woman of a certain age, which generally means a woman of an uncertain age. Her figure was a few pounds beyond girlish, and I had a hunch she dyed her hair and might have had her face lifted somewhere along the way, but whatever she’d done had paid off. She was probably old enough to be my mother’s older sister, but that didn’t keep me from having the sort of ideas a nephew’s not supposed to have.

Haig told her anyone could have observed something, and not just the guilty party, and Philip Perigord started to ask a question, and Haig held up a hand and cut him off in mid-sentence. Most people probably would have finished what they were saying, but I guess Perigord was used to studio executives shutting him up at pitch meetings. He bit off his word in the middle of a syllable and stayed mute.

“It is a holiday,” Haig said, “and we all have other things to do, so we’d best avoid distraction. Hence I will ask the questions and you will answer them. Mr. Corn-Wallace. You are a book collector. Have you given a thought to collecting manuscripts?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. He was the best-dressed man in the room, looking remarkably comfortable in a dark blue suit and a striped tie. He wore bull and bear cufflinks and one of those watches that’s worth $5000 if it’s real or $25 if you bought it from a Nigerian street vendor. “He tried to get me interested,” he said, with a nod toward our client. “But I was always the kind of trader who stuck to listed stocks.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s impossible to pinpoint the market value of a one-of-a-kind item like a manuscript. There’s too much guesswork involved. I’m not buying books with an eye to selling them, that’s something my heirs will have to worry about, but I do like to know what my collection is worth and whether or not it’s been a good investment. It’s part of the pleasure of collecting, as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve stayed away from manuscripts. They’re too iffy.”

“And had you had a look at As Dark as It Gets?”

“No. I’m not interested in manuscripts, and I don’t care at all for Woolrich.”

“Jon likes hard-boiled fiction,” his wife put in, “but Woolrich is a little weird for his taste. I think he was a genius myself. Quirky and tormented, maybe, but what genius isn’t?”

Haig, I thought. You couldn’t call him tormented, but maybe he made up for it by exceeding the usual quota of quirkiness.

“Anyway,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said, “I’m the Woolrich fan in the family. Though I agree with Jon as far as manuscripts are concerned. The value is pure speculation. And who wants to buy something and then have to get a box made for it? It’s like buying an unframed canvas and having to get it framed.”

“The Woolrich manuscript was already boxed,” Haig pointed out.

“I mean generally, as an area for collecting. As a collector, I wasn’t interested in As Dark as It Gets. If someone fixed it up and completed it, and if someone published it, I’d have been glad to buy it. I’d have bought two copies.”

“Two copies, madam?”

She nodded. “One to read and one to own.”

Haig’s face darkened, and I thought he might offer his opinion of people who were afraid to damage their books by reading them. But he kept it to himself, and I was just as glad. Jayne Corn-Wallace was a tall, handsome woman, radiating self-confidence, and I sensed she’d give as good as she got in an exchange with Haig.

“You might have wanted to read the manuscript,” Haig suggested.

She shook her head. “I like Woolrich,” she said, “but as a stylist he was choppy enough after editing and polishing. I wouldn’t want to try him in manuscript, let alone an unfinished manuscript like that one.”

“Mr. Mihalyi,” Haig said. “You collect manuscripts, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“And do you care for Woolrich?”

The violinist smiled. “If I had the chance to buy the original manuscript of The Bride Wore Black,” he said, “I would leap at it. If it were close at hand, and if strong drink had undermined my moral fiber, I might even slip it under my coat and walk off with it.” A wink showed us he was kidding. “Or at least I’d have been tempted. The work in question, however, tempted me not a whit.”

“And why is that, sir?”

Mihalyi frowned. “There are people,” he said, “who attend open rehearsals and make surreptitious recordings of the music. They treasure them and even bootleg them to other like-minded fans. I despise such people.”

“Why?”

“They violate the artist’s privacy,” he said. “A rehearsal is a time when one refines one’s approach to a piece of music. One takes chances, one uses the occasion as the equivalent of an artist’s sketch pad. The person who records it is in essence spraying a rough sketch with fixative and hanging it on the wall of his personal museum. I find it unsettling enough that listeners record concert performances, making permanent what was supposed to be a transitory experience. But to record a rehearsal is an atrocity.”

“And a manuscript?”

“A manuscript is the writer’s completed work. It provides a record of how he arranged and revised his ideas, and how they were in turn adjusted for better or worse by an editor. But it is finished work. An unfinished manuscript...”

“Is a rehearsal?”

“That or something worse. I ask myself, What would Woolrich have wanted?”

“Another drink,” Edward Everett Stokes said, and leaned forward to help himself to more eggnog. “I take your point, Mihalyi. And Woolrich might well have preferred to have his unfinished work destroyed upon his death, but he left no instructions to that effect, so how can we presume to guess his wishes? Perhaps, for all we know, there is a single scene in the book that meant as much to him as anything he’d written. Or less than a scene — a bit of dialogue, a paragraph of description, perhaps no more than a single sentence. Who are we to say it should not survive?”

“Perigord,” Mihalyi said. “You are a writer. Would you care to have your unfinished work published after your death? Would you not recoil at that, or at having it completed by others?”

Philip Perigord cocked an eyebrow. “I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “I’ve spent twenty years in Hollywood. Forget unfinished work. My finished work doesn’t get published, or ‘produced,’ as they so revealingly term it. I get paid, and the work winds up on a shelf. And, when it comes to having one’s work completed by others, in Hollywood you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. It happens during your lifetime, and you learn to live with it.”

“We don’t know the author’s wishes,” Harriet Quinlan put in, “and I wonder how relevant they are.”

“But it’s his work,” Mihalyi pointed out.

“Is it, Zoltan? Or does it belong to the ages? Finished or not, the author has left it to us. Schubert did not finish one of his greatest symphonies. Would you have laid its two completed movements in the casket with him?”

“It has been argued that the work was complete, that he intended it to be but two movements long.”

“That begs the question, Zoltan.”

“It does, dear lady,” he said with a wink. “I’d rather beg the question than be undone by it. Of course I’d keep the Unfinished Symphony in the repertoire. On the other hand, I’d hate to see some fool attempt to finish it.”

“No one has, have they?”

“Not to my knowledge. But several writers have had the effrontery to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and I do think Dickens would have been better served if the manuscript had gone in the box with his bones. And as for sequels, like those for Pride and Prejudice and The Big Sleep, or that young fellow who had the colossal gall to tread in Rex Stout’s immortal footsteps...”

Now we were getting onto sensitive ground. As far as Leo Haig was concerned, Archie Goodwin had always written up Wolfe’s cases, using the transparent pseudonym of Rex Stout. (Rex Stout = fat king, an allusion to Wolfe’s own regal corpulence.) Robert Goldsborough, credited with the books written since the “death” of Stout, was, as Haig saw it, a ghostwriter employed by Goodwin, who was no longer up to the chore of hammering out the books. He’d relate them to Goldsborough, who transcribed them and polished them up. While they might not have all the narrative verve of Goodwin’s own work, still they provided an important and accurate account of Wolfe’s more recent cases.

See, Haig feels the great man’s still alive and still raising orchids and nailing killers. Maybe somewhere on the Upper East Side. Maybe in Murray Hill, or just off Gramercy Park...

The discussion about Goldsborough, and about sequels in general, roused Haig from a torpor that Wolfe himself might have envied. “Enough,” he said with authority. “There’s no time for meandering literary conversations, nor would Chip have room for them in a short-story-length report. So let us get to it. One of you took the manuscript, box and all, from its place on the shelf. Mr. Mihalyi, you have the air of one who protests too much. You profess no interest in the manuscripts of unpublished novels, and I can accept that you did not yearn to possess As Dark as It Gets, but you wanted a look at it, didn’t you?”

“I don’t own a Woolrich manuscript,” he said, “and of course I was interested in seeing what one looked like. How he typed, how he entered corrections...”

“So you took the manuscript from the shelf.”

“Yes,” the violinist agreed. “I went into the other room with it, opened the box, and flipped through the pages. You can taste the flavor of the man’s work in the visual appearance of his manuscript pages. The words and phrases x’d out, the pencil notations, the crossovers, even the typographical errors. The computer age puts paid to all that, doesn’t it? Imagine Chandler running Spel-Chek, or Hammett with justified margins.” He sighed. “A few minutes with the script made me long to own one of Woolrich’s. But not this one, for reasons I’ve already explained.”

“You spent how long with the book?”

“Fifteen minutes at the most. Probably more like ten.”

“And returned to this room?”

“Yes.”

“And brought the manuscript with you?”

“Yes. I intended to return it to the shelf, but someone was standing in the way. It may have been you, Jon. It was someone tall, and you’re the tallest person here.” He turned to our client. “It wasn’t you. But I think you may have been talking with Jon. Someone was, at any rate, and I’d have had to step between the two of you to put the box back, and that might have led to questions as to why I’d picked it up in the first place. So I put it down.”

“Where?”

“On a table. That one, I think.”

“It’s not there now,” Jon Corn-Wallace said.

“It’s not,” Haig agreed. “One of you took it from that table. I could, through an exhausting process of cross-questioning, establish who that person is. But it would save us all time if the person would simply recount what happened next.”

There was a silence while they all looked at each other. “Well, I guess this is where I come in,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said. “I was sitting in the red chair, where Phil Perigord is sitting now. And whoever I’d been talking to went to get another drink, and I looked around, and there it was on the table.”

“The manuscript, madam?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that was what it was, not at first. I thought it was a finely bound limited edition. Because the manuscripts are all kept on that shelf, you know, and this one wasn’t. And it hadn’t been on the table a few minutes earlier, either. I knew that much. So I assumed it was a book someone had been leafing through, and I saw it was by Cornell Woolrich, and I didn’t recognize the title, so I thought I’d try leafing through it myself.”

“And you found it was a manuscript.”

“Well, that didn’t take too keen an eye, did it? I suppose I glanced at the first twenty pages, just riffled through them while the party went on around me. I stopped after a chapter or so. That was plenty.”

“You didn’t like what you read?”

“There were corrections,” she said disdainfully. “Words and whole sentences crossed out, new words penciled in. I realize writers have to work that way, but when I read a book I like to believe it emerged from the writer’s mind fully formed.”

“Like Athena from the brow of What’s-his-name,” her husband said.

“Zeus. I don’t want to know there was a writer at work, making decisions, putting words down, and then changing them. I want to forget about the writer entirely and lose myself in the story.”

“Everybody wants to forget about the writer,” Philip Perigord said, helping himself to more eggnog. “At the Oscars each year some ninny intones, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ before he hands out the screenwriting awards. And you hear the usual crap about how they owe it all to chaps like me who put words in their mouths. They say it, but nobody believes it. Jack Warner called us schmucks with Underwoods. Well, we’ve come a long way. Now we’re schmucks with Power Macs.”

“Indeed,” Haig said. “You looked at the manuscript, didn’t you, Mr. Perigord?”

“I never read unpublished work. Can’t risk leaving myself open to a plagiarism charge.”

“Oh? But didn’t you have a special interest in Woolrich? Didn’t you once adapt a story of his?”

“How did you know about that? I was one of several who made a living off that particular piece of crap. It was never produced.”

“And you looked at this manuscript in the hope that you might adapt it?”

The writer shook his head. “I’m through wasting myself out there.”

“They’re through with you,” Harriet Quinlan said. “Nothing personal, Phil, but it’s a town that uses up writers and throws them away. You couldn’t get arrested out there. So you’ve come back east to write books.”

“And you’ll be representing him, madam?”

“I may, if he brings me something I can sell. I saw him paging through a manuscript and figured he was looking for something he could steal. Oh, don’t look so outraged, Phil. Why not steal from Woolrich, for God’s sake? He’s not going to sue. He left everything to Columbia University, and you could knock off anything of his, published or unpublished, and they’d never know the difference. Ever since I saw you reading, I’ve been wondering. Did you come across anything worth stealing?”

“I don’t steal,” Perigord said. “Still, perfectly legitimate inspiration can result from a glance at another man’s work—”

“I’ll say it can. And did it?”

He shook his head. “If there was a strong idea anywhere in that manuscript, I couldn’t find it in the few minutes I spent looking. What about you, Harriet? I know you had a look at it, because I saw you.”

“I just wanted to see what it was you’d been so caught up in. And I wondered if the manuscript might be salvageable. One of my writers might be able to pull it off, and do a better job than the hack who finished Into the Night.”

“Ah,” Haig said. “And what did you determine, madam?”

“I didn’t read enough to form a judgment. Anyway, Into the Night was no great commercial success, so why tag along in its wake?”

“So you put the manuscript...”

“Back in its box, and left it on the table where I’d found it.”

Our client shook his head in wonder. “Murder on the Orient Express,” he said. “Or in the Calais coach, depending on whether you’re English or American. It’s beginning to look as though everyone read that manuscript. And I never noticed a thing!”

“Well, you were hitting the sauce pretty good,” Jon Corn-Wallace reminded him. “And you were, uh, concentrating all your social energy in one direction.”

“How’s that?”

Corn-Wallace nodded toward Jeanne Botleigh, who was refilling someone’s cup. “As far as you were concerned, our lovely caterer was the only person in the room.”

There was an awkward silence, with our host coloring and his caterer lowering her eyes demurely. Haig broke it. “To continue,” he said abruptly. “Miss Quinlan returned the manuscript to its box and to its place upon the table. Then—”

“But she didn’t,” Perigord said. “Harriet, I wanted another look at Woolrich. Maybe I’d missed something. But first I saw you reading it, and when I looked a second time it was gone. You weren’t reading it and it wasn’t on the table, either.”

“I put it back,” the agent said.

“But not where you found it,” said Edward Everett Stokes. “You set it down not on the table but on that revolving bookcase.”

“Did I? I suppose it’s possible. But how did you know that?”

“Because I saw you,” said the small-press publisher. “And because I wanted a look at the manuscript myself. I knew about it, including the fact that it was not restorable in the fashion of Into the Night. That made it valueless to a commercial publisher, but the idea of a Woolrich novel going unpublished ate away at me. I mean, we’re talking about Cornell Woolrich.”

“And you thought—”

“I thought why not publish it as is, warts and all? I could do it, in an edition of two or three hundred copies, for collectors who’d happily accept inconsistencies and omissions for the sake of having something otherwise unobtainable. I wanted a few minutes’ peace and quiet with the book, so I took it into the lavatory.”

“And?”

“And I read it, or at least paged through it. I must have spent half an hour in there, or close to it.”

“I remember you were gone a while,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. “I thought you’d headed on home.”

“I thought he was in the other room,” Jayne said, “cavorting on the pile of coats with Harriet here. But I guess that must have been someone else.”

“It was Zoltan,” the agent said, “and we were hardly cavorting.”

“Canoodling, then, but—”

“He was teaching me a yogic breathing technique, not that it’s any of your business. Stokes, you took the manuscript into the john. I trust you brought it back?”

“Well, no.”

“You took it home? You’re the person responsible for its disappearance?”

“Certainly not. I didn’t take it home, and I hope I’m not responsible for its disappearance. I left it in the lavatory.”

“You just left it there?”

“In its box, on the shelf over the vanity. I set it down there while I washed my hands, and I’m afraid I forgot it. And no, it’s not there now. I went and looked as soon as I realized what all this was about, and I’m afraid some other hands than mine must have moved it. I’ll tell you this — when it does turn up, I definitely want to publish it.”

“If it turns up,” our client said darkly. “Once E.E. left it in the bathroom, anyone could have slipped it under his coat without being seen. And I’ll probably never see it again.”

“But that means one of us is a thief,” somebody said.

“I know, and that’s out of the question. You’re all my friends. But we were all drinking last night, and drink can confuse a person. Suppose one of you did take it from the bathroom and carried it home as a joke, the kind of joke that can seem funny after a few drinks. If you could contrive to return it, perhaps in such a way that no one could know your identity... Haig, you ought to be able to work that out.”

“I could,” Haig agreed. “If that were how it happened. But it didn’t.”

“It didn’t?”

“You forget the least obvious suspect.”

“Me? Dammit, Haig, are you saying I stole my own manuscript?”

“I’m saying the butler did it,” Haig said, “or the closest thing we have to a butler. Miss Botleigh, your upper lip has been trembling almost since we all sat down. You’ve been on the point of an admission throughout and haven’t said a word. Have you in fact read the manuscript of As Dark as It Gets?”

“Yes.”

The client gasped. “You have? When?”

“Last night.”

“But—”

“I had to use the lavatory,” she said, “and the book was there, although I could see it wasn’t an ordinary bound book but pages in a box. I didn’t think I would hurt it by looking at it. So I sat there and read the first two chapters.”

“What did you think?” Haig asked her.

“It was very powerful. Parts of it were hard to follow, but the scenes were strong, and I got caught up in them.”

“That’s Woolrich,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said. “He can grab you, all right.”

“And then you took it with you when you went home,” our client said. “You were so involved you couldn’t bear to leave it unfinished, so you, uh, borrowed it.” He reached to pat her hand. “Perfectly understandable,” he said, “and perfectly innocent. You were going to bring it back once you’d finished it. So all this fuss has been over nothing.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“It’s not?”

“I read two chapters,” she said, “and I thought I’d ask to borrow it some other time, or maybe not. But I put the pages back in the box and left them there.”

“In the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“So you never did finish the book,” our client said. “Well, if it ever turns up I’ll be more than happy to lend it to you, but until then—”

“But perhaps Miss Botleigh has already finished the book,” Haig suggested.

“How could she? She just told you she left it in the bathroom.”

Haig said, “Miss Botleigh?”

“I finished the book,” she said. “When everybody else went home, I stayed.”

“My word,” Zoltan Mihalyi said. “Woolrich never had a more devoted fan, or one half so beautiful.”

“Not to finish the manuscript,” she said, and turned to our host. “You asked me to stay,” she said.

“I wanted you to stay,” he agreed. “I wanted to ask you to stay. But I don’t remember...”

“I guess you’d had quite a bit to drink,” she said, “although you didn’t show it. But you asked me to stay, and I’d been hoping you would ask me, because I wanted to stay.”

“You must have had rather a lot to drink yourself,” Harriet Quinlan murmured.

“Not that much,” said the caterer. “I wanted to stay because he’s a very attractive man.”

Our client positively glowed, then turned red with embarrassment. “I knew I had a hole in my memory,” he said, “but I didn’t think anything significant could have fallen through it. So you actually stayed? God. What, uh, happened?”

“We went upstairs,” Jeanne Botleigh said. “And we went to the bedroom, and we went to bed.”

“Indeed,” said Haig.

“And it was...”

“Quite wonderful,” she said.

“And I don’t remember. I think I’m going to kill myself.”

“Not on Christmas Day,” E.E. Stokes said. “And not with a mystery still unsolved. Haig, what became of the bloody manuscript?”

“Miss Botleigh?”

She looked at our host, then lowered her eyes. “You went to sleep afterward,” she said, “and I felt entirely energized, and knew I couldn’t sleep, and I thought I’d read for a while. And I remembered the manuscript, so I came down here and fetched it.”

“And read it?”

“In bed. I thought you might wake up, in fact I was hoping you would. But you didn’t.”

“Damn it,” our client said, with feeling.

“So I finished the manuscript and still didn’t feel sleepy. And I got dressed and let myself out and went home.”

There was a silence, broken at length by Zoltan Mihalyi, offering our client congratulations on his triumph and sympathy for the memory loss. “When you write your memoirs,” he said, “you’ll have to leave that chapter blank.”

“Or have someone ghost it for you,” Philip Perigord offered.

“The manuscript,” Stokes said. “What became of it?”

“I don’t know,” the caterer said. “I finished it—”

“Which is more than Woolrich could say,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said.

“—and I left it there.”

“There?”

“In its box. On the bedside table, where you’d be sure to find it first thing in the morning. But I guess you didn’t.”

“The manuscript? Haig, you’re telling me you want the manuscript?”

“You find my fee excessive?”

“But it wasn’t even lost. No one took it. It was next to my bed. I’d have found it sooner or later.”

“But you didn’t,” Haig said. “Not until you’d cost me and my young associate the better part of our holiday. You’ve been reading mysteries all your life. Now you got to see one solved in front of you, and in your own magnificent library.”

He brightened. “It is a nice room, isn’t it?”

“It’s first-rate.”

“Thanks. But Haig, listen to reason. You did solve the puzzle and recover the manuscript, but now you’re demanding what you recovered as compensation. That’s like rescuing a kidnap victim and insisting on adopting the child yourself.”

“Nonsense. It’s nothing like that.”

“All right, then it’s like recovering stolen jewels and demanding the jewels themselves as reward. It’s just plain disproportionate. I hired you because I wanted the manuscript in my collection, and now you expect to wind up with it in your collection.”

It did sound a little weird to me, but I kept my mouth shut. Haig had the ball, and I wanted to see where he’d go with it.

He put his fingertips together. “In Black Orchids,” he said, “Wolfe’s client was his friend Lewis Hewitt. As recompense for his work, Wolfe insisted on all of the black orchid plants Hewitt had bred. Not one. All of them.”

“That always seemed greedy to me.”

“If we were speaking of fish,” Haig went on, “I might be similarly inclined. But books are of use to me only as reading material. I want to read that book, sir, and I want to have it close to hand if I need to refer to it.” He shrugged. “But I don’t need the original that you prize so highly. Make me a copy.”

“A copy?”

“Indeed. Have the manuscript photocopied.”

“You’d be content with a... a copy?”

“And a credit,” I said quickly, before Haig could give away the store. We’d put in a full day, and he ought to get more than a few hours’ reading out of it. “A two thousand dollar store credit,” I added, “which Mr. Haig can use up as he sees fit.”

“Buying paperbacks and book-club editions,” our client said. “It should last you for years.” He heaved a sigh. “A photocopy and a store credit. Well, if that makes you happy...”

And that pretty much wrapped it up. I ran straight home and sat down at the typewriter, and if the story seems a little hurried it’s because I was in a rush when I wrote it. See, our client tried for a second date with Jeanne Botleigh, to refresh his memory, I suppose, but a woman tends to feel less than flattered when you forget having gone to bed with her, and she wasn’t having any.

So I called her the minute I got home, and we talked about this and that, and we’ve got a date in an hour and a half. I’ll tell you this much, if I get lucky, I’ll remember. So wish me luck, huh?

And, by the way...

Merry Christmas!