Murder Most Merry

AS DARK AS CHRISTMAS GETS – Lawrence Block

It was 9:45 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 ear, 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, 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?”

“Leather-bound 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’re 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 nineteen eighty.”

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 Thirty-fifth 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 four-thirty 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 five thousand dollars if it’s real or twenty-five 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 hardboiled 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 awhile,” 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.”

“Kanoodling, 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!