Silver Spire

Fifteen

I was still at the computer when I heard the groaning of the elevator at six. Wolfe entered the office, slipped an orchid into the vase on his desk, got settled, and rang for beer. “The veal cutlets were superb,” he announced.

“So was my ham sandwich — take it from the man who made it. I put some reading material on the blotter. You want to go over it first, or should I report?”

He raised his eyebrows. “These verses?”

“The best I could do. Meade apparently wasn’t big on marking up his Bibles. But I found that list on his desk, along with the names and phone numbers.”

Wolfe pulled in a bushel of air. “Report,” he said, pouring beer into a glass from one of two bottles Fritz had just brought in. I gave him my usual playback, which took just over twenty minutes. He sat with his eyes closed, opening them occasionally to locate his glass and lift it to his lips. When I finished, he studied the sheet with the verses. “Get Mr. Bay,” he said.

“It’s after six. He’s probably gone home.”

“You are resourceful, as you remind me daily.”

“Yes, sir.” I punched the church’s number and got a recorded woman’s voice informing me that the office hours were nine to five daily and reciting the times of the Sunday services. It ended by giving a number that could be called in case of emergency. I decided this was not an emergency and called directory assistance for Bay’s home number. They had it, which was a mild surprise. Wolfe already was on the line when the man himself answered.

“Mr. Bay? Nero Wolfe. I need information.”

“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” he asked plaintively. “My wife and I are just sitting down to dinner.”

“This will take but a moment. At the time of his death, was Mr. Meade in the process of preparing a sermon?”

“No... not that I know of. I’m not taking another vacation until November. Roy probably would have been in the pulpit at least one of the weeks I was to be gone, but we hadn’t discussed it yet.”

“Might he have been scheduled to preach elsewhere?”

“Unlikely,” Bay replied. “Roy didn’t give guest sermons very often, although he certainly was free to do so. And when he did, I usually knew about it, because he almost always asked my advice on content and organization.”

“The reason for my questions is that Mr. Goodwin discovered a listing of Bible passages on Mr. Meade’s desk today,” Wolfe said. “Seven of them. The first is I Timothy 6:10.”

“The most misquoted verse of all,” Bay said.

“Inarguably.”

“As I’m sure you know, in most modern translations it reads something like ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.’ But the words ‘the love of’ seem to get dropped when the passage is cited — at least by lay people.”

“Can you suggest any reason Mr. Meade might have set down these passages?” Wolfe read the other six for Bay.

“No,” the minister answered. “Diane told me that Mr. Goodwin had made a photocopy of some material from Roy’s office, and I was going to take a look at the originals tomorrow. I will not claim to be an expert on every verse in the Bible, Mr. Wolfe, but from what I do know, those you mentioned just now don’t seem to follow a particular pattern. Roy probably was using them in his own personal devotions, for whatever specific reasons he had. That’s not at all unusual. I often make note of certain verses myself when I’m reading the Bible. They help me to focus both my thoughts and my prayers.”

Wolfe thanked Bay and cradled the receiver, studying the verses again. He glared at his empty glass before refilling it, then walked to the bookshelves and pulled a Bible out, carrying it back to the desk. He thumbed through it, stopping occasionally to make a notation on a sheet of bond I had supplied at his request.

“Finding anything?” I asked sociably after several minutes. I got a grunt in response. He repeated the process with a second Bible from the shelf and a third, and judging by the expression on his face, he had discovered no more in them than he had in the first. He still had all three of the books open on the desk when Fritz announced dinner.

Wolfe seemed like his usual self at the table, polishing off three helpings of the salmon mousse with dill sauce — his own recipe — and launching into a monologue on why the country consistently elects Republican Presidents and Democratic Congresses. The way he laid it out, it made perfect sense to me.

When we were back in the office after dinner, I started to get worried. First off, Wolfe didn’t ring for beer after he’d finished his coffee. He just sat for five minutes with his hands on the arms of the chair and his eyes shut, then closed the Bibles, returned them to the shelves, and announced he was going to bed. It was nine o’clock, and he never turns in much before midnight. It had all the earmarks of that most dreaded of Wolfe’s maladies — a relapse.

I have never figured out what brings on the relapses, but he’s been having them all the years I’ve been on the payroll. He doesn’t get one on every case — not even close. And he doesn’t necessarily fall into them on the most difficult cases. But when one comes, nothing short of a five-alarm fire in his bedroom will blast him out of it. I’ve seen these things last anywhere from one day to two weeks, and in the extreme, I’ve known him to quit altogether. That happened in the Farnstrom Jewelry swindle, which never did get solved, and we had to give back a retainer that would have kept Wolfe in beer, books, and beluga caviar for months, never mind that he doesn’t eat caviar.

I went to bed hoping the evening’s performance had been a false alarm, but it didn’t take me long the next morning to learn otherwise. “He is not himself, Archie,” Fritz said glumly when I came down to the kitchen for breakfast. “I can tell.”

“All right, how can you tell?” If I sounded irritated, it was because I didn’t want to believe him.

“He had that look he gets when he...”

“When he what?” I snapped.

I instantly regretted my tone, because Fritz looked like he’d just been slapped. He clenched his fists in frustration. “When he... when he gives up. You know how he is then, you have seen it, too. That’s how he looked when I took his breakfast up to him.”

“Relapse.” There, I said the word, and we nodded to each other.

“Okay, we’ve been through this drill before,” I told him. “There’s not a hell of a lot we can do when he’s like this, and we both know it. He usually goes one of two ways — either he stays in his room like a hermit, or he parks himself here in the kitchen and tells you how to do your work, right down to the sage and the chives and God knows, even the paprika or whatever. Remember the time he camped in the kitchen and ate half a sheep in two days? Cooked God knows how many different ways? For your sake, I hope he does the hermit bit.”

“Twenty different ways. Archie, I don’t want him to do either thing. I just want him to go to work,” Fritz said, cupping his hands and looking at the ceiling.

“Me too. We’ll just have to hope this is one of the shorter spells.”

Wolfe apparently went up to play with the orchids directly from his bedroom at nine as usual, because I heard the drone of the elevator. That part of his schedule at least remained intact. At eleven, as I sat in the office typing some correspondence he had dictated the day before, the elevator whirred again, but it never got to the first floor — a bad sign. Ten minutes later, Fritz was in the office looking even more woebegone than earlier. “He called me on the kitchen phone and said he wants his lunch brought up to him in his room. That is bad... very, very bad.”

“The good news is that he’s not hounding you in the kitchen. The bad news is, he’s definitely, positively in a relapse. And as usual in one of these things, the schedule’s out the window. Man your battle stations and be prepared for anything.”

Fritz didn’t appreciate the attempt at humor, and I wasn’t amused by it myself. As Wolfe’s relapses go, this ended up being medium-long — about one hundred eighteen hours if you count it as beginning after dinner Wednesday. He stayed in his room all of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, except for his twice-daily trips to commune with the orchids.

When these things occur, I make it a point not to let them alter my personal life. As I do once a week, I played poker that night at Saul Panzer’s. I was picked almost clean for most of the evening, but I won the last three pots — one of them on a bluff — and walked away only fifteen bucks in the hole, which was a moral victory, because I had been down more than fifty. Friday I was Lily Rowan’s escort at a fancy dinner party for twelve in a palatial duplex on Sutton Place. The food was almost as good as Fritz’s, and I even knew which forks to use with what courses. And Saturday, Saul and I went to a Rangers-Washington playoff game at the Garden, which the Rangers won in three overtimes. One of the Sunday papers said it was “the most thrilling game in hockey history.” Maybe.

For the next several days, the only event related to the case, other than two “what-have-you-got-for-me?” calls from Lon Cohen, was when Nathaniel Parker phoned on Friday. “How’s Wolfe coming with this thing?” he asked smoothly.

“Working on it,” I lied.

“Well, Durkin’s a basket case wondering what kind of progress is being made. He doesn’t want to call you guys, for fear Wolfe will get angry with him. And he’s not answering his phone, because the press has been all over him the last few days. They’ve staked out his place in Queens, and when his wife went out to pick the morning paper off the front stoop yesterday, a TV crew rushed the house and tried to interview her. She slammed the door in their faces.”

“Good for Fanny. I always did like her style. Next time Fred calls, tell him things are moving along.”

Parker snorted. “Your tone doesn’t exactly instill confidence.”

“Well, you know Wolfe. He plays it pretty close to his oversized vest.”

“We haven’t got forever,” Parker cautioned before signing off. That’s a lawyer for you, always full of cheering observations.

Fritz gave me periodic reports on Wolfe’s condition, given that he took a meal tray up to his room three times a day. “His appetite is excellent, Archie. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?” he told me Friday afternoon.

“Nuts to his appetite. I’m going up.” I took the steps two at a time to the second floor and rapped on his door. “It’s me,” I said. “We need to talk.”

He said something like “Come in,” and I opened the door. He was propped up in bed wearing his yellow pajamas and reading. For some reason, he always seems larger when he’s in bed, maybe because of all that yellow — not only his pajamas, but the sheets and coverlet as well. He gave me a questioning scowl.

“Pardon the interruption, but are you planning to return to work sometime soon? Say, before Fred Durkin is shipped off to Attica to spend the rest of his days making license plates, or whatever it is they do at those places now?”

“I just read something very interesting, Archie,” the resident genius said in a chatty tone, gesturing to the book he was holding. “Did you know that the first English factory to use steam power was that of Josiah Wedgwood, the maker of china?”

“I have to admit that comes as a surprise, and I’m certainly glad to see that you’re enjoying your reading. Just as a matter of curiosity, will you be back in the office in the near future, or should I have it redecorated as a shrine to your past glories? We could probably help with the upkeep of the brownstone by charging admission. It may turn out to be our only income.”

He closed his eyes. “Sarcasm has never been among your strengths, Archie. You would do well to excise it from your repertoire.”

“Yes, sir. My question stands.”

“At the moment, I am immersed in this volume. I would like to complete it in peace. Good day.”

I thought about going to the office, getting my Marley, and finishing him off, but that wouldn’t help Fred any. Instead, I smiled and walked out, closing the door quietly behind me and giving myself an A+ in restraint.