The Last Coincidence

Two

The next day began quietly enough. At seven-forty-five I was at my small table in the kitchen of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street near the Hudson, which is the place I’ve called home for more than half my life. And that small table is just about the only spot I ever have breakfast unless I’m with Lily at her Katonah retreat or find myself in jail, which, truth to tell, has happened more than once in the years I’ve been collecting paychecks signed by Nero Wolfe. I had finished a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and one cup of black coffee and was starting in on a second cup, to go with the Canadian bacon and pancakes with wild-thyme honey that Fritz Brenner was preparing for me.

Wolfe, true to his morning custom, took nourishment on a tray up in his room, and my meal company, as usual, was the Times, which was propped up on the rack I had had made so I could read and still have both hands free to tackle the meal. Fritz, chef extraordinaire and the one indispensable cog in the machinery of the brownstone — with the possible exception of Wolfe himself — quietly scurried about making preparations for lunch: baby lobsters with avocados.

Fritz and I have worked out a series of accommodations over the years that allow us to coexist beautifully in the brownstone. One is that he doesn’t talk to me during breakfast, and I don’t tell him how to cook; simple, but it works. The Times wasn’t holding my interest, especially with the Mets wallowing in fifth place and the Yankees doing no better and also behaving as if they actually were fond of their current wimp of a manager.

After the events of the previous night, though, nothing less than an article on the latest adventures of Sparky Linville would have satisfied me. Lily had done her best to talk me out of seeing him, but I tried to assure her I wasn’t going to involve her niece in any way. She had frowned and remained doubtful about the undertaking, and before we parted made me promise that Noreen’s name would under no circumstances be mentioned.

I finished breakfast and carried a cup of coffee down the hall to the office. Wolfe wasn’t there, of course, and wouldn’t be until eleven. His unvarying Monday-through-Saturday schedule calls for him to spend four hours daily — nine to eleven in the morning and four to six in the P.M. — playing with his ten thousand orchids in the greenhouse on the fourth floor, along with Theodore Horstmann, the crotchety old orchid tender who’s worked for Wolfe even longer than I have.

I touched down at my desk and contemplated the day’s work, which consisted primarily of paying the bills and updating the orchid-germination records on the personal computer. We didn’t have any cases at present, which suited Wolfe just fine, what with his case of terminal laziness. The bank balance was reasonably healthy, though, in the main because of the fat fee our fat resident genius got for figuring out — with some incidental help from yours truly — which of a Scarsdale millionaire’s domestic staff of seven had filched a coin collection valued in the high six figures.

After contemplating the day’s chores some more, I put them aside and dialed Saul Panzer’s number. For those of you new to these narratives, Saul is a free-lance operative, or detective if you prefer, the best of his kind in New York City and, for my money, in the western hemisphere, maybe the eastern too. Anyway, Nero Wolfe has hired him for everything from a basic tailing job to putting together extensive dossiers on people who are so secretive that their names have never even appeared in the Times or any other paper.

Saul gets at least double the going day-rate for free-lancers and still rejects more work than he accepts, but he almost never turns Wolfe down. And he never turns down a chance to take my money, either, in our weekly poker games.

“ ’Morning,” I said when he answered on the second ring. “I thought you’d be out combing the streets of this great metropolis by now.”

“As a matter of fact, I was just about to leave. An interesting situation over in Long Island City, should wrap it up today. What can I do you out of?”

“You did me out of enough with that flush against my jack-high straight the other night. I’m just casting for some information.”

“Cast away.”

“What can you tell me about Sparky Linville?”

“Oh, yeah... the hotshot with the heavy foot, the one who got pinched going one-fifteen on the Grand Central Parkway in a Porsche a couple weeks ago. You probably read about it.”

“Keep going.”

“Hell, Archie, you see the papers. You know as much as I do. The punk’s got money backing up on him. And women too, apparently. The spoiled-prince syndrome, you know?”

“Into drugs?”

“Possibly, but I haven’t heard anything specific. Then, there’s no reason I should. Linville and I don’t exactly move in the same circles.”

“Where does he live?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. Say, what’s your interest in the young rake, anyway?”

“I’m enamored of his life-style, as in rich and famous, and I want to learn to be just like him.”

“Why do I not believe you?” Saul muttered. “Okay, let me get back to you. Going anywhere in the next few minutes?”

“Only as far from the telephone as my faithful PC. You got a pipeline?”

My answer was the click followed by the dial tone, so I swiveled to the computer and began entering the germination records from the three-by-five cards Theodore had left on my desk the night before. I was at it for every bit of six minutes when the phone squawked. “Got a writing implement handy?” Saul asked.

“Of course. What took you so long?”

“Mr. Linville,” he said, ignoring the sarcasm, “is the product of what the historians would refer to as a dynastic marriage. His given name is Barton, which is his mother’s maiden name. As in the department-store Bartons. And his father, as you probably know, owns most of Linville Frozen Foods. The heir, an only child, is twenty-six, and he lives alone — at least most of the time — in a pricey three-bedroom pleasure dome in what was described to me as an old but elegant co-op on East Seventy-seventh.” He gave me the address. “His favorite nocturnal haunt is, surprise, surprise, that yuppie playpen, Morgana’s, which he hits at least two or three times a week, frequently in the company of at least one well-turned-out young female, sometimes two, other times with a date and another couple or with one or more male friends. Being a classy fellow, he’s also been known to thump his chest and bellow about his amorous conquests. And in case you didn’t know it, Morgana’s, or so I’m told, is an overpriced chrome-and-glass temple on Second Avenue frequented by a well-cushioned crowd ranging from their twenties upward who want to be talked about and written about and seen, mostly by one another.”

“It may shock you, but I’ve been there.”

“Very little shocks me,” Saul said, “although that comes close.”

“I like to be unpredictable. Anyway, I gather what you’re telling me is that our Mr. Linville eschews the solitary and contemplative life.”

“Don’t ever let anybody ever say you don’t have a way with the mother tongue,” Saul shot back. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. Anyway, if you’re still with me on this, our hero has been known to favor Morgana’s with his presence for up to three hours at a stretch, usually middle-to-late evening, and then sometimes he moves off with his entourage to one of several places in the Village or SoHo. He’s described as a moderate drinker, Scotch usually, but once in a while he sails past his limit and then he tends to get a tad surly. He’s not all that large, and he picked a fight in Morgana’s some months back with somebody who is. Result: Young Barton Linville ended up on his keester. No major damage, except to his pride.”

“You’re a veritable storehouse of information. I am truly impressed.”

“As well you should be. I’ve got more if you can take the time away from your precious PC.”

“I’ll make the sacrifice.”

“Dandy. Our prince has a job — or at least a position — at his father’s frozen-foods company. From what I gather, it’s a sinecure, and he doesn’t do a hell of a lot there to earn whatever money falls his way from out of the old man’s pocket.”

“Kid sounds like a real jewel.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I’ve done my good deed for the day. It’s off to Long Island City.” Before I could thank Saul, the line had gone dead again.

I went to the shelves where we keep a month’s copies of both the Gazette and the Times and took a chance on the Gazette, lugging three weeks’ worth back to my desk. Naturally, what I was looking for was in an issue near the bottom of the stack — a photo of a grinning, tuxedoed Linville at a benefit dinner for neighborhood food pantries the night after his speeding episode on the Grand Central Parkway. The caption described him as a “free-wheeling, fun-loving dynamo-about-town” and quoted him as defending his driving thusly: “Really, what’s the big deal? It’s a great-handling car. And I was sober, wasn’t I? I demanded a breathalizer test, and I passed — no alcohol at all, not a trace. Hell, I’m a safer driver at a hundred than most of those clowns on the road are at forty-five or fifty.”

My next move was to dial Fred Durkin, a free-lance operative Wolfe and I use when we can’t get Saul or when we need two men or when the job doesn’t call for a bushel of finesse. Fred, who stands five-ten and is a marginal Weight Watchers’ candidate, is by no means a dummy, but he’s a little rusty upstairs sometimes, although he has three traits — bravery, honesty, and dependability — that in Wolfe’s book and mine more than compensate for whatever he might be lacking in the penthouse. I knew business had been a little slow for Fred lately, so I wasn’t surprised to find him at home in Queens at a time when most people are pursuing an income.

“Mr. Wolfe have a job?” he blurted before I could finish my sentence of pleasantries.

“Not Mr. Wolfe — me. It’s a stakeout, at your usual rates, of course.”

“Fire away. I’m available, like right now.”

“Tonight’s soon enough, although this could take more than one night.”

I filled him in on the program. He didn’t recall ever having heard of Linville, but he did know where Morgana’s was. We agreed that he would stop by the brownstone to get the Gazette photo before six, which is when Wolfe comes down from his afternoon session in the plant rooms. Fred has always been a little uncomfortable around Wolfe. Besides, this time around, he was working for me, not Wolfe, and what I do on my own time is nobody’s business but my own.