The Last Coincidence

Three

I was once told by A guest in the brownstone, a steel-company executive by the name of Hazlitt, who was a client of ours, that dining with Nero Wolfe is a singular event. I have no doubt Mr. Hazlitt knew whereof he spoke, although I’m the least-qualified person on the planet to respond to that comment, having sat at the same table with His Largeness so often over the years that I may fail to totally appreciate what others experience when they make a debut visit to our dining room.

Our normal routine — which is to say something over ninety-nine percent of the time — calls for both lunch and dinner to be served in the dining room, which is across the hall from the office on the first floor. Fritz does the serving, and Wolfe and I are usually the only servees, although on occasion, guests such as Mr. Hazlitt are invited by Wolfe to join us. Tonight, though, it was just the two of us, and Wolfe had set the discussion topic, which also is part of the routine.

As we laid waste to the lamb-cutlet casserole with tomatoes and carrots, he expounded on why the Roman Empire was doomed from its inception, and I mostly nodded and chewed, throwing in an occasional question to show that I was listening and interested. The casserole was easily up to Fritz’s five-star standards, as was the peach cobbler that chased it. When we were back in the office with coffee, Wolfe immediately burrowed into his current book, Louis XIV: A Royal Life, by Olivier Bernier, which pleased me if only because it gave me time to reflect on how I would approach Sparky Linville if Fred chanced to call. I can’t claim my reflective moods come all that often, but when they do, it’s nice to have Wolfe otherwise occupied.

After forty-five minutes of drinking coffee and watching Wolfe turn pages, I rolled my chair over to the PC to massage the orchid-germination records I’d entered earlier. No sooner had I settled in than the phone rang, and answering it is part of my unwritten job description. “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Fred. Subject just entered Morgana’s, with another male. I’m across the street in the doorway of a poster shop. I’ll wait here in case subject flies. Instructions?”

“Sounds good. Thanks.” I hung up, convinced that the lack of work was causing Fred Durkin to watch too many TV police shows. His dialogue needed work. I waited five minutes, then got up and stretched, yawning.

“Think I’ll take a stroll,” I told Wolfe. “I could use the exercise, and the weather’s on my side.”

“Indeed?” he said, raising his eyebrows, setting his book down, and ringing for beer. “Who was on the telephone?”

“Fred, to tell me he can make our next poker game. See you later.” I didn’t get an answer, but then, I didn’t expect one. As I walked out of the office, I looked back and saw that Wolfe had returned to his book.

When I’m working on a case, I’ll sometimes take a taxi, sometimes the Mercedes sedan that Wolfe owns and I drive. But because this was me operating on my own, there was no question as to transportation. After leaving the brownstone and making sure that Fritz had bolted the door behind me, I walked east on Thirty-fifth in the cool, pleasant air and after six minutes of waving my arms flagged a cab on Eighth Avenue, telling him to let me off on the corner half a block from Morgana’s.

Traffic was relatively light, both on the streets and the sidewalks, and it wasn’t hard to spot Fred when the hack dropped me off on Second Avenue. He was standing in front of a poster shop that had closed for the night, and he looked about as inconspicuous as a leopard in a Laundromat.

“How nice to see a friendly face,” I said as I walked up to him, wondering if I should have spent the extra dollars to hire Saul.

“Archie, unless there’s a back way, which I can’t believe, he’s in there,” Fred hissed in a voice just above a whisper, even though no one was within a grenade’s throw of us. “I haven’t been out of sight of the entrance since I called you. He came up in a cab with another young guy. I recognized Linville right off from the photo. He’s fairly short — I’d put him at five-eight. Dark, shiny hair. He’s wearing a light brown sport coat, a dark sport shirt, no tie, tan pants. The guy he’s with has light hair, almost white, and he’s even shorter than Linville, I mean, really short, like five-three or four, if that. He’s got on a blue blazer, gray slacks, open-collared white shirt.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling vaguely ashamed of my earlier doubts. “Okay, I’ll take it from here.” I peeled off bills that easily covered his time and held them out.

“I can wait,” he said stiffly. “Except for expenses, Mr. Wolfe always pays me by check. You know that — you’re the one who writes them.”

“Right,” I said, jamming the greenbacks into my pocket. “I just thought—”

“You just thought what?” Fred fired back, breaking out of his near-whisper. “That maybe I was hard up? That I’m a charity case? Forget it!” He stalked off down the street.

I called after him but got no response, and he disappeared into the darkness. So far, my record as an employer was enough to suggest I could take lessons from Wolfe, hard as I found that to accept. I vowed to patch things up with Fred tomorrow, then shifted my attention to the opposite side of the street.

Morgana’s was not totally alien to me; I’d been there once — which was plenty. That was with Lily a half-dozen years ago, when the place was considered “hot” by whoever does the considering. We had gone with some friends of hers after a charity dinner, and what sticks in my mind is how much the owners must have spent on chrome and etched glass and spotlights and metallic wallpaper.

The clientele, which I recalled from that night as ranging from young and pleased with themselves to young-middle-aged and even more pleased with themselves, seemed mostly bored, both with each other and with the surroundings. And I distinctly recall that my Scotch and water was markedly light on Scotch.

As for the dancing — ha! Okay, it was a disco, plain and simple, but that didn’t stop Lily and me from giving the assemblage a few of our moves out on the floor. We may not be Astaire and Rogers — quite — but I like to think the young pups and even the lounge lizards picked up a little something from us that night.

So much for the stroll down memory lane. Morgana’s is in a nondescript five-story brick apartment building in a nondescript block of Second Avenue in the Seventies. In keeping with its neo-Babylonian interior, somebody concluded chrome-look double doors were the answer to the entrance and then went a step further by framing the doors in something that looked like pink marble and topped the whole business off with a lavender canopy trimmed in pink fringe.

Why they chose to outfit the doorman in light blue escaped me, but then, I never passed the design-school entrance exams. I briefly considered going inside; after all, the place isn’t really a private club — it just acts like it is. But I vetoed that course of action because I preferred to make the acquaintance of Sparky Linville in the relative peace and quiet of Second Avenue, rather than the hubbub of the disco. I leaned against the metal grillwork that had been pulled down over the windows of the poster shop and waited.

Actually, I was glad for the doorman, regardless of his garb, because he was the only sign of life at Morgana’s for the first seventeen minutes I kept watch. Oh, there were passersby, all right, including a bag lady who turned to smile at me and comment on the nice weather and a gray-haired jogger wearing shorts and a T-shirt advertising an FM radio station who almost ran me down on the sidewalk, probably because he was preoccupied by whatever was assaulting his senses through his headphones.

Anyway, Morgana’s was hardly hopping, unless, contrary to Fred’s observation, there was indeed a back door through which hordes of eager visitors were funneling. Finally a cab delivered one young couple, then another, and a third twosome, not quite as young, departed and the doorman listlessly flagged a taxi for them. I yawned, half-wishing I still smoked, and leaned back, trying to find a way to get comfortable with a metal grille as a vertical mattress. The luminous dial on my watch told me it was ten-twenty. Was it possible that Sparky Linville had found a reason to spend the whole night in Morgana’s?

Just when I was beginning to seriously consider packing it in, the chrome doors swung open and out popped the subject himself, along with his sidekick. Before I continue, honesty compels me to report that when, the next morning, I filled Wolfe in on the events at Morgana’s, he was understandably less than impressed. “Archie,” he said, “as I have stated often, your impetuosity constitutes both a signal strength and a glaring liability. This episode manifestly demonstrates the latter. You were without a feasible plan.”

Okay, so Wolfe had it right. I hadn’t used those so-called reflective moments back in the office to plan anything remotely resembling a strategy. Anyway, these two guys were out on the sidewalk in front of Morgana’s talking to the doorman as I hustled across the street, dodging a car and a Korean delivery boy on his bike. The doorman had his lips puckered to use his cab whistle when I joined the threesome. “Sparky Linville?” I said to the taller one, who had slicked-back dark hair and deep-set, brooding eyes that made him seem as if he’d just stepped out of a Giorgio Armani magazine ad.

Linville turned toward me and gave a tense Kirk Douglas smile, showing a perfect set of pearlies. “Could be. What’s it to ya, Jack?” So far, he seemed to be in character.

“I want to talk to you for a few minutes — alone.” I looked meaningfully at his sawed-off, white-headed friend and then at the doorman. The latter seemed to be exceedingly interested in the buttons on his powder-blue coat.

“And just what have we got here, yet another newspaperman?” Linville folded his arms across his chest and tilted his head to one side, chin up. “I haven’t seen you before, have I now, old chap?” he said. I know Lexington Avenue hot-dog vendors who can do a better English accent.

“No, I’m not with a paper, I—”

Linville’s pipsqueak friend cut in with a word I’m not going to repeat on these pages, but which got my attention. “Listen, you pygmy weasel, how’d you like to be used as a street sweeper?” I said, pivoting toward him. He repeated the word, and reflexively I cocked my right arm, but it was halted by the doorman before I could start its arc, which was just as well. At that moment, a well-dressed yuppie couple emerged from Morgana’s, and the woman, wearing a white fur jacket that was superfluous given the weather, let out a squeal. “Oh, Josh, they’re fighting,” she keened in a liquor-laced tone. “How awful!”

“How stupid, you mean,” Josh huffed in a voice that showed one member of the pair to be sober, even if he didn’t know how to match a sport coat and slacks. “This place started going downhill months ago. Damned if we’ll be back. Come on, we can find our own cab.”

“Please, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to move on. I know you don’t want any trouble,” the doorman said quietly, his hand gripping my wrist. He was probably pushing sixty, with white hair, a red face, and blue eyes that matched his silly coat, and he looked at me with a long-suffering expression, as if he’d seen it all right out here in front of Morgana’s and it had stopped holding his interest a generation ago.

“Yeah, listen to the man and stir the dust, Jack,” young Linville said, shedding his lamentable English accent, “or I’ll lose my patience and turn Hallie here loose on you.”

The shrimps both guffawed, and the doorman, whom I could easily have brushed aside and who knew it, gradually released his hold on my wrist. “Please, sir,” he repeated, “I’ll have to ask you to leave these gentlemen alone.”

“You need to work on your terminology,” I said evenly, but we all knew I had lost the skirmish. As I turned and stalked off, the laughter of the two followed me, along with the shrill of the doorman’s cab whistle.