The Missing Chapter

Ten

The weekend in Katonah could not have been improved upon. The weather was better than any New Yorker had a right to expect in mid-April: Sunny, light breezes, temperatures flirting with seventy. Lily and I rode two of her spirited Morgans for an hour or so Saturday afternoon, followed by a dip in the pool, and we dined down the road from her place at a just-opened restaurant in a two-hundred-year-old Tudor mansion. I had salmon en piperade and a few bites of her rack of lamb. Fritz would have given his blessing to both dishes. Sunday after brunch in the same restaurant, we rode some more, swam some more, and were back in town by six.

The memory of the weekend lingered pleasantly as I drove through the rain of a Monday morning in south-central Indiana, but I’m getting ahead of myself. My instructions from Wolfe on Saturday had been brief: Visit Childress’s aunts and anyone else in Mercer who could reveal anything about the man, both during his hometown years and after he went to New York. When I pressed for more direction, he gave me his “Use your intelligence guided by experience” line, which I have heard more times than I can begin to count.

After making plane and car-rental reservations, I had called Debra Mitchell to get the names of, Childress’s aunts, only one of whom — Melva Meeker — she had talked to on the telephone. “She wasn’t very communicative, to say the least,” Debra told me crisply. “My guess is that you’re wasting your time trying to phone her. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know the name of the other aunt.” I said thanks, not bothering to add that I was planning a face-to-face visit.

Maybe it was the rain, or the hills and curves and crawling farm vehicles, but it took me nearly two hours to navigate the two-lane blacktop through newly green and wooded rural countryside from the Indianapolis airport to Mercer, which trumpeted itself with a red-and-blue billboard proclaiming THE COMMUNITY WHERE HOOSIER HOSPITALITY WAS BORN — AND STILL FLOURISHES! Below it was a smaller, newer sign, in the same colors, that read CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MERCER METEORS FOR THEIR FIRST EVER STATE HIGH SCHOOL REGIONAL BASKETBALL TITLE. A few hundred yards farther down the road, I came upon a motel. The Travelers’ Haven was far from posh, but it looked decent enough — a long, white, one-story stucco building between the road and a field that appeared to this city boy to be freshly plowed. A half-dozen cars were parked nose-first on the blacktop in front of the rooms. I wheeled my rented sedan up to the office and went inside, triggering a bell when I opened the door.

“Afternoon.” A deep voice stretched it to four or five syllables, rather than the conventional three. The voice belonged to a dusty-haired, long-faced guy in baggy, gray flannel slacks and a red wool shirt who ambled through a doorway from the back, grinning and pushing wire-rimmed glasses up on the beak that was his nose. He was at least three inches over six feet, but if he weighed one-fifty, it was only because he wore his boots when he hopped on the scale.

“Afternoon,” I countered, making no attempt to elongate the word. I know my limitations. “Can I get a room for a couple of nights?”

He puckered his lips. “No reason to say no. But we do like the cash up front. We’ve never been much for credit cards here.”

“Always a good policy,” I responded, returning his sober nod. “I will pay for the first night now, and if I decide to stay a second one, you’ll get the greenbacks for that later today. Fair enough?”

He nodded again, this time with a slight grin. “Fair enough.” He quoted me a price; it was higher than I would have guessed, but I was not inclined to negotiate. I opened my billfold and peeled off the bills, which he counted twice aloud and slid into an ancient cash register before handing me a brass key. “Room one-twenty,” he twanged. “Down the line six doors on your right. Everything should be there, but if you need extra towels or another bar of soap, stop back. We’ll take care of you, count on it. A good place for breakfast is the Old Skillet downtown. Right across from the courthouse. They serve a passable dinner, too. Although the best spot for that is Bill’s Steak House, right on this road just south of town on the left — barely more’n a mile from here.”

I thanked him, stifling the urge to say “much obliged,” and walked to my room, which was a pleasant surprise. There was a king-size bed with a firm mattress and a bathroom that looked like it had recently been fitted with new fixtures and light blue tile. The TV set had a good-sized screen, although that was wasted on me: If you strung together all of the television I watch in a given year, not counting the news, the tape would not run as long as it takes me to walk from the brownstone to Lily’s apartment up on Sixty-third between Park and Madison.

I unpacked, washed up, and went back to the motel office, where Indiana Slim was taking a reservation over the phone. “Where do I find the local newspaper office?” I asked as he cradled the receiver.

“It’s right on the courthouse square. Two doors from that restaurant I was telling you about, the Old Skillet.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose again. “ ’Fraid we don’t have a daily paper here; I suppose we’re just too doggone small. The Mercury only comes out twice a week, Tuesday and Friday. It’s all right, though — I always read it straight through front to back.” He nodded with pride. “Fellow who’s the editor, name’s Southworth, comes from somewhere back East. They say he’s a real crackerjack.”

“Much obliged,” I responded, deciding not to fight the urge. With a basketball team called the Meteors and a newspaper named the Mercury, the fine folks in Mercer either liked alliteration or they were big into astronomy — or maybe some of both. I half-expected to find a movie theater named the Mars.

The burg did have a movie house, all right, but it was the Roxy, and the aging letters on the marquee announced that it was CLOSED FOR REMODELING. From the look of the facade, the place more likely was closed for eternity. I parked on one side of the square just as the bell in the courthouse tower tolled twice, in near agreement with my watch. The newspaper occupied the street level of a solid, two-story red-brick building that was in far better shape than the Roxy, although it probably was older. On the big window, silver Old English type spelled out The Mercer Mercury, and beneath that logo, smaller black letters proclaimed it as Proudly Serving Gilmartin County Since 1887.

Entering, I found myself in a reception area manned by a strawberry blonde with a well-shaped nose who was busy driving an electric typewriter. The nameplate on her desk announced she was Barbara Adamson. I had the nose, and the rest of what appeared to be a nicely designed face, in profile while her fingers skimmed over the keys. She got to the bottom of the sheet and whipped it crisply out of the machine, then turned toward me with a smile that would have warmed a penguin’s tootsies. The face was every bit as pleasing head-on as it had been in profile.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting, sir,” Barbara Adamson said softly, making me believe every word. “Can I help you?”

I told her I wanted to see Southworth, handing her one of my cards, the eggshell-colored number with only my name, address and phone number on it.

She studied it, nodded, and smiled, both with her mouth and her Scandinavian blue eyes. “Do you have an appointment, Mr. Goodwin?”

“No, but I wish I did. Would that help?”

Another smile, this one accompanied by a slight blush. “Oh, I didn’t mean to sound rude or anything like that. Actually, Mr. Southworth is very accessible. He tries to see everybody. Does he know you?”

“I’m afraid not,” I answered.

“You’re from New York City,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “At the risk of sounding like this is some sort of backwater, I’ll confess to you that we don’t get a lot of visitors from New York. May I tell him what business you’re in?”

“You may, Ms., Miss, or Mrs. Adamson. I’m a private investigator.”

“It’s Mrs.,” she responded, breaking my heart. “A private investigator? Excuse me and I’ll see if he’s available.” She got up and went through a doorway, leaving me to look at framed front pages of the Mercury that decorated the walls of the reception room. I was reading one from September 1945 with the headline our boys come home to cheering when a husky voice broke in. “I’m Chet Southworth; what can I do for you?”

He was about my height, but had the edge on me both in weight and years. His thick hair, which fell across one side of his forehead, was more gray than brown, and although I wouldn’t have termed him fat, wide blue suspenders were being given a test. I asked if I could steal a few minutes of his time.

He moved his shoulders up and then down. “Why not? Come on back to my office.” I nodded my thanks to Barbara Adamson and followed him through the doorway and along one side of an underrated, high-ceilinged room where a half-dozen people worked at computer terminals. “We’ve only had VDTs for our editorial staff for a few months now,” Southworth said over his shoulder, “but they’re a godsend. I tried for two years to get management to invest in a system, and they finally got tired of hearing me carp and whine.”

His office was a windowless cubicle in a back corner of the newsroom. “Not much, but it’s home,” he said with a smile, gesturing me to a chair as he dropped into the upholstered one behind his paper-littered desk.

“So, you’re an honest-to-God, card-carrying New York private dick, eh?” Southworth chuckled, considering me over the tops of half-glasses. “Never thought I’d live to see one.”

“I enjoy bringing excitement into people’s lives,” I said. “Actually, I’m the legs for another detective, Nero Wolfe.”

He raised both chin and eyebrows. “Ah, him I’ve heard of, yeah. I’m from New York — the state, not the city. I worked on the Syracuse paper for fourteen years. Copy boy first, then police reporter, and on to the copy desk. After that I was city editor on a couple of small dailies in upstate towns nobody ever heard of. When my marriage fell apart, I came out here and — oh, hell, you don’t want to hear my life story any more than I feel like telling it. Now what interests you and Nero Wolfe in this out-of-the-way corner of the Midwest?”

“Charles Childress.”

“That’s kind of what I figured, although I don’t know why. From the reports we got, there wasn’t any question but that it was a suicide.”

“Mr. Wolfe has a client who thinks otherwise. And he agrees with the client.”

Southworth chewed absently on a pencil. “And you’re here to find out if there’s something in the guy’s background that might suggest a motive for murder, right? I’m afraid I’m not going to be a hell of a lot of help, Mr. Goodwin. Normally, going to the local newspaper in a situation like this would make damn good sense. But here it doesn’t, for two reasons: First, I’ve only been in Mercer a little over three years, so I don’t know where the skeletons are buried like somebody who’s home-grown would. And most of the staff is even newer to the paper than I am. Second, when I took over as editor, I changed the character of the Mercury a great deal. It used to concentrate almost exclusively on the folksy stuff — club news, farm news, nonmalicious gossip. We still do some of that, only because we have to, being a community paper. But I’ve swung more toward what I hope is probing coverage of things like the county government and the board meetings of the towns where we circulate. And believe it or not, the paper has dug up some corruption here and there. Not headline news by big-city standards, but we did get a member of the county board indicted for taking money under the table.

“And you know what — the readers love it! A local family, the Kirbys, owns the Mercury, and to describe them as conservative is like saying western Kansas is flat. When we started getting harder-edged in our reporting, I was worried that one Kirby or another would pressure me to back off. Wrong. It turned out that their country club friends — the bankers, the retailers, the owners of the big cement plant over in Mapes — were all hoping somebody would get on the case of the local politicos.”

Southworth took off his glasses and pressed his palms against his eyes. “Anyhow, that’s a long-winded way of saying that I don’t know much about Childress. Oh, we ran a piece when he died, of course. Apparently he was one of the three most famous people to ever come out of Mercer. The other two were a Medal of Honor winner in World War I and a high school basketball star back in the fifties who ended up going to the pros. Anyway, our obit on Childress was on page one — about eight ’graphs, most of it on his writing career, along with a picture we had in our files — it’s the one used on his books. I’ll get you a copy of that issue.”

“Thanks. As I understand it, he spent several months in Mercer about two years ago during his mother’s final illness. A couple of people who knew him in New York felt that he was different when he came back East.”

The editor looked interested. “Yeah?”

“They said he seemed older, grimmer, and more distracted than before. Other than his mother’s death, did anything happen while he was here?”

Southworth wrinkled his forehead. “Not that I’m aware of, but it just occurred to me that we did a feature on him, a profile, during the time he lived here taking care of his mother; I’d forgotten all about it until you mentioned her. Not a bad piece — Gina Marks did it. I’ll get her.” He sprang from his chair, and went to the doorway. “Gina, got a minute? Come on in,” he said in a voice that was neither a command nor a plea.

A slender woman of about twenty-five with straight black hair and dark, wide eyes gingerly stepped into the office, looking first at Southworth and then at me.

“Have a seat,” the editor boomed. “Gina, this is Archie Goodwin, a private investigator from New York. He’s looking into Charles Childress’s death, got an idea there may be a possibility he was murdered. You interviewed Childress for that feature when he was staying here. How did he strike you at the time?”

Eyes wider, she looked from me to Southworth and back again. “God, I don’t know,” she said in a throaty voice, spreading long-fingered hands, palms up. “That’s hard to say, it’s been so long ago, now. He wasn’t terribly friendly, I remember that much. Darlene — she’s our feature editor—” this explanation was for my benefit, “gave me the assignment, and the first time I called Childress at his mother’s house, he started out being just plain rude, said he was in Mercer only for personal reasons and didn’t want to be bothered with the press. When I told him a lot of people all over the county read his books and would love to know more about his work, he softened a little and asked me to call him again in two weeks or so. I did, and that time, he ended up talking to me.”

“Where was the interview? At his mother’s house?” I asked.

Gina Marks shook her dark head vigorously. “Oh, no. I did offer to go out there — it’s on the county road about halfway between here and Clark’s Grove — but he said he’d rather meet me in town. I ended up interviewing him one morning in a booth at the Old Skillet. It was about ten, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.”

“Was he forthcoming?”

“Not very! I got enough for my piece, but just barely. He seemed, I don’t know... sort of distant, and resentful, too, like I was intruding on his time.”

“Well, he did have a lot on his mind then,” Southworth put in.

“Did he talk much about his life in Mercer?”

Gina gave me a thumbs-down and a sour look. “No, and obviously, that’s what I had wanted. But all I got was that it was his mother who stimulated his interest in reading, and literature in general, starting when he was twelve or thirteen. Beyond that, he didn’t want to talk about Mercer at all. I think he looked down on this area as some sort of cultural desert. And it was obvious that he resented having to spend time here, even to take care of his mother. Frankly, Mr. Goodwin, the man didn’t impress me one bit. He was a snobbish, arrogant, shallow transplant to the big city who tries to ignore the place he came from and what it taught him.”

“So he didn’t mention anyone else from here — relatives, friends?”

“Oh, he tossed off some obligatory, predictable compliment to one of his high school English teachers, who died years ago,” she said hotly. “But it was so damn rehearsed, he’d probably used it in a dozen other interviews.”

“Did you talk to anybody else for your story?” I asked.

“No — he made me feel so guilty for invading his privacy that I was just happy to pull what I did out of him. And what I wrote ended up being almost entirely on his approach to writing, with very little about his years in Mercer. To be honest, I’m not proud of that piece. I’d do it differently today.”

I nodded in sympathy. “How many relatives does he have here?”

“Two aunts, and I think some cousins. I’ve never met any of them.”

“Is there any scuttlebutt around town about Childress that you’ve come across?”

I got a glare. “Nothing I’ve ever heard; It may surprise you, Mr. Goodwin, coming as you do from the self-anointed cultural capital of the western world, to learn that not all small-town newspapers are gossip sheets. We didn’t win all those awards we’ve gotten since Chet took over by chattering about personal lives and peccadilloes.” She sucked in air and let it out with an indignant whoosh.

“Whoa!” I leaned back and held up a palm. “I’m not taking shots at you or the paper. And I’m not interested in idle gossip for its own sake. Remember, we’re talking about the possibility that a murder has been committed.”

“Okay, sorry.” Gina smiled sheepishly and slapped herself lightly on the cheek. “I guess maybe I get a little defensive sometimes.”

“Dammit, get defensive!” Southworth barked, punching the air with a beefy fist. “I love to hear you defend the Mercury. I know Goodwin meant no offense, though. If he didn’t come up with questions like that, then he wouldn’t be a good reporter. Do you need to talk anymore to Gina?”

When I said no, she stood up and came over to me, offering a hand to show there were no hard feelings. I took it and smiled.

After she walked out, the editor motioned toward the doorway. “She’s damn good,” he said, “best we’ve got, and I know I’ll be losing her before long. There’s only so much variety and challenge you can offer an enterprising reporter like her in a town this size and on a twice-weekly. But... that comes with the territory — you train ’em to lose ’em. Tell me, what makes your boss and his client — and you, too, I assume — so sure that Childress was murdered?”

“Nothing tangible, except that life had been going more or less well for him,” I replied. “And he was supposed to be married in the fall.”

He nodded. “So I heard. I suppose you’re going to talk to his relatives?”

“The aunts, anyway. Can you point me toward them?”

“Barbara — that’s the woman you met out front — can give you directions to where they live.” Southworth got to his feet and stretched. “Normally a few whiffs of a thing like this would get my old police reporter’s juices flowing, but from what little I know and what you’ve told me, I don’t see any arrows that point to murder. If you do find something, though, I’d appreciate a call.”

“I have a prior commitment to a paper in New York,” I told him. “But if you don’t mind being second in line...”

He laughed heartily. “Don’t mind a bit. I understand that you’ve got to keep your primary sources happy. But I’d sure as hell like to scoop the argyle socks off those arrogant bastards who run the fat, self-satisfied daily over in the next county.”

“Sounds like a healthy attitude to me,” I told him as we shook hands. “If and when something happens, I’ll be happy to supply you with some boulders for your catapult.”