The Missing Chapter

Nineteen

After Wolfe had pointed out my latest grammatical faux pas, I filled him in on the Billings-Ott bout, as described by Vinson. He made a face, and after I had finished, he directed me to visit both participants. “Should I call first?” I asked after we had gone over the ground Wolfe wanted covered with each of them.

“No. I am aware that you have plans for this evening; tomorrow is soon enough.”

“It is also Saturday, which means I’ll have to catch them at home.”

“Do so,” he replied, returning to the onerous task of reading Childress’s book. The plans Wolfe referred to were a dinner date I had with Lily Rowan at Rusterman’s, which dishes up the best meals in Manhattan outside of the brownstone. It was founded and operated for many years by Wolfe’s best friend, Marko Vukcic, and after Marko was murdered, Wolfe served for a time as executor of the estate, dining there at least monthly and dropping in once or twice a week, unannounced, to check on the kitchen and raise hell if the staff wasn’t maintaining the standards for which the eatery had become famed. On the rare occasions when Wolfe dines out today, Rusterman’s is still the place — the only place.

Lily ordered the tournedos Beauharnais and I had the squabs à la Moscovite, and we both showed our approval of the artistry of Felix, the chef and current owner of the establishment, by cleaning our plates before indulging ourselves with the soufflé Armenonville.

“You seem a mite preoccupied this evening, Escamillo,” Lily said as she eyed me over a cup of steaming espresso, using the nickname she had tagged me with when we first met and I had made the acquaintance of an agitated bull in a pasture.[1]

“Just musing idly about my agenda for the morrow,” I told her. “I need to see a couple of guys who got into a bare-knuckle boxing match in the bar of a restaurant last night.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You do lead the most interesting life.”

“Funny, that’s approximately what I told someone else earlier today.” I went on to give her a capsule history of the case and all the players.

“Here’s my theory,” Lily purred. “They all conspired to kill him, and they drew lots as to which one would actually pull the trigger. From the way you describe this Childress person, he can’t possibly have had any friends — not even Vinson.”

“Surely you are not suggesting that our client himself is a murderer?”

“Why not? I seem to recall that it’s happened to Nero Wolfe before.”

“Only rarely. Vinson isn’t so stupid to try something like that. Besides, he had nothing to gain that I can see by killing Childress.”

She showed me her pearly whites — and they are white. “Okay, scratch him. But I still say all the others are in it together.”

“So noted. I’ll pass your theory along to the man who signs my checks,” I promised. And I did, the next day. He was not impressed.

When I got home, the office was dark, meaning of course that Wolfe had turned in. There were no messages on my desk, and I decided to call it a day myself when I spotted Death in the North Meadow on one corner of Wolfe’s desk, where he always places a book immediately after he completes it. I figured, what the hell, I should read at least some of Childress’s work myself. I already knew what Wolfe thought of the guy’s prose, but somewhere in my growing-up process, I fell into the habit of forming my own opinions. The problem is, I’ve never gotten a crumb’s worth of satisfaction out of a novel; to me, they just aren’t alive. Give me the newspaper any day.

I took the book upstairs, and I waded through several chapters before turning in. It did nothing to change my mind about fiction in general and detective stories in particular. Sergeant Orville Barnstable was too quirky for my tastes, and I qualify as an expert: After all, I live under the same roof with a world-class eccentric, regardless of how anyone defines the word.

For starters, Barnstable turned out to be an unrelenting bumpkin, even for a cop in a semirural setting. By the fourth chapter, I’d lost track of the number of “gol-durns” and “aw-shuckses” that had escaped the Bull Durham-stained lips of this supposedly lovable curmudgeon, to say nothing of his habits of spouting homespun proverbs (“The early bird gets Aunt Maude’s mince pie and wishes he hadn’t” and “Never plow the same field twice unless you fell asleep at the wheel of the tractor the first time”) and consulting his gold pocketwatch with the steam locomotive etched on the back every other chapter. His “solid, stolid, sober” housekeeper-cook, the formidable Edna Louise Rasmussen, nagged him so incessantly and so stridently that any jury in a real-world courtroom would have let good ol’ Barnstable off with a justifiable homicide verdict if he’d taken it into his head to silence her forever with his trusty Smith & Wesson.

As far as the story line went — what there was of it — I had fingered the murderer correctly by page forty-six, as a peek at the preposterous and contrived climax later confirmed. I solved the thing not because I’m so clever, but because Childress’s plot was as transparent as a used-car salesman’s grin. When I told Wolfe the next day that I, too, had sampled Childress’s prose, he scowled and turned back to his crossword puzzle. The man doesn’t know true sacrifice when he encounters it.

By the time I did talk to Wolfe that Saturday, I already had paid visits to Ott and Billings. Both were listed in the Manhattan directory, and they lived about six blocks apart on the Upper East Side, which was my good fortune.

I called on Franklin Ott first. He and his wife lived in a co-op in the East Seventies just west of First Avenue. The post-World War II red-brick building was easily the newest structure on its block, and from the looks of its black-marble-and-chrome lobby, the literary agent was doing just fine, thank you. I gave the doorman my name.

“Is Mr. Ott expecting you?” he asked, reluctantly putting down the Daily News horoscope. He peered over half-glasses with a bored expression on a jowly face that hadn’t experienced a razor for at least twenty-four hours.

“No, but we’ve met, and I think he’ll recognize the name. If he doesn’t, tell him I’m from the office of Nero Wolfe.”

He brightened noticeably. “Oh, the big-time gumshoe, eh? Him I’ve heard of. Working on a case, are you?”

“As you probably know, Mr. Ott is an author’s agent,” I answered, stressing the adjective.

“Oh, okay, I get it,” he said with a crooked smile. “You guys are doing a book about your work. Make terrific reading, I’ll bet. Yes, sir, terrific reading. I’ll call Mr. Ott.” He picked up the phone and after a few seconds spoke into the receiver. “Mr. Ott? Mr. Goodwin from Nero Wolfe’s office is downstairs. What? Yes... Goodwin. Yes... all right. Thank you, sir.” He turned to me. “Go right on up,” he said respectfully, his jowls jiggling as he nodded. “Eleventh floor, apartment C. It’s to the right when you get off. Good luck with your book. I’ll buy a copy.”

I thanked him for the vote of confidence and took a nonstop ride in the automatic elevator, which also was done in chrome and something resembling black marble. A slender, mousy, gray-haired woman who hardly looked like the swearing type answered my knock. “Mr. Goodwin, I’m Eleanor Ott,” she said softly, making a slight bow, or maybe it was supposed to be a curtsy. “Frank mentioned you to me after your visit to his office. He’s in his study right now.” She leaned closer, as if imparting a secret. “Don’t be surprised when you see him — he’s got a bandage on his face,” she whispered, although no one apparently was within earshot. “He was hit the other night — maybe you already know about it.”

“By Keith Billings, I understand.”

“What a vile young man!” she hissed, her pleasant face contorting. “He ought to be arrested and thrown into jail. I told Frank that he should press charges, and... well, never mind what I think.” She made a feeble attempt at a smile and asked me to follow her.

As I passed the sunken living room, my initial impression of the building was reinforced. At least thirty feet long, the room looked like a prime candidate for the cover of one of the slick home-decorating magazines. I won’t attempt to describe the decor, other than to say I felt for an instant that I was in the apartment of some very well-off friends of Lily’s we had visited in Paris several years ago.

Eleanor Ott led the way down a long corridor lined with photographs of writers and gestured me into a wood-paneled room where Franklin Ott, clad in an open-collared shirt and yellow cardigan sweater, sat at a handsome mahogany desk flipping the pages of what looked like a manuscript. This room was as neat as his office was messy.

“Oh... Goodwin, come in, come in. Pardon my appearance,” he said absentmindedly, rising and touching a hand lightly to the dressing that covered most of his left cheek. “I got into a little flare-up two nights ago. I suppose you’ve heard about it?”

“I have, and that’s why I’m here,” I said, taking a seat facing his desk as he dropped back into his chair and his wife closed the door, leaving us alone. “I’m curious as to how it all came about.”

He moved forward and stuck out his chin. “Now don’t go trying to make more of this than there is,” he cautioned tartly, waggling an index finger. “What happened between Keith Billings and me Thursday night is not going to give you or Nero Wolfe any insight — none whatever — into how Charles Childress met his death. So don’t you go getting any ideas.” There was menace in his voice.

“Okay, but I still need to satisfy that stubborn curiosity of mine.”

“Like a barnacle on a ship’s hull, huh? Okay.” He sighed. “Here’s a play-by-play. I can’t say I’m proud of what happened, but I’ll give it to you straight.” He pushed the manuscript aside and leaned his thin elbows on the desk blotter.

“My wife and I were at Cowley’s on Fifty-fourth, maybe you know it. Great ribs, great fish — particularly the coquilles St. Jacques. That’s scallops, you know. It’s about the only place we ever eat out anymore. We were in the bar waiting for a table to open up in the dining room when Keith Billings swaggered in, or maybe staggered better describes it. Now there’s no love lost between us — never has been. I won’t say I was instrumental in getting Billings canned as Charles’s editor — Charles made a lot of the noise himself — but I had my oar in there with Vinson, too, and Billings knew it, of course. The guy is arrogant, obnoxious, and overrated as an editor. He’s also a twenty-four-carat smart-ass, and whenever we meet — which thankfully is not very often — he always gets in a dig at me right at the start. Well, this time I thought I’d beat him to it.”

“And you did?”

He winced and shook his head at the painful memory. “Yeah. Understand, I’d had too much to drink. Hell, so had Billings, for that matter. Anyway, I made a crack about him getting the ultimate revenge against Charles for what I called his ‘ignominious departure from Monarch Press.’ That was stupid of me, of course. Billings came over to our booth and started spewing obscenities, calling me a ‘third-rate peddler of third-rate writers’ and a ‘disgrace to my profession’ in between the four-letter words.

“I replied that his use of profanity was indicative of the paucity of his vocabulary, which in turn was indicative of his lack of ability as an editor, or words to that effect. That’s when he said, ‘Stand up, you flannel-mouthed son of a bitch.’ ”

“And you did?” I said again.

“Yes. I mean, nobody talks that way in front of my wife,” he said angrily. “I’d barely gotten to my feet when the punch came. I never saw it coming, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor on my back and Eleanor was screaming. The episode won’t make a tape of great moments in publishing history.”

“I suppose not. It does strike me you were asking for trouble by baiting Billings,” I observed.

“Mea culpa. No question about it. As I said before, I’d had too much to drink. But having conceded that, I was still surprised by what happened.”

“How do you interpret his reaction?”

Ott’s fingers brushed his bandage and he chuckled. “You’d like me to say that Keith Billings’s right to the face indicates to me that he blew Charles away, wouldn’t you? Well, I can’t honestly do that, as much as I loathe the man. He’s a jerk, but sorry, I don’t see him as a murderer.”

“Is it true you didn’t press charges against him?”

“Yeah,” he said, waving the thought away with a hand. “Eleanor wanted me to, but I wasn’t hurt badly. And besides, what happened was as much my fault as his.”

“That’s charitable of you,” I remarked.

“Charitable, hell!” he said, chuckling again. “Besides, the story has a happy ending of sorts. Keith Billings had been hanging out in Cowley’s for years; it’s almost a second home for him. When I was still lying on the floor being tended to, I heard Pierre — he’s the maître d’ — telling Billings in that cultured French voice of his that he wasn’t welcome in the place anymore.”

I thanked him for his time.

“No problem. I wasn’t going anyplace. I was just sitting here thinking about how Billings has been banned from Cowley’s.” His chuckle had grown to a cackle, and Ott was still cackling when I excused myself and left.

My next stop, at eleven-twenty that Saturday morning, was Billings’s place on Eighty-second. His building, a drab, nine-story gray monolith, didn’t appear to be in the same ballpark as Ott’s. As Billings had told me earlier, there was no doorman. I found the editor’s name on the directory in the unadorned, beige lobby and leaned on his buzzer. Nothing. I pushed again, waiting for a half-minute.

I was about to walk out when the intercom barked a fuzzy sound I took to be a sour and decidedly uncordial “Yes?”

“It’s Archie Goodwin,” I pronounced carefully into the speaker. I translated the response as “Whaddya want?”

“I’d like to see you for a couple of minutes,” I said.

The response was a groan, followed by a four-letter word, and then a pause. “All right, dammit, come on up,” he rasped.

Two ceiling lights were out, making the sixth-floor corridor even more dismal than it would have been. Billings’s door was ajar, and I rapped my knuckles lightly on it, causing it to swing open. The editor sat slumped on a tired sofa in the small living room, arms crossed and face pouting. “Why don’t you do like the TV commercial tells you to and phone first?” he grumped, not bothering to get to his feet.

“A gross lapse in etiquette on my part. Sorry,” I told him insincerely as I settled into the nearest chair without waiting for an invitation.

Billings maintained his seat and his pout. “Before you start in, I’ll save you some breath. Yes, I popped Frank Ott in Cowley’s night before last. No, I’m not sorry I did it. Yes, I’d been drinking. No, our argument had nothing to do with the fact that Charles Childress is dead. Okay, what’s next?”

“Thanks for helping me along. Do you often deck people in public places?”

“My, we’re hostile today, aren’t we? What I do in public places is not really any of your business, is it, Mr. Goodwin? But I’ll answer anyway. No, I am not normally given to physical violence. With Frank Ott, I am willing to make an exception, however.”

“How does it happen that Mr. Ott is so favored?”

His pout turned to a rigid smile. “We went through this drill once before, when you came to my office. Remember? As I told you then, Ott worked on Vinson to get me canned from Monarch, or at least taken off the editing of the Childress books. Even given that, I probably would have ignored him when I went into Cowley’s the other night, except that he started mouthing off, whining loud enough for the whole damn bar to hear, claiming that I had killed Charles in revenge for his part in my — how shall I term it? — departure from Monarch.

“He kept it up, so I went over to the booth where he and his wife were sitting, and I chewed on him, told him to get the hell up. He did, and I let him have it. He went down like a rock. His wife got hysterical, the lounge lizards have something to talk about for the next few weeks, and I was told to go away and stay away. End of story.” Billings clapped his hands once for emphasis and fell back against the cushions, yawning.

“You told me when we talked last week that you didn’t think Childress was murdered. Do you still feel that way?” I asked.

He let his eyes move around the cluttered room — to the bookshelves, to the two-foot-high pile of newspapers stacked in one corner, and to the television set, which rested on a stand and had a layer of dust on its screen. “It’s funny, the way things happen,” Billings said, interlacing his hands behind his head and looking at the ceiling. “If I hadn’t walked into Cowley’s Thursday night — and if I hadn’t downed a few vodkas earlier — I probably would still believe beyond any doubt that Charles the Obnoxious blew his brains out.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Billings rolled his eyes. “Oh, come off it, will you? I thought big-time private eyes were supposed to be quick on the uptake. And you work with no less than the great Nero Wolfe. Is it possible that you don’t have a clue?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Maybe you really don’t have a clue,” Billings responded with a sneer. “Think for a moment about what happened at Cowley’s: I walk in, obviously tight, and quiet, sedate Frank Ott, who has never bothered to acknowledge me — let alone my existence — when we’ve met in public before, suddenly goes on the attack with venom, all but accusing me of pulling the trigger on Childress. He was totally out of character. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Help me along,” I said with a grin.

Billings actually laughed. “Goodwin, you need help like Saudi Arabia needs sand. Why do I feel like I’m being messed with?”

“Beats me. Do you really think Frank Ott has a strong enough motive for murder?”

“I wouldn’t have said so a few days ago, but... well, dope the thing out for yourself,” Billings said through clenched teeth. “Ott was savaged, albeit unfairly, by Childress in that diatribe in Book Business. So was I, of course, but by the time the vicious article ran — and God, was it vicious — I was already gone from Monarch and was established in a new job with a new publisher. Ott, however, did not have the luxury of changing jobs. He was entrenched in his own literary agency. Where was he going to go?”

“And you’re suggesting that he killed Childress, making it look like suicide?” I asked.

He bounced on the sofa and aimed an index finger at me, firing once. “You said it, Goodwin, I didn’t. And I won’t. But taking a detached look at the situation, one would be forced to conclude that Frank Ott’s best hope for survival as a literary agent was to dramatically take to the offensive and discredit his attacker. And what better way than to point to that attacker’s self-destruction as overwhelming evidence of a deranged and unbalanced character?”

“Assuming that you are right, why would Ott, having accomplished his mission of making a murder look like a suicide, then bait you into a fight?”

“Aha!” Billings crowed. “Why indeed? I’ll grant you that he didn’t know for sure I would be in Cowley’s Thursday night, but — and this is a big ‘but’ — anyone who knows my, shall we say, habits, knows that I stop at Cowley’s more nights than I don’t. So the odds were on his side. Now, Frank Ott already had gotten rid of Childress, but that wasn’t enough for him. He also wanted to ruin me if he could. He hated me for pointing out Charles’s many deficiencies as a writer.”

I snorted. “So he got to his feet and meekly let you punch out his lights?”

Billings stretched both arms above his head and made Vs with the fingers of each hand, in the manner of one R. M. Nixon. “Precisely! He threw out the line, and I took the bait. He goaded me, knowing I would lose my temper and do something stupid. He set himself to take the punch, which also was pretty stupid. In the midst of all this stupidity, I did one smart thing, though. I went to my bosses at Westman & Lane the morning after the episode — yesterday — and told them exactly what happened. They’re very understanding, I’m happy to report.

“And now, Mr. Goodwin, you’ll say good-bye,” Billings snarled, finally rising from the sofa to gesture me to the door. I was only too glad to leave.