Three

Wolfe considers any discussion whatever of business — or potential business — at the dining room table as bordering on heresy. There have been a handful of times when, for various reasons, I have ignored the house rules and persisted in talking about some revenue-producing venture during a meal. This, however, was not such an occasion. For the moment, I was content to get my choppers into the cassoulet Castelnaudary, which I sometimes refer to as boiled beans, although to call it that hardly does the dish justice. For the record, it’s got white beans, but also pork, carrots, mutton, onions, and a batch of other wonderful stuff that only Fritz knows for sure. Wolfe thinks he can list every ingredient, too, but I happen to have evidence — Fritz’s word — to the contrary.

Anyway, Wolfe and I ate with respectful gusto, and he held forth on the relative merits of limiting the terms of members of Congress. I can’t say that his monologue nudged me toward one camp or the other, because he was equally persuasive in his arguments on each side. When I asked where he stood, he said nothing, but the folds in his cheeks deepened, which for him is a smile.

Back in the office with our coffee, we busied ourselves — Wolfe by signing checks and correspondence I had typed from his dictation, and me by entering orchid germination records into the personal computer. We both knew I was about to raise the subject of Horace Vinson’s request.

“Well?” I said, swinging around in my chair to face Wolfe, who had picked up his latest book, Churchill, by Martin Gilbert.

“Well, what?” he replied with a glower, keeping his eyes stubbornly on the pages.

I grinned. “You just signed checks totaling slightly more than thirty-seven hundred dollars, checks that I will hand-carry to the main post office later this afternoon. Would you care to know what the impact of these checks is on the bottom line?”

“I abhor that term.”

“ ‘Bottom line’? Yes, I know you do, and I promise never to use it again in your presence if you turn loose with some instructions — instructions relating to Mr. Vinson’s visit, that is.”

Wolfe expelled a bushel of air and set his book down deliberately. “Very well. I could ignore your ululations, but you would continue to badger me until the atmosphere in this room became oppressive. Your notebook.”

“Yes, sir.” This time, I kept my grin to myself. Lily Rowan more than once has told me that smugness does not become me.

“Telephone Mr. Cohen,” Wolfe said curtly. “Better yet, visit him. Learn everything you can about Mr. Childress, Mr. Ott, Mr. Billings, Mr. Hobbs, and Mr. Vinson. And Mr. Childress’s fiancée.”

“Do I also call Vinson and ask him to open his checkbook and start writing?”

“Not yet. Let him wait. He has no viable alternative.” Wolfe picked up his book and hid behind it, signifying that his order-giving had ended.

A word or three about Lon Cohen: He has been on the payroll of the New York Gazette for so long that I tell him he can remember when they set type by hand — and by the light of kerosene lamps. If he has a title, I don’t know what it is, but he’s got an office on the twentieth floor, two doors from the publisher’s carpeted acre, and there’s a rumor around the Gazette building that the old man doesn’t sneeze before first checking with Lon.

Whatever the truth, Lon probably knows more about what’s going on, both aboveboard and below, in the far-flung boroughs of New York on any given day than the mayor, the police chief, and the doorman at the Waldorf-Astoria combined. And he’s also one hell of a poker player, as I sadly learned again last Thursday in our weekly game at Saul Panzer’s, when I let him bluff me — I think — out of the biggest pot of the night.

Through the years, Wolfe and I have developed a mutual-aid society of sorts with Lon. He passes along information on cases we’re working on, and, assuming Wolfe cracks said cases, the Gazette is rewarded with an exclusive. And Lon gets the bonus of dinner in the brownstone every few months, topped off with multiple servings of the Remisier brandy he loves so much.

It’s almost two miles, north and a little east from the brownstone to the Gazette offices, but the wind had died down and the skies had cleared, so I chose to hoof it, leaving Wolfe to his book and his beer. It was almost three when my knuckles collided with Lon’s oak door and I swung it open.

“Don’t you ever wait for somebody to say ‘Come in,’ for God’s sake?” he barked, cupping the receiver of one of three telephones on a desk strewn with newspapers, coffee cups, crumpled memos, and more felt-tipped pens and yellow pencils than you’d find in any stationery store in Midtown. Lon Cohen is dark — that description takes in his skin, his slicked-back hair, and his eyes, which are always moving. He muttered something to the person on the other end of the line and banged the receiver into its cradle, looking at me with a scowl that sent an unspoken but clear “I’m busy — what the hell do you want?” message.

“Sure, I’ll sit down, thanks,” I told him, easing into a chair in front of his desk, which also had a personal computer on it, the screen dark. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood and—”

Lon spat a word, then gave me a tight smile. “You never just happen to be anywhere, any more than I happen to suspect Nero Wolfe is hungry for information because of a case he’s got his teeth into. Whatever you’re here for, make it fast; we just got a tip that the police think they’ve finally nailed the guy who’s done all those neighborhood bank jobs in Brooklyn and Queens.”

“The one wearing the bulb-nosed mask?”

“That’s the clown,” Lon nodded, delivering the line deadpan. “Don’t tell me this is a social call, because I’m not buying it.”

“Okay, I won’t. Charles Childress.”

His thin face registered mild interest, and he leaned forward. “The mystery writer who lived in the Village and shot himself last week. What about him?”

“Interesting you should ask. What do you know about any enemies he might have had?”

“Aha. So a certain well-known and well-fed private cop suspects the suicide is not a suicide.”

“Could be. But there’s a question on the floor.”

Lon leaned back and tugged on an already loosened tie knot. “Anything’s possible, of course, but the best reporter we’ve got, J. D. Greifenkamp by name, dug around a little and found Childress was unstable, to say the least. He had fiddled with suicide at least once before, about four years back. Gas, that time. But somebody happened by and saved him, or so the story goes. Also, he’d had at least three shrinks, although in New York that’s damn near par. We’re told his mood swings would make a roller coaster seem like a horse-and-buggy ride by comparison.”

“Had he been depressed lately?”

“Apparently. Something to do with a new contract for those Sergeant Barnstable books he was doing. You know about them?”

“Not much, except that he’d picked the character up from another author, right?”

Lon nodded and tugged on his tie some more. “Yeah, Darius Sawyer. I read two or three of Sawyer’s books some years back. Pretty good stuff. This Barnstable is a middle-aged police detective, either a bachelor or a widower, in a small Pennsylvania city with a phony name. Someplace about the size of Scranton or Allentown. He’s homespun, with more cracker-barrel philosophy than I care for. Sort of a slow-moving, ‘aw-shucks’ type, but his mind is in high gear all the time, and of course he always gets the killer in the last chapter. It sounds hokey, I know, but the writing was top-notch, and so were the plots, for that matter. Sawyer built quite a following over the years, and when he died, Childress was brought aboard by Monarch Press to keep the Barnstable series going. I hadn’t seen any of his books, but I gather they were so-so or less.”

“Who do you gather that from?”

Lon narrowed his eyes. “One of our book reviewers. Why?”

“Wilbur Hobbs?”

“That’s right — oh, I see where you’re heading. The feud between Hobbs and Childress over the panning Wilbur gave his books. If Wolfe is looking to blow that up into something, forget it. Wilbur Hobbs is one acerbic, arrogant specimen, but hardly the murderous type. If he’s the best you’ve got, I’d tell your client to pack it in. By the way, who is your client?”

I smiled and shook my head. “Nice try, but uh-uh. I understand Childress really blasted your man in print recently.”

Lon looked down at his cluttered desk top, then leaned on an elbow and rubbed his forehead. “Archie, I’m not one for washing dirty linen in public, although you’re hardly public. What I’m about to say is for your ears only — which I realize means Wolfe’s, too: If there were one person I could dump from the staff of this venerable journal, it would be Hobbs. Not just because he’s arrogant and obnoxious, but because I don’t trust him.”

“How so?”

Before Lon could answer, one of his phones bleated. He scooped up the receiver. “Yeah, yeah... Okay, I see... Yeah, all right, you can hold the edition for five minutes if you absolutely have to, but not one damn second more, got it?” He slammed the receiver down and turned back to me. “The police got the masked marvel, all right. The stupe dropped his plastic clown’s face on the sidewalk half a block from his bungalow in Jamaica. Anyway, as I was saying, I don’t trust Hobbs as far as I can throw him. There’s scuttlebutt around, has been for several years, that he’s not above taking a few shekels here and there in exchange for a glowing review. The piece Childress did for the Manhattan Literary Times was the first time he’s been accused in print, though.”

“Is there anything to it?”

Lon pressed his palms against his eyes. “Dammit, I don’t know — maybe it’s my nature, but I’m suspicious. And to be honest, I’m biased, too — against Hobbs. You know how much I love this business, Archie, but there are always a few rotten apples in a bushel, and my guess is this particular apple’s got more worms than an Ozark bait shop. Every newspaper of any size has at least one or two reporters, feature writers, or critics who figure they hold their job by some kind of divine right and, cloaked in the armor of the holy and almighty First Amendment, have a license to write anything they please — fairness and the laws of libel and privacy be damned.”

“That’s quite a speech. You mentioned there’s been talk about Hobbs.”

“We’ve had a few random complaints through the years, including both a letter and a call a while back from Horace Vinson, the big kahuna at Monarch Press. He didn’t back it up with any evidence, though.”

“Horace Vinson — is he well-thought-of?”

“Are you kidding? The guy’s like a god, particularly to the writers who eat their oats in the Monarch stable. They worship him. Hell, he’s even been compared to Maxwell Perkins.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but who’s—”

“For a second, I forgot who I was talking to,” Lon cut in, holding up a hand. “You may be street-smart, as we like to say in our columns, but your cultural literacy is deficient, to say the least. Perkins was a great editor, a legend back in the twenties and thirties and forties. He worked with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe — Thomas that is, not Nero.”

“Thanks, I’ll file that away in my memory bank. Back to Hobbs: Given the negative flak, is his job here at the Gazette in any jeopardy?”

“ ’Fraid not. The man who signs all our checks is a big booster of his.” Lon jabbed a thumb in the direction of the publisher’s office. “He likes the controversy Hobbs generates with his reviews. Claims it draws readers into the book section. He may be right, but I’m still for giving the guy a one-way ticket to the unemployment line, and I’ve said so to the boss more than once.”

“You’re cold of heart in these tough times, old friend. While we’re on the subject of Charles Childress, who came upon the body? Your story didn’t say.”

“I’m not sure who decided we’re still on the subject, but because we are old friends, it was another writer, a woman named Patricia Royce. She found Childress in mid-afternoon on the floor of his office; he’d apparently been dead about two hours, according to the medical examiner. Now, who’s your client?”

“Is it fair to assume that Miss — or Ms., or Mrs. — Royce was close to the deceased?”

“For somebody who doesn’t like to answer questions, you sure can ask a lot of them,” Lon complained, swiveling to answer the bleat of his telephone again. He gave his caller two curt yesses and a nasty no before signing off and turning back to me. “I can think of a pair of reasons why I’m indulging you, Archie and you know damn well what both of them are. One, I like being asked to break bread at Wolfe’s, and two, every so often you and your boss lob a scoop in this general direction. This may not be one of those times, but I can’t take the chance.”

I grinned. “You, sir, are a hard-headed, clear-eyed pragmatist.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere. Patricia Royce — real surname, Reiser — is a novelist, historical stuff, heavy on the romance. Not my type of bedtime reading, but she’s well-thought-of and has gotten good reviews across the board. She had known Childress for about ten years. To hear her tell it, their relationship was what people of my generation would have called ‘platonic.’ They apparently bolstered each other. When one was having trouble writing, the other would be encouraging, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a good quid pro quo. How did she get into his apartment?”

“Had a key. She used his word processor from time to time — hers was always on the blink.”

“Uh-huh. What do you know about Childress’s agent and his fiancée?”

“Believe it or not, Archie, I don’t have a shred of information about either one. And do you know why? Because I haven’t inquired. And why haven’t I inquired? Because nobody — except you, of course — has remotely suggested that this is anything but a suicide.”

He leaned back and spread his arms, palms up. “And now, on the memory of my dear, departed mother, I swear solemnly that you have picked me dry. I know nothing more about Charles Childress or the means of his departure from this earthly life.”

“That’s good enough for me,” I said, grinning and getting to my feet. “Will you also swear that if you get any more information on the late Mr. Childress, you’ll pass it along to yours truly?”

Lon swore, all right, although not in a way that his dear, departed mother would have cared for. He then tossed a wadded-up piece of paper at me, but it missed. I picked it up and fired it into his wastebasket, which was ten feet away. “It’s all in the wrist action,” I told him as I bowed and quickly backed out the door.