Five

Wolfe had not stipulated the order in which I was to conduct my interviews after I had seen Debra Mitchell, so, in light of La Mitchell’s comments, I opted to call next on Patricia Royce, which meant a trip back downtown. First, though, I stopped for lunch at a little diner on Seventh Avenue near Forty-eighth that I’ve patronized off and on for years. It’s had the same counterman, a gravel-voiced guy named Bennie who’s almost as heavy as Wolfe, since the days when you could ride the Staten Island Ferry for a nickel. The Reuben sandwich was as good as ever, and so was the mince pie, which I chased with a glass of ice-cold milk.

Vinson had given me Patricia Royce’s address, on one of the east-west streets in the East Village between Second and Third Avenues. My watch read twelve-forty-five when the cab dropped me in front of a four-story brick building, which suffered by comparison to recently rehabbed neighbors on either side.

I climbed the seven steps to the dingy foyer and pressed the buzzer next to ROYCE 2-B. After a few seconds, I got a muffled “Yes?”

“My name is Archie Goodwin,” I said into the speaker. “I am here to talk about Charles Childress.” There was a pause, followed by something that might have been “I’ll be down.” The entrance buzzer didn’t sound, so I had no option but to stand in the foyer. While I waited, I tried to slip the key I’d found in Childress’s apartment into the lock, but it didn’t fit. After what probably was two minutes but seemed like ten, a very pale woman with dark blue eyes, sandy hair parted in the center and wearing jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt appeared at the inner door. She could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. “What do you want?” she asked through the glass.

“Are you Patricia Royce?”

She nodded, but made no move to open the door.

“I’m investigating Charles Childress’s death,” I said, talking more loudly than I needed to. “May I come in?”

“Are you with the police? I’ve already had one of their Homicide people come to see me.”

“No, I’m a private detective working for Nero Wolfe.” I pulled my laminated P.I.’s license out of my billfold and held it up to the glass.

Patricia Royce shrugged. Then she pulled the door open with a sigh. “I’ve heard of Nero Wolfe, and I guess I might have heard of you, too,” she said. “I don’t know what there is to investigate, but all right. Come on up.” Her tone was hardly enthusiastic, although I didn’t give her a chance to change her mind.

I massaged a slightly bruised ego and followed her up one flight and into a tiny living room furnished in some kind of modern — maybe Danish. We sat, me in a stainless-steel-and-leather chair that didn’t look comfortable and wasn’t, and she on a sofa built for people whose bodies bent only at right angles.

“I appreciate your seeing me,” I told her. “The last few days must have been hard on you.”

“They have,” Patricia Royce said softly, looking at the worn toes of her running shoes. “Do you and your Mr. Wolfe represent some insurance company?”

“No. Our client is an individual, someone who feels Mr. Childress may have been murdered.”

“Really? Why in the world would one think that?” Her face lacked both makeup and animation, although its parts were nicely arranged. There were pale freckles sprinkled across an upturned nose. I’ve always been a sucker for freckles.

“I’m not entirely sure. I understand you found his body.”

She leaned forward and kneaded slender, pale hands between her legs, then looked idly around the room, but never at me. “Am I keeping you from something?” I asked after fifteen seconds, trying to mask the irritation I felt.

“Hmm? Oh — no, no,” she said, acting as though she’d just been awakened. “Yes, I found... Charles. As I told the man from Homicide, and also the one newspaper reporter who called, I had gone to Charles’s apartment — it’s only a few blocks from here — to use his word processor, his PC, you know. I did that fairly often if he was going to be out. I have one of my own, but it hasn’t been working.”

She shook her head several times and looked at the wall above my head. I thought I was losing her again, but she tuned back in. “Last... Tuesday, it was, I had called Charles that morning to find out if I might be able to use his PC; mine has been acting up a lot lately, as I said. He was always very generous about it, and he said he’d be away all afternoon, and all evening, too, until late. I went to his apartment about three, and, well... I, I found him.”

“Where?”

“Is this really necessary?” she pleaded in a broken voice. “Are you aware that I gave the police a long statement?”

“Ms. Royce, I realize this isn’t pleasant, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

She glanced around the room before nodding. “Um, all right. Would you like some coffee?”

I told her no thanks, and she leaned back and ran her fingers through her sandy hair. “Well, where was I? Oh yes, as I said, I got to Charles’s apartment about three and let myself in — he’d given me a key years ago. I went back to — you’re not taking any notes.”

I smiled. “I’ve got a good memory.”

She made a half-hearted attempt to return the smile, finally looking straight at me. “You are fortunate, do you know that? I used to work as a newspaper reporter, in Hartford, for a short time just after I got out of school, and I felt I had to take down every single word when I was interviewing someone. Finally I got the good sense to buy a tape recorder. Anyway, as I was saying, I went back to the rear bedroom, which Charles used as his office, and... he was on the floor beside his desk, with a pistol next to him. There wasn’t much blood, just a little on the side of his... on the side of his head.” She passed a hand over the dark blue eyes that seemed even darker against her pale complexion. “Well... that’s it, that’s all. All there is. He was dead. I called the police, and they got there fast, just a few minutes later.”

“Did you recognize the pistol?”

“Yes, it was Charles’s — at least it looked like the one he had bought back in January or February. He showed me where he kept it — in the nightstand next to his bed. He said he wanted me to know where it was in case anybody tried to break in while I was working there alone.”

“I understand there had been some break-ins on the block, and even in his building.”

She nodded, studying her hands. “Yes, and that’s why he said he got the gun. But you know, I’ve been thinking more about that, and I really wonder if maybe he really was planning to kill himself all along, and that’s the real reason...”

“So you’re convinced it was suicide?”

Patricia Royce folded her arms and twitched her shoulders. Another ten minutes with her and I’d start twitching myself. “Of course I am. Who would want to kill Charles?” she cried defiantly.

“Why would he want to kill himself?”

“Like I said, I’ve thought a lot about that. I probably knew Charles as well as just about anyone, and he was very moody. And I do mean very moody. His lows were really low, even when things were going well for him. He tended toward depression, and he’d been depressed and distracted more than usual lately.”

“Why?”

“I think for several reasons,” she replied, furrowing her forehead. She rocked back and forth for another half-minute before going on. “For one thing, he wasn’t getting a lot of good reviews for his Barnstable books, particularly the last one. Have you read any of them?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I feel they’re awfully well done,” she said. “I’m probably biased because of our friendship, but I think they are as good as the ones Darius Sawyer had written. The reviews bothered Charles, particularly what that idiot Hobbs wrote in the Gazette. But he was also down because he didn’t think he was appreciated by Monarch, his publisher.”

“Did you agree with Childress’s assessment?”

“Mr. Goodwin, you may be asking the wrong person,” she responded, avoiding my eyes. “As you might be aware, I’m a novelist, too. Oh, nowhere near as successful as Charles was, but I have written four books, novels set either in the South or in England in the eighteenth century. I think every author is to some degree paranoid. We all feel that we’re undervalued or are taken for granted — or both — by our publishers, whether or not that’s really true. And in Charles’s case, the feeling was intensified because of his latest contract offer, which he thought was insulting. And then there was something else...”

“Go on.”

She looked at the ceiling. “Did you know that he was engaged to be married?”

“I’ve heard something to that effect.”

“It’s true,” she murmured, eyes still fastened on the ceiling. “The woman — her name is Mitchell — Debra Mitchell — is extremely attractive, and extremely successful, too; she is an executive with GBC-TV. Well, in the last few weeks, Charles had been having... misgivings about her.”

“Do you know why?”

Patricia pressed her lips together, then nodded. “Charles didn’t talk a lot to me about it, but I sensed that he’d grown increasingly conscious of how, well... how overbearing she could be. He seemed to feel Debra wanted to run every aspect of his life. And Charles was an extremely independent individual. Extremely.”

“Was he thinking of breaking it off?”

Another deliberate nod, and more lip gymnastics. “I got that distinct impression. I never pried into his social life — that wasn’t how our relationship was structured. But a few days before, well, before what happened, he said something that made me believe he had decided to end their engagement.”

“Can you remember what it was?”

“More or less. I had come by the apartment to use his PC. He was just on the way out, and he made some comment about being doomed to ‘eternal bachelorhood.’ That’s the phrase he used. I remember very distinctly, he said it twice.”

“Do you know if he did end the engagement?”

“No,” she said, rising partway up and tucking her legs under her. “I never asked.”

“Ms. Royce, you spoke a minute ago about the structure of your relationship with Mr. Childress. How would you define that structure?”

“Mm. Yes. Please call me Patricia. The only person who gets formal with me is the loan officer at my bank, and I don’t want to be reminded of him. I know it sounds like a newspaper gossip-column cliché, but Charles and I truly were good friends — nothing more. We first met years ago, lord, it’s been almost ten now, at a writers’ workshop up in Vermont. We hit it off immediately. We found we admired the same authors — and disliked the same ones, too. Back here in New York, we ended up growing into sort of a two-person support group, encouraging each other, propping each other up when the rejection slips came in. And they did, for both of us, before we started getting published. And we’ve bounced ideas off each other, and passed manuscripts back and forth for help in improving them. We were always comfortable together.”

“But there was no romantic aspect?”

She almost smiled. “Mr. Goodwin, have you ever been married?”

“First off, I feel the same way you do about nominatives of address. My handle of first choice is Archie, and I implore you to use it. Second, no, I have never taken that walk down the aisle. Why?”

“My guess is you have one or more close woman friends. Am I correct?”

I nodded. “You are, and I think I see where you’re headed.”

Now she really did smile, which was a welcome sight. “I’m sure you do, Archie. How often do you get asked, ‘When are you going to marry so-and-so?’ ”

“It has happened more times than I have thumbs.”

“Like you, I never have been married, although I was close on one occasion, and even now, more than eleven years later, I don’t know whether or not I’m sorry I backed out of it. But I do know it is possible to have a close relationship with a man without sex being its lodestar. I realize Debra Mitchell saw me as a threat to her relationship with Charles, but she needn’t have. Debra’s greatest enemy was her own personality.”

“Uh-huh. I gather you have a book of your own in the works right now?”

Her whole body sagged, and she shook her head. “I did — about half of a manuscript of a novel set in Scotland at the time of the last Stuart uprising, at Culloden. But, after... after... what happened, I couldn’t stand to even look at the stupid thing anymore. Everything in it reminded me of him, because I’d done so much of the work at his apartment.”

“So now it’s on hold?”

“Now it’s as dead as the House of Stuart,” she murmured. “I destroyed the disk. It’s gone — completely.”

“How does your publisher feel about that?”

She turned her palms up. “I haven’t told them about it, but of course I’ll have to. They weren’t expecting anything until the fall anyway, and my editor had never seen even a sample.”

“Seems like a shame. Patricia, can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Childress? Or who would have profited in any way from his death?”

She shook her head vigorously. “No! And that’s why I can’t believe he was murdered. Mr. — Archie, Charles shot himself, it’s that simple. I know that doesn’t make it any less tragic than murder. But he had tried suicide one other time years ago after what he called his ‘Great American Novel’ got rejected by the seventh or eighth publisher. He turned on his gas stove and — well, a neighbor smelled the gas, and the building super came in just in time. Charles was in therapy for a long time after, but in all the years that I’ve known him since then, he never went more than a few months without slipping into some sort of very deep depression. He was a very creative, very troubled spirit.”

“I understand he had no close relatives.”

“Just an aunt or two and a cousin out in Indiana. He came from a place called Mercer. His mother died about two years back. I remember it because he was there with her for a long time, six months or more, while she lingered. He was different when he returned to New York.”

“In what way?”

She closed her eyes tightly and started rocking again, then blinked awake. “Oh, older, I guess, or more world-weary. Maybe that’s to be expected when the person closest to you dies. He was an only child, and his father had been dead for years, so he had to bear the whole strain while his mother slowly slipped away.” She shuddered. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go and get morbid on you. It’s just that Charles never seemed the same after that; he quit laughing and smiling almost entirely.”

I’ll bet you don’t do a lot of either yourself, I thought as I looked at her, wondering how many times she’d been in therapy herself. “You mentioned that Childress had given you a key to his apartment. Speaking of keys, does this one look familiar?” I pulled out my newfound brass acquisition.

“No... no, I don’t think so,” she answered, taking it from my palm and peering at it. “Should it?”

“Not necessarily. Well, thanks for the time you’ve given me. If you think of anything that would be helpful, here’s my card. Oh, and one more thing,” I said, trying to make it sound like an afterthought, as I rose from a chair that should be tossed on the nearest New York City dump.

“Yes?”

“For the record, where were you a week ago Tuesday before you went to Childress’s apartment — say from about noon on?”

“I’ve been expecting you to ask me that.” Patricia Royce, too, stood. Her sandy head came just up to my shoulders. “I was here all day, until I walked over to Charles’s place. Your next question, of course, is, ‘Did anyone see me during that time?’ And the answer is no, other than passersby on the street during my three-block walk, none of whom I knew.

“If that makes me a suspect in your eyes, so be it. I’m afraid I haven’t been very helpful, Mr. Archie Goodwin, and I guess I can’t be, at least if your goal still is to show that Charles died by any hand but his own.”

Okay, maybe she wasn’t the life of the party, but the woman did have a way with words. I thanked her again and we shook hands, but her dark blue eyes never met mine. If we didn’t part as friends, we weren’t enemies, or at least I didn’t feel we were. After she closed her door, I lingered in the hallway long enough to determine that the lock on her apartment door was not a match for the mystery key.