Eight

“Interesting specimen,” I said to Wolfe when I got back to the office. “Just the kind of guy you’d like to sit around with shooting the breeze.”

He snorted. “Mr. Childress was correct; the man is a preening poseur.”

“Sounds right to me. Say, here’s an idea: I tell Lon Cohen that unless he finds a way to get Hobbs tossed off the Gazette, he won’t ever get any more invitations to dinner here.”

Wolfe picked up his book and snorted again. “Archie, the fabric of your humor is frayed. Have you made arrangements to see Mr. Childress’s editor?”

I was about to respond when the phone rang. As if on cue, it was the individual in question, Keith Billings, returning my call. Billings sounded harried, so I didn’t waste words. “I work for Nero Wolfe, who is investigating Charles Childress’s death, and I would like to see you for a few minutes, preferably today.”

“Why?” he snapped.

“We are talking to everyone who knew Childress, in the hope that we can learn—”

“That you can learn how to turn his death from a suicide into a murder, right? I know enough about your famous boss to be aware that murder is his métier — not to mention a very profitable livelihood.”

“Then you also should be aware that Mr. Wolfe has a respect for facts. He doesn’t twist or alter them, and he certainly doesn’t have to manufacture murders in order to get business. A client is convinced that Mr. Childress was killed, and Mr. Wolfe happens to agree.”

“Just who is this client?” Billings fired back.

“Sorry, that’s something I cannot divulge at this time.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. You’re on a fishing expedition.”

“Look, I realize you and Childress weren’t exactly the best of friends, but—”

“Oh, now I get it. If I don’t sit still for an interview with you, the implication is that I’ve got something to hide, is that it, Goodwin?”

“You interrupted me — for the second time.” I kept my voice even and amiable. “What I was about to say was: but I’m certain you’d do anything you could to help identify the murderer — if there is one.”

I knew he was still on the line because I could hear angry breathing. After about fifteen seconds, he strung a series of expletives together, none of which can be used on vanity license plates in any state. The man belonged in publishing, all right: He had a fine grasp of the language and used a few words I made a mental note to look up later in Wolfe’s Oxford Dictionary of American Slang.

“All right, dammit, I’ve got a nightmare of an afternoon, but I can spare a few minutes,” Billings said after he’d finished spewing venom. “Come at three — I’m on the eighteenth floor. I assume you know the address.”

I assured him I did, and at two-fifty-six, I sauntered into the Art Deco lobby of a mature skyscraper on Madison Avenue in the Forties. The Westman & Lane Publishing Company occupied four floors, sixteen through nineteen, and its roster of employees, which included Keith Billings, took up more than one-fourth of the building directory. When I got off the elevator at eighteen, I found myself facing a massive reception desk. Behind it rose a large backlit display of Westman & Lane’s current publications, artfully arranged on several glass shelves. Also behind the desk sat a young man with oversized dark-rimmed glasses and curly black hair tied in a ponytail. He looked up from the book he had been reading and blinked his complete indifference in my direction.

“I’m here to see Keith Billings,” I said. “The name is Goodwin.”

He considered me with more indifference. “He expecting you?” When I said yes, the young dynamo tapped out a number on his phone and pronounced my name. He then nodded, cradled the receiver, and twitched his ponytail to the left. “Through that door,” he droned. “About halfway down on the right. Can’t miss it.”

I would have said thanks, but I didn’t want to distract him from his book, which he had dived back into. I pushed through into a long corridor. Where GBC-TV had been white all over, this place was gray, from the fabric walls to the carpeting. Office doors were spaced every few feet on both sides. An identical nameplate next to each one proclaimed its occupant in sans-serif capital letters. Many of the doors were open, revealing rooms barely big enough for one medium-sized desk, a couple of guest chairs, bookshelves filling one wall from floor to ceiling, and editors, all of whom seemed busy, presumably editing.

That is what Keith Billings was doing when I cast a shadow across his desk from the doorway. He looked up from a sheaf of papers, ran a hand through a forest of brown hair that already looked like it had been styled by an eggbeater, and tossed a frown in my direction. “Archie Goodwin, occupation — detective. Come in, sit down,” he said without warmth, gesturing toward his pair of standard-issue tubular chairs. Both had piles of books on them, so I took the smallest stack, placing it on the floor, and sat.

“Oh — sorry about the mess,” Billings muttered. “As you can see, housekeeping’s not high on my priority list.” He got up, all five-feet-seven of him, stalked to the door, shut it with a bang that unquestionably put a kink in the heavy editing going on up and down the hallway, and returned to his desk. “That’s the only way to keep from getting interrupted around here, and even a closed door is no damn guarantee. Now, you wanted to talk about Childress — go ahead.”

Billings planted elbows on the two clear spots on the desk top, resting his chin on clasped hands. I put him at no more than thirty-five, and maybe a year or two younger. His neck was thick and his face was square and ruddy, with wide cheekbones and eyes that I would have called black, although they probably were dark brown, complete with deep circles under them. He looked like a man who took life seriously and smiled only on alternate Wednesdays. He and the late Mr. Childress must have made quite a pair.

“As I said on the telephone earlier today, Mr. Wolfe has been engaged by someone who believes Charles Childress was murdered. And he agrees with—”

“Where’s the evidence?” Billings growled. “And what do the police think? The papers haven’t printed a single word about murder. Nothing — not one damned word.”

“Interruptions can come from both sides of a closed door,” I responded calmly. “On the phone, you told me how busy you are, and I don’t doubt that for a minute. But this will go much faster if you allow me to complete the sentences I start.”

He twitched a hand irritably. “Okay, go on, go on.”

“I don’t have hard evidence that Charles Childress’s demise was anything but a suicide, and neither does Mr. Wolfe — or our client, for that matter. But I learned a long time ago that when Nero Wolfe has a conviction about something, he’s invariably right. And he is convinced that Childress was murdered.” Okay, so I was laying it on thick, but I needed to seize the offensive.

“Now, you had known Childress for several years,” I went on quickly. “Was he the type who might have killed himself?”

“Mr. Goodwin, it may surprise you to know that I am not an expert on suicidal behavior. Until now, I have never known anyone who destroyed himself — assuming of course that Charles did. As you must be aware, he was given to extreme mood swings — believe me, I saw more of them than I cared to. In the course of a few minutes, the man could go from high to low and back again. But regardless of where he was on that roller coaster of his, it was never a picnic working with the guy.”

“Was he a good writer?”

Billings twitched his head. “All depends on whom you talk to. My former boss, Horace Vinson — I suppose you’ve already met him — gave Charles higher marks than I did. And several critics around town had lower opinions of him than mine. In fairness, he did a pretty decent job of re-creating Darius Sawyer’s characters. The biggest problem I had was his plots. They were clumsy and awkward, but whenever I tried to strengthen some part of the structure, he’d throw a fit. I mean, he’d really go into a rage. I’ve dealt with some difficult writers in my ten-odd years as an editor, but Charles was the corker.” He scowled at the memory.

“What was wrong with the plots?” I asked.

“Sheesh! What wasn’t wrong with them? I don’t know if you’re familiar with whodunits, but the trick is to give each suspect — there’s usually five or six of them, maybe even seven — a solid motive for having committed the murder, or whatever the crime is. Then, you’ve also got to make sure that each of the suspects gets more or less equal play as the story unfolds. Of course it helps to strew some red herrings along the way, too. But the toughest thing is to make the puzzle hard to solve while at the same time playing fair with the reader.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the clues need to be there for the reader to find. They should be well-hidden — damn well-hidden — but they should be there. For one thing, Charles didn’t handle his clues well; the ones he bothered to put in at all were usually so obvious a semi-literate eight-year-old could spot them. And he normally spent all his time concentrating on one or two of the suspects and all but ignoring the others, none of whom had a very believable motive.”

“I gather you had a hard time getting him to change anything.”

Billings shook his head. “Huh — a hard time? It was damn near impossible, even after the first Barnstable book came out. At first, the reviews were mixed to mildly favorable, although the majority of the critics clobbered him for exactly the things I’d pointed out and had tried to get him to change. But he was almost as hard to deal with when we worked on the second book, and finally, I went to Horace. He promised he’d speak to Charles, get him to be a little more flexible. Horace did talk to him all right, but it didn’t do a hell of a lot of good. Charles remained convinced he was Tolstoy incarnate, or at least Balzac. He was still miserable to deal with, and his plots still had more holes than all the golf courses in Westchester combined. He went ballistic any time I suggested changes. So what happened? The second book got worse reviews than the first, with most of the criticism focused on the plot. Why was I not surprised?”

“And after all that, you still were willing to edit a third Childress book?” I asked.

“Mr. Goodwin, it wasn’t a case of being willing,” Billings said sharply. “I was Monarch’s mystery editor — that was my job. Vinson liked Charles, and his first two books sold well enough, in spite of the mixed reviews. If I wanted to stay with Monarch, and I did, those two factors left me with no options, other than to do what I could to make the Barnstable books as good as possible under the circumstances.”

“Then came the third book.”

Billings swiped at a buzzing fly and missed. “God, don’t remind me. There’s probably not much I can say that you don’t already know. Things really turned ugly between Charles and me. The less-than-rave reviews he’d gotten, combined with criticism from some of the purists who had grown up on the Sawyer books, made him paranoid and defensive. Bear in mind that Charles Childress was not a Gibraltar of stability to begin with. Are you aware that he had attempted suicide before?”

“You’ve got my attention.”

“Actually, he did talk about it once, maybe to get sympathy, although I know that sounds cynical — in fact, I don’t like hearing myself say it. Anyway, some years back, before I’d met him, he apparently got depressed when a manuscript of his for a big novel was rejected, and he turned on the gas in his apartment.”

“He told you this?”

Billings leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Yeah, he did. And I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. I remember that after he told me about it, we sat in my office — that was when I was still over at Monarch — looking at each other like two stupes. Hell, I don’t think either of us said a word for five minutes. But you know, I never felt closer to the guy than I did that day.”

“That feeling obviously didn’t last for long.”

“No. Charles was always furious with me about something. He didn’t take criticism well, and he accused me more than once of, to use his words, ‘trying to turn my book into your book.’ It got so that I found that I was even arguing with myself over every change I made in his work. I spent far too much time trying to figure out how he’d react to every change I made, and I don’t have to tell you that’s not a great way to edit a manuscript.”

“Maybe he was doing it intentionally, to keep you from fiddling with his writing,” I suggested.

He turned his palms up. “I don’t believe Charles was that calculating. He honestly felt everything he wrote was without fault, and that an editor’s role was simply to catch minor stuff — typos, punctuation errors, that sort of thing. He was stunned when the reviews of his first Barnstable book weren’t all paeans to his towering talent.” He grimaced.

“And you mentioned criticism from some of the purists. What about that?”

“Do you know about the Barnstable clubs?” The phone rang. Billings ignored it.

“Just that they exist. Something to do with the acronym PROBE, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. Standing for, if you can believe it, ‘Passionate Roster of Orville Barnstable Enthusiasts.’ Apparently, readers took to Orville Barnstable almost from the start. After Darius Sawyer wrote his first three or four books, so I’ve been told, this cult following sprang up. All over the country, and in Canada, too, Barnstable clubs were formed. ‘Posses’ is what the local chapters call themselves, and a newsletter was started out in California that had — and still has — a national mailing list. These people are as fervent as the Sherlockians; they know every detail about the stories, every idiosyncrasy about Barnstable and the other characters in the series. I know — I’ve given some speeches to a local chapter here, and the one in Philadelphia, too.

“Anyway, the clubs themselves on the whole were pretty kind to Charles — they were mainly delighted to have new Barnstable stories. And Charles, too, spoke to the local chapters; he was like a hero to them, and of course he liked that — who wouldn’t? But he also got a lot of mail from individuals, not necessarily PROBE members, and some of it was on the nasty side. You know, in preparation to edit Charles’s books, I read most of the ones Sawyer wrote — they all were published before I joined Monarch. I immersed myself in them and took a bookful of notes. But as well as I thought I knew the series, these people pounced on all sorts of minuscule inconsistencies in Charles’s books. And some of them berated him for no other reason than because he had the effrontery to add to what they saw as a sacred canon.”

“Did all this bother him?” I asked.

“Hell yes, it did. He’d pop his cork and fire off angry replies until finally, I just quit forwarding correspondence to him unless it was favorable.”

“Pretty thin-skinned. Did any of these letter-writers threaten Childress?”

“Not that I’m aware of. They were purists, but they weren’t that hostile.”

“As far as you know, did anyone else ever threaten him?”

Billings leaned back and smirked. “No, Mr. Goodwin. I’m afraid that you and Nero Wolfe are really going to have to pull a rabbit, or at least a hamster, out of a hat this time to construct a halfway-believable murder scenario.”

I smiled benignly. “In the years that you knew Childress, did anything unusual happen to him? A personal crisis, a trauma of any kind?”

“You really are reaching, aren’t you? Frankly, if you were hooked up with anybody except Wolfe, I’d ask you to get the hell out of here, but even I make allowances for genius, which is what I understand your boss claims to be. As far as personal crises, Charles always seemed to be immersed in one of his own making. Hell, as I’m sure you know, just in the last few weeks he had feuded in print with me, with his agent, and with that popinjay who masquerades as a book reviewer for the Gazette.”

Billings paused to run a palm across his cheek and yawn. “The only time I remember Charles being upset by something unrelated to his writing was when his mother died. That was, oh... probably around two years ago now. He spent months in his hometown out in one of those interchangeable ‘I’ states in the Midwest — maybe Illinois or Indiana, while she deteriorated. It was pretty rough on him. When he came back, he seemed, I don’t know... distracted is probably the best description. And he stayed distracted for months. During that time he even quit squabbling with me over changes I made in his precious prose.”

“I suppose it’s understandable that he’d be shaken,” I responded.

“I guess so, except that he never seemed particularly close to his mother while she was alive and healthy. If I recall correctly, he told me just before he went home during her illness that he hadn’t been back there in seven or eight years. And it’s not exactly halfway around the world from here.”

“Except maybe in outlook. During the period when he was ‘distracted,’ did he keep on writing?”

“Yeah. In fact, he cranked out quite a bit while he was with his mother, too. He’d send me batches of chapters periodically; they were okay, about the same quality as what he did here.”

“Did he ever say anything about his months in the Midwest?”

“Not much. I asked once how he occupied himself all day, but he brushed me off with some comment about there being nothing to do except to write and talk to his relatives and take long walks down back roads. He said once that he didn’t fish, he didn’t hunt, and he didn’t know a Jersey from a Holstein. And didn’t want to.”

“The apple fell pretty far from the tree. You made a reference earlier to his feuding in print with you, Franklin Ott, and Wilbur Hobbs. Did those attacks in Book Business and the Manhattan Literary Times surprise you?”

Billings screwed up his face. “Not really. I had already left Monarch to come here, but it made me mad, damn mad. I wasn’t surprised because I’d had enough experience with the guy to know that his modus operandi was to blame other people for whatever writing problems he had. Hell, look how he took Ott over the coals in those articles.”

“Franklin Ott?”

He nodded. “Charles wasn’t stupid enough to mention him by name, of course, but everybody knew who he was writing about. Have you talked to Ott yet?”

“Briefly.”

“Did he tell you that he lost three of his clients, including a topflight science-fiction writer, within days after that damn piece of Charles’s ran?”

“He mentioned that he has had some turnover,” I said.

Billings slapped his leg. “Some turnover — ha! For a few days there, it was more like an exodus. Oh, I know, he’s picked up a couple of new names since, but that can’t match what he lost, at least not in terms of dollars.”

“Interesting. What were the circumstances of your departure from Monarch?”

That raised the flicker of a smile, which disappeared as quickly as it arose. “Somehow, I think you already know a good deal about that, Mr. Goodwin. But of course you’d like to hear it straight from this horse’s mouth. All right; after Charles’s third Barnstable book, Death in the North Meadow, went to press, he went to Horace Vinson and demanded a new editor. He told Horace that we had ‘irreconcilable personality differences’ — that’s actually the phrase he used, the intransigent bastard. Now you’ll never get me to badmouth Horace Vinson — he’s a wonderful bookman, and a true gentleman of the old school. The man redefines the word ‘courtly.’ But it’s commonly known inside the business, and maybe outside, too, that whenever there’s a conflict, Horace will invariably side with the author against the editor. And he did here. He told me that he was giving Charles a new editor, and that he hoped I’d understand.

“I’d seen something like this coming for a long time,” Billings continued glumly, “so I wasn’t terribly surprised. For one thing, I knew damn well that Ott, snake that he is, was lobbying hard to get me pulled off Charles’s books. I was very calm during our conversation, but I told Horace firmly that as long as I was Monarch’s mystery editor, I expected to edit all of the house’s mysteries. To me, that was simply non-negotiable. In that pleasant, engaging way he has, he held his ground, and the result was that we agreed to disagree. I resigned, which I know saddened him. Off the record, he gave me a very handsome severance, something he was not obligated to do. And that’s all there is to it. End of story.”

“Are you happy here?”

“Happier than I thought I’d be. Westman & Lane is a smaller house than Monarch, and I’m handling a wider range of fiction, although I still get to edit mysteries, which are my first love. And of course, Mr. Goodwin, there is one more thing that you want to ask me.”

“There is?”

“Absolutely. You want to know if I can account for my movements on the day that Charles was found dead. I know the drill pretty well. After all, I do edit mysteries, as you’re well aware.”

“Okay, Mr. Billings, where were you on—”

“On the Tuesday before last,” Billings cut in, smirking. “I looked on my calendar right after you phoned, knowing that you and Wolfe would consider me a suspect. And frankly, I’m still a suspect as far as you’re concerned, because I have no alibi — none whatever. I’d been working at home on Tuesdays — I can get infinitely more done away from the telephone and other office interruptions. And that was the case on the day Charles was found dead. I was at home all day — I have an apartment on the Upper East Side. Do I live with someone? No, sorry. Does my building have a doorman? No, it’s not in that league. Did anybody see me? No, at least not until I went to a bar in my neighborhood for a sandwich — corned beef, it was, on rye, and a beer. Any other questions?”

I showed him the key I was carrying, which he told me looked like hundreds of others he’d seen, but not that had ever belonged to him. “Here are mine,” he said casually, tossing a ringful on his desk blotter. None matched the one I had.

“Anything else?” he demanded.

“Ever been to Childress’s apartment?” I asked.

“You don’t give it up, do you? No, I have never been there.”

“Did you know that he died from a bullet fired from his own gun?”

“Yeah. Listen, I do read the papers. I don’t know why he had one, but I wasn’t surprised. I’ve toyed with getting a small-caliber pistol myself, for self-protection. Lord knows you need one in this town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a pile of stuff to do.”

I got up, playing ever so fleetingly with the idea of making an anonymous, handkerchief-over-the-mouthpiece telephone call to one Lieutenant George Rowcliff of the Homicide Squad and telling him that a fellow named Keith Billings was seen leaving Charles Childress’s apartment building on the day the latter was found dead.