The Bloodied Ivy (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 3)

by Robert Goldsborough

  “That’s the business we’re supposed to be in, all right, cutting through conundrums.” I was beginning to wonder if the little professor ever tried to say anything simply. “Let’s not be too hard on Mr. Wolfe, though. At this very moment, his brilliant mind is no doubt shrewdly processing the things you told him. I’ll discuss the situation with him this afternoon and call you. My thinking right now is that I’d like to go up to Prescott, see the place where Professor Markham fell, and meet the people you mentioned, along with any others who knew him well.”

  Cortland looked troubled. I actually began to feel sorry for the sawed-off savant. “I don’t think I’d want to broadcast the fact that I was hiring you…”

  “Of course not,” I said. “We can work out a plausible explanation for me to be there. Let’s worry about that tomorrow. By the way, because Mr. Wolfe still hasn’t made a formal commitment, you may want this back.” I held out his check.

  He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, please keep it. I still want to engage Mr. Wolfe, and I’ll leave the draft with you as good faith.”

  “Fair enough,” I answered, sliding the check into my center desk drawer. I got up and gestured Cortland toward the front door. Wolfe wasn’t the only one in the brownstone whose stomach was primed for Fritz’s veal cutlets and endive salad.

  FOUR

  I WAS SORE AT WOLFE for walking out on our meeting with Cortland, but I knew he was getting back at me for trying to stick him with some work. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even retaliate at lunch; he has a rule, never broken, that business is not to be discussed during meals. Consequently, I was a captive audience of one while he held forth on how the role of the vice president should be redefined to give him—or her—far more of the ceremonial duties of the executive branch, thereby freeing up the president to spend more time on the business of governing. I mainly listened and nodded while polishing off three helpings of the veal and two healthy wedges of blueberry pie.

  When we were back in the office with coffee, though, I wasted no time getting on Wolfe’s case. “Okay, so you’re riled that I brought in a prospective client without checking with you first. And you also didn’t much like the resignation business. But you’ve often told me how important it is that a guest be honored—‘a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality,’ if I may quote you. Well, you certainly didn’t treat Cortland like a jewel.”

  Wolfe took a sip of coffee and set the cup down deliberately, dabbing one corner of his mouth with a napkin. “Archie, I am accustomed to your febrile attempts at generating business without consulting me. That is hardly out of character. Further, I long ago became acclimated to your periodic resignations, one of which I may someday accept. Neither of those actions ‘riled’ me, to use your word. However, Mr. Cortland’s performance this morning was patently irritating.”

  “You mean all those big words?” I grinned.

  Wolfe waved away my question with a hand. “Bah. The man uses the language as if it were buckshot—indiscriminately and with little regard for precision. He obviously has gotten into the habit of using a big word where a small one will better serve him. My annoyance is far more basal.”

  “His refusal to suggest suspects?”

  He shrugged. “Clearly, the dead man was not lacking detractors within the university community; this much we learned. The zealous disciple comes to us insisting that his oracle was murdered, yet is loath to single out an individual from among those detractors.”

  “So maybe he’s concerned that he’ll finger somebody who is innocent. That’s natural enough,” I said.

  “Perhaps, although his obvious enmity toward those he identified might tend to preclude such concern.”

  “Are you suggesting that Cortland is a phony or a liar?”

  Wolfe laced his fingers over his center mound. “Not necessarily. What do you suggest?”

  I won’t say Nero Wolfe never seeks my advice, but it probably happens less often than a presidential election, unless you count the times he asks my opinion about a young woman, particularly if she’s a key figure in a case we’re working on. He thinks I’m an expert on women, and I go on letting him believe that.

  “I told you before that I’m playing a hunch here,” I said. “I know you think I’m trying to drum up business, and I have to plead guilty to doing that more than once in the past. But I’ve got this feeling that little guy is on to something. Don’t ask me to explain it—I can’t. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

  “Or is it my money?”

  “No, sir, I mean it. I’d like to go up to Prescott. I’ll even pay all the expenses myself, including the gas in your car. And for every hour I’m gone, I’ll work an extra hour in the office for you on my own time. Fair enough?”

  Wolfe raised his eyebrows. “What do you expect to accomplish there?”

  “For one thing, I want to see the school, and the site of the so-called accident. For another, I’d like to meet those characters Cortland talked about today. Also, there must be others on the campus who knew Markham, probably knew him well. What about it? You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Wolfe scowled. “How far is this place?” Despite his encyclopedic knowledge on a wide variety of subjects, he’d flunk a course in the geography of the New York metropolitan area, to say nothing of more distant precincts.

  “About seventy-five miles north, an hour and a half at most,” I said. “I know a lot of the country up that way, and it’s a nice drive.”

  He shuddered at the idea of anybody willingly riding in an automobile for ninety minutes, let alone driving one. To Wolfe, people who use cars regularly have forfeited the right to be termed sane. I should mention here that he does own a car, a two-year-old Mercedes sedan that I had picked out. He can’t drive it, and will only ride—in the back seat at that—when I’m behind the wheel. Even then, his trips out are rare, such as to the annual Metropolitan Orchid Show, which is all of twenty-five blocks from the brownstone. And even then, he keeps his eyes closed most of the way.

  “When will you go?” he asked stiffly.

  “I was thinking about tomorrow. I figure Cortland can show me around, and I’ll use some kind of cover. Maybe I can be the father of a prospective student, there to take a look at the campus.”

  Wolfe frowned, maybe at the notion of me as somebody’s father. “We’re having spareribs for lunch tomorrow.” It was a formidable objection.

  “I’ll have Fritz save me some,” I said, but I didn’t get a reply because he was behind his book, which meant he’d given up trying to talk me out of the expedition.

  For the next hour or so, I entered orchid germination records into the PC, but at four o’clock, when Wolfe went up to the plant rooms for his afternoon playtime, I turned to my phone and dialed Lon Cohen’s number at the Gazette. Lon doesn’t carry a title at the paper, but he’s got an office next to the publisher’s on the twentieth floor, and when anything from a minor gang war to a bribery scandal in the mayor’s office occurs, Lon seems to know more about it sooner than anyone else in the five boroughs. He answered in his usual world-weary tone.

  “Nice to hear you sounding so chipper,” I said. “Got a minute?”

  “Of course not. What kind of trouble are you manufacturing today?”

  “Hey, this is me you’re talking to, remember? Archie, the newspaperman’s best friend.”

  “Okay, friend, what’s up?”

  “What can you tell me about Prescott University?”

  “What’s to tell?” Lon said. “It’s a private school, as I’m sure you know. Pretty campus. About halfway between West Point and Poughkeepsie, and they say the Prescott women prefer Military Academy cadets to Prescott men, while the men on campus would far rather go out with Vassar women than the ones at their own school. Enrollment’s somewhere around six thousand, and the place has Ivy League pretensions—and Ivy League tuitions. Academically, so-so to good. For years, it was known for this archconservative, Markham, who just died in
a fall a few weeks—wait a minute. Does this have anything to do with Markham, Archie?”

  “Why would it?” I asked innocently.

  “Just seems like a funny coincidence, that’s all. A place like Prescott is lucky if it makes the papers once in five years—make that ten. Its most notorious faculty member tumbles into a ravine, and a few weeks later, one Archie Goodwin—the newspaperman’s best friend, no less—calls and wants to know about the school. Now I ask, if you were me, wouldn’t you be suspicious, too?”

  “I might, if I were the suspicious type, like you. Fortunately, however, I’m not. Since you brought up Markham, though, what can you tell me about him? What kind of guy was he?”

  “So you are interested in him.” Lon’s curiosity was kicking into high gear. “What gives?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to share right now, but if and when I do, you’ll be the first to know. What about Markham?”

  I heard a sigh through my receiver. “Brilliant, although radical. He was somewhat trendy fifteen years or so back. That’s when he was in demand as a speaker and columnist and a panelist on political TV shows. He was even approached to run for Congress from up around Prescott one time, but nothing ever came of it. You may remember that the Gazette carried his column for a while, but we dropped it, and so did a lot of other papers, and it finally died. The simple fact is that other conservative columnists like William Buckley and George Will are better writers and they aren’t on the lunatic fringe, which is where I’d place Markham.”

  “What was he like personally?”

  “I never met him, but from what I hear, cantankerous, contentious, inflexible. He didn’t have much give in his political views, and he had the reputation as being hard to get along with on the faculty. He was quite an outdoor type, somewhat like that old Supreme Court justice from some years back, William Douglas. He’d done a lot of mountain climbing and hiking, as I recall. Also, I seem to remember hearing that he had quite an eye for the ladies.”

  “That doesn’t make him a bad person.”

  “Not at all—probably helped keep him young. I think he’d been a widower for quite a number of years.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Lon said. “I thought I’d done pretty well to dredge up what I did from memory. After all, he hadn’t been in the news all that much in recent years. Archie, can’t you give me at least a clue about what you’re up to here?” Good old Lon. He never stops working.

  “I wish I could, but you know how secretive the detective business is.”

  “Spare me, please. And remember who your friends are when you finally decide you can talk about this for publication.”

  “That’s a guarantee,” I told him, and he knew I meant it. We’ve gotten a lot of helpful information from Lon through the years, but he’s also built a thick file of Gazette exclusives, thanks to us. As Wolfe is fond of saying, on balance, we’re more or less even.

  After I signed off with Lon, I dialed Cortland’s office number at Prescott, and he answered on the first ring. “It’s Archie Goodwin,” I said. “I’d like to come up there tomorrow. What time’s most convenient?”

  “Capital!” he squeaked. “I’ve got two classes in the morning, eight-thirty and ten-thirty, and my afternoon is completely free.”

  I told him I wanted to look around the campus on my own, and also that I hoped to meet Potter, Schmidt, and Greenbaum. There was a pause while he considered it. “I’m not sure about Keith, but I can probably introduce you to the other two, maybe at lunch in the faculty dining room,” he said at last.

  We talked some more, and it was decided that I would meet him in his office at eight o’clock the next morning. That would mean getting up about five, which is about two hours earlier than usual for me, but then, where does it say a detective’s life is an easy one?

  FIVE

  THE SUN WAS JUST COMING up on what promised to be a grade-A October day when I got the Mercedes from the garage on Thirty-fourth Street where we’d been keeping our cars for years. It was ten after six when I turned onto the Henry Hudson at Fifty-seventh and headed north, paralleling the river. The traffic was light as I crossed the George Washington Bridge and went up the Jersey side of the Hudson on the Palisades Parkway.

  It felt good getting out of the city. Fritz had been popping his rivets with curiosity as I ate sausage, eggs, and griddle cakes and tried to read the Times at my small table in the kitchen. He frets when Wolfe isn’t on a case because he thinks we’re always three days from bankruptcy, and nothing I say ever seems to help. “Where are you going so early, Archie?” he asked anxiously, and when I told him, he asked if this meant we had a case. I hated to disappoint him by saying, in truth, that it was too early to tell, that this little venture north was strictly my own enterprise. He put on a glum face after that, but I calmed him somewhat by saying there was a possibility—only a possibility—that the trip might result in some business. At that I felt guilty, because I knew damn well no bookie east of Pittsburgh would give odds that I could get Wolfe to take Cortland’s money.

  I was on the Thruway now, having switched over west of Nyack, and was headed through the Ramapo Mountains, moving north with the semis, the RVs, and the station wagons with Maryland and Delaware plates and luggage on their roofs that probably were going up into the Adirondacks to ogle the fall colors.

  On the phone with Cortland the day before, I had worked out a cover, discarding the father idea in favor of being an uncle. I was to be an acquaintance named Arnold Goodman, who was looking at Prescott as a possible school for my nephew, a high school senior in Indianapolis. “Normally, visits are planned through our Admissions Office,” Cortland told me, “but because we’re such ‘old friends’ it would be perfectly commonplace for me to invite you up, show you around, take you to lunch. I can make all kinds of introductions with no trouble at all.”

  My watch read seven-thirty-five when I left the Thruway at Newburgh and turned east. When I got to 9W, I went north up the old road for about fifteen minutes, and at the bottom of a long grade found myself in Prescott, a small antique of a town that probably had a bed or two George Washington slept in. I vaguely remembered the place from that time some years back when Lily Rowan and I had come up for that football game with Rutgers, and it didn’t seem to have changed a hair since. I drove along one side of the town square and, per Cortland’s directions, found myself entering the campus of Prescott University, founded 1784, which matched some Hollywood producer’s idea of how a college ought to look—redbrick buildings with spanking white shutters and spanking white columns and a sprinkling of ivy, set among lots of old trees that were changing their colors as proudly as any you’d find up in the Adirondacks or even Vermont.

  I parked in the visitors’ lot and, again following Cortland’s directions, located the Union Building. Skirting one side of it on an asphalt path, I got to Richardson Hall, where his office was and where I was to meet him. It was three minutes to eight when I walked into an entrance hall that could have used a good airing, opened the frosted glass door on the first floor marked POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPT., and was greeted from behind a desk by a smiling, nicely arranged face framed by auburn hair. “Hi, can I help you?” the voice asked. It was nice, too.

  “I’m here to see Professor Cortland,” I said, using the smile that Lily once referred to as “puckishly engaging.”

  “Oh, you must be Mr. Goodman,” she said, standing and letting me see that the rest of her also was nice. “Doctor Cortland is expecting you, but he’s got a student in with him. He shouldn’t be long.”

  I thanked her and took a hard-backed chair in the small reception area while she went back to typing, which gave me a chance to study her in profile. A particularly good nose, I thought, trying to remember which movie actress had one like it. I was concentrating on the problem when a shaggy-haired young man in blue jeans and a T-shirt with what apparently had once been a rock group’s name on it passed me
on his way out, followed by Cortland.

  “Arnold!” he yelped as if greeting someone he hadn’t seen since childhood. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but you know how crucial student conferences are.”

  “Walter,” I said, rising and going along with the charade by pumping his hand vigorously. “I really appreciate your taking the time to see me.” He ushered me past Ms. Auburn-Hair-with-the-Nice-Nose, and I turned to give her one last puckishly engaging smile, which got returned, with interest.

  Once inside Cortland’s office, which was roughly four times the size of a phone booth, I sat in the only guest chair while he slipped in behind his standard-issue metal desk. He was wearing a different crazy-quilt sportcoat from the one he had on when he visited us in New York, but the smudges on his glasses looked the same. “Here’s a map of the campus that will facilitate your getting around,” he said, handing it to me. “I’ve marked the important places.”

  “Thanks. I know you’ve got an eight-thirty class, so I won’t hold you up. I want to see the place where Markham went over the edge, which of course I can do on my own, and I’d also like to sit in on a class taught either by Schmidt or Greenbaum, or both. Is that possible?”

  “Why…yes, I suppose so,” Cortland answered, looking surprised. “Let me check the schedule.” He turned to a foot-high stack of papers on his right and burrowed into the middle of it, somehow coming out with what he wanted, a small booklet, which he thumbed. “Yes, I was pretty sure of this; Ted has the Introduction to American Government class at nine-thirty. That’s an A-level course, principally freshmen. It’s in the auditorium over in Bailey, with maybe three hundred students. You can slide in and hardly be noticed. As for Orville, let’s see…he doesn’t have any classes today—that’s the department chairman for you. But I’ll try to see that you make his acquaintance at lunch. He almost always eats in the faculty dining room.”

  I thanked Cortland and got up to go. As we were walking out of his cubbyhole, I nearly collided with a blonde in a jumpsuit who was lugging a stack of books. “Oh, I’m awfully sorry!” she exclaimed, looking up at me with round blue eyes that didn’t remind me of any particular actress, but looked like they belonged right where they were. If the first two women I’d seen were typical of Prescott, I might just take residence here and wire Wolfe to find a new gofer.