Murder On Christmas Eve

by G. K. Chesterton

  ‘Perigord,’ Mihalyi said. ‘You are a writer. Would you care to have your unfinished work published after your death? Would you not recoil at that, or at having it completed by others?’

  Philip Perigord cocked an eyebrow. ‘I’m the wrong person to ask,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent twenty years in Hollywood. Forget unfinished work. My finished work doesn’t get published, or “produced,” as they so revealingly term it. I get paid, and the work winds up on a shelf. And, when it comes to having one’s work completed by others, in Hollywood you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. It happens during your lifetime, and you learn to live with it.’

  ‘We don’t know the author’s wishes,’ Harriet Quinlan put in, ‘and I wonder how relevant they are.’

  ‘But it’s his work,’ Mihalyi pointed out.

  ‘Is it, Zoltan? Or does it belong to the ages? Finished or not, the author has left it to us. Schubert did not finish one of his greatest symphonies. Would you have laid its two completed movements in the casket with him?’

  ‘It has been argued that the work was complete, that he intended it to be but two movements long.’

  ‘That begs the question, Zoltan.’

  ‘It does, dear lady,’ he said with a wink. ‘I’d rather beg the question than be undone by it. Of course I’d keep the Unfinished Symphony in the repertoire. On the other hand, I’d hate to see some fool attempt to finish it.’

  ‘No one has, have they?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. But several writers have had the effrontery to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and I do think Dickens would have been better served if the manuscript had gone in the box with his bones. And as for sequels, like those for Pride and Prejudice and The Big Sleep, or that young fellow who had the colossal gall to tread in Rex Stout’s immortal footsteps …’

  Now we were getting onto sensitive ground. As far as Leo Haig was concerned, Archie Goodwin had always written up Wolfe’s cases, using the transparent pseudonym of Rex Stout. (Rex Stout = fat king, an allusion to Wolfe’s own regal corpulence.) Robert Goldsborough, credited with the books written since the ‘death’ of Stout, was, as Haig saw it, a ghostwriter employed by Goodwin, who was no longer up to the chore of hammering out the books. He’d relate them to Goldsborough, who transcribed them and polished them up. While they might not have all the narrative verve of Goodwin’s own work, still they provided an important and accurate account of Wolfe’s more recent cases.

  See, Haig feels the great man’s still alive and still raising orchids and nailing killers. Maybe somewhere on the Upper East Side. Maybe in Murray Hill, or just off Gramercy Park …

  The discussion about Goldsborough, and about sequels in general, roused Haig from a torpor that Wolfe himself might have envied. ‘Enough,’ he said with authority. ‘There’s no time for meandering literary conversations, nor would Chip have room for them in a short-story-length report. So let us get to it. One of you took the manuscript, box and all, from its place on the shelf. Mr Mihalyi, you have the air of one who protests too much. You profess no interest in the manuscripts of unpublished novels, and I can accept that you did not yearn to possess As Dark as It Gets, but you wanted a look at it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t own a Woolrich manuscript,’ he said, ‘and of course I was interested in seeing what one looked like. How he typed, how he entered corrections …’

  ‘So you took the manuscript from the shelf.’

  ‘Yes,’ the violinist agreed. ‘I went into the other room with it, opened the box and flipped through the pages. You can taste the flavor of the man’s work in the visual appearance of his manuscript pages. The words and phrases x’d out, the pencil notations, the crossovers, even the typographical errors. The computer age puts paid to all that, doesn’t it? Imagine Chandler running Spel-Chek, or Hammett with justified margins.’ He sighed. ‘A few minutes with the script made me long to own one of Woolrich’s. But not this one, for reasons I’ve already explained.’

  ‘You spent how long with the book?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes at the most. Probably more like ten.’

  ‘And returned to this room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And brought the manuscript with you?’

  ‘Yes. I intended to return it to the shelf, but someone was standing in the way. It may have been you, Jon. It was someone tall, and you’re the tallest person here.’ He turned to our client. ‘It wasn’t you. But I think you may have been talking with Jon. Someone was, at any rate, and I’d have had to step between the two of you to put the box back, and that might have led to questions as to why I’d picked it up in the first place. So I put it down.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On a table. That one, I think.’

  ‘It’s not there now,’ Jon Corn-Wallace said.

  ‘It’s not,’ Haig agreed. ‘One of you took it from that table. I could, through an exhausting process of cross-questioning, establish who that person is. But it would save us all time if the person would simply recount what happened next.’

  There was a silence while they all looked at each other. ‘Well, I guess this is where I come in,’ Jayne Corn-Wallace said. ‘I was sitting in the red chair, where Phil Perigord is sitting now. And whoever I’d been talking to went to get another drink, and I looked around, and there it was on the table.’

  ‘The manuscript, madam?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know that was what it was, not at first. I thought it was a finely bound limited edition. Because the manuscripts are all kept on that shelf, you know, and this one wasn’t. And it hadn’t been on the table a few minutes earlier, either. I knew that much. So I assumed it was a book someone had been leafing through, and I saw it was by Cornell Woolrich, and I didn’t recognize the title, so I thought I’d try leafing through it myself.’

  ‘And you found it was a manuscript.’

  ‘Well, that didn’t take too keen an eye, did it? I suppose I glanced at the first twenty pages, just riffled through them while the party went on around me. I stopped after a chapter or so. That was plenty.’

  ‘You didn’t like what you read?’

  ‘There were corrections,’ she said disdainfully. ‘Words and whole sentences crossed out, new words penciled in. I realize writers have to work that way, but when I read a book I like to believe it emerged from the writer’s mind fully formed.’

  ‘Like Athena from the brow of What’s-his-name,’ her husband said.

  ‘Zeus. I don’t want to know there was a writer at work, making decisions, putting words down and then changing them. I want to forget about the writer entirely and lose myself in the story.’

  ‘Everybody wants to forget about the writer,’ Philip Perigord said, helping himself to more eggnog. ‘At the Oscars each year some ninny intones, “In the beginning was the Word,” before he hands out the screenwriting awards. And you hear the usual crap about how they owe it all to chaps like me who put words in their mouths. They say it, but nobody believes it. Jack Warner called us schmucks with Underwoods. Well, we’ve come a long way. Now we’re schmucks with Power Macs.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Haig said. ‘You looked at the manuscript, didn’t you, Mr Perigord?’

  ‘I never read unpublished work. Can’t risk leaving myself open to a plagiarism charge.’

  ‘Oh? But didn’t you have a special interest in Wool-rich? Didn’t you once adapt a story of his?’

  ‘How did you know about that? I was one of several who made a living off that particular piece of crap. It was never produced.’

  ‘And you looked at this manuscript in the hope that you might adapt it?’

  The writer shook his head. ‘I’m through wasting myself out there.’

  ‘They’re through with you,’ Harriet Quinlan said. ‘Nothing personal, Phil, but it’s a town that uses up writers and throws them away. You couldn’t get arrested out there. So you’ve come back east to write books.’

  ‘And you’ll be representing him, madam?’

  ‘I may, if he
brings me something I can sell. I saw him paging through a manuscript and figured he was looking for something he could steal. Oh, don’t look so outraged, Phil. Why not steal from Woolrich, for God’s sake? He’s not going to sue. He left everything to Columbia University, and you could knock off anything of his, published or unpublished, and they’d never know the difference. Ever since I saw you reading, I’ve been wondering. Did you come across anything worth stealing?’

  ‘I don’t steal,’ Perigord said. ‘Still, perfectly legitimate inspiration can result from a glance at another man’s work –’

  ‘I’ll say it can. And did it?’

  He shook his head. ‘If there was a strong idea anywhere in that manuscript, I couldn’t find it in the few minutes I spent looking. What about you, Harriet? I know you had a look at it, because I saw you.’

  ‘I just wanted to see what it was you’d been so caught up in. And I wondered if the manuscript might be salvageable. One of my writers might be able to pull it off, and do a better job than the hack who finished Into the Night.’

  ‘Ah,’ Haig said. ‘And what did you determine, madam?’

  ‘I didn’t read enough to form a judgment. Anyway, Into the Night was no great commercial success, so why tag along in its wake?’

  ‘So you put the manuscript …’

  ‘Back in its box, and left it on the table where I’d found it.’

  Our client shook his head in wonder. ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ he said. ‘Or in the Calais coach, depending on whether you’re English or American. It’s beginning to look as though everyone read that manuscript. And I never noticed a thing!’

  ‘Well, you were hitting the sauce pretty good,’ Jon Corn-Wallace reminded him. ‘And you were, uh, concentrating all your social energy in one direction.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Corn-Wallace nodded toward Jeanne Botleigh, who was refilling someone’s cup. ‘As far as you were concerned, our lovely caterer was the only person in the room.’

  There was an awkward silence, with our host coloring and his caterer lowering her eyes demurely. Haig broke it. ‘To continue,’ he said abruptly. ‘Miss Quinlan returned the manuscript to its box and to its place upon the table. Then –’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ Perigord said. ‘Harriet, I wanted another look at Woolrich. Maybe I’d missed something. But first I saw you reading it, and when I looked a second time it was gone. You weren’t reading it and it wasn’t on the table, either.’

  ‘I put it back,’ the agent said.

  ‘But not where you found it,’ said Edward Everett Stokes. ‘You set it down not on the table but on that revolving bookcase.’

  ‘Did I? I suppose it’s possible. But how did you know that?’

  ‘Because I saw you,’ said the small-press publisher. ‘And because I wanted a look at the manuscript myself. I knew about it, including the fact that it was not restorable in the fashion of Into the Night. That made it valueless to a commercial publisher, but the idea of a Woolrich novel going unpublished ate away at me. I mean, we’re talking about Cornell Woolrich.’

  ‘And you thought –’

  ‘I thought why not publish it as is, warts and all? I could do it, in an edition of two or three hundred copies, for collectors who’d happily accept inconsistencies and omissions for the sake of having something otherwise unobtainable. I wanted a few minutes’ peace and quiet with the book, so I took it into the lavatory.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I read it, or at least paged through it. I must have spent half an hour in there, or close to it.’

  ‘I remember you were gone a while,’ Jon Corn-Wallace said. ‘I thought you’d headed on home.’

  ‘I thought he was in the other room,’ Jayne said, ‘cavorting on the pile of coats with Harriet here. But I guess that must have been someone else.’

  ‘It was Zoltan,’ the agent said, ‘and we were hardly cavorting.’

  ‘Canoodling, then, but –’

  ‘He was teaching me a yogic breathing technique, not that it’s any of your business. Stokes, you took the manuscript into the John. I trust you brought it back?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘You took it home? You’re the person responsible for its disappearance?’

  ‘Certainly not. I didn’t take it home, and I hope I’m not responsible for its disappearance. I left it in the lavatory.’

  ‘You just left it there?’

  ‘In its box, on the shelf over the vanity. I set it down there while I washed my hands, and I’m afraid I forgot it. And no, it’s not there now. I went and looked as soon as I realized what all this was about, and I’m afraid some other hands than mine must have moved it. I’ll tell you this – when it does turn up, I definitely want to publish it.’

  ‘If it turns up,’ our client said darkly. ‘Once E. E. left it in the bathroom, anyone could have slipped it under his coat without being seen. And I’ll probably never see it again.’

  ‘But that means one of us is a thief,’ somebody said.

  ‘I know, and that’s out of the question. You’re all my friends. But we were all drinking last night, and drink can confuse a person. Suppose one of you did take it from the bathroom and carried it home as a joke, the kind of joke that can seem funny after a few drinks. If you could contrive to return it, perhaps in such a way that no one could know your identity … Haig, you ought to be able to work that out.’

  ‘I could,’ Haig agreed. ‘If that were how it happened. But it didn’t.’

  ‘It didn’t?’

  ‘You forget the least obvious suspect.’

  ‘Me? Dammit, Haig, are you saying I stole my own manuscript?’

  ‘I’m saying the butler did it,’ Haig said, ‘or the closest thing we have to a butler. Miss Botleigh, your upper lip has been trembling almost since we all sat down. You’ve been on the point of an admission throughout and haven’t said a word. Have you in fact read the manuscript of As Dark as It Gets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The client gasped. ‘You have? When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘I had to use the lavatory,’ she said, ‘and the book was there, although I could see it wasn’t an ordinary bound book but pages in a box. I didn’t think I would hurt it by looking at it. So I sat there and read the first two chapters.’

  ‘What did you think?’ Haig asked her.

  ‘It was very powerful. Parts of it were hard to follow, but the scenes were strong, and I got caught up in them.’

  ‘That’s Woolrich,’ Jayne Corn-Wallace said. ‘He can grab you, all right.’

  ‘And then you took it with you when you went home,’ our client said. ‘You were so involved you couldn’t bear to leave it unfinished, so you, uh, borrowed it.’ He reached to pat her hand. ‘Perfectly understandable,’ he said, ‘and perfectly innocent. You were going to bring it back once you’d finished it. So all this fuss has been over nothing.’

  ‘That’s not what happened.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘I read two chapters,’ she said, ‘and I thought I’d ask to borrow it some other time, or maybe not. But I put the pages back in the box and left them there.’

  ‘In the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you never did finish the book,’ our client said. ‘Well, if it ever turns up I’ll be more than happy to lend it to you, but until then –’

  ‘But perhaps Miss Botleigh has already finished the book,’ Haig suggested.

  ‘How could she? She just told you she left it in the bathroom.’

  Haig said, ‘Miss Botleigh?’

  ‘I finished the book,’ she said. ‘When everybody else went home, I stayed.’

  ‘My word,’ Zoltan Mihalyi said. ‘Woolrich never had a more devoted fan, or one half so beautiful.’

  ‘Not to finish the manuscript,’ she said, and turned to our host. ‘You asked me to stay,’ she said.

  ‘I wanted you to stay,’ he agr
eed. ‘I wanted to ask you to stay. But I don’t remember …’

  ‘I guess you’d had quite a bit to drink,’ she said, ‘although you didn’t show it. But you asked me to stay, and I’d been hoping you would ask me, because I wanted to stay.’

  ‘You must have had rather a lot to drink yourself,’ Harriet Quinlan murmured.

  ‘Not that much,’ said the caterer. ‘I wanted to stay because he’s a very attractive man.’

  Our client positively glowed, then turned red with embarrassment. ‘I knew I had a hole in my memory,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think anything significant could have fallen through it. So you actually stayed? God. What, uh, happened?’

  ‘We went upstairs,’ Jeanne Botleigh said. ‘And we went to the bedroom, and we went to bed.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Haig.

  ‘And it was …’

  ‘Quite wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘And I don’t remember. I think I’m going to kill myself.’

  ‘Not on Christmas Day,’ E. E. Stokes said. ‘And not with a mystery still unsolved. Haig, what became of the bloody manuscript?’

  ‘Miss Botleigh?’

  She looked at our host, then lowered her eyes. ‘You went to sleep afterward,’ she said, ‘and I felt entirely energized, and knew I couldn’t sleep, and I thought I’d read for a while. And I remembered the manuscript, so I came down here and fetched it.’

  ‘And read it?’

  ‘In bed. I thought you might wake up, in fact I was hoping you would. But you didn’t.’

  ‘Damn it,’ our client said, with feeling.

  ‘So I finished the manuscript and still didn’t feel sleepy. And I got dressed and let myself out and went home.’