Fade to Black (The Nero Wolfe Mysteries Book 5)

by Robert Goldsborough

  “All right, I’m sorry,” she said quietly, sounding genuine. “You’re right—I’ll mention it to the police, although I suppose that will mean more grief.”

  “Not as much as if they find out through some other source—not me—and wonder why you didn’t bother to tell them.”

  “You’ve made your point.”

  “Good. Did Swartz ever indicate he might be concerned about his safety?”

  “No, not at all. God knows the last few days I’ve gone over every conversation we had, at least all that I could remember. And I can’t think of a single thing that would be helpful.”

  “Did the two of you discuss advertising, even in a general way?”

  She smiled, lowering her eyes and shaking her head. “That’s the funny part; we scrupulously avoided the entire subject, I suppose for fear one of us would inadvertently slip and say something about work we were doing for our respective cherry drinks.”

  “Why do you think he called Annie Burkett the other day?” I asked.

  “I can only guess it was to tell her who was supplying his agency with information about our Cherr-o-key work,” she said glumly.

  “Were you surprised when Annie told you about the call?”

  “You’re damn right I was. I had all that I could do to keep my composure. Remember, Annie knew nothing about my having gone out with Andy. But it was natural for her to tell me about the call; after all, I am her immediate superior. I think I’d pulled myself together pretty well by the time we went into Rod’s office, though, and found you there.”

  “I’d have to agree,” I said. “You seemed fine to me, although maybe a tad too quick and emphatic in denying that you knew Swartz. Were you puzzled that he didn’t call you instead of Annie?”

  “No. After he kissed me off, I told him in damned blunt terms that I didn’t expect to hear from him again under any circumstances. I really blasted him.”

  “Did you know that he knew Annie?”

  She nodded. “He mentioned to me once during our short relationship that he’d run into one of my co-workers a few times in the past on group outings, with several couples, that sort of thing. I don’t think he ever saw her during the time we went out, though. I gathered one of his former dates was a friend of Annie’s.”

  “One more point and I’ll be on my way. Can you account for your time Tuesday afternoon, say from four o’clock on?”

  Sara regarded me hostilely. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. “Let me think … Tuesday afternoon. Seems like years ago. Well—it’s easy enough without giving myself a headache trying to remember,” she said leaning forward and opening a leather appointment book on her desk. “Oh yes,” she nodded, running her finger down a page. “I had a meeting with one of our creative teams in my office at three to talk about a new TV campaign for a Caribbean island we represent; it lasted … oh, a little over an hour, I think.”

  “And then?”

  She peered into the book again and wrinkled her nose. “Hmm … I see I had down at four an appointment with a young woman who was coming in for a job interview, but she canceled. Didn’t give a reason, but my guess is she landed someplace else. Oh, now I remember: I was happy about the cancellation, because I had the rest of the day clear, which is a rarity for me. I went shopping at Bloomie’s for a birthday present for my sister—before you ask, I bought her a mauve sweater—and then I went on home.”

  “Were you with anybody who can vouch for you between the time you left here and, say, six o’clock?”

  “Nope,” she said fliply, “unless you count the Bloomie’s salesgirl, who I was with for every bit of ten minutes. And when I got home, I stayed in all evening.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Upper West Side. And to answer your next question before you ask it, the building doesn’t have a doorman. So there you are, no alibi.” She turned her palms up and smirked at me, as if daring me to ask if she had bumped off Swartz.

  “There I am indeed,” I said, getting to my feet. “What would you say if I asked whether you visited Andrew Swartz Tuesday evening?”

  Another smirk, along with an arching of eyebrows. “I would say no.”

  “Well, then, I think that’s all. If I remember right, Miss Burkett’s office is to the left and then around the corner to the right, right?”

  “Right,” Sara Ryman said with conversation-ending finality, swiveling in her chair and bending over some artwork on a large table behind her desk. I nodded at the back of her head, wondering if Cramer would ever hear from her, then made myself a three-to-two bet the call would be made and headed for Annie’s office. She was putting on her coat when I looked in from the hall. “Hi, can I see you?” I said. “I promise I’ll only stay a minute.”

  “Oh, Mr. Goodwin—Archie! I was just getting ready to go to a doctor’s appointment.”

  She looked as if she could use a doctor, or a vacation, or maybe both. The last couple of days obviously had weighed heavily on Annie Burkett. Her face showed unmistakable signs of strain and fatigue.

  “I’ll walk out with you. Things been rough?”

  “Oh—you mean because I’m seeing a doctor? It’s just a routine checkup; I’ve had the appointment for weeks.”

  “I was referring to all the Swartz uproar.”

  “Believe it,” she said, making a half-hearted attempt to smile. “I don’t think I’ve slept for three hours straight since … you know. I didn’t even come to work yesterday, which was just as well. Rod said that between the police and the reporters, this place was a zoo all day.”

  “Have the police been hard on you?” I asked as we stepped out onto the sidewalk and into a gust of wind that spun Annie around.

  “Oh, not really, I guess,” she said after I steadied her and she hooked onto my arm. “When they took us to headquarters after you and I … found Andy, I got questioned for more than an hour by a man named Phelps, who was, well, brusque, but I guess that’s to be expected, isn’t it?” She watched my face unhappily for a reaction. Maybe she was hoping I could tell her that Phelps’s boorish behavior was a sign that he believed she had no involvement in Andy Swartz’s death.

  “Brusque is one word for Phelps,” I agreed. “Are you going north?” Annie said she was, that her doctor was on East Thirty-third, so I suggested we share a cab, which didn’t get an argument.

  “Did Phelps seem satisfied with what you told him?” I asked when we were in a taxi heading for the nearest entrance to the FDR Drive.

  “I … guess so,” she said, toying with the buttons on her coat. “I mean, I knew Andy so little there really wasn’t much to say, but Mr. Phelps kept asking the same questions over and over.”

  “Such as?”

  She smiled tremulously, then braced herself as our cab braked to a sudden stop to avoid running over a hawk-faced woman in a fur coat, who was walking two Chihuahuas whose scarlet winterwear featured collars that looked suspiciously like mink. Annie waited until our cabbie quit muttering in Arabic before answering my question. “Such as, ‘If you didn’t know the guy very well, why did he call you in the first place to talk about the cherry drink business?’”

  “What was your answer?”

  “Well, I kept telling him that I was the only person at M/L/R he knew at all, so I was the natural one for him to call.”

  “I assume Phelps asked where you had been earlier in the evening?”

  “Yes, he did,” she said, a hint of anger creeping in. “Actually, he came right out and asked if I killed Andy. That really got to me. I came pretty close to losing control just then, and I think I sort of shouted at him, asked how dare he suggest such a thing—even though I know he was just doing his job. But the truth is, I didn’t really have an alibi for the whole time he asked about. I left the office about five-thirty and stopped off on the way home at a little deli in SoHo to get some groceries, but then I was in my apartment till I walked over to Toohey’s to meet you.”

  “I’ll bet Phelps loved that.”

/>   She nodded. “He gave me a pretty hard time.”

  “Uh-huh. And he of course asked what you thought Swartz wanted to tell you.”

  “Heavens, yes, time after time. All I can do is guess, but like I told him, it must have been about the leaks—it had to be. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for Andy to talk business with me.”

  “Is it possible that he was looking for a job at M/L/R?”

  “Huh—I doubt that very much. He probably was making more than everybody in our place except the partners, and he might even have been close to them.”

  I studied her out of the corners of my baby blues. “You two only met a handful of times as I recall, right?”

  She nodded, one hand cupped primly over the other in her lap. “Yes, about six or seven—I’ve been trying to remember exactly how many. Once we were part of a big group, four couples, who went to see ‘Les Miz.’ Also, the same bunch went to a Mets game, and several times, some combination of couples went to movies or dinner. Andy was always with my girlfriend—Lori O’Keefe is her name. She’s the one I mentioned who worked for the magazine Flame and Flair.”

  “Had Miss O’Keefe still been going out with Swartz recently?”

  “Oh, no—that was over long ago, more than a year, I think. Which was why I was so surprised to hear his voice when he called the other night. Lori never talked much about it, but I kind of gathered he was the one who ended the relationship.”

  “Was it serious between them?”

  “I think she would have liked it to be, but Andy didn’t seem hot to settle down. I could sort of tell that just by the way he acted when they were together.”

  “Did he ever ask you out?”

  “No,” she said, coloring slightly. “And if he had, I would’ve said no, even after he and Lori split up. He’s not my type.”

  “In what way?”

  “Too intense. He seemed driven, you know? Even when we were all out someplace, it was like he never loosened up. Always tense, nervous.”

  “Do you still see Miss O’Keefe?”

  “No, Lori moved to Washington about four months back.”

  “Bad aftertaste of the romance?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” she said, shaking her head vigorously. “She’s pretty resilient. No, she moved because she got a good job with one of the city magazines down there and she sounds real happy.”

  “On those times you were with Swartz, did he ever ask anything about your work on the Cherr-o-key account?”

  Another shake of the head. “Never once, Archie. Mr. Phelps asked me that one about six different times. The subject of work never came up between us, except in a kidding way. Whenever we met, Andy would laugh and say something like ‘Whoops, there’s the enemy—better be careful what I say!’ and then everybody would laugh. It was almost like a ritual.”

  “And you never brought work up?”

  “No, I sure didn’t. I guess I’m pretty tight-lipped about what goes on at the agency, especially when it involves work in progress.”

  “One more thing,” I said as we spun off the FDR at Thirty-fourth Street, “do you have any theory yourself as to how Cherr-o-key advertising was finding its way over to Colmar and Conn?”

  “God, I wish I did,” she answered, displaying one of the most honest, open expressions I’ve ever seen on a woman who is presumably conscious of how attractive she is. “The office has been up in arms over all that for weeks, as you know. But I can’t think of a single person at M/L/R who would do such a thing—not one. We’re … like family, you know? Okay, so that sounds hokey, but it’s really that way. That’s why it’s such a wonderful place to work—most of the time.”

  “So I gather. Does Miss O’Keefe know what happened to Swartz?”

  “Uh-huh, I called her yesterday. She was shocked of course, but she’d already seen it in the Times. She gets it delivered down there. Once a New Yorker, you know? In fact, she had tried to call me about it before I reached her. Oh—here’s my doctor’s building. Let me pay for part of the cab,” she said, rooting around in her purse.

  “Don’t bother, Annie,” I answered, covering her hand with mine. “After all, this ride’s actually on your employer.”

  She attempted a smile, although her heart wasn’t in it, and she stepped out onto the sidewalk. As we pulled away, I turned to watch her through the rear window, thinking she might wave. But her gaze was straight ahead as she slowly walked, almost trancelike, toward the building’s entrance.

  SIXTEEN

  IN THE BIG WEBSTER’S SECOND Edition dictionary that resides on a stand in the office, the first definition of lazy is: “Disinclined to action or exertion; averse to labor; indolent; idle; slothful.” That pretty well describes Wolfe most of the time. And even when he does rouse himself sufficiently to accept a case, I’ll give eight-to-five that he suffers at least one relapse before he wraps it up.

  This story’s relapse began early Thursday evening, when I returned home from my visit to M/L/R and my taxi ride with Annie Burkett. It was five after six when I walked into the office, which meant that Wolfe, fresh from a two-hour orchid frolic, was just settling in at his desk with beer and his latest book, The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin. I plopped down at my own desk and suggested he might be eager for a report on the afternoon’s activities.

  “I am not,” came the reply from behind the open book. When I pressed the issue, I got a glare, but a little thing like a glare almost never stops me, so I started right in, beginning the narrative with my arrival in Mills’s office. I hadn’t gotten more than two sentences out when Wolfe closed his book and rose, beer bottle in one hand and glass in the other, and marched out, taking a hard left in the hall. I could have followed him, but his destination was the kitchen, where, to avoid my badgering, he undoubtedly would get in Fritz’s way during the preparation of dinner, which featured veal birds. I made a mental note to apologize to Fritz for saddling him with this king-sized nuisance and then settled back with the sports section of the Gazette, which had a long analysis of why the Knicks were dead last in their division.

  Wolfe’s relapse continued for three days. It didn’t bother me the first night, Thursday, because that’s when I go to Saul Panzer’s for the weekly poker game, and this time, I went home with a fat wallet. But things got tense on Friday. Wolfe came down to the office at eleven in the morning, fresh from the plant rooms, and after breezing through the mail informed me that he was going straight to the kitchen to work with Fritz on developing a new mixture of ingredients for their cassoulet Castelnaudary. I let him get away with that one, and of course any talk of business was out of the question during lunch, so it was after two, when we were back in the office with coffee, that I again started to report on my visit to Mills/Lake/Ryman.

  “Not now, Archie,” he said loftily, “I am in the process of finishing this book.”

  I told him in Anglo-Saxon terms what he could do with the book and proceeded to report anyway, giving him a verbatim of the conversations at the agency, the set-to between Boyd Lake and Sara Ryman, and the taxi trip with Annie Burkett. At first he tried to read as I talked, but then surrendered and sat back with his eyes closed. When I finished, he opened them and picked up his damn book again.

  “Well,” I said, “what now?”

  “What indeed, Mr. Goodwin?” He gets formal with me only when he’s riled, but I was on the riled side myself.

  “All right, I’ll give you a what: What happens when our clients—you know, the ones who already have thrown a sizable chunk of change our way—call and ask for a progress report?”

  Wolfe shrugged. “Tell them what you always do: that we are at work.”

  “Mrs. Goodwin back in Chillicothe didn’t bring her son up to be a liar.”

  “Twaddle. If I had a dollar for every time I have known you to lie, my fortune would rival that of Croesus.”

  “You’re not exactly living from hand to mouth as it is, although you might be if you keep behaving like this.”

/>   The conversation continued in that vein for several more minutes, but there’s no reason you should have to endure any more of it. Besides, I made no progress whatever against the forces of sloth. In fact, I got so mad at Wolfe that I ducked out on dinner and walked to a little place on Lexington for a corned beef on rye and milk, chased by two wedges of apple pie. It all went down nicely, but was hardly in the same league with the lamb kidneys and dumplings being dished up in the dining room on Thirty-fifth Street. Such is the price of anger.

  The weekend was no improvement. On Saturday, Wolfe didn’t even descend to the office after his morning séance with the orchids, probably because he didn’t have the stomach—if you’ll excuse that figure of speech—to listen to my carping. I finally did grouch at him after lunch, but he played deaf, so I left him with a few choice comments about ergophobia, a word I had just discovered that morning in the thesaurus. As I stalked out of the office, I looked back and at least had the satisfaction of seeing him register surprise at hearing such a word come from the likes of me.

  I walked off my funk in the biting January air, eventually finding myself at Saul Panzer’s apartment. I rang the bell, and wonder of wonders, he was home, having just cleaned up a nasty little blackmail case over on Staten Island. We ended up playing gin for more than two hours. When I said good-bye, I left behind almost the same amount of lettuce I had won in the same location less than forty-eight hours earlier. Sic transit lucre.

  I didn’t see much more of Wolfe during the weekend. Saturday night, Lily and I had an early dinner at Rusterman’s and then took in the Rangers-Montreal game at the Garden, which our boys amazingly won by four goals. And on Sunday, I also was with La Rowan, at a lavish brunch some plutocratic pals of hers threw out in the Hamptons. This high living in exurbia helped to keep my mind off the case and out of the house until Sunday night. And when I did drag in, the office was dark and there were no messages on my desk.

  The relapse came to an end Monday, in a bizarre way. I was parked in the office sipping coffee and reading the Times’s sports section at eleven when Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, walked in with the usual “Good morning Archie, did you sleep well?” and eased into his desk chair. Before I could answer—and it was going to be a sarcastic zinger—the doorbell rang. Fritz was out shopping, so I had to pass on the zinger and play butler. Damned if it wasn’t Cramer again.