EQMM, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "When I came aboard,” Nurls went on, “the records situation was rustic, to put it charitably. The old fellow had taken them with him, for reasons of his own; I picture a loose-leaf notebook in his personal shorthand. I rang him up in Phoenix, and he proceeded to read off the winners’ names, and contact information where it existed. I thought it would be a grand gesture to invite as many of them as were available to attend the dinner as guests of the A.P.A."

  He related the tragic circumstances: Of twenty-four former winning poets, eleven could not be located, six had died from natural causes, three had committed suicide, and two weren't interested; one, over, the telephone, had been emphatic on the subject to the point of questioning the details of Raymond Nurls's ancestry.

  One of the pair remaining was too elderly to make the trip. The last was willing, but required mileage and accommodations. These the executive director agreed to provide, since the budget to feed the past anointed was untouched. “I'm concerned chiefly with one of the names on the list,” Nurls said. “A gentleman named Noah Ward."

  "Dead, disgruntled, or unlocatable?” Lyon asked.

  "The last. So far I've been unable to learn anything about him. I did a computer search on the name, but none of the matches I came up with applies. I was able to narrow it down to three who have any connection with literary endeavour, but one is far too young—he would have been in junior high the year Ward was honored, and our prize committee is not disposed to recognize precociousness—another, the editor of the book-review page of a Baltimore literary journal, assured me he'd never written poetry and didn't review it because, quote, ‘I wouldn't know a grand epic from subway doggerel,’ unquote. The third, who self-publishes suspense fiction, assured me he'd never heard of the A.P.A. I rang off when he attempted to sell me a book. Blood Boulevard, I believe, was the title.” He adjusted his glasses.

  Lyon shifted his weight, evidently in sympathetic discomfort with this last piece of intelligence. Actually he was trying to burst a bubble in his gut, which he did, with spectacular results. In a belching contest I'd put every cent I've embezzled from him on his nose. “Why this obsession with one name on the list?"

  "Because Ward is the only one on it I've been unable to confirm ever existed."

  "Ah."

  Encouraged, the executive director steepled his hands higher.

  "Nary a birth certificate nor a social security card nor a school transcript nor an arrest record nor so much as a ticket for overtime parking. Really, Mr. Lyons—"

  "Lyon. I am singular, not plural."

  "I stand corrected. It's next to impossible, not to say impossible, to exist in today's world without leaving a footprint of some kind on the Internet. Therefore I propose that Noah Ward never existed."

  "And this is significant because—"

  "You're a detective. Figure it out. Whoever claimed that ten-thousand-dollar prize under a fictitious name is guilty of grand fraud."

  "I assume you've ruled out the likelihood of a pseudonym."

  "At once. The rules of the American Poetical Association expressly state that all work must be submitted under the contestant's legal name. The provision was adopted to prevent them from submitting more than one work for consideration. A long lead time was established between the deadline and the announcement of the winner to investigate the identities of all the contributors."

  "Your predecessor could not enlighten you on the details?"

  Nurls jammed his glasses farther into his head. “He perished last week, in a fire that consumed his condominium, himself, and any records that might have furnished additional information. The disaster was entirely accidental,” he added quickly. “Investigators with the fire department traced it to a faulty electrical circuit."

  "Unfortunate and tragic. I assume you polled the membership for reminiscences? The committee responsible for the honor springs to mind."

  "Our rolls run toward an older demographic. Everyone who might have shed light upon the selection has passed. The one member I managed to reach who was present at that dinner is an unreliable source.” He touched his left temple.

  "Dear me. All the powers appear to have aligned themselves against you. Is it your intention to bring legal action for the recovery of the ten thousand?"

  "It is. The association has empowered me, upon filing formal charges, to remit fifteen percent to the party who identifies and exposes the guilty person. Expenses added, of course.” Nurls sat back a tenth of an inch, folding his hands on his spare middle.

  Lyon finished his cream soda in one long draft and patted his lips. He replaced the pocket square with all the ceremony of a color guard folding the flag. “I accept the challenge, Mr. Nurls. We'll discuss payment upon success or an admission of failure. In the latter event, I will accept no remuneration."

  I had to hand it to the little balloon. He'd managed to appear professional and hold off the wrath of the State of New York in one elegant speech. I knew him then for a liar when he said he couldn't pull a rabbit out of a hat. But the bean counter in the ugly orange chair wouldn't have taken the Holy Annunciation at face value. He'd have asked the angel for references, and followed up on them through Google.

  "How do I know you can deliver?” he said. “Forgive me, but all I have to go on is three lines in the Times."

  Lyon looked at the clock. “It's nearly lunchtime. Blood soup, with a stock combined of livers and gizzards; free-range goose, of course. Cheese blintzes for dessert and a fine Manischewitz from my cellar. Once you've sampled the fare of my table, you'll be in a better position to judge my success in this profession. Will you join us?"

  Nurls declined, looking a shade green around the collar; but he was hooked. Me too, from then on. A first-rate, second-rate grifter knows a champ when he sees one.

  * * * *

  "Phooey!” said Lyon, when I suggested checking the Library of Congress for poetical compositions copyrighted under the name Noah Ward. (Wolfe says “Pfui,” but his disciple has trouble pronouncing the labial.) “It's futile to attempt to prove a man does not exist. It expends energy the way trying to add light to dark expends paint, with no appreciable effect. We will assume as a hypothesis that Nurls is right and Ward is a chimera."

  "How'd you know that about paint?” I asked.

  "I investigated the phenomenon of temporary employment the summer I turned fifteen. A less than august August.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his little finger. “A check was issued to Noah Ward, and someone had to cash it. The transaction took place too far in the past for any bank to retain a record of it, even if we found the bank and its personnel were willing to cooperate. March down to the police station and inquire whether anyone using that name or something similar has ever been arrested for bunco steering."

  "These days they just call it fraud."

  "Indeed? Colorless. A pity."

  "Ever's a long way to comb back, even if I could get them to do it."

  "Concentrate on the past seven years. I assume that's still the statute of limitations for most crimes. A man who draws water once may be expected to return to the well the next time he thirsts. Perhaps he wasn't so successful the second time."

  "What if the well isn't in Brooklyn?"

  "Start here. Until he has the money in hand, a poet is unlikely to come by the travel expenses necessary to collect."

  I have cop friends. I'd been down there often enough to strike up acquaintances and I have a good line of gab, which they like almost as much as Krispy Kremes and are apt to disregard a little thing like a felony record of the nonviolent kind in order to enjoy it. I cast my line and caught a big fish, although I didn't know it at the time and would have thrown it back if I had.

  * * * *

  It was Friday night. For religious reasons Gus couldn't clock in again until after sundown Saturday, and unlike his hero, Lyon is capable of burning a salad, so I fixed him two boxes of mac-and-cheese in the microwave and made myself a BLT. I can keep kosher as well as the next guy, but ev
ery so often I get a craving for swine and shellfish that has to be addressed.

  We were just finishing up when the doorbell rang. It rang again before we remembered Gus couldn't answer it. By the time I got to the door, our visitor had abandoned ringing for banging. I used the peephole and hustled back to the dining room.

  "It's cops,” I said. “Actually only one, but what he lacks in number he makes up for in mean."

  Lyon glared up at me from his tilted bowl. I shook my head innocently. I hadn't tried to sell anyone an autographed Portable Chaucer in six months.

  I brought Captain Stoddard into the office, where Lyon was just sitting down behind the desk. I was halfway through introductions when he brought his fist down on the leather top. “Where do you get off sending this cheap crook to my precinct? I've put every officer who gave him the time of day on report."

  "Please have a seat, sir. I have spinal issues that make it agony to tilt my head back more than three degrees.” His tone wobbled a little. He seemed to have authority issues as well, but I gave him points for the show of spunk. Stoddard did too, maybe, or maybe he'd been on report himself too many times that fiscal period for pushing around citizens. Anyway he sat.

  Physically, he's the opposite of Nero Wolfe's nemesis in NYC Homicide. Inspector Cramer is beefy where Captain Stoddard is gaunt, and the captain's a few more years away from mandatory retirement, but he filled the orange chair with nastiness the way Cramer fills the famous red one with buttock. Stoddard commands the local precinct. I was trying out the straight-and-narrow as much to avoid another interrogation by him as to stay out of jail.

  "Woodbine left your name,” he told Lyon. “So far I can't find a record under it, but if you're partnered up with this little goldbrick artist I'll start one for you personally. What kind of scam you got going that involves turning the Brooklyn Police Department into an information service?"

  "I pay taxes, Mr. Stoddard. If you look up my name outside your rogues’ gallery, you may be able to figure out how much. But even the poorest resident of this country has the right to consult the police when he suspects a law has been broken."

  He gulped, but he got it out. It was a good speech, too. The proof was in the way the man he spoke it to didn't haul him out of his chair and slam-dunk him into his own recycling bin. Instead his nails made little semicircles in the pumpkin-colored leather.

  "I monitor all the computers in the precinct,” he growled. “Some cops think that when I step out they can fool around in the files and get away with it. They always fold when I jump them. Who's this bird Ward?"

  Courage has its limits. Lyon looked to me for support, but I was scareder than he was, with experience to justify it. He took a couple of deep breaths to prevent hyperventilating and told Stoddard everything Raymond Nurls had told us. He'd barely finished when the captain sprang to his feet with an Anglo-Saxon outburst that knocked out of line the picture on the wall next to the elevator shaft. I'd thought only the elevator could do that.

  "A puzzle!” he roared. “My precinct has murders to investigate, rapes, child abuse, armed robbery, each of which requires three weeks minimum to make an arrest and a case to make it stick, not counting petty little interruptions like burglary, purse-snatching, and assault, and you take up twenty minutes of that time playing Scrabble."

  "You're being metaphorical, of course,” Lyon put in. “Fraud is not a parlor game."

  The fist came down, jumping a pen out of its little onyx skull. Lyon jumped and looked ill. “A cheesy award given out by a bunch of nances for the best ode on a Greek pot. No!” Fist. The pen rolled to the edge of Lyon's blotter.

  The little butterball surprised me. Ever since Stoddard had jumped up he'd been doing his best to shrink himself inside his folds of suet, like an armadillo gathering itself into a ball. Now his eyes opened wide and he straightened himself in his chair, tilting his head back two degrees past agony to meet the glare of his tormentor. “Would you repeat what you just said?"

  Stoddard wound back the tape a little too far, back to the unbroadcastable word that had brought him out of his chair.

  "After that,” Lyon said. His tone was as steady as the tide. “After I questioned your choice of the word Scrabble."

  "An award! A cheesy award!” The captain shouted into his face, flecks of spittle spattering him from his hairline to the knot of his green silk tie. “Are you deaf, too? I know you're dumb!"

  "Thank you, Mr. Stoddard. You are a synaptical savant."

  That silenced him. It silenced me, too, until I looked up both words on the dictionary program. He straightened, looking around.

  "Where's your investigator's license? You're supposed to display it prominently."

  "I haven't one."

  Stoddard's bony face twisted to make room for a horse-toothed grin. It wasn't nice. He isn't a nice man, nor even a good one.

  He lowered his tone to conversational level; he might have been bidding four, no trump. “Do you know what the penalty is in this state for conducting professional investigations without a license?"

  "I've never had cause to look it up. A professional would be well-advised to do so, but I don't charge for my services. My amateur standing remains intact."

  The horse teeth receded. Stoddard's BB eyes darted left, then right. That put me inside range. “What about Woodbine? Don't tell me he works for you for free. He'd walk to Albany and back for the left-handed dollar."

  "I employ Mr. Woodbine to obtain the information I require to pursue my avocation."

  "That's investigation. You need a license to earn a salary."

  "Tish-tush."

  I gave Lyon double points for that; thumbing his nose to authority while employing a phrase alien to his inspiration. At his insistence I'd made a sizeable dent in his Rex Stout library, and had not once come across it. Somewhere in that roly-poly wad of derivative claptrap was an authentic original waiting to be recognized, as well as a tough little nut. “When a personal assistant is asked to pick up the telephone and inquire when a bank closes, is he conducting an illegal investigation or running an errand? Is it your desire to give up your day off to answer that question at a public hearing?"

  I never found out if Stoddard had an answer for that.

  He opened his mouth, presumably to let out a four-letter opinion of the question that had been put to him, but he closed it. Lyon's eyes were shut tight, and he was foraging inside his left ear like an anteater.

  * * * *

  Nero Wolfe never sums up a case without an audience. It can contain a handful or a horde, but it rarely gathers outside his personal throne room, where the Great Detective holds forth from behind the massive desk on West 35th Street, New York, New York. Claudius Lyon would have it no other way, even if the venue was his office of many compromises in Brooklyn, and his spectators restricted to four.

  Stoddard was present, eager to make his case to prosecute Lyon and me for conducting a private investigation without a license, as well as fraud, and of course Raymond Nurls was invited. My seat, turned from my desk, was a perk of the job, but I couldn't see any reason why Gus was there, except to fill one more seat in a show that needed a solid third act if it weren't to be left to die on the road. It had taken all of Lyon's powers of persuasion to convince Gus that he wouldn't burn in hell for sitting in. Just to make sure, Gus sat in the green chair nearest the door, where he could escape if anyone asked him to turn on a light or something. Nurls's thin frame bisected another green chair, and Stoddard deposited his hundred and seventy pounds of pure hostility in the orange.

  Lyon entered last, straightened the picture on the wall, scowled at the pea-size green tomato growing at the end of the vine in the pot on his desk, and sat down. “Thank you all for coming. Does anyone object to Mr. Woodbine taking notes?"

  Nurls shook his head, the silver chain swaying on his glasses. Stoddard scooped a small portable cassette recorder out of his pocket and balanced it on his knee. “Just in case he misses something culpable."


  Lyon shrugged and cracked open the can I'd placed on the desk. He took a slug and began.

  "Mr. Nurls. When was the Van Dusen Prize first presented?"

  "Fifteen years ago this fall. It was presented to—"

  "The A.P.A. was then ten years old?"

  "Yes. I don't see what this has to do with Noah Ward. He wasn't honored until years later."

  "I will establish relevance presently. I suppose it goes without saying that before the existence of the ten-thousand-dollar honorarium, the honor was not referred to as a prize."

  "It does, and yet you said it. A prize without a prize is hardly a prize."

  "Poetically put. How, then, was it referred to?"

  "It was called the Golden Muse Award. The plaque still contains an etching in gold of its mythological subject."

  "During our first conversation, you said the man you replaced as executive director had held that position since the A.P.A. was founded, is that correct?"

  "Yes. Really, Mr. Lyon—"

  Stoddard interrupted. “I'm with him. Connect this to the scam artist who conned the sissies out of a bundle."

  "I beg your pardon, sir. That is not my intention."

  Even Gus took his eyes off his escape route to look up at Lyon. Stoddard and Nurls started talking at once. I gave up trying to get it all down.

  A pudgy palm came up for silence; he broke it himself when his voice squeaked. “I have been engaged to untangle the mystery that surrounds the elusive Noah Ward. I shall now proceed to do so. Mr. Nurls, when you spoke with your predecessor on the telephone, did he call the Van Dusen Prize by that name?"

  Nurls started to speak, then adjusted his glasses and started again. “No. As a matter of fact, he just called it ‘the award.’ I assume he did so out of habit."

  "Not unusual for one long familiar with the original. How did he read off the names of past winners?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Did he say, ‘The Golden Muse Award in nineteen eighty-eight went to Joe Doakes,’ ‘The Golden Muse Award in nineteen eighty-nine went to Jane Doe,’ and so on and so forth?"