Nearly Nero

by Loren D. Estleman

  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 every 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 clambering onto his perch behind the desk. I was halfway through introductions when our visitor brought his fist down on the leather top. “Where do you get off sending this cheap crook to my precinct? I 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 NYPD 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 calculate 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 dug 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?”

  Spunk 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 too and looked ill. “A cheesy award given out by a bunch of nancies for the best poim about a lark. No!” Fist. The pen rolled to the edge of Lyon’s blotter.

  The little butterball surprised me. Ever since Stoddard had leapt 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 synaptic 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, or even a good one. He lowered his tone to conversational level; he might have been bidding four, no trump. “Do you know the penalty 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 a dirty 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 the NYPD 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 flapdoodle 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 with the energy of 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 Thirty-Fifth 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 reduced to four.

  Stoddard was present, eager to make his case to prosecute Lyon and me for playing detective without saying Simon Says, 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 the cook that he wouldn’t burn in hell for sitting in on Shabbat. 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 170 pounds of pure hostility in the orange.

  Lyon entered last, straightened the picture on the wall, scowled at the pe
a-sized green tomato growing at the end of the vine in the pot on his desk, and scaled to his seat. “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,” he said.

  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 went to—”

  “The American Poetical Association 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 encomium 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 Calliope and Erato, the—”

  “Thank you. During our first conversation, you said the man you replaced as executive director had held that position since the APA was founded, is that correct?”

  “Yes. Really, Mr. Lyon—”

  This time Stoddard interrupted. “I’m with Poindexter. Connect this to a 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 stare 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; the owner 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?”

  “Certainly not. The conversation would have been interminable. He provided the year and the name in each instance, and I wrote them down.”

  Lyon drank, burped, wiped. “One of my abandoned interests is the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. I gave up the study when it became clear that the board at Columbia University would never honor Rex Stout, or more appropriately Archie Goodwin for his many contributions to American letters. I do recall that in nineteen forty, when the director of the board objected to the others’ choice of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was decided that no prize would be issued that year. Are you aware if this ever happened in regard to the Van Dusen Prize or the Golden Muse?”

  “It never did. The former executive director read off twenty-four years and twenty-four names. This year’s winner has not yet been determined.”

  “I submit that it happened, and that he told you as much when he used the phrase you misunderstood for a man’s name. The three syllables you interpreted as ‘Noah Ward,’ had they been spelled out, would in fact read—”

  “No award.” Nurls slumped in his seat. I hadn’t thought his spine had that much play in it.

  Stoddard shot to his feet. His tape recorder slid off his knee to the floor. “You took up my precinct’s time and mine over a dumb-ass pun?”

  “A homonym, to be precise. A hazard of oral communication.”

  “You and Woodbine are both under arrest for obstruction of justice.”

  Lyon’s moon face was gray as cardboard, but he held his ground.

  “Don’t be absurd, Mr. Stoddard. I’ve prevented Mr. Nurls from obstructing justice unwittingly by filing a nuisance complaint. If there never was a Noah Ward, no fraud was perpetrated, and the APA simply reinvested the money that would have been awarded, assuring the continued existence of the Van Dusen Prize. I have you to thank for a signal accomplishment on my part.”

  “Don’t drag me into it, you little blimp.”

  “No dragging is necessary, sir. Earlier today in this very room, you referred to the Van Dusen as an award, not a prize, and employed an emphatic ‘No’ to indicate your rejection of the importance of the affair to the police. You may have noticed that at that point I entered into a reverie.”

  “You stuck your finger in your ear.”

  “I find the action stimulates the cortex. Granted you hadn’t a notion you were supplying a catalyst for the chemistry of my cognitive function, but that in no way diminishes your role in the outcome. I congratulate you.”

  “Bull. Since when is wordplay a signal accomplishment?”

  “I must thank you again, for putting the question. In spite of the laws of physics, I have managed to change a tint of paint by adding a small amount of light to dark. In spite of Aristotle’s philosophy, I have proven that someone never existed.”

  Nurls produced a checkbook, scribbled, and got up to place the check on Claudius Lyon’s desk. “Two thousand, including a bonus for a job well done. You are a magician.”

  Captain Stoddard hovered. I wouldn’t say he drooled, but he was ready to pounce the second Lyon touched the check.

  The man behind the desk never looked at it. “Arnie, will you do the honors?”

  I said I’d be pleased as punch. Nurls watched, astonished, Stoddard, boiling, as I tore the check sideways, lengthwise, and crosswise, and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket by my desk.

  Stoddard slammed the door behind him, knocking crooked the picture on the wall. Lyon said goodbye to our client, rose, and straightened it on his way to the elevator.

  THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLFE

  “Get lost, Little Orphan Anything for a Buck.”

  The bomb dropped while I was card-indexing Claudius Lyon’s latest contribution to horticultural science, a hybrid tomato plant that comprised all the disadvantages of a beefsteak and none of the advantages of a Roma, and Lyon, foundering up to his chins as usual behind his preposterously enormous desk, was pretending to read The Portable Schopenhauer. It was actually Carolyn Keene’s The Clue of the Dancing Puppet inside the drab dust jacket, and he’d read it twice before in my tenure.

  “Arnie,” he said, “how long have you been working for me?”

  I scowled at my new computer, a state-of-tomorrow’s-art job that anticipates my mistakes and makes them for me. “Three years, two months, fifteen days, eleven minutes, and twenty-nine—no, thirty seconds.”

  “How much do you estimate you’ve embezzled from me during that period?”

  The mouse skidded out from under my fingers.

  He looked up from his book with his Gerber Baby smile. “I am a genius, but not an absent-minded one. I call my bank from time to time and occasionally balance my checkbook. When you deposit the royalties from NASA on my father’s pressure-cooker gasket patent, you round down the amount and palm the rest. Absent a tedious study of the actual figures, I can arrive at a reasonable estimate by multiplying your time in my employ by the average sum pilfered. The product would support a modest harem.”

  “Well, it was a lark while it flew,” I said finally. “Is it federal or local? I hear they put out a spread in the U.S. prisons. Anything beats Spam Saturday in Sing Sing.”

  “There’s no need for bravado. I don’t intend to pursue charges. With whom would I replace you? There is only one Arnie Woodbine, and Archie Goodwin is permanently off the market. I must make the best of my knockoff. Dock
yourself ten dollars a week until the account is even.”

  “But that’ll take—”

  “Nine years, one month, twelve days, five hours, and thirty-two minutes. Consider it a long-term contract, which you’d be wise not to break.” He returned to his reading.

  In case anything about the foregoing seems familiar—not counting the larceny—now is a good time to point out that “Claudius Lyon” is an invention. The man who uses the name has remodeled his life to conform to that of his hero, Nero Wolfe of Manhattan, who raises orchids, employs a world-class chef, and solves mysteries brought to him by baffled clients. Lyon’s own limitations have forced certain compromises: He grows tomatoes, eats kosher most of the time because that’s all his chef, Gus, knows how to cook, and depends upon me, the poor man’s Archie Goodwin (Wolfe’s legman and hectoring angel), for mundane errands.

  He’s as fat as Wolfe but much shorter, and when he climbs into the big chair behind his desk he looks like Tweedledum with his legs swinging free. Not having any prior experience with geniuses, I don’t know if he is one, but he’s a damn clever little butterball who hasn’t forgotten a thing he’s learned from the thousands of whodunits he’s read. I’ve seen him fall on his prat more than his share, but I’ve never seen him stumped.

  Well, I had nothing better to do for the next nine years, one month, etc., and I’d been to prison and found it not up to my standards, so I didn’t complain about the pay cut; instead I worked out an arrangement with Gus to buy generic lox and split the price difference. Lyon hasn’t Wolfe’s palate and wouldn’t know the gourmet brand from Karl’s Kut-Rate Kippers. It was a stingy little scam compared to the one I’d had going, even when I extended it to include gristly corned beef and day-old bagels, but it would do until something better came along. If you’re the type who can live life on the level without gnawing your nails down to the knuckle, congratulations, and keep it to yourself. Without a dash of pepper the stew’s just too flat.

  The reason for all this chatter is it explains how the principal resident of the townhouse at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush, put his chubby little gray cells to work on the problem of William Thew.