Nearly Nero

by Loren D. Estleman

  Gus’s main motivator in our conspiracy was the convenience of not having to take the cross-town bus to the snooty little market that sold the best kosher in the five boroughs; the cheap stuff was available on the corner, and it delivered. I happened to answer the doorbell the day the pushy delivery boy showed up lugging a paper sack bigger than he was. I had to spread a bunch of celery to see his pinched little face under the obligatory backward baseball cap.

  “Here, kid.” I traded him a buck for the sack.

  “My name’s Jasper, not kid. Jasper Hull.”

  “The hell you say. You got that from an eighty-six-year-old man’s obituary in the Daily News.”

  “It’s Jasper just the same. I want to see Lyon.”

  “What’s the matter, I don’t tip big enough?”

  “You call this a tip?” He pretended to blow his nose on George Washington, which even I thought was disrespectful; but I noticed he didn’t throw it away. “I got a case for Lyon. He’s a detective, ain’t he? That’s what it says in the Yellow Pages.”

  “It doesn’t either. I wrote the ad. It says he provides answers to questions.”

  “If I got it that way, I’d’ve took my lousy buck and went. I seen all the fortunetellers I want to. They charge you up front and tell you a lot of bogus stuff that could mean anything.”

  “ ‘Satisfaction guaranteed.’ The ad says that too.”

  “Okay. Here.” He held up the dollar.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It’s a what-do-you-call it, a retainer.”

  I grinned. “Nice try, kid. Tell Captain Stoddard he’s in violation of the child labor laws.” I started to push the door shut, but damn if he didn’t insert his wiry little body into the space. It was either squash him or stop. I considered the point and decided against squashing. It’s hell on the finish.

  I said, “You’d think the cops’d have enough to keep busy in a town like this without setting traps for one little fat guy with schizophrenic tendencies, but a month doesn’t go by without the fuzz up top trying to trick Lyon into accepting payment and busting him for practicing private investigation without a license. Recruiting a kid’s bad enough; a dollar’s an insult to his intelligence. A fiver’s plenty cute given the inflationary index. I’m surprised Stoddard didn’t knock out a front tooth and give you a scruffy mutt from the pound.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means get lost, Little Orphan Anything for a Buck.” I leaned on the door. A little Mop & Glo can erase anything, even crushed adolescent.

  He pushed back. Schlepping all that produce had made him strong as Gus’s blood sausage. “How good can he be if he don’t charge?”

  “You’re right. Now make like a tree and go away.”

  “I don’t like cops neither,” he said. “They say they’re there to help, but all they do is write stuff down and shove it in a drawer. The detective agencies I tried won’t listen to nobody but a grownup. I seen Lyon’s name in the listing, and when this order came in where I work, I thought I’d take a shot.”

  “A shot at what?”

  “Finding my father.”

  I had a comment about his father on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t spit it out. If I got Lyon a job right away worthy of his whacked-out brain, he might overlook a little chiseling on my part.

  “Wipe your feet, kid.” I opened the door wide.

  Lyon squeaked like a loose fan belt when I told him I’d parked a ten-year-old boy in the front room. To begin with he doesn’t trust any creature his own size, and as for childhood he thinks it’s a conspiracy to break valuable objects and make doorknobs sticky, which is a favorite phobia of his. He’d just come down from the plant room and hugged to his chest the specimen of the day in its fragile clay pot. “Get rid of him and spray Lysol on anything he might have touched. Children are the main carriers of most of the diseases on this planet.”

  “Just this morning you were whining about having nothing to do. Now you want to shoo away work.”

  “I’m not a missing-persons bureau. Why should I be made to suffer because some prepubescent was careless enough to misplace his own flesh and blood?”

  “You don’t know suffering. Try sitting around listening to you sigh and moan and cheat at Clue.”

  “I never cheat! It’s not my fault Miss Scarlett would never choose a wrench to commit murder, with rat poison available at every True Value in Greater New York! Phooey!”

  “Pfui!”

  That never failed to derail one of his tantrums, the ability of seemingly everyone else in his orbit to pronounce Wolfe’s favorite epithet without hosing down the room. Before he could fill the vacuum I said, “I’ll bring the kid in. You want I should put down papers?”

  The moon face turned red and screwed up, but instead of bawling, he said, “Remain standing, and be prepared to hurl yourself between us the moment he starts to sneeze. There are four million strains of bacilli on the head of a pin. I shudder to think how many are harbored in a child’s nostrils.”

  Jasper Hull turned the big globe with a palm in passing; Lyon sucked in air through his teeth. The kid stopped in front of his desk.

  “You’re fat.”

  “And you have no pubic hair. Please remove your cap. The room is heated sufficiently and the roof doesn’t leak.”

  He uncovered a shock of red hair and hopped up onto the orange leather chair. “My mother’s dead. I live with my aunt. She don’t know I’m here. She says if my father was worth looking for he wouldn’t have to be looked for.”

  “She has a point, though the syntax is dubious logically. Why do you want to find him?”

  “Aunt Jill’s okay, but I’m sick of living with girls. My father left before I was born. I’m not sure my mother even knew his name.” He lifted his chin.

  “That’s unfortunate. Without a name or a description, there’s no place to start.”

  “He’s a tall skinny redhead and his name’s William Thew.”

  I was taking notes, poised as ordered to throw myself into the bacterial breach if necessary. “That’s T-H-E-W?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t spell it out.”

  Lyon said, “You stated he left before you were born. When did you meet?”

  There was a tooth missing from Jasper’s grin. “You figured that out from what I said.”

  “I’m fat, not a fool. Answer the question.”

  “It was the day my mother died, in Brooklyn General Hospital.”

  Kids are natural reporters; it’s only when they grow up that they learn to digress and embellish. Jasper’s mother had been hit by a truck in a crosswalk near their apartment six months ago and died a few days later without regaining consciousness. That day, the boy and his aunt got off the hospital elevator just as the man he’d described was leaving his mother’s room. The man, who was about thirty, was wearing a heavy topcoat over faded jeans and was obviously not a hospital employee. Asked if he’d come to visit the patient, he’d said yes. When the aunt asked who he was, he’d hesitated, turned toward a window in the corridor, then turned back and said, “William Thew.”

  “How do you know my sister?”

  “We, uh, went to school together.”

  “Is she awake?”

  “No.”

  “It was very kind of you to come. Where can I contact you in case her condition changes?”

  He gave her a phone number, then looked at his watch and said he had to get back to work. The elevator was open, and as he stepped inside, Jasper spoke up. “What kind of work?”

  “I’m an artist.” The doors slid shut and he descended.

  “Did you have any contact after that?” Lyon asked.

  “No. After Mom died, Aunt Jill tried the number, but it was phony. We looked for him at the funeral. He didn’t show.”

  “How did he know your mother was in the hospital?”

  “The accident was in the paper. He must’ve read about it.”

  “Did either of you ask at th
e nurses’ station if he’d stopped there to find out what room she was in?”

  “My aunt did, but you know what those places are like, nurses coming and going all the time. Nobody remembered him.”

  “What makes you think he’s your father?”

  “Well, we both have red hair.”

  “Ten percent of the population does.”

  “I just know, okay?”

  “Not okay. Mr. Woodbine informed you I’m not a fortuneteller, and I don’t believe you are one either.”

  “Aunt Jill thinks I’m nuts too. Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper.”

  Lyon looked at me. I got a sheet of stationery out of my desk and a Cross pen and gave them to the kid. He folded the paper into a stiff square, stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth, and scribbled, stopping a couple of times to look up at Lyon. He handed back the sheet blank side up. I passed it to Lyon, who glanced at it and gave it back to me. I grinned. In a few strokes the kid had captured his basketball-shaped head and that sourpuss expression he wears when he thinks he’s being poker-faced. Jasper Hull had a future as a cartoonist.

  “He said he’s an artist,” Jasper said. “My mother couldn’t draw a straight line and neither can my aunt. Where’d I get it if not from him?”

  “Young man, Shakespeare’s father was once fined for maintaining a dung heap in his front yard. His son wrote Hamlet. Gus!”

  The kid jumped, but I was used to that bellow. The major-domo in the rusty cutaway coat hobbled in with a cream soda and left as Lyon pried loose the top, deposited it in his desk drawer, swigged from the can, and burped. Then he started digging in his ear with a finger.

  That caught me off-guard. I hadn’t thought the conversation had provided anything to bother waking up his cortex over.

  “I can draw you a picture of Thew,” Jasper said. “You could show it around, like they do on Law & Order.”

  But the excavation went on another minute without comment. Finally the finger was withdrawn. “Do you remember the number of your mother’s room at Brooklyn General?”

  “Six-oh-eight, why?”

  “You came here seeking the services of a detective, not lessons in the practice of the craft. Please leave a number where you can be reached with Mr. Woodbine.”

  “What about that picture?”

  “Young man, I have no intention of tramping all over the city asking strangers to look at a doodle, and Mr. Woodbine has far too many other responsibilities. Give him your number.”

  “Yeah, I bet he calls.”

  I showed him out and went back to the office, where Lyon was studying his portrait. “The tough little nut stole my pen,” I said, “but that’s all right. He sure can draw.”

  “Caricature is the lowest form of humor. Dispose of it.”

  I put it in my breast pocket. I hoped I could find a frame the right size.

  “I want you to take the digital camera and photograph the view from all the windows between room six-oh-eight and the elevator in Brooklyn General,” he said. “Shoot every angle.”

  “They’ll think I’m a terrorist.”

  “Phooey. ‘Hospital security’ is a contradiction in terms. If he hadn’t the ill fortune to encounter Jasper Hull and his aunt, William Thew would have been in and out like a ghost.”

  “Why ill fortune; child support?”

  “Don’t put the horse before the cart.”

  “I think you’re supposed to.”

  “Pre–Industrial Age semantics. Thew hoards personal data as if it were gold, but I am an intellectual Jesse James. When he ran into Jill and Jasper, he wandered down my stagecoach road.”

  I got the camera out of the safe. “I’ll hang on to a shot just to get one of you in the saddle. Tabloids’ll eat it up.”

  I didn’t ask what was behind the assignment; he’d just have given me the speech about cadging lessons in the practice of the craft. I picked a quiet time during visiting hours and took thirty shots. There was just the one window in the corridor between 608 and the elevator, so it didn’t take long, and I finished just before an orderly got off on that floor pushing his squeaky cart. I boarded the elevator with the camera tucked under my coat and found a one-hour place on Utica to make prints.

  Ansel Adams wouldn’t have gotten up to look at my portfolio: cars in the parking lot, a brick hardware building with some old advertising on it, an ancient tenement coming down, a new high-rise going up, and an enterprising vendor selling flowers from a sidewalk stand, a bane to the competition in the gift shop downstairs. But Lyon gave each print the close attention of a Renaissance expert studying a cache of Rembrandt drawings. Some he slid to one side after thirty seconds of scrutiny, others he bent over at his desk with a heavy brass-handled magnifying glass in his puffy pink fist. He kept returning to one in particular, then sat back and laid aside the glass.

  “Tell me what you think.”

  I looked at it. It was one of the shots in which the old hardware building featured prominently. “Great composition. I owe it all to a guy I met doing a year and a day for taking pictures of naked ladies in a tanning parlor.”

  “The composition is hideous, but I didn’t send you out on behalf of Architectural Digest. The focus is good. The leaves having fallen from the trees this time of year gave you a better perspective on the billboard that would have been possible six months ago, when Jasper Hull and his aunt visited his mother in the hospital.”

  The sign was painted directly on the brick wall of the hardware, possibly using the very product it advertised.

  “ ‘It Covers the World,’ ” I read. “And sure enough, there it is dumping out of a bucket all over terra firma, one coat. I bet Sherwin-Williams has been using that slogan for a hundred years.”

  Lyon drew a Sharpie from a squat toby mug of Napoleon on his desk and spent another minute bent over the picture. When he sat back, I saw that Jasper Hull had nothing on Claudius Lyon in the freehand-art department. He’d sketched a close approximation of bunches of maple leaves on the naked tree branches that had stood between the camera and its subject.

  But it wasn’t his technique that drew a long low whistle from me; much to the annoyance of Lyon, who when he condescends to purse his lips and blow, manages only a dry whoosh. His expression curdled further. “Indeed. Have we any friendly contacts on the police force?”

  “Stoddard’s as friendly as it gets, and you know where he’d admire to put his size thirteen.”

  I’m not without resources, however, and got a buddy on the staff of the Habitual Handicapper to call in a couple of markers in Records and Information downtown. When he checked in, Lyon eavesdropped on the extension. “Encouraging,” he said when we hung up; which coming from him is a rave. “What is your reporter friend’s name?”

  “Radislav Kubelski.” Noting his sour expression I added, “Sorry, boss. Archie Goodwin’s got the market cornered on Lon Cohens.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please telephone young Mr. Hull and arrange an appointment.”

  “Mr. Woodbine, I take it? I’m Jillian Hull.”

  Next to a full pardon from the governor it was the nicest surprise I could have hoped to find on the doorstep. She was on the bright side of thirty, a honey of a honey blonde with her hair pinned back loosely behind cute little ears and blue eyes as big as campaign buttons. She came up to my shoulder and I could’ve lifted her in one hand, but I didn’t chance it. She wasn’t smiling.

  Neither was Jasper, slumped next to her with his fists in his pockets. “She was there when you called. She made me tell.”

  “My nephew’s been through a traumatic time, Mr. Woodbine. Humoring him is one thing, taking advantage of his fantasies in a season of mourning quite another. It may even be criminal.”

  I leered; Goodwin grins, but my mouth doesn’t work that way. The suit she wore fit her too well here and there to back up her pique. “Pardon my not responding, but it wouldn’t be hospitable to make you go through it all again for Lyon. He’s th
e criminal in charge. I’m just the henchman.”

  “Take me to him, please.”

  It being a few minutes short of evening business hours, I trotted upstairs and gave him the news in the plant room. He was up to his elbows in sheep manure, but it wasn’t enough of a distraction to keep him from blushing. Nero Wolfe only distrusts the female sex; Claudius Lyon is terrified of it. “Tell her she isn’t involved and turn her out.”

  “She’d take Jasper with her. He’s a minor, she’s his guardian. You’d be giving up your curtain-closer.” Seeing that he was undecided, I added, “She thinks we’re both criminals, which makes her half right. The odds are better than even she’ll march straight to the cops, and you know what that means.”

  The prospect of another tense meeting with Stoddard made him forget himself. He rubbed his nose, leaving a stain. The whole world was going to stink now. “Seat her on the sofa, out of my direct line of sight.”

  “She already took the orange chair.”

  “Sweet Mr. Moto! They have the rest of the world; why must they lay siege to my one little corner?”

  The doorbell rang. I went downstairs and took a slant through the trick window. The angular figure perched on the stoop sent me bounding back up to the plant room. “It’s the captain.”

  “What captain?” He was busy disinfecting himself at the sink.

  “Crunch, of course. He’s doing a survey door-to-door on whether we eat his cereal with milk or straight from the box. Who else? Stoddard.”

  Lyon didn’t blush this time; he whitened a shade. Authority of any kind always took the wind out of him. Me, too, but my reasons are well known. Maybe his old man had caught him filching candy when he was even littler than he was now and had a cop friend put him in the clink to teach him a lesson. They say that’s how Hitchcock got started. “Word must have reached him of our inquiries,” he squeaked. “Don’t answer!”

  “He’ll just come back madder.”

  The ringing stopped and the banging started. Lyon bobbed his head, washing his hands furiously. “I suppose we must let him sit in, if only for the sake of the door.”