Nearly Nero

by Loren D. Estleman

  There were five, all men, and only one so far as I knew connected with the case, but I’d sooner confess all my sins to the Brooklyn Tattler than acknowledge he’d passed me by after all. He spoke to them not quite in order, one of the lines being busy, so he had to try again after consulting with the next name on the list. That got his goat all over again, on account of that kind of thing never happens to Wolfe. The conversations were brief. He hit pay dirt on the fourth, which would have been the third if the party hadn’t been yakking with someone else the first time he tried, but by then he was in a better mood and beyond throwing a tantrum over such a trifle.

  I scuttled that by using the phone again.

  “Who the devil are you calling?”

  “The liquor store. We’re out of gin and I know how you get when a guest asks for something and you can’t give it to him.”

  “Who said anything about inviting a guest?”

  “No one had to. This is the point in the story where the fat detective hauls all the suspects into his office and exposes his gray matter.”

  “Put the phone down!”

  I put it down. I’m an embezzler, not insubordinate.

  He bellowed for Gus, who came shuffling in wearing his rusty tailcoat. “Was it something?” he asked.

  “How is our supply of spirits?”

  “Gin we don’t got.”

  Lyon thanked him and sent him back to the kitchen. “I told you to have this room soundproofed.”

  “I did. Gus is psychic. All kosher chefs are. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.” Actually I’d had the paneling removed and any old shoddy blown in and split the difference with the contractor. I changed the subject by asking politely if I could call the liquor store now.

  He waited in the front room working the Minute Mysteries in Gus’s collection of Cooking for Schlemiels until showtime. It tore him up not being able to make his entrance directly from the elevator like that other tub of lard, but at the last shindig it had gotten stuck worse than usual and the fire department had to be called, so until we found a repairman as old as the installation he wasn’t risking any more such embarrassment in front of company.

  I put Messassarian, Pears, Gaglan, and Constance Ayers in green chairs and gave the big orange one to a doughy jasper named Homer Sayles, owner of Homer Sayles Home Sales. That mark of distinction puzzled the others, who had been no less surprised to see him at all at that address. Everyone recognized him and greeted him by name.

  I was happy on a couple of counts. For once, after that initial confusion, I’d figured out what Lyon had up his sleeve besides flab. It had come out during that last business call, and since Wolfe never did his own dialing, his protégé couldn’t break training just to keep me in the dark. The absence of Captain Stoddard contributed to my air of well-being; this one was outside his jurisdiction, so he didn’t have an excuse to show up and make us wet ourselves when he yelled about investigating for profit without a license.

  Lyon came in carrying the prop tomato plant for his desk, made a little bow like a toy drinking bird, and hopped onto his chair. His can of soda was waiting. He popped the top, filled a Betty Rubble glass, and passed a little wind.

  “I’ve invited Mr. Sayles, who is germane to the matter at hand,” he said, fanning the air with his green handkerchief. “You’ll remember, Mr. Messassarian, that his was one of the names you mentioned when I called to ask about the customers who came to pick up their suits the day Axolotl the Great’s coin went missing.”

  The Armenian slid his quadrifocals up and down his long nose, playing miniature trombone. “Yes, but as I told you, all those men are above suspicion.”

  “Phooey. However, all four of the men you named are, to flatter your gullible turn of phrase, above suspicion in this matter. So are Mr. Pears, Mr. Gaglan, and Miss Ayers. In fact, Mr. Messassarian, you are the only person present who is not.”

  Musty dropped his teeth. I’m not batting around a cliché. They bounced off the Kazakhstan rug and landed under his chair, where I had to get down on my hands and knees to snare them. After that he sat nervously clacking together the uppers and lowers and extracting from between two incisors a tag I was conscientious enough as cohost of the affair to relieve him of before Lyon saw made in wisconsin and stash it in a pocket. The boss, fortunately, was on a roll and disinclined to notice.

  “I was inclined at first to suspect Miss Ayers. Of all of you, her finances are the worst, and she became positively hysterical during her interview with Mr. Woodbine. But she is a woman, and therefore given to inexplicable displays of emotion.”

  The bookkeeper illustrated his point by taking off a shoe and throwing it at him. He squeaked and ducked. Her heel struck Andy Warhol’s tomato soup can on the wall behind Lyon’s head, cracking the glass in the frame. He wiped his face with his hanky and continued.

  “Mr. Pears was my next choice. He stands to inherit, and I’m convinced he has no interest in coins, but he made an unfavorable impression on Mr. Woodbine, whose character judgment is sound. But that was inconclusive.”

  The roly-poly fraud was making it up as he went along. I’d been arrested twice by policewomen who looked like perfectly respectable hookers. But any sort of character judgment would look uncanny next to his. He’d hired me.

  “I had high hopes for Mr. Gaglan. He appears to have no motive and is well-bred, which as we all know predisposes him toward guilt. The culprit is always the least likely suspect. I cite Agatha Christie, Philo Vance, and Mathilda Pearl Worthwhistle for establishing precedent and upholding it. Mrs. Worthwhistle’s The Corpse Blew a Raspberry is—but I digress. Mr. Gaglan simply defied any connection to the coin’s disappearance.”

  Norman Pears’s little pot belly quivered. “So by eliminating everyone else in the shop, you arrived at the conclusion that it has to be Uncle Krekor. What a demented polyp you are.”

  Lyon did a fine job of imitating Wolfe’s immunity to insult, by which I mean he didn’t actually bust out crying, just looked like he was about to. I don’t know I’d blame him if he did. I’ve had hemorrhoids I got along with better than Pears, but calling Lyon a demented polyp was hitting it square on the head. A furious clacking from the direction of Messassarian’s lap indicated he agreed. He’d dropped his teeth once again.

  “You haven’t said why Mr. Sayles is here.” The Ayers woman had her shoe back on, but the way the broken heel wobbled when she crossed her legs drew a true picture of her sense of composure.

  “The reason I asked him to join us is he was fitted by Mr. Messassarian for a tuxedo. The three other customers who claimed their purchases that day were fitted for ordinary business suits.”

  Aurelius Gaglan had a polite, quizzical smile on his mild face. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Sayles is to be honored by the Brooklyn Real Property Association as its Realtor of the Year. The banquet is not until next week, and since he has faith in his tailor he saw no reason to don it until that evening.

  “On the telephone I asked him the same three questions I’d asked the others. One: Have you examined the suit? Two: Have you noticed anything unusual about it? Three: Would you examine it now, purely to satisfy my curiosity? Mr. Sayles was the only man who answered no to question number one, which of course allowed me to skip to number three.”

  Miss Ayers said, “If you don’t start making sense soon, I’ll throw the other shoe.”

  He cringed and stepped on the gas. “This is a picture of the coin. Had I seen it yesterday, this meeting would not have been necessary.”

  I took the photo from him and handed it to Sayles, whose polite smile broadened when he saw it. He passed it to the woman. She squealed and giggled. Pears snatched it from her, looked, said, “Oh, for hell’s sake,” and gave it to his uncle. Musty put his teeth back in, fibers and all, peered through his lenses, shook his head, and gave me the expression of a hound that had lost the scent.

  Lyon focused on Homer Sayles. “You brought it as I asked?”r />
  The Realtor of the Year nodded briskly and spoke for the first time. “I gave it to Mr. Woodbine.”

  I went out and brought it back from the hall closet on its padded hanger. On the boss’s instructions I unzipped the vinyl carrier and showed them all the sleek black dinner jacket, with Axolotl’s profile stitched in place where the second button belonged.

  The tailor fingered it, almost touching it with his nose. He muttered a word that was shorter than his name but had just as many s’s in it. I recorded it phonetically on my PalmPilot.

  “The presence of four holes revealed little, in description,” Lyon said. “Visually, the evidence was suggestive. Mr. Woodbine obtained it from a numismatic website. The modern button, common as it is, was unknown in the time of King Axolotl, or he might have selected a design less associated with everyday haberdashery.” He waggled a pudgy finger at his tailor. “To avoid a repetition of the mistake I advise you to make an appointment with your ophthalmologist for a new eyeglass prescription, and take steps to reorganize and separate your vocation from your avocation.”

  “Splendid. Archie, write Mr. Messassarian a check. Include a bonus of five percent.”

  I guess when he saw himself in the mirror all decked out in cutaway, cloak, and top hat, Lyon saw Fred Astaire looking back. I saw the little man on the Monopoly box, only fatter.

  “For you, no charge,” the Armenian said. “You have saved me a fortune and restored my faith in the integrity of my staff.”

  “I cannot accept. That would constitute payment for my investigative services and bring down the wrath of Mr. Stoddard.” He shivered a little.

  As for me, I blew my nest egg when Persian Boy ran dead last at Belmont. So I was still working for Claudius Lyon and had to hide my face from security when we saw Carmen at the Met.

  WOLFE IN THE MANGER

  “It’s harder to delude yourself into thinking you’re the world’s greatest fat detective when you’re working out of a Motel 6.”

  “Nero Wolfe?”

  “You kidding?”

  “Archie Goodwin?”

  “That’s me.”

  “It says either one. Sign here.” The messenger in the dun-colored uniform stuck out his gizmo and I made a squiggly line on it no graphologist could trace; I knew, because I’d studied the art of forgery before I gave it up on account of all the paperwork. I took what he’d brought and shut the door before he could rethink things.

  Who can explain a split-second decision? Automatically accepting offered objects is hardwired into polite Americans. Also, larceny and imposture are part of my DNA. If you don’t want a dog to be a dog, don’t stick a lamb chop under its snout.

  Should the next uniform at Claudius Lyon’s door be blue, I could always say I’d misheard the name. Arnie Woodbine sounds a little like Archie Goodwin, if you mumble. Shucks, it’s why I was hired. Everything in that Brooklyn townhouse is a Bizarro version of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone in Manhattan, from the owner’s name to Gus, the kosher chef who can do as many things with borscht as Fritz, Wolfe’s man, can do with vichyssoise—except make it palatable to the 90 percent of the population that can’t stand beets. I fit square in the middle as a kind of demonstrator-model Goodwin, running errands for my fat employer when I’m not chiseling him. (The last part is pure Arnie.)

  The package was hefty, wrapped tightly in Tyvek, and might have been a football, if you filled a football with suet and had a reason to send something as athletic as a football either to Wolfe or to Lyon. In response to a sudden burst of butterflies in my stomach I hoisted it to my ear, listening for ticking or the shifting click of a digital clock changing numerals. No timing device, but if it was a bomb it might have been rigged to explode on opening.

  On the other hand, it might be a human head; but I’d been reading too many of Lyon’s penny dreadfuls lately, while the local handicappers’ sheet was in limbo pending the outcome of a printers’ strike. On the other hand, the parcel had been intended for Nero Wolfe, to whom a severed head was a cabbage and nothing more; except even Fritz, his live-in world-class chef, couldn’t make coleslaw out of it.

  All this diverted me from my natural instinct, which was to keep it for myself, to spend if it was cash or fence if it was jewelry, or hock if it didn’t seem too hot. Intended for a big-shot detective like Wolfe, it could have been any of those things as well as something that could detonate. So I raised my loyal chin, placed the bundle on Lyon’s desk, and skedaddled to the kitchen to gobble latkes and a bagel while waiting for the boss to come down from the roof, hunching my shoulders against an explosion all the while.

  “Was it the doorbell I heard?” asked Gus, shoveling salt into a skillet. “A case, maybe.”

  He sounded disapproving. Lyon works for free, and is apt to let envelopes from his accountant pile up unopened while he’s pretending to detect. I was no longer in charge of the mail since he’d caught me rounding off a check to the next hundred, planning to pocket the difference. He’d have fired me that time if he’d been able to find an Artie Goodman or even a Charlie Dugan in the directory, someone anyway with the right number of syllables and proportion of vowels to consonants to suggest a reasonable facsimile to Archie Goodwin; he’s that gone on tracing the original cast.

  I shrugged, looking at the Racing Form in the rack in front of me for a horse named Surprise Package or some variation. “You’ve worked here longer than me. How much homeowner’s insurance does Lyon carry?”

  “Arnie, no.”

  I looked at Gus and smirked. He’d stopped stirring and turned my way. His long sad face had gone grayer than usual.

  “Don’t worry, arson’s not my line. Anyway, those company investigators put every check endorsement under a lens. A backward kid might be able to match Lyon’s scribble, but I’m too sophisticated to pull it off. I just wanted to know if he’d get enough to rebuild the place if anything happened to it. It’s harder to delude yourself into thinking you’re the world’s greatest fat detective when you’re working out of a Motel 6. He might just get a bad case of lucidity, and you and I would have to go out and find honest work.”

  He resumed stirring. “Speak for yourself. I’m a culinary artist.”

  “The next guy you work for might know the difference between free-range chicken and that pigeon on the ledge you’ve been overfeeding for months. You can throw all the saffron and sage you want to on it, but it’ll still come out of the oven rooting for the old Dodgers. Think there’ll be a Christmas bonus this year?”

  I’d changed the subject to spare his feelings. We were equal partners in the business of separating Lyon from his finances, but even co-conspirators were capable of sticking their own necks in a noose if they got fed up enough to turn rat. There’s honor among thieves; and Santa never misses a yoga lesson.

  “Of course there will,” he said cheerfully. “People who inherit fortunes never miss a chance to give them away.”

  “No compunctions about accepting gifts connected with a Christian holiday?”

  “He has asked me the same question, phrased more diplomatically. I set his mind at ease. I have many nephews, and the price of bar mitzvah presents, it doesn’t go down.”

  The more he talked about his enormous family the more I was convinced he’d turned up in a basket on the front porch of some temple. I wasn’t even sure he was Jewish. The last time his day off fell on Saint Patrick’s Day, he’d come home smelling of corned beef and Bushmills.

  But who was I to quibble? No one under that roof was what he pretended to be; first and foremost the man who paid the taxes on it.

  Speak of the devil. Just then the old building trembled. Either the New Madrid Fault was practicing for the Big One or the elevator was heaving the little slug of lard down from the plant room. I gulped the last of my coffee and hightailed it to the office. Every morning it’s important to meet the pig you’re carving with a fresh, shiny face.

  Lyon came in wearing a green suit—it was his favorite color, but given his abund
ance of flesh and lack of stature he belonged on a box of Lucky Charms—and carrying a tomato plant in a pot to decorate his desk. Ever since he’d read Black Orchids for the umpty-second time he’d been trying to duplicate Nero Wolfe’s success with unconventional color breeding, but because tomatoes can be depended upon to turn black all by themselves, with results neither appetizing nor aesthetically pleasing, he was trying for purple. So far all he’d accomplished was a feverish mauve, which tasted like a sunburned potato. He stopped when he saw the package on the blotter.

  “Is this a clue?”

  Try as he might to sound exasperated—his role model puts up with sleuthing chores only to subsidize his flower-growing, flesh-gobbling, and beer-drinking—he can never quite keep the excitement out of his tone whenever an investigative opportunity comes his way.

  “You’re the detective,” I said. “It was delivered here by mistake. Kype the address.”

  When he read it he almost dropped the plant. He’d forgotten he was still holding it.

  No one ever put down a thing more quickly, not counting a hand grenade, or picked up another thing with more reverence, not counting an ankle bone belonging to an early saint. He tested it for heft. “Who signed for it?”

  “He asked if I was Archie Goodwin. I misunderstood, sorry.”

  “Flummery.”

  Well, if you’re up on his favorite reading, you know where he got that word. If I’ve given the impression he’s dimwitted, I erred. He’s just nuts.

  “We must see it reaches its intended recipient. Get Wolfe’s residence on the phone at once. No, wait.”

  When he gives an order and he’s right there, I carry it out. If you require obedience from your assistant, you can’t go wrong hiring a fellow who knows a warm spot when he’s found it, especially when he’s the shady type. But knowing him and seeing how tightly he was holding on to that package with the magic name on the label, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have to put through that call. It would have been unpleasant, because Wolfe was well aware of this sedulous ape’s existence, and deplored it; but it was hero worship that turned the thing in the end. I cradled the receiver on my desk and waited.