Nearly Nero

by Loren D. Estleman

  I had to admit the expression on the face of the squirt behind the desk was beginning to resemble a scowl and not so much a colicky baby about to throw a tantrum. He’d been practicing in front of a mirror, probably with a picture of Nero Wolfe stuck in the frame for comparison. The pint-size hypocrite was delighted in inverse ratio to the look of annoyance. His idol’s reluctance to stir himself to solve a case was legendary, while he himself couldn’t wait to show off what he’d learned by reading up on Wolfe’s cases.

  Not that much sleuthing would be needed to get to the bottom of this one; one look at that nose that was using Daffodil’s face for a perch and a nitwit would know why the third generation of Hyman Brills had skedaddled. That left the mystery of why he’d hooked up with her in the first place, and just how Lyon was going to twist Delmer Warp from client to criminal overlord.

  It all gave me palpitations, as at a nod from the boss I swiveled to my processor and prepared to take notes on the conference. Was this the case that would jar him out of his delusional lifestyle, preparing him for a sane existence and me for unemployment? The only fly in our cushy ointment, Gus’s and mine, was that a sudden attack of compos mentis would strike our Dutch uncle, forcing us to become contributing members of society.

  I tucked my fear aside long enough to record the details of the happy couple’s sudden separation and Lyon’s subsequent cross-examination of the bride. Her father held her hand throughout the ordeal, patting it from time to time and interrupting the stream of questions to interject a phrase or a sentence. Her other hand wore a wedding set the size of matched life preservers, glittering with sparklers. His accent hovered somewhere between Bela Lugosi and Boris Badenov, while she spoke pure Kentucky cornpone, all “you-all” this and “you-all” that.

  I expected Lyon to grill her over whether Brill was as well-off as the society page made out, or had latched onto the daughter of the undertaker-turned-furniture-baron for her fortune, only to quail at the thought of having to wake up to that proboscis every morning for the rest of his life; but that would have been too rational. Instead he pumped her for information on the nature of her husband’s acquaintances, until it dawned on me that he suspected Brill had been kidnapped and that she would hear from his abductors any time with a ransom demand.

  Eventually he shifted his focus to the father. I hit a couple of clinkers on the keyboard when he began hammering on Warp’s business picture; the fat little salmon was swimming upstream in a mad dash to prove that the trade in coffee tables and Barcalounger had gone soft and that the father of the bride had had his son-in-law snatched in order to extort money from Hyman Brill Jr., the venture capitalist, in return for the safe delivery of his son.

  But Warp, underworld genius or no, tumbled to that line of reasoning a split second before I did, gathered up his daughter, and stormed out of the room, leaving Lyon’s face in a self-satisfied pout and—shocking me to the lisle socks I could only afford because he was careless about keeping up with the household accounts—his left finger doing a do-si-do inside the ear on that side of his Charlie Brown–shaped head with his eyes closed in rapture.

  He only did that when he was about to come up with a solution that addressed every point of conjecture. It was his equivalent of Nero Wolfe pursing and drawing in his lips just before he separated a fat rabbit from a silk hat.

  “If you’re thinking of railroading our client,” I said, “you might as well call Captain Stoddard and give him the good news. As much as he’d like to nail us both for playing detective without a ticket, he’ll be grateful for a front-row seat in civil court when Warp sues you for false accusation, defamation of character, and a bad case of cholesterol on the brain.”

  He wasn’t listening—not because he had one ear stopped up, but because when he went into one of those trances it could last for minutes or hours while the world spun merrily away outside his notice. I got up.

  “So long to you, Porky. I’m going to propose to Daffodil Warp-Brill, and beat the rush when the annulment comes through. Maybe her old man will make me vice president in charge of the wicker division.”

  His eyes popped open and he withdrew the finger. “Don’t be obtuse, Arnie. No annulment is necessary. However, you would have to wait for a divorce, an event I fear is unlikely.”

  “If we’re going to split hairs over legal definitions, let’s talk slander, false and malicious accusation, violation—”

  “I wasn’t referring to the dissolution of the Brills’ marriage. That would be unnecessary, since it was never legal to begin with. She was already married when they walked down the aisle.”

  “To who?” Well, I suppose it should have been “To whom”; but I was too rattled to bone up on posh.

  “To Delmer Warp. He has no daughter. Daffodil is his wife.”

  “Everyone knows you’re nuttier than a Whitman’s Sampler, but this time you’ve gone to the front of the line at Bellevue. Those noses came from the same genetic code.”

  “People are often attracted to one another by a shared physical trait; also, there’s something to be said for the theory that in time, couples acquire a resemblance. Didn’t you notice the way he held her hand all the time I was bearing down on her? Did that look like the way a father holds his daughter’s hand, at least in a normal parent-child relationship? You’re a keener observer than that. But in case you did miss it, surely you noticed the strong trace of his Lithuanian origins in his pronunciation, while the woman’s speech came directly from a Kentucky coal mine.”

  “I thought maybe she had a Southern-fried mother.”

  “Indeed.” He was actually bouncing in his chair; try as he did to stay in character, his natural enthusiasm for his make-believe sometimes trumped Wolfe’s gravitas. “How old did you determine her to be?”

  “Thirty, thirty-five; although the front of her face might have preceded the rest of her by a year.”

  “Delmer Warp could pass for sixty, but a corrupt soul ages at an accelerated rate. He observed his fortieth birthday last May. I read of the event in the company newsletter. His business is incorporated, and I happen to own a share of stock. I know you think I’ve exaggerated his gifts, but I cannot accuse him of embracing parenthood at five or ten years of age. I can only conclude that your head was too full of dollar signs to see anything but the lucrative case Warp had chosen to dangle before us.”

  I lashed back. “I was distracted by that meatball on her wedding finger. A man could live—”

  “Not for a day on paste like that. I might have been taken in myself for a minute at least. Genuine jewelry that size resides only in the Tower of London; but it had to be large enough to cover the pale spot where she’s worn a wedding ring for years, or draw suspicion to so recently married a finger. Once that explanation occurred to me, the rest was child’s play.”

  I sat back, blowing air. “Well, butter my—”

  He glanced at the clock and rose. “Speaking of butter, Gus will be serving his commendable goulash in three minutes.”

  “But what was Warp after?”

  “Come, come, Arnie. Dining, digestion, disclosure. In that order.”

  Later, settling himself back behind the carrier-class desk and burping paprika, he answered my question.

  “You heard me asking Warp about his business. Surely you saw I suspected him of not being as successful as the Garden State Gazette made him out to be. What you could not have known is that I was positive, based upon his last quarter as it appeared in the stockholders’ report.

  “In the daily columns, every heiress is beautiful, and every prominent entrepreneur a major captain of industry. It sells copies. Well, you’ve met the heiress. Warp overbought maple bedroom sets last year following a retirement home epidemic, just before the bottom dropped out of that market. He’s inventory-heavy and cash-poor. In order to get out from under, he fobbed off his wife on the son of a genuine tycoon, hoping to blackmail him into making a handsome settlement to avoid being accused of bigamy. I assume she has
charms that weren’t evident in her current circumstances.

  “Hyman Brill Jr. is a recluse. He’s rarely been photographed, and he pays a reverse publicity agent to keep his name out of the press. I doubt he was pleased even to see it connected with his son’s blessed event. To fight the accusation would drag out the affair, bringing entertainment to thousands of people at his expense. He’ll pay—unless we get in touch with him and give him the score, so he can threaten Warp before Warp can threaten him. No doubt the element of surprise will frighten Warp into inaction, sparing Brill effort.”

  I’ve been over it and over it—just in case there was something in it for me—but it always comes out as loony as a Canadian dollar. Lyon had made some sharp observations, but the rest was wild speculation based on his certainty that Delmer Warp was Genghis Khan in a suit. Okay, a few days later a two-line note appeared in the Gazette to the effect that the Brill-Warp marriage had been dissolved “by mutual consent.” It didn’t make the little stump right, but it didn’t make him wrong, either. That’s the advantage of being cuckoo: You can’t prove sanity without eliminating evidence of derangement, and one man’s dementia is another man’s quaint quirk.

  And when you had him pegged as a paranoid-schizo with delusions of normalcy, he reached up his sleeve and dealt you a hand you couldn’t beat; which is what he did that afternoon in his office.

  He chuckled, ending on a squeak. “Warp panicked when young Brill vanished. He thought he’d seen through his nefarious plot, and wanted to find him and convince him otherwise before he had a chance to report to his father.”

  I’d never heard anyone use “nefarious” out loud before; but I let it drift. “Is that why Brill Three scrammed? He doped it out himself?”

  “I doubt it. Anyone who’d fall for so transparent a ruse would be unlikely to see the light on his own.”

  “Why, then?”

  He opened And Be a Villain to the strip of bacon. “You surprise me. You saw that nose. No man who didn’t daily face the identical feature in a mirror could put up with it. I thought you of all people would be shallow enough to see that.”

  PETER AND THE WOLFE

  “As one loony to another, you might be able to shake this guy’s story and get him to cough up his real moniker.”

  The moon turned blue, swine flew, and hell sprouted icicles.

  Mind you, I can’t swear to these things. Brooklynites never look at the sky, and having spent time in stir, I’d rather not find out for sure if things are worse down below; but when Captain Stoddard of the NYPD calls up Claudius Lyon to ask for his services as a detective, you can be sure that all of the above is gospel.

  Lyon himself never answers the phone when either Gus, the keeper of the keys, or I’m around. Nero Wolfe doesn’t, and his worshipper across the river wouldn’t tie his shoes without confirming which loop Wolfe makes longer. (Not that the little lump would bend over regardless.) So when the bell rang during his morning two hours in the office, I picked up the receiver. “Claudius Lyon’s office. Arnie Woodbine speaking.”

  The boss, watching me over the Nancy Drew coloring book, registered alarm at my reaction to the voice scraping in my ear. “Arnie, are you having an aneurysm?”

  I might as well have been; they say it’s impossible to answer yes to that question, and I could no sooner have identified who was on the other end of the line than I could have removed my foot from the third rail in the subway. I inclined my no-doubt pallid face toward the extension on the desk.

  Wherever it was my blood had gone, Lyon’s joined it when Stoddard yelped at him. It would make the captain’s year if he nailed one or both of us for conducting private investigations without a license. No matter that there were worse crimes to address; they weren’t personal. He likes us the way suede likes rain, the way mongooses like cobras, the way Krazy Kat likes bricks. He don’t like us, is what I’m saying. I kept my receiver to my ear. I was afraid he’d hear the click if I hung up, and rubber-hose me for rudeness.

  “Mr. Stoddard,” Lyon squeaked. “To what do I owe this—”

  “Take that sentence where it’s going and I’ll reach down this wire with both hands and rip your lungs out through your nose. Did you read today’s Tattler?”

  Which showed he kept up on his homework. Lyon’s addicted to that local scandal sheet, with its aliens in the White House, pig-faced boys, and a legitimate news item when it runs out of freaks. At a look from my employer I got the morning edition out of the drawer of my desk where I store slugs for the parking meter, snapped it open, and scanned through the Elvis sightings until I found something that seemed to serve. I folded to the short piece and passed it across the big desk. It ran:

  JOHN DOE THINKS HE’S SAINT

  Brooklyn, December 5: Yesterday, local police

  took into custody a man found wandering down the

  middle of Ocean Parkway who police say has identified

  himself only as Saint Peter, traditionally known as

  the custodian of the pearly gates to heaven.

  So far, according to Captain Stoddard of the

  Eleventh Precinct, attempts to learn the man’s true

  identity have proven …

  Now, nothing short of a chocolate éclair the size of his head can restore Lyon’s composure faster than a fresh mystery to solve. That’s what Wolfe does all the time, and what I said about tying his shoelaces applies quadruply to detecting. He even rediscovered his sense of humor. “I assume, sir,” he said, “you’re referring to the counterfeit apostle you have locked up in a cell and not this other item about the captain of the SS Titanic located alive and well on a desert island; although it does pique my interest that the commander of a vessel that went down in the North Atlantic in 1912 should resurface on an atoll in the Pacific.”

  Precedents were falling everywhere that morning. Not only did Stoddard not follow through on his promise to separate Lyon from his lungs; he responded in a tone I suppose a snarling Doberman would consider polite. “I wish I had that one. The department shrink and every colleague he can dredge up to consult can’t shake this character’s story. He’s Saint Peter, that’s that, and my thirty-year record’s shot to sh—”

  “How can I assist you?” It was just as much of a novelty for the boss to interrupt the captain in mid-gripe as for the captain to let him; but Lyon dislikes profanity. “Phooey” is as close as he ever comes, far as it is from Wolfe’s “Pfui.” My fat little meal ticket also disapproves of spraying saliva.

  “It came to me we’ve been going about this all wrong. They say it takes a thief to catch a thief. I’ve proved that’s malarkey, but one nut sure enough knows how to talk fruitcake. As one loony to another, you might be able to shake this guy’s story and get him to cough up his real moniker.”

  At this point I’d recovered myself enough to put in my shekel’s worth. “Excuse me, Captain, but there’s only one mental deficient in this conversation. I’m not the sharpest blade in the shop, but I’m sane, and Mrs. Woodbine didn’t raise her children to fall for a sure case of entrapment. Mr. Lyon solves your little conundrum, you’re so grateful for the commendation you get from the chief you hand him one of your four-for-a-quarter stogies, and the second he claps his squat fingers around it you bust him for accepting a fee for practicing without a license.”

  “You, too, as an accomplice. But this is on the level. If he manages to pull this off—and I’m grasping at straws here, fat as this one is; I think he’s a dumb cluck with dumb luck, and sure as hell when it runs out it’ll be when he’s working for me—I won’t even give him so much as a thank you.”

  “That part I buy,” I said. “The ‘no thanks’ part. Nice try, Captain. Try again some other—”

  I saved my breath too late. I was looking at the chub on the other side of that Olympic-regulation-sized desk, and from his expression you’d have thought he was Popeye and Captain Stoddard was a can of spinach.

  “Lunch is served in one hour,” he said. “You and Saint
Peter are invited to share Gus’s superb matzo ball soup.”

  I waited until the receiver banged—even when he wasn’t ticked off at us, which was mostly always, Stoddard never broke off a conversation without making an angry racket—then got up from my chair. Lyon glanced at the clock. “Where are you going? I have germination records to dictate.”

  “The tomatoes can germinate themselves, which is what they do anyway. You’re not fooling anybody with those four hours a day you waste up there. I’ve got some vacation days coming and I’m taking them now. When I get back from Vegas, I’ll visit you in the hoosegow. I may even have Gus whip up a herring with a saw in it.”

  “Don’t be absurd. The last time you visited Las Vegas you had to hitchhike back. You pawned your return ticket and lost everything on a hand of stud.”

  “It was Texas Hold’em; and I’d sooner work my way back washing dishes in every greasy spoon between here and Reno than press shirts in a prison laundry. I’ve done both, so I’m not just talking through my hat.”

  “Nonsense. We have Mr. Stoddard’s word it isn’t coggery.”

  I had to lean over my keyboard to look up that one: The man wouldn’t step out of character long enough even to use something simple like deception. “If you were half the detective you think you are, and Wolfe was half the detective you think he is—which makes you a quarter of a detective, and even that only in your own mind—you’d know that the law against lying to a cop don’t work both ways. He’d lie on a gallon of truth serum if he thought he could cogger you into the joint.”

  “You know I detest it when you turn a noun into a verb. Sit down, confound it! If it comes to that, I’ll confess and exonerate you into the bargain.”

  It just so happens that Lyon is as good as his word, nutty as he is; so I took my seat and blew off the rest of the morning taking down blather from Gardening for Dummies until Gus’s gong and then the doorbell rang, announcing lunch and our guests.