Corpus Corpus

by H. Paul Jeffers

  The first, a gentleman with a chesterfield overcoat and a hurried expression, had muttered, "Good afternoon, Sherlock," and kept on walking.

  A block farther, one of a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls had blurted, "Hey, get a look at him!"

  The last, an elderly black man with a grizzled gray beard, extended the ubiquitous panhandler's paper coffee cup and said, "I don't have matches to sell like Neville Sinclair had in The Man With the Twisted Lip, but I could surely use whatever spare shillings you might have in your pockets, Mr. Holmes."

  A dollar poorer, Wiggins descended into the subway and took up a position at the end of the platform in the expectation that the last car of the train when it pulled in would not prove to be so crowded that there was no room for a large man. Only then did he chuckle in admiration of the street begger's savvy in having quickly deduced upon encountering a man dressed up like Sherlock Holmes that reference to a classic Holmesian story concerning another panhandler would result in the windfall it had succeeded in producing.

  When the train arrived and the doors of the cars opened, the Wiggins strategy in choosing to ride in the last was vindicated. Side-by-side unoccupied seats amply accommodated a posterior as formidable and expansive as the behind of Stout's brainchild, although the very idea of Wolfe taking a subway was preposterous in the extreme.

  As for trains in general, Wolfe had said, "No publication either before or after the invention of printing, no technological treatise and no political or scientific creed, has ever been as narrowly dogmatic or as offensively arbitrary in its prejudices as a railway timetable."

  Certainly, a suggestion that Wolfe venture down into the subway would have been dismissed out of hand. And were he to see such a thing as the subway train rumbling into the Fifty-first Street station of the Lexington Avenue line he certainly would have uttered the most extreme word in the Wolfe lexicon: "Pfui!"

  Four stops and twelve minutes later as Wiggins exited the subway at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South, he stood two blocks from the Gramercy Park Hotel and the culmination of the months of meticulous planning required to ensure that this year's Black Orchid affair surpassed all previous gatherings of the Wolfe Pack.

  Parked along Lexington Avenue opposite the hotel, vans of four local television stations and a cable network made it clear that he had been right in telling Maggie Dane that her appearance with Theodore Janus would be controversial.

  He had defended murderous radicals in the 1960s as patriots akin to Minutemen standing up for liberty at the Concord Bridge. Was it not Janus who had with a straight face painted a portrait of that newspaper heiress from California who had played footsie with black radicals as a victim and not a perpetrator? Who but Theodore Janus could have gotten off the beast who had strangled so many poor old women in Boston with an insanity plea? Janus's word stretching had succeeded in redefining federal wiretaps in the case against the godfather of organized crime as outrageous intrusion of a law-abiding citizen's privacy. The exhortation had resulted in freedom for the very man heard on the tapes ordering what amounted to wholesale murder, while the one who had gone to prison had been a low-level hood who cooperated with authorities in planting the wiretaps.

  Could any other lawyer have managed the deft hedging that sent Morgan Griffith to federal prison instead of death row for the murders of Jonathan Dodge and two others, as well as his proven record as a traitorous assassin?

  Who but Janus could carry off such a conceit as constantly wearing western-style outfits, even in the courtrooms of New York City? Yet the clothing served as a silent reminder that he bore the name of the ultimate easterner who went west, that famous coiner of a phrase that was the bedrock of American society, "the square deal," the old Rough Rider himself, Theodore Roosevelt. At least a dozen convicted felons across the country had reaped the benefit of Janus's impassioned pleas to parole boards for a grant of clemency that invariably concluded with the words of TR:

  Surely everyone of us who knows his own heart must know that he too may stumble, and should be anxious to help his brother who has stumbled. When the criminal has been punished, if he then shows a sincere desire to lead a decent and upright life, he should be given the chance, he should be helped and not hindered; and if he makes good, he should receive that respect from others which so often aids in creating self-respect—the most valuable of all possessions.

  The foremost criminal defense attorney in the nation being a fan of Nero Wolfe had come as a surprise, for it was Wolfe who had said of the lawyers, "They are inveterate hedgers. They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense. They are insufferable word-stretchers."

  Janus had proved to be exactly the sort of man who could read a compliment into Wolfe's condescension and live up to all the unflattering adjectives applied to him in the stern court of public opinion, as he recently had done in the sensational case in which the prosecution was led by his former protégé.

  Entering the hotel lobby, Wiggins smiled gleefully at seeing them together for the first time since Janus had prevailed over her at trial. Side by side, each with an arm around the other, they beamed in the glare of floodlights.

  Aglow with delight, he let his mind reel back to the tempest he had provoked in the steering committee meeting by his daring gambit in nominating Janus for the Nero Wolfe award.

  Thrilled with both the outcome and himself, he also noted Janus alive, swaggering, grinning, and basking in the glories of his renown.

  "The first time I heard you make a speech," said Bogdanovic as he searched for a parking place a block from the Gramercy Park Hotel, "I was minutes away from being elevated from probationary cadet to police officer. You were a mere captain. I can quote almost verbatim what you said."

  Goldstein shifted uneasily in the passenger seat. "I do hope this isn't going to be embarrassing."

  "You said, 'Police work does not require genius. What is needed is common honesty, common sense, and common courage. Police work requires the practical virtues—the commonplace virtues that are absolutely essential if we are ever to make this force and this city what they should be. If these virtues are lacking, no amount of cleverness will save us.' I was impressed!"

  "You ought to have been. I happened to be quoting Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt."

  "You wound up your speech by telling us fledgling coppers that we could learn a lot about solving crimes if we were to read detective novels."

  "Good advice that, in your case, appears to have gone in one ear and out the other."

  "That's not true, Chief. I have tried. May I remind you that my study of the cases of Agatha Christie's little Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, played a key role in ending the murder spree by Andrew Sloan and his girlfriend last year?"

  "Proving my point about the importance of police reading mystery novels."

  "What will I be hearing in your speech tonight?"

  "It's not a speech. It's a toast. But I may take the opportunity to speak in long overdue defense of Inspector Cramer of the Homicide Squad and his day's version of Johnny Bogdanovic, Sgt. Purley Stebbins, as well as Lt. George Rowcliff. And I may even get around to praising Police Commissioner William Skinner and Deputy Commissioner O'Hara, who had the nicest office in the old headquarters building."

  "Your office in One Police Plaza isn't what I'd describe as being uncomfortable."

  "Good old Two hundred forty Centre Street." Goldstein sighed as Bogdanovic parked. "I miss that drafty old castle. It had real character!" Stepping from the car, he surveyed the venerable buildings around an iron-fenced, lightly snow-dusted square studded with old trees and laced with gravel footpaths. "Look at these fabulous houses. What a grand piece of real estate!"

  "May I remind you, Chief, that just over there at number twelve once resided Gerald Chapman, America's first Public Enemy Number One? The late Jonathan Dodge's town house is a block from here."

  "But he wasn't murdered there, was he? That deed took place in an apartment on the Upper West Side and t
he body was dumped in Stone County. And even if Dodge had been killed here, if I could afford it I'd love to live in one of these houses and I wouldn't care if my next-door neighbor was an ax murderer."

  Standing on a curb as the traffic passed, Bogdanovic peered across Twenty-first Street at the hotel. "I stayed here once when I was in the academy. There'd been a blizzard and the whole damned city was shut down. I was living way out in Queens and drove in every day. I didn't even try digging that old heap of a car out. I think half my class was put up here. It's a very nice hotel. The place was full of Air France airline stewardesses that night, as I recall."

  "Vive la France," Goldstein said, stepping from the curb to the street. "Vive la difference!"

  Dominating the northwest corner of Twenty-first and Lexington Avenue, the Gramercy Park Hotel rose seventeen floors. Pushing through a revolving door, they entered a lobby that seemed far too small for the crowd. Behind a tree of microphones in the middle of the throng stood Dane and Janus.

  "Meet the press," Goldstein said grumpily. "The news media and celebrities, bees to the honeycomb."

  "In Janus's case," grumbled Bogdanovic, "it's more like a swarm of flies on a pile of manure."

  Frequently shouting over one another, the reporters acted as if the fame of those being questioned afforded those with press credentials hanging from cords around their necks the privilege of abandoning the courtesy of formality in addressing strangers for the familiarity of first names. She was neither Miss Dane nor the politically correct Ms. Dane, but Maggie. The man in fringed buckskin jacket, clutching an unlit long black cigar and towering over her, was not Mr. Janus, or even Theodore, but Theo.

  "Maggie, how does it feel now that you're as famous as the man who used to be your boss?"

  "Hopeful that it won't last."

  "Theo, how did you feel about Maggie as your adversary?" "Proud."

  "How would you have felt if Maggie had won?"

  "I never doubted for a moment that she'd lose. That's not a criticism of Maggie. She did the best she could with what she had to work with."

  "Meaning?"

  "A prosecutor plays the hand that's dealt. Maggie was given losing cards from the start. Evidence the police had was garbage. Their witnesses were ineptitude incarnate. It is a tribute to her skills that she almost turned a sow's ear into a silk purse."

  "Speaking of purses, some observers say that it was only because your client had money to hire you that he got off."

  "My client got off, to use your term, because the people's case was riddled from the beginning with reasonable doubt."

  "Maggie, are you appealing?"

  Janus blared, "Just look at her! That face! The flaming red hair! Those smiling green Irish eyes. Is she appealing? Why, the evidence speaks for itself."

  "Maggie, are you appealing the verdict? Might there be a new trial somewhere down the road?"

  Standing at the rear of the crowd, Goldstein grunted. "What an idiotic question."

  "The people get no second bite of the apple," Dane replied. "Appeals can only be made by the defense. Unless there has been a mistrial, the constitutional provision against double jeopardy prohibits the state from holding a second trial."

  "Even if new evidence turns up?"

  "Mr. Janus's client could confess and it wouldn't matter. He cannot be tried again on the same charge."

  "Isn't that unfair to the people?"

  "We Irish have a saying. Life is unfair," Dane said as a TV news cameraman moved to capture her and Janus from behind with the crowd of reporters arrayed before them.

  "There's a rumor out in L.A.," said a woman representing a supermarket tabloid, "that you're so disgusted with how the case ended that you are thinking about giving up on the law."

  "I'll answer for Maggie," Janus said. "Irish never quit."

  "How about a book, Maggie?"

  She smiled broadly. "I recommend any novel by Rex Stout."

  "Theo, what about you? Are you writing a book on the case?"

  "I've got a lot of people still angry with me for the one I wrote live years ago, Janus for the Defense. There are so many clients who were upset with me that I vowed not to do a sequel. I am, however, planning a book."

  A young man with a camera slung from a shoulder and grasping a traditional reporter's spiral-ring notebook pleased Goldstein by beginning his question politely with "Mr. Janus, . . ."

  Janus stood on the tips of his boots to peer over the heads of the reporters. "Is my father here?" he joked, looking around as if searching for something.

  "Whenever someone says 'Mr. Janus' I think my old man must be around."

  When the laughter subsided, the young man continued, "How do you sleep at night?"

  Still basking in the joviality, Janus replied, "I sleep in the raw!"

  The reporter shook his head violently. "What I meant was, how can you sleep at night knowing that you make it possible for so many guilty people to go free? Do you ever think about the feelings of the people who loved the victims of these criminals that you got off?"

  Bogdanovic whispered to Goldstein, "There's a booby trap."

  With frozen smile, Janus said softly, "I don't free anyone, young man. Juries do. And when they have rendered their verdict of not guilty, I sleep with the clear conscience of a baby."

  Thrusting himself anxiously before the microphones, Wiggins declared, "Time for only one more question."

  A young woman asked, "Theo, were you surprised to find out that you'd be getting this award from Maggie?"

  "To paraphrase Nero Wolfe," Janus replied, tilting back his Stetson hat, "there are two ways for a man to ruin a friendship. One is to lend a pal a lot of money. The other is to question the purity of a woman's gesture."

  As Goldstein and Bogdanovic stepped aside from departing reporters and camera crews, a mammoth figure rushed toward them.

  "Welcome, welcome," bellowed Wiggins. "Chief, you're looking swell!" Black eyes barely visible in the fleshy folds of his face rolled toward Bogdanovic.

  "And, you, dear Sergeant B.," he said, patting a slight bulge of the detective's jacket, "Still packing the old reliable Glock! How goes the daily tussle against the criminal element of our fair city?"

  Bogdanovic shrugged. "We keep on trying."

  "You're too modest. The murder rate is down sharply."

  "Tell that to the victims."

  "Oh, Sergeant B., please don't be dour. Let yourself go. Have yourself some fun this evening. Chief, order him to."

  'John doesn't approve of your choice of guest of honor."

  "He's not the only one. One member has resigned over it."

  "The only way I could get John to attend," Goldstein went on, "was to promise he'd get to meet Maggie Dane."

  Wiggins squeezed the hard bicep of Bogdanovic's shooting arm. "You shall meet her right now, Sergeant B. I am delighted to declare that cocktails are now being served."

  Surrounded by admirers, she could barely be seen as Wiggins employed formidable girth and a bulldozing voice to clear a path across a room that seemed much too small for the crowd. Reaching her, he declared, "Maggie, this is Detective Sgt. John Bogdanovic of the New York Police Department. Is he not the spitting image of Archie Goodwin?"

  "I hope I'm not under arrest, Sergeant," she said, extending a small, delicate hand.

  Although no one noticed but him, his big hand trembled as he reached for hers.

  "Now be a good lad, Sergeant B.," Wiggins ordered. "Go to the bar and fetch the lady a glass of something for the toasts. Make it champagne. Ever since she went Hollywood, it's her favorite."

  A few moments later he presented the drink. "Here you go, Miss Dane. Champagne for one."

  Taking it, she said, "I see you know your corpus, Sergeant." "Beg pardon?"

  " 'Champagne for One.' One of Wolfe's finest cases," answered Wiggins as he waddled away in the direction of a cluster of men crowding around Janus. Holding a martini, he stood like an oak.

  "I'm sorry to disappoint
you," said Bogdanovic, "but that 'champagne for one' remark was sheer coincidence. I had no idea it was a tide. On the subject of Nero Wolfe, I'm an ignoramus."

  "Are you also an abstainer? You're not drinking."

  He looked at her smilingly. "Never on duty."

  The ring of a spoon-struck glass cut through the din. Then came Wiggins's commanding voice. "Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the first toast of the evening by Judge Reginald Simmons."

  Thin to the point of being skeletal, he moved to the front of the room with the practiced dignity of his calling. "Appreciating that we all came here tonight for the drinks and the food, not a lot of talk, I'll be brief. Archie Goodwin is sharp, inquisitive, impetuous, skeptical, pertinacious, and resourceful. With those traits, this paragon ought to have been a judge. To Archie Goodwin!"