Corpus Corpus

by H. Paul Jeffers

  Retrieving his drink, he turned and strode away so fast that he ran into a waiter and dropped the delicate martini glass. "I'm sorry, sir," gasped the faultless waiter. "I'll get you another."

  "Hell yes, boy. With two olives."

  As Janus returned to the head table, Bogdanovic regarded the guests at his table. "Sorry. I just don't like that guy."

  "Don't apologize, Sergeant," said Simmons as he waved off a waiter who tried to pour a glass of wine for him.

  "Chief Goldstein," said Janus, clasping his fresh drink as he resumed his place at the head table, "your able sergeant is a man with forceful opinions forthrightly expressed." 'John's Croatian."

  "Yes, that would account for it. The Balkan temperament can be fiery. I could use a man with his passion working for me."

  'Johnny Bogdanovic as a private investigator for a defense attorney? I don't think that's in the cards. He's committed to sending murderers to prison."

  "Too bad. I like him." He reached for the martini. "I toast to murderers, Chief Harvey Goldstein, Sergeant Johnny Bogdanovic, all others who pursue them, and people like me who do our duty by defending them!"

  Goldstein lifted a bottle of beer. "I prefer to drink to the cause of justice."

  When they set down their drinks Janus asked, "Is making a deal for Paulie Mancuso's testimony justice?"

  Goldstein smiled. "The district attorney's office turned him into a witness. He's in protective custody. My office has never been invited into the loop."

  "Be glad you're not being dragged into that quagmire," said Janus as a scoop of rice with a dollop of quince jelly went into his mouth.

  "Will you be jumping in on Mancuso's side? Or have you been hired by the people he'll be testifying against?" "Neither, thank God. Merely curious."

  With delicate movements he took up knife and fork and cut a small piece of turkey only to be interrupted by a book's appearance before him. "Sorry to bother you, Mr. Janus," said a young woman, holding the book between him and his dinner plate, "but will you please autograph this for me?"

  Taking a pen from his breast pocket and opening Janus for the Defense to the title page, he looked up at her smilingly and asked, "What's your name?"

  "It's not for me. I bought this for my father. He's a great admirer. Could you make it 'To Sidney' and then write something personal?"

  After thinking a moment, he wrote in green ink, "lb Sidney, Nothing corrupts a man as deeply as writing a book," and signed "Theo Janus" with a flourish.

  When the young woman was too far away to hear he said, "Very rude of her. But at least it was the hardcover edition, not the paperback."

  "If you are not getting involved in the Mancuso thing," said Goldstein, "why did you bring it up?"

  "I represented the scoundrel once. For about fifteen minutes. We parted company when he asked how much money it would take to bribe a couple of jurors. Maggie Dane was with me at the time. It was all I could do to keep her from leaping across the table and strangling the jerk. We've all come a long way since that day. I can't get out of my thoughts what a splendid career Maggie could have had if she had stayed on my side of the courtroom."

  Goldstein's eyes settled on her. "I guess she preferred to stand on the side of the angels."

  Cracking a smile, Janus turned his attention to the turkey. "Sergeant Bogdanovic may have inherited his passion, but it's too bad he hasn't your gift for quiet self-righteousness."

  Goldstein looked admiringly and with welling affection toward Bogdanovic. 'John's a good man. If I could get him reading more detective novels, he'd be even better. He's yet to grasp the truth that being a homicide cop isn't just a job. It's an art."

  "To quote the scripture according to Wolfe, 'Competence is so rare that it is a temptation to cling to it when we find it.'

  As A WAITER served sherbet and sponge cake and Bogdanovic's intense brown eyes were directed not at the dessert but toward the head table, Maggie Dane leaned close. "Relax, Sergeant. No one is going to attack your boss."

  "Famous last words. Mrs. Lincoln: 'Come on, Abe, a night at the theater will do you good.' President Kennedy to the Secret Service: 'They love me in Dallas. Take the bubbletop off the limo.' Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis: 'Let's step out on the balcony for a little fresh air.' John Lennon to Yoko Ono outside the Dakota: 'The kid only wants my autograph.' "

  With a little laugh that was a gust of warmth on his cheek, she startled him with a feathery kiss. "You are a gem. How did Harvey find you?"

  Picking up a dessert spoon, he replied, "It was through the police department magazine Spring 3100, named after what used to be the department phone number. It had an article saying that the chief of detectives was looking for a man to be his assistant. I tossed my name in the hopper. Weeks went by. I assumed he'd found his man. Then I was called in for an interview. This consisted primarily of a lecture on the value of reading detective stories for real-life police. He never actually came right out and said I'd gotten the job. I found out after I'd left the office when his executive assistant asked me if I'd be needing anything special in the way of furnishings for my office. How did Wolfe find Archie Goodwin?"

  "Unlike Dr. Watson, who wrote about how he and Sherlock Holmes came to meet, Archie never said, except to indicate that he'd been working for someone else and Wolfe was impressed with the work. Like you, Archie's duties included bodyguard." "Did he ever save Wolfe's life?"

  "Many times. This included smacking a Cuban woman who had revenge on her mind. She'd smuggled a dagger into Wolfe's office in a sock."

  "How sweet of her. Good for Archie."

  "Exactly what would you do were someone to attempt such a thing this evening?" "Whatever I had to."

  "Even at the risk of injuring an innocent bystander?" "Absolutely."

  "Have you ever had to jump in to save his life?"

  "Thankfully, no," he said, looking toward the head table as Wiggins left it to stand at the podium.

  Holding a glass of white wine, Wggins said, "It's my pleasure to introduce the distinguished Wolfie who is to offer the toast to the genius whose life and legacy we salute this evening. The next toast will be given by none other than someone who is so much like both the author and the character he created. Namely, myself'

  With a grin of delight he basked in a chorus of groans, boos, and catcalls.

  "No, my friends, it's quite true. Like Nero Wolfe, I am-" Goldstein blared, "Fat."

  With feigned indignation, Wiggins turned and wagged a thick finger at him. "I heard that, Chief!"

  Goldstein winked. "I intended you to."

  "As I was about to say before being so rudely interrupted," Wiggins continued, "like Nero Wolfe, I am a genius." The room hissed.

  "As to my commonalities with the venerated author," he went on undaunted, "I am mad about books, food, music, people who work, and heated arguments. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, closed minds, loud noises, and oily people."

  Bogdanovic whispered to Dane, "Then what the hell is Janus doing here?"

  "That's why I have taken unto myself," Wiggins proceeded, "the honor of standing here and asking you to rise and join with me in lifting a glass of cheer in grateful tribute to the creator of Nero Wolfe, et al., the one and only Rex Todhunter Stout."

  As one voice, the audience invoked the hallowed name.

  Putting aside his drink, Wiggins began his introduction of Goldstein by talking rapturously of how the proprietor of the Usual Suspects bookstore himself had been considered a suspect in two recent sensational murder investigations. He continued, "That I immediately ranked high on the list of possible murderers and found myself eliminated much too quickly was due entirely to the efforts of a brilliant homicide investigator. He is a man I am certain Nero Wolfe would have hired in an instant and thoroughly enjoyed working with. And I am thrilled that Detective Sgt. John Bogdanovic is with us this evening!"

  Lowering his head and trying to sink from view, Bogdanovic let out a throaty groan.

&n
bsp; With hands clapping like flippers of a trained seal, Wiggins scolded, "Don't be shy, Sergeant B. Stand up and take a bow!"

  STILL SAVORING THE amusement of Bogdanovic's embarrassed look at being forced by Wiggins to stand up and accept public acclaim, Goldstein realized with a start that Wiggins now spoke of him.

  "In Chief of Detectives Harvey Goldstein," he said, "this grand and beloved city of ours has for nearly twenty years had in its service a man with utmost dedication to leading such stalwart sleuths as Detective Bogdanovic in a relentless struggle against crime, especially the most fascinating one of all...murder. But he and his intrepid assistant have not come here tonight to solve a case, unless one of you has homicide on the mind. If you do have a plan, I caution you against acting it out. The chief is not here to solve a crime, but to lead us in a toast to the woman who has graciously accepted our invitation to represent Miss Lily Rowan and to present the Nero Wolfe Award. Therefore, with great pleasure and without further ado, I give you Chief Goldstein."

  With balding head barely visible above the podium, he said, "Except in the category of beauty, I detect nothing of Lily Rowan in the woman who represents her here this evening. Lily is lazy. Very lazy. She is, to use Nero Wolfe's adjectives, 'rich, intemperate, and notorious.' She once lived at the Ritz and now owns a posh penthouse on an exclusive block of East Sixty-third Street with a Kashan carpet that set her back fourteen thousand dollars. She spends summers at her place near Katonah and owns a ranch in Montana. But she doesn't have a clue as to how to get somebody indicted nor how to try capital cases, whereas in that department the woman I am honored to toast in her role of Lily Rowan is without par."

  Beaming as he stood beside Dane with a glass of club soda in his hand, Bogdanovic said softly, "Here's to you, Maggie."

  When the toasters resumed seats, she rose. "As Lily Rowan, I thank you from the bottom of my lazy, rich, intemperate, and notorious heart. As myself, I simply can't avoid comparing this evening to one in the Wolfe case entitled 'The Silent Speaker.' "

  Her eyes turned down to Bogdanovic.

  "For benefit of Chief Goldstein's aide-de-camp," she said, lighdy touching his shoulder, "who informed me during the meal that regarding Nero Wolfe he is an ignoramus . . ."

  Titters of amusement rippled around the room.

  "For Sergeant Bogdanovic's enlightenment, then," she went on, looking round the room, "in 'The Silent Speaker' Cheney Boone had been invited to make the main speech at a dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. Of the fourteen hundred guests, a hundred were invited to a private reception. To go over notes for the speech, Boone left the group to shut himself up in a small room off the stage. It was there that Alger Kates would discover him dead on the floor. Murdered."

  With a sidelong look, she saw Janus clutch his throat as if he were straining for breath, then pitch forward so that his head struck the table with a thud. Amid gasps of alarm, he jerked upright with a broadening grin and bellowed in a feigned western drawl. "I'se here to git my award and no damn murderer's gonna keep me from it. So git on with it, darlin'. Time's a wastin'."

  "Theo, I can't imagine who'd wish to kill you," she replied with a litde laugh. "Except everyone who saw you at work on TV in a certain recent murder trial."

  Shoulders twitching with laughter, Janus grumbled, "The verdict's in, Maggie, and you cannot try the case over. Or file an appeal. Dem's da rules."

  "Indeed they are, Theo. And nobody wants to change them. I thank God that ours is a system that believes it is better that a thousand guilty men go free than an innocent one go off to prison."

  A THUNDERCLAP OF applause and a rain of cheers left no doubt that the Wolfe Pack wholeheartedly agreed with Maggie Dane and that nothing Theodore Janus might say during his speech could change their minds. They had not gathered to honor him for his work as America's most famous defense lawyer. It was because he had compiled an encyclopedia that he clutched their Nero Wolfe Award, in the form of a small bust of the immense detective they so revered and who in their minds and hearts existed not in the imagination of Rex Stout and his readers but actually, along with Archie Goodwin and the others, in an elegant brownstone somewhere on West Thirty-fifth Street.

  Taking Dane's arm as they followed Goldstein and Wiggins into a more intimate room for a private reception arranged by Janus for members of the steering committee, Bogdanovic said, "I don't want to disillusion you, Maggie, but I worked for a time in the Tenth Precinct, which covers West Thirty-fifth Street. There are no residences. It's all industrial property."

  'Just because you stayed awake on Christmas Eve and never saw a bearded fat man in a red suit doesn't mean there's no Santa Claus, Detective."

  "Right. And if I staked out Baker Street in London and didn't see a tall guy in a cape and fore-and-aft hat would not mean Sherlock Holmes isn't living there."

  She let go of his hand and came to an abrupt halt. "Well of course he's not! He's old, retired, and keeping bees in Sussex."

  "What about Nero Wolfe? He must be pretty long in the tooth by now, too. What has he retired to keep?"

  "Same as he kept when he was working cases," she answered as she walked on. "Orchids!"

  Catching up with her, Bogdanovic slowly shook his head. "Do any of the detectives in all those books you and Goldstein never cease reading ever die?"

  "Hercule Poirot passed away in 1975. His obituary ran on the front page of the New York Times. Since no obit has appeared for Holmes or Wolfe, they are obviously alive and well."

  Entering the room, its atmosphere already suffused with the pungent aroma of cigars, Bogdanovic found Janus standing at the bar in the center. Holding a box of them open for all takers as Bogdanovic approached, he said, "I know Cuban cigars are banned in America, Detective, but have one anyway."

  "Thanks, but no thanks."

  "What a stalwart defender of the law you are! Well, if I am to be arrested for possession of contraband, so be it. If a genuine Cohiba isn't worth going to jail for, what is?" Offering the box to Dane, he said with a smile, "How about you? More and more women are smoking them nowadays, especially in Hollywood. They call it 'cigar chic' "

  "You know me, Theo. I've never been interested in keeping up with the latest vogue."

  "And you never objected to my smoking cigars, either. Thank God you weren't like the Maggie in Rudyard Kipling's poem. As I recall, it's called 'The Betrothed' and is about a man who's having second thoughts about marrying a gal named Maggie who's given him an ultimatum to choose between herself and his cigars. Part of it goes:

  Open the old cigar box,—let me consider anew,— Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

  A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

  And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke."

  Bogdanovic grunted and said, "Maggie, if you'd care to kill him right now, I'd be delighted to testify on your behalf that it was justifiable homicide."

  "Don't worry, John," she said, lightly kissing Janus on the cheek. "If I wanted Theo dead, he'd have been pushing up daisies long ago."

  "Since you won't take my cigars," said Janus, "I hope you'll enjoy the line cognac I'm providing. It's not everyday that I'm given the Nero Wolfe Award, made all the sweeter because it came from the hands of the second-best lawyer in the country."

  A moment later as she sipped brandy, Bogdanovic stared at Janus as he distributed more cigars. "Look at him," he said. "How can you put up with that condescending snob? Second-best. Meaning he's the top."

  "If he isn't, please tell me who is."

  "Maybe I should arrest him for possession of contraband."

  "If you do so," she said, surprising him by giggling like a schoolgirl, "you'll be made to look the fool."

  "Really? How so? Cuban cigars have been banned in the United States since the 1960s."

  "They're not Cuban. It's an old scam of Theo's. Only the box and the bands are Cuban. The real Havanas are kept in a special humidor in a locked room
at his ranch upstate and when he travels in a box in the glove compartment of his Rolls-Royce, from which he takes what he needs and transfers them to a leather pocket case."

  "What a shyster! No wonder he gets along so well with the top mugs in the mob. Birds of a feather."

  "Mark Twain didn't hang around with gangsters, but he did the same thing once. He had friends who constantly accused him of smoking the worst cigars in the world. One of them was notorious for smoking only costly and elegant cigars. So one day Twain went to his house when no one was looking and took some of the man's choicest. He removed the labels and put the cigars into a box of his own stogies, then passed them out to those friends at dinner. After they'd gone he found the cigars on the lawn, only partially smoked, where the snobs had tossed them away. The next day the person he'd stolen them from told him that someday he was likely to get shot for giving people such awful cigars."

  "But Janus isn't making a point, is he? He's perpetrating a fraud on people who just gave him an award, and in my book that makes him as low as a snake's bellybutton. Well, snakes have been known to get their heads bashed in. Or swallowed by bigger ones."

  "They can also be murder weapons, as in Fer-de-Lance, Nero Wolfe's first recorded case."

  "I haven't read it."

  "A fer-de-lance is a snake."

  "There was also a deadly snake in the Sherlock Holmes case that Dr. Watson called 'The Speckled Band.' "

  Goldstein's voice intruded. "It was a swamp adder, trained to climb a bell rope."

  Turning to Goldstein, Bogdanovic blurted, "A trained snake?"

  "It answered to a whistle," said Dane, grinning.

  "Unfortunately for Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran," said Goldstein, holding a half-smoked Janus cigar, "it ignored common wisdom about never biting the hand that feeds you and sank its fangs into its owner and trainer. Dare I ask you what's prompted this discussion of snakes?"

  Dane answered, "Your assistant thinks Theo Janus is one."