I saw it coining the minute the little boob took Too Many Cooks down from the shelf. I just didn’t know what lunatic form it would take this time.
He kept all his first-edition Nero Wolfes, bound for him in green cloth — his favorite color — within easy reach because he never made a move without consulting the Gospel According to Archie Goodwin. He’d cracked that nut ten thousand times, but always managed to pick out something fresh to nibble on.
If you’re familiar with the series, you know Wolfe is a fat eccentric genius who solves baffling mysteries (usually of the murder sort) when he isn’t busy growing orchids or eating ritzy food prepared by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Claudius Lyon — who wasn’t born with that name but picked it up because it’s Nero Wolfe inside out, more or less — is just as fat, and eccentric enough for both of them, but as to genius — well, there’s a fine line between it and goofy. He’s also a good foot shorter, a fact he failed to consider when he bought his Wolfe-ish townhouse in Brooklyn and filled it with furniture built to his idol’s scale. As a result, the big green leather chair behind the Uruguayan fruitwood desk swallows him up when he sits in it and his teeny feet swing six inches short of the floor.
Nevertheless, he sits in it four hours every weekday, two in the morning and two in the late afternoon, because that’s what Wolfe does. The rest of the day he spends with his tomatoes in the plant room on the roof and feeding his fat face with brisket and gefilte cooked by Gus, who is regarded as the finest kosher chef in the five boroughs — regarded by Gus, anyway. I can barely stomach the stuff myself, but it’s better than what they feed you in Sing Sing, and it’s part of my salary.
Lyon isn’t nearly as busy a detective as Wolfe, which is swell by me on account of the royalties he gets from an invention of his dead father’s pays the bills. He doesn’t charge for his services anyway. He can’t, without a private investigator’s license and with Captain Stoddard chomping at the bit to bust him the minute a dollar appears in his chubby little fist for a feat of detection. Stoddard’s the meanest man in the Brooklyn P.D., an institution that never recruited anyone on the basis of genteel good manners.
Me, I’m only here because my name is Arnie Woodbine. I type ten errors a minute and the best deduction I ever made put me in the joint for the second time, but when you say the name fast it sounds kind of like Archie Goodwin, who takes notes and does the heavy lifting for Wolfe and writes about his boss’s exploits for suety little bookworms like Lyon to read.
Too Many Cooks takes the fat Manhattan genius on a rare train trip to a chefs’ convention, which, of course, leads to murder or Goodwin wouldn’t have bothered to publish the account. Wolfe never leaves his brownstone on business, but will do so for recreation if it has anything to do with orchids or haute cuisine. So this time the story gave Lyon the bright idea that he needed to do the same. How could anyone take his loony masquerade seriously if he didn’t do everything his role model did, straight down the line?
The catch was, growing orchids is beyond his abilities, and there are no tomato-growing shows because they would be as boring as his shift in the plant room, which he uses to sneak a few chapters of Trixie Belden and the Bobbsey Twins. Any quadruple amputee with the IQ of a TV weather girl can turn a tomato seed into a tomato. As for preparing food for dining, Lyon can’t make a sandwich. Those things stumped him for a while. He sat dandling his sausage-shaped legs under the big desk, pouting like a fat baby making up its mind where to throw its bowl of strained kale. Which bothered me, because without a client or a whodunit to distract him I couldn’t risk adding a zero to my pay-check with him there in the room.
This went on for an hour after he put down the book. I went out for the mail, and when I came back with his copies of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Shoots & Sprouts (“Ketchup vs. Catsup: The Controversy Escalates”), I found him foraging deep in one ear with a chunky forefinger. That gesture was his version of Wolfe pushing his lips in and out to indicate he’d untied a knotty problem after much deliberation.
“Arnie,” he said, fastidiously wiping his finger with a green silk handkerchief, “where do you stand in regard to the opera?”
“A block away. Farther if I’m driving. Why, fixing to snag a hat with horns and pigtails and waddle into the chorus?” Actually I can take the music or leave it, galloping hippos and all, but I got pinched once picking pockets in the lobby of the Met, and my mug was taped to every ticket booth in town.
“I’ve never given it much consideration myself. Goodwin hardly ever mentions the subject, so I must infer it presents no diversion to his employer.” Yeah, he talks like that. I went online so many times to figure out what he was getting at, the Internet stopped taking my calls. Goodwin, I hear, is on his third Webster’s Second. “However, one adjusts as necessary.”
I made my face discreet. He encouraged me to needle him, like you-know-who does you-know-who, but rubbing it in about botany and vittles would be doing the polka on thin ice. His pudgy kisser screwed tight and turned purple when he got sore; no sight to take to lunch.
“I’ll see what’s playing.” I sat down at my desk and turned on the monitor.
“That would be placing the conveyance in reverse order with the equine. Call my tailor.”
“You have a tailor?” He dresses good, give or take an untucked shirttail, in three-piece suits and a tie, after His Portliness, but I assumed he did his shopping in the Husky Boy section at Skinnerman’s. At the time I hadn’t been with him long enough for him to split his britches and require a replacement.
“Certainly. I’m not a cowpuncher. Krekor Messassarian, spelled the way it sounds. He’s in the Brooklyn directory.”
Again to spare me the spectacle of that angry Gerber face I refrained from pointing out that the Yellow Pages is a dandy place to look up somebody from 1993, and opened it. Messassarian wasn’t as hard to find as I’d thought; I slid my finger down that column under Clothing and Alterations until I came to a name that ran smack into the margin.
I got him right away. The heavily accented voice walked me through the pronunciation of his name and agreed to come by that evening for dinner and a first fitting.
He turned out to be an Armenian of seventy or a hundred, with bloodhound features and spectacles as thick as glass ashtrays. The badge of his profession, a length of yellow tape measure, hung around his neck. He smelled like a canvas dropcloth that had been left out on the back porch for a year. Messassarian takes too long to write, so I’ll just call him Musty.
His head bent close to his blintz to see what he was eating. I couldn’t imagine how he handled a bitty thing like a needle. Lyon said he wanted a full-dress suit with all the trimmings: white tie, silk hat, and cape with a white satin lining. If the opera scheme didn’t pan out, he could always put on the getup and argue Home Rule for Ireland with Queen Victoria. In the front room I helped out by taking Musty’s dog-eared memorandum book while he measured and recorded the dimensions, which were fantastic. The circumference was the same as the height and the inseam was my collar size. A few dozen more bagels with a shmear and a case of cream sodas and Lyon could go to the Summer Olympics as the beach volleyball.