The room took up an entire floor, with bolts of material on racks and a cutting table the size of an indoor swimming pool littered with paper patterns and pieces of fabric and big shears and thousands of pins glittering under strong overhead lights. There was a unisex changing booth behind a curtain and a platform in front of a three-way mirror where the customer du jour could stand and keep an eye on what the tailors were doing with his inseam.
“Just routine,” Musty said, introducing me to his staff. “For the insurance. Just routine.” If I was the one who’d copped the coin I’d have been diving for the fire escape the third time he said it was just routine. They all gave me the fish-eye and went on about their work while the boss showed me the locked cabinet where he kept his collection, with a little shelf built under it for spreading it out and examining it under a strong glass. There were loose coins on the shelf he said were no great shakes, mixed up with needles and other gear that had wandered away from the work area. The cabinet lock was a Taft. I could have picked it with an uncooked noodle.
He had a picture of the missing piece. The Persian king was a weak-chinned jasper with a hoop in his ear. He looked like a female impersonator.
I’d Googled him. He’d gone to war with Rome and lost, the northern barbarians had kicked his butt, and he’d managed to get the Chinese province to sue for peace because the emperor was too busy fighting off the Mongols to give him any time. He spent half his life as a hostage held for tribute and had choked to death on a fig. The way I saw it, “Axolotl the Adequate” suited him better. But his coin was worth, well, a king’s ransom.
Messassarian had three people on staff: a nephew named Norman Pears, shaped like his surname, who at middle age looked a little less like a bloodhound than his uncle, but he had thirty years to catch up; Constance Ayers, his bookkeeper, who wouldn’t do any harm to an evening gown and a good set of highlights, but whose mannish suit and mousy brown bun took her down to a seven; and Aurelius Gaglan, a master tailor, who was nearly as old as his employer but dressed better, an advertisement for the concern in a fawn flannel suit shaped to his narrow frame, with a fine head of black hair with white sidewalls.
Musty had given me the lowdown on them all the night before. He’d hesitated a bit over Miss Ayers, and when I pressed him he’d admitted she had money troubles, something to do with a deadbeat ex-husband who had left her with bills to pay.
“I have no reason to suspect her, however,” he’d added quickly. “She’s been with me for years, and her accounts always balance to the penny. If she were tempted, she could have robbed me blind, without risking so blatant a theft.”
But I know a little something about temptation and opportunity, so I saved her for dessert. I set up my interrogation in Musty’s office, a pebbled-glass cubicle in a corner out of earshot of the others if we kept our voices low. From behind a desk heaped with books of bound fabric samples, I started with Norman Pears.
“I don’t care a jot for Uncle Krekor’s little bits of metal.” He slumped in the visitor’s chair with his knees open and his little pot belly nesting between his thighs. “For one thing, I’m not into collecting anything, and for another, I’m set to inherit when he shoves off. The business isn’t much, but if you’re any sort of detective you can tell he’s never spent a nickel more on it or himself than he had to. A careful man could live comfortably on what he’s put away for the rest of his life.”
Musty had told me Pears was in his will; he was his only family. “Maybe you couldn’t wait. Does not collecting anything include debts?”
“You mean is there a shylock or a bookie in my closet? If there is, you’ll find him, if you’re any sort of detective.”
That was the second time around for that dig. I didn’t like the creep, but then I don’t have much in common with anyone who doesn’t have a shylock or a bookie in his closet. “Okey-doke. Shoo in Mr. Gaglan.”
The tailor was a gentleman, which meant he kept his opinion of my fused-not-stitched seams to himself and the expression on his face. This one collected suits, but since he got the material at cost and did his own fittings they weren’t really an extravagance. He was a widower who lived in a furnished room and said he made more money working in the shop than he needed. I wanted even more for him to be guilty than Pears based on that.
Miss Ayers couldn’t afford to collect anything. She was so high-strung I wanted to marry her myself just so I could have the pleasure of dumping her.
“I’m the most honest person in the world! I’m so honest I think everyone else is honest, too, which is why I’m in this fix.”
“What fix is that?”
“Owing more than I can ever pay. I know Mr. Messassarian told you. He has no right to share my personal troubles with a stranger.”
“If you’re so sore about it, you shouldn’t have shared them with him.”
“I needed to confide in someone, and he’s so absent-minded I never thought he’d remember we had the conversation.”
“Maybe you thought he’d forget he ever had that coin.”
She jumped up and left, making a noise like a cat on helium.
“It’s her,” I told Lyon. “When I sat her down I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, but she managed to talk me into it. If she takes the stand in her defense the judge will tack on twenty years for something they were trying next-door.”
He was pouting again. Entering the tomato room without knocking, I’d caught him peeking at the ending of The Haunted Mill when he should have been fertilizing the beefsteaks. “You’ve already implicated Norman Pears and Aurelius Gaglan. You’re no Archie Goodwin.”
“I’m glad you admit it. It’s the first step to coming clean and saying you’re not Nero Wolfe.”
“Stop being nonsensical. I’m merely pointing out that you can’t make the same dismal case against three people.”
“Maybe they’re all in it together.”
He took off his apron. It said CHEFS DO IT THREE TIMES A DAY. It was the last time he’d made me do his damn shopping. “Office hours approach. When we get there, be good enough to provide me with a complete description of the establishment.”
I took the stairs and beat him; the elevator is as reliable as Lyon is a horticulturist. He heard my report, guzzling cream soda and kicking his feet, then looked at the picture Musty had given me of the coin. He put it down and massaged his brain through his ear. Then he told me to get the tailor on the phone. I listened on the extension, wrote down some names and numbers, and dialed the first before he could give me my marching orders. That annoyed him more than my outracing the elevator, because he hated not being ahead of everyone else no matter what.
There were four, all men. 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 too, on account of that kind of thing never seems to happen 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 too good a mood to throw a tantrum over it.
I put the kibosh on 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.”