When I was in my own room on the third floor, the first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was to go into the bathroom and remove the towel bar from the wall. It’s a hollow stainless steel bar, and there was a little plastic vial in it that contained several dollars’ worth of reasonably good grass. I poured the grass in the toilet and flushed, rinsed out the vial, and tossed it out the window. Then I went through the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t find anything to worry about except for a few codeine pills that my doctor had prescribed for a sinus headache. I thought about it and decided to hell with them, and I flushed them away, too. That left nothing but aspirin and Dristan, and I didn’t think the cops would hassle me much for either of those. I put the towel bar back and washed my hands.
I looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like the way I was dressed. I put on a fresh shirt and a pair of slacks that didn’t need pressing too badly. I traded in my loafers for my black dress shoes.
Then I went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall. I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number I know best.
Haig answered the telephone himself for a change. We talked for a few minutes. Mostly I talked and he listened, and then he made a couple of suggestions, and I hung up the phone and went off to discover the body.
I guess I’ll have to tell you something about Leo Haig.
The place to start, I suppose, is how I happen to be working for him. I had been looking for a job for a while, and things had not been going particularly well. I got work from time to time, washing dishes or bussing tables or delivering messages and parcels, but none of these positions amounted to what you might call A Job With A Future, which is what I have always been seeking, though in a sort of inept way.
My problem, really, was that I wasn’t qualified for anything too dynamic. My education stopped a couple of months before graduation from Upper Valley Preparatory Academy, which is to say that I haven’t even got a high school diploma, for Pete’s sake. And my previous work experience — well, when you tell a prospective employer that you have been an assistant to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, a termite salesman, a fruit picker, and a deputy sheriff in a whorehouse in South Carolina, well, what usually happens is his eyes glaze and he points at the door a lot.
(I don’t want to go into all this ancient history now, really, but if you’re interested you could read about it. My first two books, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, pretty well cover the territory. I don’t know that they’re much good, but you could read them for background information or something. Assuming you care.)
Anyway, I was living in New York and doing the hand-to-mouth number and reading the want ads in The Times, and there were loads of opportunities to earn $40 a week if you had a doctorate in chemical engineering or something like that, but not much if you didn’t. Then I ran into an ad that went something like this:
RESOURCEFUL YOUTH wanted to assist detective. Low pay, long hours, hard work, demanding employer. Journalistic experience will be given special consideration. Familiarity with tropical fish helpful but not absolutely necessary. An excellent opportunity for one man in a million...
I didn’t know if I was one man in a million, but it was certainly one advertisement in a million, and nothing could have kept me from answering it. I called the number listed in the ad and answered a few questions over the phone. He gave me an address and I went to it, and at first I thought the whole thing was someone’s idea of a joke, because the building was obviously a whorehouse. But it turned out that only the lower two floors were a whorehouse. The upper two floors were the offices and living quarters of Leo Haig.
He wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know exactly what I expected, but whatever it might have been, he wasn’t it. He’s about five-two and very round. It’s not that he’s terribly heavy, just that the combination of his height and girth makes him look something like a basketball. He has a head of wiry black hair and a pointed goatee with a few gray hairs in it. That beard is very important to him. I’ve never seen it when it was not trimmed and groomed to perfection. He touches it a lot, smoothing and shaping it. He says it’s an aid to thought.
I spent three hours with him that first day, and at the end of the three hours I had a job. He spent the first hour pumping me, the second showing off his tropical fish, and the final hour talking about everything in the world, himself included. I went out of there with a lot more knowledge than I had brought with me, A Job With A Future, and a whole lot of uncertainty about the man I was working for. He was either a genius or a lunatic and I couldn’t make up my mind which.
I still haven’t got it all worked out. I mean, maybe the two are not mutually exclusive. Maybe he’s a genius and a lunatic.
The thing is, the main reason I got the job was that I had had two books published. You may wonder what this has to do with being the assistant of a private detective. It’s very simple, really. Leo Haig isn’t content with being the world’s greatest detective. He wants the world to know it.
“There are a handful of detectives whose names are household words,” he told me. “Sherlock Holmes. Nero Wolfe. Their brilliance alone would not have guaranteed them fame. It took the efforts of other men to bring their deeds to public attention. Holmes had his Watson. Wolfe has his Archie Goodwin. If a detective is to make the big time, a trustworthy associate with literary talent is as much a prerequisite as a personality quirk and an eccentric hobby.”
Here’s something I have to explain to you if you are going to understand Leo Haig at all.
He believes Nero Wolfe exists.
He really believes this. He believes Wolfe exists in the brownstone, with the orchids and Theodore and Fritz and all the rest of it, and Archie Goodwin assists him and writes up the cases and publishes them under the pen name of Rex Stout.
“The most telling piece of evidence, Chip. Consider that nom de plume, if you will. And of course it’s just that; no one was ever born with so contrived a name as Rex Stout. But let us examine it. Rex is the Latin for king, of course. As in Oedipus Rex. And Stout means, well, fat. Thus we have what? A fat king — and could one ask for a more perfect appellation to hang upon such an extraordinary example of corpulence and majesty as Nero Wolfe?”
Haig hasn’t always been a detective. Actually he’s only been a detective about a year longer than I’ve been an assistant detective. Until that time he lived in a two-room apartment in the Bronx and raised tropical fish to sell to local pet shops. This may strike you as a hard way to make a living. You’d be right. Most tropical fish are pretty inexpensive when you buy them from the pet shop, and even that price has to be three or four times what the shopkeeper pays for them, because he has to worry about a certain percentage of them dying before he can get them sold. Haig had developed a particularly good strain of velvet swordtails — the color was deeper than usual, or something — and he had a ready market for most of the other fish he raised as well, but he was not getting rich this way.
The way he got rich took relatively little effort on his part. His uncle died and left him $128,000.
As you can probably imagine, that made quite a difference in his life. Because all of a sudden he didn’t have to run around New York with plastic bags full of little fishes for sale. He could do what he had always dreamed of doing. He could become the World’s Greatest Detective.