“Goodwin, eh? Yeah, I know who you are. Have a seat,” Franklin Ott said absently, waving a hand toward three unmatched guest chairs while he studied something in a manila folder. Ott was thin all over — chest, shoulders, face, even his straw-colored hair, what little remained of it. I sat while he finished reading from the folder and tapping on the desk top with the eraser end of a gnawed yellow pencil. He shook his head, slapped the folder shut, and leaned back, cupping his hands behind his head.
“Let’s see how good I am,” he cracked with a lopsided grin. A bobbing Adam’s apple caused his polka-dotted bow tie to vibrate with every syllable. “Your boss, the famed Nero Wolfe, has been hired by somebody — I don’t know who but I can make an educated guess — to poke around into the death of Charles Childress, a death this certain somebody figures is murder, not suicide. Being the shrewd and thorough fellow that he is, Nero Wolfe knows, of course, that Childress had been on less-than-friendly terms with several people in this town, a certain literary agent among them. To steal a line from an ebullient former mayor of this great metropolis, ‘How am I doing?’ ”
“Not bad,” I said, nodding. “Anything more you want to add?”
Ott hooked his thumbs under his belt and shrugged. “No, it’s your turn to sound off. I’ve read a lot of mysteries, but I’ve never seen a live detective before. Do you come out of the hard-boiled school, or are you the urbane type?”
“Beats me, although I don’t recall that anybody’s ever called me urbane. Why don’t you take notes and tell me what you think when we’re finished? First off, how long were you Childress’s agent?”
Ott studied some of the bundled manuscripts on the opposite wall before replying. “Just about four years. He’d had somebody else, but he dropped her because he didn’t think she had enough good contacts in the publishing houses, which was true — I know the woman.”
“Were you glad to get him as a client?”
“Yeah, at the time, which doesn’t say a whole lot about my ability to read character. Charles had done a few so-so mysteries for a small publisher, although they didn’t make him much money. Horace Vinson at Monarch noticed him, though, and felt he had a lot of potential. This was not long after Darius Sawyer had died, and the shrewd Mr. Vinson wanted very badly to find a way to keep the Barnstable royalties pouring in.”
“I gather Sawyer’s books were big money-makers.”
Ott made a face and twitched his shoulders. “Yeah, they did all right, but at least part of Vinson’s strategy was that new Barnstable books would stimulate sales of the backlist, too. Backlist is the old books,” he explained. “Hell, there must be at least two dozen Barnstable books by Sawyer, maybe more, and Monarch has the rights to all of them. Makes good business sense.”
“So Childress hired you to strike a deal with Vinson, right?”
“That’s pretty much it. Charles said he’d heard good things about me, and he knew I had several authors at Monarch.”
“Was he happy with what you worked out originally?”
“Mr. Goodwin, Charles Childress was never very happy with anything or anyone, as I was to find out all too soon. He was a colossal pain in the ass at every step of the way, and if I had any brains at all, I would have dropped him right after I negotiated that first damn Barnstable contract. Now you, as a highly skilled interviewer, will no doubt ask me why I didn’t drop him. I’ll save you the effort. The answer is greed — pure, simple, unadulterated greed.”
“That hardly sets you apart from the rest of us.”
“I suppose not. I kept thinking there might be a film deal in the Childress stuff.”
“But there wasn’t?”
Ott curled his narrow lower lip. “No, and I should have realized it, but hope springs eternal. Not much of Darius Sawyer’s stuff ever got picked up by the movies or TV through the years, and I learned that wasn’t about to change. There’s not a whole lot of Hollywood interest in an eccentric Pennsylvania bachelor geezer who lives in a farmhouse and goes around spouting Ben Franklin proverbs and drinking iced tea on his way to solving murders. The homespun approach may have worked on Murder, She Wrote, but nobody — and I mean nobody — on the Left Coast had the slightest interest in turning the Barnstable stuff into a TV show or a mini-series or a movie. Lord knows, I’ve spent enough time trying to make something happen. And all I got for my efforts from Charles was a lot of bitching that I just didn’t know the right people out there.”
I nodded in sympathy. “Sounds like he was a real sweetheart to deal with.”
Ott snorted. “You don’t know the half of it. Things between us just kept getting worse. Charles never thought his first contract was big enough — that was for just one book, because Vinson wanted to see how well Charles could handle a Barnstable story before committing to more. I got him a better overall deal on the second contract, which was for two books, but he still wasn’t happy. And several months ago, when we began negotiations on another two-book Barnstable contract, Charles insisted that I ask for about eighty percent more than the previous deal. I damn near spilled a cup of coffee into my lap When he came up with that. It was an insane proposal, and I told him so. You know what he said to me? ‘You’re supposed to have so much goddamn clout with people like Vinson and Monarch. Well, prove it.’
“What could I do?” Ott complained. “I told Vinson our asking price over lunch one day, and he looked at me like I’d lost my reason. Of course he knew damn well Childress was pushing me, and he also liked Charles, although I’ll never know why. Well, we — Vinson and I — must have hashed things over for close to two hours, and the most I could get out of him was a bump of about fifteen percent over the previous contract, which I felt was fair, although I didn’t tell him that.”
“How did Childress react to the offer?”
“Hah! How do you think? Charles started screaming at me, right here in this office. The son of a bitch said I was worthless, and that he’d find himself a new agent, somebody who knew what he was doing. I told him to go ahead — that I didn’t need the grief, which was true. Hell, I’ve got plenty of writers, and losing Childress wasn’t about to break me. What really teed me off was that Charles couldn’t stand his editor, Keith Billings, and I was the one who put pressure on Vinson to sack the guy, or at least take him off Charles’s books, which he did.”
“Is Billings a poor editor?”
“I’d say so, yeah. He’s arrogant, although that hardly makes him an oddity in our business. But he’s also arbitrary and heavy-handed. He does way too much rewriting — not very skillfully, I might add. And he thinks all authors are totally incapable of taking a detached look at their own work. Well, dammit, I got him off Charles’s back, and some thanks I received for the effort.” He gave a stack of manuscripts on his desk a vicious shove.
“Then came that article of Childress’s in Book Business, right?”
“Yeah. It shouldn’t have surprised me, knowing what kind of a jerk he could be, but I’ve got to admit it was a jolt. Have you read it?”
I said I hadn’t, and he went on, his thin face reddening. “He didn’t mention me by name, but he didn’t have to. Everybody between the Village and the north end of Central Park knew who he was talking about when he wrote that, quote, ‘Too many of today’s agents are basically lazy, uninspired, and reactive.’ He went on to say some more, too, none of it much fun to read, at least for me.”
“Did you talk to Childress after the piece ran?”
“I did not,” Ott snapped. “But I did call Vinson, and I blew, I mean I really blew. I’ve always had a good relationship with Horace, but that day I took my anger out on him, in spades. Hell, I told him I was going to sue both him and Childress.”