Wolfe moved his head up and down a fraction of an inch, which for him is the equivalent of a vigorous nod. “Lieutenant Rowcliff has never mastered the art of interacting civilly with other human beings.” He laced his fingers over his center mound.
“And obviously he never will,” Vinson huffed. “Mr. Wolfe, book publishing has been extremely good to me. I’ve always worked hard, so I don’t apologize for whatever success I’ve attained, but I have also been well rewarded for my efforts. By most standards, I’m a wealthy man. I dislike seeing anything happen that reflects badly on the publishing business, to say nothing of my extreme dislike of violence. I know that you don’t come cheap, nor should you, given your record. But I feel confident that I can afford your rates. I want you to find out who killed Charles Childress.”
Wolfe considered him through narrowed eyes. “Sir, you say you dislike that which reflects badly upon your profession. It is likely that were Mr. Goodwin and I to undertake the investigation you propose, a Substantial amount of negative publicity would accrue to that profession, or at least to substantial segments of it. You may want to heed one of Mr. Dickens’s passages and let sleeping dogs lie.”
Vinson’s jaw dropped. “I must tell you that I’m shocked,” he snapped. “Here a murder has been committed, and you, who have solved so many killings through the years, suggest that I merely look the other way!”
“At the risk of incurring your displeasure, I remain unconvinced that a murder has been committed,” Wolfe replied evenly. “The police are not total lackwits, with the possible exception of the man you encountered at headquarters. And even Lieutenant Rowcliff is possessed of a brain, albeit one not always fully operational. You appear to be the only person of the opinion that Mr. Childress did not take his own life.”
Vinson’s aristocratic face flushed. “Not so! I should have mentioned this earlier, but I talked to Charles’s fiancée yesterday. She absolutely agrees with me that it’s inconceivable he committed suicide.”
“Indeed?”
“Her name is Debra Mitchell. A stunning woman, absolutely lovely.” Vinson stopped to take a deep breath. “They were to be married at the end of the summer, in September.”
Wolfe raised his shoulders a fraction of an inch and let them drop. “One’s betrothed would hardly be likely to concede the possibility that her suitor committed suicide. Let me approach the matter from the opposite direction: Why are the authorities so unshakable in their conviction that Mr. Childress killed himself?”
Vinson was clearly angry, but he struggled to compose himself. “Charles was subject to pronounced mood swings,” he said tensely. “I had seen him at both extremes; the highs were... well, very high, and the troughs were canyons.”
“Was he manic-depressive?”
“I’m no psychiatrist, Mr. Wolfe, so I don’t know the precise clinical definition of that affliction, although Charles certainly showed what I think of as symptoms. But suicide — absolutely not, regardless of what the police say.”
“Why did Mr. Childress possess a handgun?”
“Oh — I should have mentioned that earlier,” the publisher said apologetically. “There had been several break-ins on his block in the last year or so, one of them an armed robbery in which a man and his wife both were beaten quite badly by the intruders. Charles had a first-floor front apartment, and that kind of thing made him jittery. He mentioned three or four months ago that he had bought a pistol.”
“Did others know he had the gun?”
“I can’t answer that, although I knew — because he told me — that he kept it in a drawer in the nightstand next to his bed.”
I’ve been around Wolfe long enough to tell when his mind begins to wander, and it was straying now, undoubtedly in the direction of the cassoulet Castelnaudary that he would be demolishing before long. “Mr. Vinson, I am not yet prepared to accept a commission from you,” he said, rising. “Mr. Goodwin will inform you of my decision.”
“When?” Vinson rasped, turning in his chair to follow Wolfe’s progress out the door.
I was left to supply the answer to one very angry and frustrated editor-in-chief. “You’ll be hearing from me later today,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I know he sometimes seems rude, but then, he’s a genius, and things are bouncing around in his cranium that you and I can’t begin to fathom.” It was part of my standard “He’s-tough-to-figure-out-but-he-means-well speech.” It did not play well with Vinson.
“He sure as hell does seem rude,” he snapped, standing and squaring his shoulders. Then the lines in his face softened. “But... I’ve worked with a lot of authors who thought they were geniuses — a few actually were — and most of them kept whatever manners they possessed well hidden. I’ve made all sorts of allowances for them, and of course I’m willing to make damn near any allowance if Mr. Wolfe does go to work on this awful business. Is there anything else I should be doing to persuade him — and you, too — that Charles was murdered?”
“You don’t have to persuade me. As for Mr. Wolfe, I can’t think of anything at the moment. He’s going to have to come around to that opinion on his own, but there’s no law that says I can’t give him a push in the right direction,” I said as we headed for the front hall.
“Push away,” Vinson answered, smiling tightly. Giving me a thumbs-up, he stepped into the wind and went down the steps in search of a taxi.
Three
Wolfe considers any discussion whatever of business — or potential business — at the dining room table as bordering on heresy. There have been a handful of times when, for various reasons, I have ignored the house rules and persisted in talking about some revenue-producing venture during a meal. This, however, was not such an occasion. For the moment, I was content to get my choppers into the cassoulet Castelnaudary, which I sometimes refer to as boiled beans, although to call it that hardly does the dish justice. For the record, it’s got white beans, but also pork, carrots, mutton, onions, and a batch of other wonderful stuff that only Fritz knows for sure. Wolfe thinks he can list every ingredient, too, but I happen to have evidence — Fritz’s word — to the contrary.
Anyway, Wolfe and I ate with respectful gusto, and he held forth on the relative merits of limiting the terms of members of Congress. I can’t say that his monologue nudged me toward one camp or the other, because he was equally persuasive in his arguments on each side. When I asked where he stood, he said nothing, but the folds in his cheeks deepened, which for him is a smile.
Back in the office with our coffee, we busied ourselves — Wolfe by signing checks and correspondence I had typed from his dictation, and me by entering orchid germination records into the personal computer. We both knew I was about to raise the subject of Horace Vinson’s request.
“Well?” I said, swinging around in my chair to face Wolfe, who had picked up his latest book, Churchill, by Martin Gilbert.
“Well, what?” he replied with a glower, keeping his eyes stubbornly on the pages.
I grinned. “You just signed checks totaling slightly more than thirty-seven hundred dollars, checks that I will hand-carry to the main post office later this afternoon. Would you care to know what the impact of these checks is on the bottom line?”
“I abhor that term.”
“ ‘Bottom line’? Yes, I know you do, and I promise never to use it again in your presence if you turn loose with some instructions — instructions relating to Mr. Vinson’s visit, that is.”
Wolfe expelled a bushel of air and set his book down deliberately. “Very well. I could ignore your ululations, but you would continue to badger me until the atmosphere in this room became oppressive. Your notebook.”