“Interesting. Had there been bad feelings between Ott and Billings?”
“No more than the usual editor-agent friction, at least not as far as I know. Anyway, from what I hear, Billings lashed back and called Frank a whiner and a second-rate agent. That led Frank to say something else, I’m not sure what, and the upshot was that they started scuffling. Billings, who’s at least twenty years younger and twenty pounds heavier, threw one punch — decked Frank, right there in the bar.”
“Was Ott hurt?”
“Mainly his pride. The guy who called me is an editor with another house whom I’ve known for years. He was sitting at the bar and saw the whole silly mess. He said Frank ended up with an ugly bruise on his cheek, and his wife was crying and swearing at Keith — she let loose with a dandy string of those words that give movies the PG rating. The bartender and a couple of patrons broke things up, and as far as my source knows, no charges got filed.”
“You literary types certainly live exciting, rough-and-tumble lives,” I said. “It’s a wonder anybody finds the time to get books written, edited, and published.”
“Go ahead, rub it in,” Vinson responded, not angrily, but in a weary voice.
“Do you read any particular significance into what happened last night?” I asked.
“I’ve been sitting here musing ever since I got the call. Honestly, I still have trouble believing either of them could be a killer. I haven’t talked to them and don’t plan to, but I think what occurred in the restaurant last night was caused by a combination of liquor and the tension of being close to somebody who died violently. Charles’s death is all anybody in our business is talking about these days, including people who never even met him.”
I thanked Vinson for his time and hung up, turning to face Wolfe. “Keith Billings and Franklin Ott got into a fistfight in a Midtown restaurant last night,” I told him. “Billings won on a TKO.”
He looked up and frowned. “Archie, in this house, messenger is not, and never will be, a verb.”
Nineteen
After Wolfe had pointed out my latest grammatical faux pas, I filled him in on the Billings-Ott bout, as described by Vinson. He made a face, and after I had finished, he directed me to visit both participants. “Should I call first?” I asked after we had gone over the ground Wolfe wanted covered with each of them.
“No. I am aware that you have plans for this evening; tomorrow is soon enough.”
“It is also Saturday, which means I’ll have to catch them at home.”
“Do so,” he replied, returning to the onerous task of reading Childress’s book. The plans Wolfe referred to were a dinner date I had with Lily Rowan at Rusterman’s, which dishes up the best meals in Manhattan outside of the brownstone. It was founded and operated for many years by Wolfe’s best friend, Marko Vukcic, and after Marko was murdered, Wolfe served for a time as executor of the estate, dining there at least monthly and dropping in once or twice a week, unannounced, to check on the kitchen and raise hell if the staff wasn’t maintaining the standards for which the eatery had become famed. On the rare occasions when Wolfe dines out today, Rusterman’s is still the place — the only place.
Lily ordered the tournedos Beauharnais and I had the squabs à la Moscovite, and we both showed our approval of the artistry of Felix, the chef and current owner of the establishment, by cleaning our plates before indulging ourselves with the soufflé Armenonville.
“You seem a mite preoccupied this evening, Escamillo,” Lily said as she eyed me over a cup of steaming espresso, using the nickname she had tagged me with when we first met and I had made the acquaintance of an agitated bull in a pasture.[1]
“Just musing idly about my agenda for the morrow,” I told her. “I need to see a couple of guys who got into a bare-knuckle boxing match in the bar of a restaurant last night.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You do lead the most interesting life.”
“Funny, that’s approximately what I told someone else earlier today.” I went on to give her a capsule history of the case and all the players.
“Here’s my theory,” Lily purred. “They all conspired to kill him, and they drew lots as to which one would actually pull the trigger. From the way you describe this Childress person, he can’t possibly have had any friends — not even Vinson.”
“Surely you are not suggesting that our client himself is a murderer?”
“Why not? I seem to recall that it’s happened to Nero Wolfe before.”
“Only rarely. Vinson isn’t so stupid to try something like that. Besides, he had nothing to gain that I can see by killing Childress.”
She showed me her pearly whites — and they are white. “Okay, scratch him. But I still say all the others are in it together.”
“So noted. I’ll pass your theory along to the man who signs my checks,” I promised. And I did, the next day. He was not impressed.
When I got home, the office was dark, meaning of course that Wolfe had turned in. There were no messages on my desk, and I decided to call it a day myself when I spotted Death in the North Meadow on one corner of Wolfe’s desk, where he always places a book immediately after he completes it. I figured, what the hell, I should read at least some of Childress’s work myself. I already knew what Wolfe thought of the guy’s prose, but somewhere in my growing-up process, I fell into the habit of forming my own opinions. The problem is, I’ve never gotten a crumb’s worth of satisfaction out of a novel; to me, they just aren’t alive. Give me the newspaper any day.
I took the book upstairs, and I waded through several chapters before turning in. It did nothing to change my mind about fiction in general and detective stories in particular. Sergeant Orville Barnstable was too quirky for my tastes, and I qualify as an expert: After all, I live under the same roof with a world-class eccentric, regardless of how anyone defines the word.
For starters, Barnstable turned out to be an unrelenting bumpkin, even for a cop in a semirural setting. By the fourth chapter, I’d lost track of the number of “gol-durns” and “aw-shuckses” that had escaped the Bull Durham-stained lips of this supposedly lovable curmudgeon, to say nothing of his habits of spouting homespun proverbs (“The early bird gets Aunt Maude’s mince pie and wishes he hadn’t” and “Never plow the same field twice unless you fell asleep at the wheel of the tractor the first time”) and consulting his gold pocketwatch with the steam locomotive etched on the back every other chapter. His “solid, stolid, sober” housekeeper-cook, the formidable Edna Louise Rasmussen, nagged him so incessantly and so stridently that any jury in a real-world courtroom would have let good ol’ Barnstable off with a justifiable homicide verdict if he’d taken it into his head to silence her forever with his trusty Smith & Wesson.
As far as the story line went — what there was of it — I had fingered the murderer correctly by page forty-six, as a peek at the preposterous and contrived climax later confirmed. I solved the thing not because I’m so clever, but because Childress’s plot was as transparent as a used-car salesman’s grin. When I told Wolfe the next day that I, too, had sampled Childress’s prose, he scowled and turned back to his crossword puzzle. The man doesn’t know true sacrifice when he encounters it.
By the time I did talk to Wolfe that Saturday, I already had paid visits to Ott and Billings. Both were listed in the Manhattan directory, and they lived about six blocks apart on the Upper East Side, which was my good fortune.