My next stop, at eleven-twenty that Saturday morning, was Billings’s place on Eighty-second. His building, a drab, nine-story gray monolith, didn’t appear to be in the same ballpark as Ott’s. As Billings had told me earlier, there was no doorman. I found the editor’s name on the directory in the unadorned, beige lobby and leaned on his buzzer. Nothing. I pushed again, waiting for a half-minute.
I was about to walk out when the intercom barked a fuzzy sound I took to be a sour and decidedly uncordial “Yes?”
“It’s Archie Goodwin,” I pronounced carefully into the speaker. I translated the response as “Whaddya want?”
“I’d like to see you for a couple of minutes,” I said.
The response was a groan, followed by a four-letter word, and then a pause. “All right, dammit, come on up,” he rasped.
Two ceiling lights were out, making the sixth-floor corridor even more dismal than it would have been. Billings’s door was ajar, and I rapped my knuckles lightly on it, causing it to swing open. The editor sat slumped on a tired sofa in the small living room, arms crossed and face pouting. “Why don’t you do like the TV commercial tells you to and phone first?” he grumped, not bothering to get to his feet.
“A gross lapse in etiquette on my part. Sorry,” I told him insincerely as I settled into the nearest chair without waiting for an invitation.
Billings maintained his seat and his pout. “Before you start in, I’ll save you some breath. Yes, I popped Frank Ott in Cowley’s night before last. No, I’m not sorry I did it. Yes, I’d been drinking. No, our argument had nothing to do with the fact that Charles Childress is dead. Okay, what’s next?”
“Thanks for helping me along. Do you often deck people in public places?”
“My, we’re hostile today, aren’t we? What I do in public places is not really any of your business, is it, Mr. Goodwin? But I’ll answer anyway. No, I am not normally given to physical violence. With Frank Ott, I am willing to make an exception, however.”
“How does it happen that Mr. Ott is so favored?”
His pout turned to a rigid smile. “We went through this drill once before, when you came to my office. Remember? As I told you then, Ott worked on Vinson to get me canned from Monarch, or at least taken off the editing of the Childress books. Even given that, I probably would have ignored him when I went into Cowley’s the other night, except that he started mouthing off, whining loud enough for the whole damn bar to hear, claiming that I had killed Charles in revenge for his part in my — how shall I term it? — departure from Monarch.
“He kept it up, so I went over to the booth where he and his wife were sitting, and I chewed on him, told him to get the hell up. He did, and I let him have it. He went down like a rock. His wife got hysterical, the lounge lizards have something to talk about for the next few weeks, and I was told to go away and stay away. End of story.” Billings clapped his hands once for emphasis and fell back against the cushions, yawning.
“You told me when we talked last week that you didn’t think Childress was murdered. Do you still feel that way?” I asked.
He let his eyes move around the cluttered room — to the bookshelves, to the two-foot-high pile of newspapers stacked in one corner, and to the television set, which rested on a stand and had a layer of dust on its screen. “It’s funny, the way things happen,” Billings said, interlacing his hands behind his head and looking at the ceiling. “If I hadn’t walked into Cowley’s Thursday night — and if I hadn’t downed a few vodkas earlier — I probably would still believe beyond any doubt that Charles the Obnoxious blew his brains out.”
“What made you change your mind?”
Billings rolled his eyes. “Oh, come off it, will you? I thought big-time private eyes were supposed to be quick on the uptake. And you work with no less than the great Nero Wolfe. Is it possible that you don’t have a clue?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“Maybe you really don’t have a clue,” Billings responded with a sneer. “Think for a moment about what happened at Cowley’s: I walk in, obviously tight, and quiet, sedate Frank Ott, who has never bothered to acknowledge me — let alone my existence — when we’ve met in public before, suddenly goes on the attack with venom, all but accusing me of pulling the trigger on Childress. He was totally out of character. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Help me along,” I said with a grin.
Billings actually laughed. “Goodwin, you need help like Saudi Arabia needs sand. Why do I feel like I’m being messed with?”
“Beats me. Do you really think Frank Ott has a strong enough motive for murder?”
“I wouldn’t have said so a few days ago, but... well, dope the thing out for yourself,” Billings said through clenched teeth. “Ott was savaged, albeit unfairly, by Childress in that diatribe in Book Business. So was I, of course, but by the time the vicious article ran — and God, was it vicious — I was already gone from Monarch and was established in a new job with a new publisher. Ott, however, did not have the luxury of changing jobs. He was entrenched in his own literary agency. Where was he going to go?”
“And you’re suggesting that he killed Childress, making it look like suicide?” I asked.
He bounced on the sofa and aimed an index finger at me, firing once. “You said it, Goodwin, I didn’t. And I won’t. But taking a detached look at the situation, one would be forced to conclude that Frank Ott’s best hope for survival as a literary agent was to dramatically take to the offensive and discredit his attacker. And what better way than to point to that attacker’s self-destruction as overwhelming evidence of a deranged and unbalanced character?”
“Assuming that you are right, why would Ott, having accomplished his mission of making a murder look like a suicide, then bait you into a fight?”
“Aha!” Billings crowed. “Why indeed? I’ll grant you that he didn’t know for sure I would be in Cowley’s Thursday night, but — and this is a big ‘but’ — anyone who knows my, shall we say, habits, knows that I stop at Cowley’s more nights than I don’t. So the odds were on his side. Now, Frank Ott already had gotten rid of Childress, but that wasn’t enough for him. He also wanted to ruin me if he could. He hated me for pointing out Charles’s many deficiencies as a writer.”
I snorted. “So he got to his feet and meekly let you punch out his lights?”
Billings stretched both arms above his head and made Vs with the fingers of each hand, in the manner of one R. M. Nixon. “Precisely! He threw out the line, and I took the bait. He goaded me, knowing I would lose my temper and do something stupid. He set himself to take the punch, which also was pretty stupid. In the midst of all this stupidity, I did one smart thing, though. I went to my bosses at Westman & Lane the morning after the episode — yesterday — and told them exactly what happened. They’re very understanding, I’m happy to report.
“And now, Mr. Goodwin, you’ll say good-bye,” Billings snarled, finally rising from the sofa to gesture me to the door. I was only too glad to leave.
Twenty
By the time I found myself on the sidewalk in front of Keith Billings’s building, lunch already was well underway in the brownstone. Rather than disturb Wolfe’s digestion by barging in at mid-meal, I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall eatery on First Avenue that dishes up the best hot turkey sandwiches in the city, a fact they proclaim in scarlet capital letters and an exclamation point on a white canvas banner six feet wide that stretches across a wall behind the counter. I straddled a stool, ordering the house specialty — what else? — along with a glass of milk, and I chewed on both the sandwich and our case.