“I’m sorry I didn’t notice you standing there.” She gestured me to the sofa while she sat in one of the chairs at right angles to it, smoothing the hem of her emerald-green dress. “I recognized your name, of course. You work with Nero Wolfe. Horace Vinson told me he was going to try to hire Mr. Wolfe to find out what... what really happened to Charles.” She looked down and then up at me, her golden-brown eyes shrewd. “Does your being here mean Mr. Wolfe will investigate his death?”
I nodded. “It does. Ms. Mitchell, I understand from Mr. Vinson that you agree with him that Charles Childress was murdered.”
“Of course I do!” she snapped, slicing the air with a manicured hand. “He would never have killed himself. Never! It’s too absurd to even discuss. Charles had everything to live for. His writing, our... our life together.” Her face registered more anger than sadness.
“But he did have drastic mood swings, didn’t he?”
“Of course he had mood swings. Charles was artistic, for God’s sake. But if everyone here with mood swings killed themselves, this town would be smaller than Utica.”
“Point taken. Had he been unusually depressed lately?”
“No, he had not,” she said tightly. “Oh, he was ticked off about his new contract, and I don’t blame him. Horace, whom I like very much, let Charles down badly and wouldn’t agree to much more than what he had gotten for his first Barnstable books. Charles was upset about that, and about the review that weasel had done in the Gazette.”
“I understand he also was angry with his agent and his editor at Monarch.”
“And with good reason in each case,” Debra said, her voice still tight. “As you probably are aware, they became his ex-agent and his ex-editor.”
“I am. Did Mr. Childress ever say anything to make you think that he was in danger?”
She shook her head vigorously and fingered the diamond pin on her floral print scarf. “No. In fact, Charles never seemed afraid of anything — or anyone. He was always ready to take on the world.”
“I understand that he wasn’t from New York.”
“No, although he had lived here for, oh, I don’t know, maybe twelve years. He comes — came — from some small town somewhere in Indiana. His parents are both dead. His closest relatives are a couple of aunts out there, both widowed, I think. I never met them, but I talked to one of them on the phone the other day, so did Horace; she made the arrangements to have Charles’s body shipped back home for burial.”
“Did you know he owned a gun?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Yes, he told me when he bought it — that was a couple of months ago. Some apartments on his block had been burglarized, even one in his own building, I think. Charles seemed almost proud of the fact that he’d picked it up. He grinned when he showed it to me, like a kid with a grotesque new toy. He laughed and said something macho like ‘Anybody who tries to bust in here is going to get the surprise of his life — and if he gets cute, it’ll be the end of his life, too.’ ”
“Did Mr. Childress carry any life insurance that you’re aware of?”
She made a noise that I could only describe as unladylike. “Not a chance! Charles didn’t have any use for it. He said insurance was the biggest waste of money since the building of the pyramids.”
“Do you know who the beneficiary of his estate was?”
“His aunts back in Indiana would be my guess,” she said defiantly. “It certainly wouldn’t have been me — I’m pretty well set, thanks to an uncle who helped develop a computer chip. And Charles knew I was well set. I didn’t need any of his money, if that’s what you were suggesting.”
“It wasn’t. Ms. Mitchell, do you care to nominate a murderer?”
The question stopped her cold, as it was supposed to. She studied the glass top of the coffee table, tracing circles on it with an index finger, then looked up slowly, tilting her head to one side. “Have you met Patricia Royce?” she asked quietly.
“No, but I intend to. Why?”
“Do you know anything about her?”
“I know she is a writer herself, and that she discovered Mr. Childress’s body the day of his death. I understand she was a close friend of his.”
“ ‘Friend’ has many meanings, Mr. Goodwin. It had different meanings to Charles and to Patricia.”
“Go on.”
She crossed her beautiful legs and tapped a shapely knee. “Let’s just say that Patricia expected something more out of the relationship than Charles did.” Her voice was chilly.
“Did he tell you this?”
“Huh! He didn’t have to. Mr. Goodwin, it doesn’t take someone with ESP to spot a woman on the make, and Patricia Royce was definitely on the make with Charles.”
“How did he feel about her?”
Debra rolled her eyes. “He saw her as a fellow author, someone who he could bounce ideas off, someone he could compare notes with. At that, she leaned on him for moral support a lot more than he leaned on her.”
“Did you and Childress ever discuss her feelings toward him?”
She nodded grimly. “We did. I told him I thought Patricia was in love with him, and he laughed at me. He just laughed at me! He said it was preposterous, that’s the word he used.”
“Ms. Mitchell, you’re not going to like this next question, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask it,” I told her, raising one eyebrow and giving her what Lily Rowan calls my “almost-smile.”
I got an almost-smile back. “Fire away,” she said bravely. “You’ll get a straight answer.”
“Okay. Were Charles Childress and Patricia Royce having an affair?”
She handled herself well, but then, she probably saw the pitch coming. “Mr. Goodwin, if I got outraged and said ‘no way!’ you probably would chalk it up as the natural reaction of a woman who was being cheated on, wouldn’t you?”
“I like to think I’m more enlightened than that,” I responded with a full smile.
“All right, then the answer is ‘no way!’ ” she said, not returning the smile. “Maybe it’s arrogance, but I believe I was close enough to Charles to know what he wanted in a long-term relationship, and Patricia didn’t have it. Now if you are going to ask me what ‘it’ is, we’ll have a problem, because I don’t think I can give you a definition.”
“How did Patricia Royce feel about you?”
Now she was toying with the little bronze eagle that perched on the coffee table. “Oh, she was always very polite when we ran into each other — too polite. I got the feeling that she wanted me to think she was this humble little writer from — where’s she from? — Virginia, I think it is. As you may know, she writes historical novels, mostly about the South. Charles always said they were very good, but I wouldn’t know. You couldn’t drag me kicking and screaming into a historical novel. Anyway, Patricia Royce was so damn self-effacing the few times we met that it gave me a pain. I know she never liked me. She and Charles had been friends long before I came along, and it was obvious that she deeply resented me, despite all that phony humility of hers.”
“And I gather you think she could have killed Childress?”
“You are not going to get me to respond to that,” Debra Mitchell said brusquely, giving the eagle another shove before she left it alone. “I know a little about the laws of libel and slander. Let’s just say I hope you spend some time talking to Patricia.”
I repeated that I planned to. “When did you last see Mr. Childress?”
“The night before he died. Last Monday night. We went out for dinner at a little Italian place we like on Second Avenue.”
“Did he seem particularly depressed?”
“Oh, he was kind of sour, but no more than he had been lately. Actually, dinner was my idea; I thought it might take his mind off his problems and cheer him. He’d always liked that restaurant, and we hadn’t been there for a while.”