Nearly Nero Read online

  Claudius Lyon is obsessed with the writings of Rex Stout, or more particularly those of Archie Goodwin, who Stout represented as literary agent until Stout’s death. Goodwin recorded the cases he’d helped solve for his employer, Nero Wolfe, a fat lethargic genius who grows orchids on the roof of his New York City brownstone, drinks beer by the bucket, eats tons of gourmet food prepared by Fritz, his Swiss chef and major-domo, and makes expenses by unraveling complex mysteries put to him by desperate clients, many of them well-heeled. Wolfe rarely leaves home and pays Goodwin to perform as his legman and general factotum.

  To a fat little boy growing up in Brooklyn, Nero Wolfe was the nuts. Lyon loved to read mysteries, but he knew he’d never have the energy to emulate Sherlock Holmes, or the physique to withstand and deliver beatings a la Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or the good looks to seduce pertinent information out of swoony female suspects like the Saint. Wolfe’s obesity and sedentary habits, however, suited Lyon right down to his wide bottom.

  Some weeks before we met, Lyon had bought the townhouse, had it retrofitted to resemble Wolfe’s sanctum, and changed his name legally to echo his hero’s; Claudius, like Nero, was a lesser Roman emperor, and he felt he’d improved on the original by choosing a surname inspired by a predator more closely associated with the circuses of Rome. I haven’t asked him what name he’d gone by before that. The bureaucrat who sends his checks had been wised up, he himself hasn’t seen fit to volunteer anything, and while I firmly believe that the contents of another man’s wallet might as well be mine, the secrets of his past are his own. To quote Lyon: “Discretion and integrity are not solely the province of the law-abiding.”

  I might not be working for him if Arnie Woodbine and Archie Goodwin didn’t look like the same name if you squinted at it and took your eyes out of focus. He was especially pleased to learn that it’s Arnie, not Arnold, on my birth certificate; Goodwin had not been born Archibald.

  But maybe I doubt too much. The notice I’d read in the racing sheet had appeared for a week in The New York Times, Daily News, and the Brooklyn rags, and had bought only disappointment in the form of an army of errand boys whose wits were about as nimble as a lawn-roller, and one feminist who protested Lyon’s insistence on hiring a man. (Gus told me the master of the house hid in the plant room until she was ejected.) I’m shorter than Goodwin, not in as good shape, and have a cauliflower ear courtesy of an early disgruntled mark that makes it more of a challenge for me to charm women; but at least I’m not a feminist, and my wit has been known to turn a respectable cartwheel from time to time.

  I’m one of his lesser compromises. To begin with, he has no tolerance for adult beverages. Even the so-called nonalcoholic beers blur his judgment, and one bottle of Wolfe’s brand of choice might send him skipping naked through Coney Island singing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” He drinks the cream soda that’s contributed in no small part to his lard, and keeps track of his consumption by counting the pop-tops in his desk, just as Wolfe does his bottle caps.

  His other substitutions are strictly personal prejudice:

  1. Wolfe’s favorite color is yellow; Lyon prefers green, and overdoes it. With all the red in the rare old office rug hand-woven by the Mandan tribe—which was wiped out by smallpox two minutes after the first European sneezed on it, hence the rarity—all those strong shades of green dotted about look like Christmas year-round;

  2. Gus is no Fritz in the kitchen, although his repertoire of kosher recipes is prodigious;

  3. The heartiest strain of orchid withers and turns black when it sees Lyon coming. Roses aren’t much less difficult. By the time I came along he’d begun cultivating tomatoes, which Gus tries his best to make work with gefilte fish.

  Lyon’s brown thumb has spared him the ordeal of replicating Theodore Horstmann, Wolfe’s resident expert on orchids. Tomatoes require no maintenance beyond watering, fertilizing, and spraying for bugs, and he spends most of his two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon on the roof watching Martin Kane, Private Eye on video. I’ve taken dozens of letters at his dictation urging all the networks to revive the series.

  So with my introduction into the household, the metamorphosis was complete, if skewed a bit. You’d think he’d have been as happy as a Wisconsin nut in a Waldorf salad. Instead he went into a tailspin that took all the manic out of his depression for weeks, and with sound reason—or anyone as sound as his reason ever got.

  No mystery.

  He’d placed another advertisement in all the regulars and the Habitual Handicapper:

  Vexed? Stymied? Up a tree? Consult Claudius Lyon,

  the world’s greatest amateur detective. No fees

  charged. Your satisfaction is my reward. Apply in

  person at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.

  The notice ran for weeks, during which time Jimmy Hoffa could have camped out on the stoop with no risk of discovery by a visitor. At Lyon’s prodding I made several trips outside to push the doorbell to make sure it was working. It rang with a kind of ha-ha the little fatty couldn’t have appreciated very much.

  “Try taking out the ‘amateur,’ ” I suggested. “People think if you don’t charge anything, that’s all your services are worth.”

  “I’m unlicensed.”

  “I didn’t say send them a bill. Just don’t say you don’t in the ad.”

  “The phrase ‘the world’s greatest detective’ would violate the truth-in-advertising laws. Nero Wolfe is still practicing, and he is demonstrably the world’s finest in his profession.”

  “Who’s afraid of Nero Wolfe?” I sang.

  “I am. When he learns I’ve counterfeited his life and livelihood, I fully expect a visit from Nathaniel Parker, his attorney. Since I do not claim to be Nero Wolfe, I cannot be accused of theft of identity, and because I accept no emolument for my efforts on behalf of my clients, I am not guilty of fraud. So long as I stay within the law, I’m a fleabite on Wolfe’s thick hide, nothing more. To stray over the line would bring doom upon this roof.” He slumped in his oversize chair, looking like Humpty Dumpty at the base of the wall.

  I let him sulk, opened the laptop on my desk, and pecked out this gem:

  Mystified? Claudius Lyon never is. See for yourself.

  No fees charged where satisfaction is not met. Apply,

  etc.

  I showed him the printout. I hadn’t seen him smile like that since I’d told him my name. Remember, I’m a first-class second-class con man; although I had to strangle my basic instincts to dupe people into thinking it might cost them when it wouldn’t. It’s a Bizarro World, that billet. I emailed the text to all the sheets, then opened the dictionary program Lyon had installed and decided emolument is a good word.

  That was Thursday. On Friday we had our first client.

  Raymond Nurls’s percentage of body fat wouldn’t have fried a lox in Gus’s skillet. In his three-button black suit he made a dividing line in the center of the guest chair, which was another of those areas where Lyon’s attempt to clone Nero Wolfe’s life had gone south. He’d hired a colorblind upholsterer, who covered it in orange. It clashed with the scarlet in the Mandan rug like our two cultures.

  Nurls was halfway through his twenties but well on his way toward crabby old age, with hair mowed to the edge of baldness and a silver chain clipped to the legs of his glasses. He steepled his hands when he spoke.

  “I assumed from your advertisement you’re either a detective or a magician. Which is it?”

  Lyon tried to lower his lids, but he was too jazzed by the prospect of work to keep them from flapping back up like cheap window shades. “I don’t pull rabbits out of hats, but I can tell you how it’s done.”

  I leaned out from my word processor, where I was taking notes. “That means he’s a detective.”

  “Very good. I’m the executive director of the American Poetical Association. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

  But unless it advertised in his complete run of Doubleday Crime Club edi
tions, Lyon hadn’t, so Nurls filled us in. The APA was an organization devoted to art patronage, specifically for poets who’d missed the memo that the road to starvation begins with the purchase of one’s first rhyming dictionary. Its purpose was to mooch money from people who’d run out of places to store it and provide grants to support promising talent until their work was ready for publication. To me it seemed cruel to jolly them along only to cut them loose just when their unsold copies were on the way back to the pulp mill, but then my mind wandered after the part about separating the rich from their wealth, so I may have missed some of the fine points. I dislike competition.

  Once a year, the association threw a dinner in a hotel in Canarsie, where the winner of the coveted Van Dusen Prize for Outstanding Poetry received a plaque and a check for $10,000. I imagine that mollified some landlord. Certainly it reawakened my interest.

  At this point Lyon swooped in for the kill. “Which was stolen, the plaque or the check?”

  “Neither.”

  Lyon yelled for cream soda.

  “I’m new to the Association,” said Nurls, when Gus left with his empty tray. “I replaced the executive director who’d been with the APA since the beginning, who retired rather suddenly to Arizona on the advice of his cardiologist. My first duty is to plan this year’s dinner, which will commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of our founding. Naturally I spent a great deal of time on the phone with my predecessor, gathering historical details to include in the program: names of charter members, events of note, etc. Naturally a complete list of past winners of the Van Dusen Prize was essential.”

  “Naturally,” Lyon and I said simultaneously. He scowled at me and I returned my attention to my screen.

  Walter Van Dusen, we learned, was a loaded industrialist jonesing for culture, who upon his death had left an endowment that made the cash incentive possible. Before that, the winners had taken home a plaque only, presumably to boil the sap from to make soup.

  “When I came aboard,” Nurls went on, “the records situation was rustic, to put it charitably. The old fellow had taken them with him, for reasons of his own; I picture a shabby notebook in his personal shorthand. I rang him up in Phoenix, and he read off the winners’ names and contact information where it existed. I thought it would be a grand gesture to invite as many of them as were available to attend the dinner as guests of the Association.”

  He related the tragic circumstances: Of twenty-four former winning poets, eleven could not be located, six had died from natural causes, three had committed suicide, and two weren’t interested; one, over the phone, had been emphatic on the subject to the point of questioning the details of Raymond Nurls’s ancestry. Of the pair remaining, one was too elderly to make the trip. The last was willing, but required mileage and accommodations. These the executive director agreed to provide, since the budget was flush.

  “I’m concerned chiefly with one of the names on the list,” Nurls said. “A gentleman named Noah Ward.”

  “Dead, disgruntled, or unlocatable?” Lyon asked.

  “The last. So far, I’ve been unable to learn anything about him. I Googled the name, and was able to narrow the list to three who have any connection with literary endeavor, but one is far too young—he’d have been in junior high the year Ward was honored, and our prize committee is not disposed to recognize precociousness—another, the editor of the book review page of a Baltimore literary journal, assured me he’d never written poetry and didn’t review it because, quote, ‘I wouldn’t know a grand epic from subway doggerel,’ unquote. The third, a self-published suspense writer, thought the APA had something to do with the Humane Society.” He adjusted his glasses.

  Lyon shifted his weight, evidently in sympathetic discomfort with this last piece of intelligence. Actually he was trying to burst a bubble in his gut, which he did, with spectacular results. In a belching contest I’d put every cent I’ve embezzled from him on his nose. “Why this obsession with one name on the list?”

  “Because Ward is the only one on it I’ve been unable to confirm ever existed.”

  “Ah.”

  Encouraged, the executive director steepled his hands higher. “Nary a birth certificate nor a social security number nor a school transcript nor an arrest record nor so much as a ticket for overtime parking. Really, Mr. Lyons—”

  “Lyon. I am singular, not plural.”

  “I stand corrected. It’s next to impossible, not to say impossible, to exist in today’s world without leaving a footprint of some kind on the Internet. Therefore I propose that Noah Ward is a chimera.”

  “And this is significant because—?”

  “You’re a detective. Figure it out. Whoever claimed that ten-thousand-dollar prize under a fictitious name is guilty of grand fraud.”

  “I assume you’ve ruled out the likelihood of a pseudonym.”

  “At once. The rules of the American Poetical Association expressly state that all work must be submitted under the contestant’s legal name. The provision was adopted to prevent anyone from submitting more than one work for consideration. A long lead time was established between the deadline for entry and the announcement of the winner to investigate the identities of all the contributors.”

  “Your predecessor could not enlighten you on the details?”

  Nurls jammed his glasses farther into his head. “He perished last week, in a fire that consumed his condominium, himself, and any records that might have furnished additional information. The disaster was entirely accidental,” he added, when Lyon’s eyes brightened. “The arson investigators traced it to a faulty electrical circuit.”

  His host pouted. “Unfortunate and tragic. I assume you polled the membership for reminiscences? The committee responsible for the honor springs to mind.”

  “Our membership rolls run toward an older demographic. Everyone who might have shed light upon the selection has passed. The only member I managed to reach who was present at that dinner is unreliable.” He touched his left temple.

  “Dear me. All the powers appear to be aligned against you. Is it your intention to bring legal action for the recovery of the ten thousand?”

  “It is. The Association has empowered me, upon filing formal charges, to remit fifteen percent to the party who identifies and exposes the guilty person. Expenses added, of course.” Nurls sat back a tenth of an inch, folding his hands on his spare middle.

  Lyon finished his cream soda in one long draft, this time patted back the burp, and replaced his pocket square with all the ceremony of a color guard folding the flag. “I accept the challenge, Mr. Nurls. We’ll discuss payment upon success or an admission of failure. In the latter event I will accept no remuneration.”

  I had to hand it to the little balloon. He’d managed to appear professional and hold off the wrath of the State of New York in one elegant speech. I knew him then for a liar when he said he couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat. But the bean counter in the ugly orange chair wouldn’t have taken the Holy Annunciation at face value if Gabriel had blown sixteen bars in his ear. He’d have asked for references, and followed up on them on Yahoo!

  “How do I know you can deliver? Forgive me, but all I have to go on is three lines in the Times.”

  Lyon looked at the clock. “It’s nearly lunchtime. Chicken soup, with a stock combined of livers and gizzards; free-range poultry, of course. Cheese blintzes for dessert and an acceptable Manischewitz from my cellar. Once you’ve sampled the fare of my table, you’ll be in a better position to judge my success in this profession. Will you join us?”

  Nurls declined, looking a shade green around the collar; but he was hooked. Me, too, from then on. A first-rate, second-rate grifter knows a champ when he sees one.

  “Phooey!”

  Wolfe says, “Pfui,” but his disciple can’t pronounce the labial without spraying.

  He was responding to my suggestion to access the Library of Congress website for poetical compositions copyrighted under the name Noah Ward.
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br />   “It’s futile to attempt to prove a man does not exist. It expends energy the way trying to add light to dark wastes paint, with no appreciable effect. We’ll assume as a hypothesis that Nurls is right and Ward is a phantasm.”

  “How’d you know that about paint?” I asked.

  “I investigated the phenomenon of temporary employment the summer I turned fifteen. A less than august August.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his little finger. “If a check was issued to Noah Ward, someone had to cash it. The transaction took place too far in the past for any bank to retain a record of it, even if we found the bank and its personnel were willing to cooperate. March down to the police station and inquire whether anyone using that name or something similar has ever been arrested for bunco steering.”

  “These days they just call it fraud.”

  “Indeed? Colorless. A pity.”

  “Ever’s a long way to comb back, even if I could get them to do it.”

  “Concentrate on the past seven years. I assume that’s still the statute of limitations for most crimes. A man who draws water once may be expected to return to the well the next time he thirsts. Perhaps he wasn’t so successful the second time.”

  “What if the well isn’t in Brooklyn?”

  “Start here. Unless and until he has the money in hand, a poet is unlikely to come by the travel expenses necessary to collect. My Ode on a Lycopersicon esculentum paid only in copies of the Herbivoron.”

  Before taking my leave I looked up all three unfamiliar words, identifying the Latin preferred name of the common tomato and the semimonthly newsletter issued by the Garden Fruit Council of New Jersey.

  I have cop friends. I’ve been down there often enough to strike up acquaintances and I have a good line of gab, which they like almost as much as Krispy Kreme and are apt to disregard a little thing like a nonviolent rap sheet in order to enjoy it. I cast my line and caught a big fish, although I didn’t know it at the time and would have thrown it back if I had.