Nearly Nero Page 7

  “Both your uncle and yourself say that you thought he was calling emergency services. He used those words, ‘emergency services’?”

  “Of course not. That’s too much of a mouthful in an urgent situation. He was shouting, ‘Nine-one-one!’ What was I supposed to think?”

  “Liar!”

  Lyon interjected. “Mr. Knicknacker. Heinrich. What was passing between you and your bookie at the precise moment Oscar entered your office? Please try to quote the exchange as accurately as possible.”

  He stroked his goat’s whiskers. “He said, ‘Pay up. Every one of your picks lost.’ I said that was untrue.”

  “You said, quote, ‘That was untrue’?”

  “Ach, no. I see what you mean. Of course I would have said that in present tense. ‘That is untrue.’ But now that I think about it, what my actual words were, ‘No, one of them won.’ ”

  “Pardon me for belaboring this point. I’ve observed during conversation that when you become upset you revert to your native language. Yesterday, for example, when I asked who had won the argument with the bookie, you replied, ‘Du lieber Gott, who else? The bookie.’ Roughly translated, the phrase means, ‘For the love of God.’ ”

  “Ja. I mean yes. I was a very young man when I emigrated from the shadow of the wall in Berlin, and I have worked hard to assimilate. Some situations, however, are too much for my adopted language to contain.”

  “Then it is possible, even probable, that you experienced a similar—lapse—during the altercation on the telephone?”

  “I did, now that you jog my memory. When he said that every single one of my picks had lost, I said—”

  Suddenly all the color drained from his bony features. “Himmel! Can it be?”

  Lyon drained his can and burped again, this time with satisfaction. “ ‘Nein,’ you said. ‘One won.’ ”

  Heinrich Knicknacker shook his head slowly. “Not said. Shouted. I must have sounded like a maniac.”

  “Nine-one-one,” I said. “Son of a—”

  Oscar turned his head. “Uncle, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing wrong with your mind.”

  The old man’s face was grave. “Yes, there is. I allowed it to jump to an evil conclusion.” He reached across the arm of his chair and patted his nephew’s knee. Looking at our host: “Thank you, Herr Lyon. You have restored to me my flesh and blood.”

  Stoddard, sympathetic as ever to a warm family moment, exploded from his seat with an oath. “I’m going to enjoy watching the bloodsuckers drain you in court.” He stamped out.

  “Unpleasant man.” But Lyon was bouncing his heels against his chair like a fat little boy with a Popsicle.

  We had cornflakes for dinner, but even that sacrifice wasn’t enough to sour his mood. As we cleared the table—me stacking bowls and glasses and balancing them from palms to elbows, he carrying a spoon—Lyon said, “Again, Arnie, I must credit you for setting me on the right path, however unintentionally. When you referred to our magnificently efficient system of emergency public assistance by its universal telephone number, I realized the implications, particularly when the German tongue is involved. I’d consider raising your salary if you weren’t already helping yourself to the household accounts.”

  I almost dropped a hundred clams in porcelain and crystal.

  After ditching it all on the drain board in the kitchen, I followed him out into the hall, fit to express myself appropriately in high dudgeon, when a wide shadow blocked the dusky light coming in through the window in the front door.

  “When you’re through preening,” I said, “you might try considering the implications of that lawsuit. I wouldn’t put it past Nero Wolfe to fire his flunkies and serve you the papers himself.”

  “Phooey. Wolfe never leaves his house on business.”

  “But isn’t identity theft personal?”

  The doorbell rang.

  WOLFE ON THE ROOF

  “My dear young lady, you need an advice columnist, not a detective.”

  Lyon was angry; I think.

  You never can tell whether the little butterball is seriously miffed or just emulating Nero Wolfe, his role model and life’s obsession.

  Then again, it might have been disgruntlement over having to spend two hours playing with his tomatoes, which never need more than ten minutes’ attention even in crisis; orchids are another thing, but tending to them is beyond his green thumb, which was not so green as the dress shirt he wore under his apron but almost as fat as his torso.

  Too bad. If you’re going to keep a greenhouse on your roof instead of a swell patio, you reap what you sow.

  But he may just have been primping for our guest, whose Prada bag and Chanel suit indicated money, and whose blond head suggested the opportunity of my selling her the Triborough Bridge. She’d arrived unannounced, but I didn’t want to risk alienation by asking her to wait, and as anyone knows who knows even one-tenth of what Claudius Lyon knows about Wolfe, nothing is more vexing to a fat genius detective than entertaining a client in his plant rooms.

  “I cannot help you now, Miss—?”

  “Alexandra Pring.”

  “I hope to cross this plum with that beefsteak, and create a tomato that is both delectable and substantial. If you wish to consult me, you must wait until eleven o’clock, when I’ll speak with you in my office. Mr. Woodbine knows that, but has chosen to ignore the rules of this house.” He favored me with the gassy-baby’s face he thought petulant.

  The fake. He was tickled pink over having a client. The one thing he can’t pull off about his masquerade is a convincing show of pique at the chance to flash his brain before an audience. Since he’s a rotten horticulturist, and can burn a salad in the kitchen, solving mysteries is the only thing he has left.

  “But it can’t wait! I’ve lost my job, and my rent is past due. Please make an exception this one time!”

  I was batting only 500. I’m sure there are plenty of blond PhDs, but I’d sized this one up right. I flied out on the rest. In bright sunlight, the bag and suit were knockoffs; and now I was the one who was miffed.

  Lyon hid his delight under a gruff litany of made-up Latin, fingering ordinary vines while drawing her out on the reason for her visit.

  “I run errands for an eccentric millionaire in Queens,” she said. “That is, I did. He was always complaining that he couldn’t reach me because I keep forgetting to charge my cell.” She opened the phony bag and showed him a cheap no-contract phone. “I admit I’m absent-minded. I keep forgetting to pay my rent, and by the time I think about it, the money’s spent. But I’m very efficient once I’m given an errand. Mr. Quilverton must know that.”

  “Ronald Quilverton, of the Boston Quilvertons?” I perked up. There might be money in the thing after all, if she was as reliable as she claimed and Quilverton was grateful to have her back.

  “Yes. I said he’s eccentric. That’s why he lives in Queens, New York, instead of on Beacon Hill back home.”

  Lyon scowled in earnest, wiping black loam onto his apron.

  “The solution is hardly worthy of my abilities, Miss Pring. Tie a string to your finger, and remember to plug in your mobile.”

  “I’ve thought of that, of course. But how can I correct my behavior if my former employer won’t take my calls asking for a second chance?”

  “My dear young lady, you need an advice columnist, not a detective.”

  “Hear me out, please. The last time I spoke with him, I was walking down Junction. He was giving me an assignment when my phone beeped, warning me my battery had run out and the call was about to be dropped. He heard it. What I can’t figure out is why he said what he said then.”

  “If it was ‘You’re fired,’ I think I can educate you.”

  “ ‘Steak and eggs.’ ”

  “Once again?”

  “I’m quoting. Well, I lost the signal before the second s, but it was definitely ‘Steak and egg,’ and of course no one says it that way in a restaurant, even if all he w
ants is one egg. What did he mean?”

  “He was instructing you to bring him breakfast.”

  “Mr. Quilverton is a vegan. He wouldn’t touch either item with a ten-foot fork.

  “I tried calling him back from a landline, but he never answered. Maybe he had a stroke. I’d call nine-one-one, but if I’m wrong, he’d never forgive the intrusion. I’m as worried about him as I am about myself. He’s a recluse and lives alone; he may be lying on his floor, with no one to help.”

  “ ‘Steak and egg’; you’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  I was thinking the eccentric was just plain nuts when Lyon surprised me by foraging in one ear with a finger. That was his answer to Wolfe’s puckering his lips in and out, indicating he was near a solution. Either that or the food talk had him thinking about lunch.

  “Miss Pring,” he said, wiping wax onto his apron. “Did it occur to you Mr. Quilverton was imploring you not to think about a hearty morning meal, but to stay connected?”

  “Stay connect—? Oh!”

  “We’re increasingly an aural society. ‘Steak and eggs’ and ‘Stay connected,’ the latter cut off abruptly when your cell lost power, would sound identical.”

  She pouted. “But I’m still out of a job.” Then she brightened. “Perhaps—”

  “No. Bringing a woman into this household would be like—” For once, the vocabulary he’d filched from Nero Wolfe failed him.

  “Like crossing a plum with a beefsteak,” I suggested.

  WOLFE TRAP

  “Season’s greetings, Captain.”

  When you looked in the dictionary under “tough cop,” you never got as far as the picture, because Captain Stoddard of the Brooklyn Bunco Squad would tear out the page and shove it down your throat.

  So when I saw that craggy, bitter-almond face through the two-way glass in the front door of Claudius Lyon’s brownstone I knew the day could only get better from there.

  Turned out I was wrong.

  “I know you’re in there, Woodbine. That little gob of goo never leaves the place and you’re too busy bleeding him dry to go out for a pint of Old Overshoe.”

  “One moment, please.” I skedaddled to report the glad tidings to my employer.

  He was sitting in the overstuffed green chair that was too big for him behind the desk that was too big for even Nero Wolfe, his hero and role model in the office he’d copied from a photo spread on Wolfe’s place of business in Knickerbocker. I caught him reading Encyclopedia Brown before he could stash it behind a hefty copy of Crime and Punishment. The short fat faker never gave up the ruse.

  He squeaked, turned a paler shade of boiled turnip, and said, “We don’t have to let him in, do we? He doesn’t have a warrant or anything, does he?”

  “I couldn’t tell from just his face. I don’t think even a police dog like him goes around carrying them in his mouth.”

  “Tell him to go away.” He reburied his nose in his book.

  “Not me, boss. I’d sooner punch a grizzly on the snoot. He’ll just come back hungrier.”

  He set aside the literature and hopped down from the chair. “I’m in the plant rooms and can’t be disturbed.”

  “Not for another twenty minutes. He knows Wolfe’s routine as well as you.”

  “A man’s home is his castle, confound it!”

  “That’s the thing about castles. Somebody’s always storming them. Look, we’re not working on anything right now. He can’t bust us for conducting a private investigation without a license, which is his only beef with us. Let’s just swallow the hemlock and get it over with.”

  He screwed up his round baby face, but he never got quite to the point of actually bawling. “Very well. Give me a moment to prepare.”

  I left him while he was slipping Encyclopedia Brown page-ends foremost on a shelf of weighty classics he got as much use out of as a stationary bike. He never read anything but whodunits and the Vine, the monthly newsletter of the Empire State Tomato-Breeders’ Association.

  “Season’s greetings, Captain.” I opened the front door.

  It was that time of year, but no one at headquarters would dare tell him.

  Stoddard shoved past me and into the office, sneered at the framed label from a can of Chef Boyardee, the big globe that still maintained there was a Soviet Union, and the day’s display on Lyon’s desk, a dwarf tomato plant with fruit the size of buckshot. The boss flattered himself he’d developed a new subspecies, the way Wolfe is doing all the time with orchids, but it was just an undernourished specimen of cherry tomato. His idol’s botanical interests are exacting and difficult, but tomatoes practically grow themselves, giving Lyon plenty of time to goof off and read The Hot-Cha-Cha Murder Case during his daily four hours total on the roof.

  I’ll give him this much; the tyrannical cop made him as nervous as he did me, which given my arrest record is no mere qualm, but unless you were sharp enough to catch the slight tremor in his pudgy hands gripping the edge of his desk, you wouldn’t know it. He even managed to dial down his frightened treble to a decibel below a dog whistle.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Stoddard?”

  The captain, of course, never missed a sign of weakness in others, but for once kept the sadistic note from his snarling baritone.

  “Normally I’d say come clean and confess to violation of the New York State Code prohibiting snooping without a ticket on file in Albany, but I’ll leave them to another time. You’re coming with me to Manhattan.”

  Sickly green crept into Lyon’s cheeks, turning them from McIntosh into Granny Smiths. But he kept his even high pitch. “Out of the question. As you know, I never leave my house on business.”

  If anything, when our guest smiled he was even more unnerving. “Who said it was business? Never mind. It is.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, which was customary to him, he plunked himself into the pinkish-orange leather chair facing the desk; it was supposed to be red, like its model across the river, but the upholsterer was colorblind.

  “It’s my niece,” he said. “My brother’s daughter.”

  For once I was more suspicious of him than he was of us. The thought that there should be two Stoddards in existence, and that one of them had procreated, was about as easy to swallow as a tomato-butter sandwich, one of my esteemed employer’s more notorious failures.

  “Stella’s a smart cookie,” he went on. “She talked herself into a job in a successful bookstore when she was sixteen, and she’s worked there four years. Now her boss suspects her of stealing two hundred dollars from the desk in his office during a Christmas party at the store. I wouldn’t be any kind of cop if I thought anybody was above suspicion, but Stella’s got too much going on upstairs to risk her job and her freedom over a couple of hundred bucks.”

  “You are, as you say, a police officer,” Lyon said.

  “You know damn well I’m a captain.”

  “As you say.” His tone wavered between a high tremolo and a vacuum cleaner. “Why not investigate the case yourself?”

  “It’s a mystery bookshop. I don’t read the things myself; last thing I want to think about when I get home is work, and from what I hear most of them bollix up the facts, putting silencers on revolvers and such. You gobble the things up like candy, so I thought you could shed some light on the nature of the business. The money came from a customer who bought a rare book, in jacket. The owner says that’s important. Me, I throw ’em away as soon as I bring home a book.”

  “Amazing.”

  Stoddard’s normal congestion deepened a shade; but he couldn’t tell any more than I could if the chubby little sparrow was referring to the habit or the thought of the captain bringing a book into his house. I figured it was 1,000 Ways to Beat a Suspect to Death.

  “It’s got a foreign title.” He dug out a fold of ruled paper and squinted at his ballpoint scrawl. “Fer-de-Lance, first edition.”

  Lyon squeaked.

  “Thought you’d be interested. Penz
ler says it was the first book about your god.”

  “Otto Penzler?”

  “You know him?”

  “We’ve never met, but I’ve ordered some items from his shop, and we’ve spoken on the telephone.” Lyon, plainly hooked (he even forgot to be afraid of his company), shook his head. “Something’s amiss. Two hundred is far too little for a first edition of that book, which began the Nero Wolfe series, and Mr. Penzler is far too well-versed in his trade to let it go for pennies.”

  The captain looked again at his notes, rubbed his nose. “Okay, I misread my own chicken scratches. It’s a first movie edition, with pictures of the actors on the cover and stills from the film inside. That help?”

  Lyon nodded, folding his hands across his middle. The fingers just met.

  “Meet Nero Wolfe, starring Edward Arnold and Lionel Stander. They changed the book’s title at the time of release, and almost everything else inside. I have a fair copy myself, but, dear me, I never paid anything approaching two hundred dollars for it. The first, of course, would be worth thousands.”

  “So somebody got suckered.”

  “Doubtful. Penzler’s reputation is spotless.”

  “Anyway, he swears Stella was the only one who went into his office between the time he locked the money in the drawer and he discovered it was missing; she’d gone there on some errand or other. What’s got me buffaloed is how whoever did it managed to unlock the drawer, take the money, and relock it afterward. Penzler claims to have the only key, and it was on his person the entire time. Stella’s good at a lot of things, but second-story work isn’t one of them.”

  I figured if Stella lived up to half the hype she was adopted.

  Lyon actually clapped his hands. “A locked-room mystery!”

  “It was a drawer, not a room.”

  “One takes things as they come.”

  I leaned across the desk and whispered in his face.

  “It’s a trap. He’ll find some way to make you accept payment, and then he’ll have you on that practicing-without-a-license rap.”