And Be a Villain (2 page)

“The total sum involved.”

“Well … let’s see … counting air time, it’s on nearly two hundred stations … production, talent, scripts, everything … roughly, thirty thousand dollars a week.”

“Nonsense,” Wolfe said curtly.

“Why nonsense?”

“It’s monstrous. That’s over a million and a half a year.”

“No, around a million and a quarter, on account of the summer vacation.”

“Even so. I suppose Miss Fraser gets a material segment of it?”

“Quite material. Everyone knows that too. Her take is around five thousand a week, but the way she splits it with her manager, Miss Koppel, is one thing everyone doesn’t know—at least I don’t.” Richards’s voice had warmed up again. “You know, Mr. Wolfe, if you felt like doing me a little favor right back you could tell me confidentially what you want with this.”

But all he got from Wolfe was thanks, and he was gentleman enough to take them without insisting on the return favor. After Wolfe had pushed the phone away he remarked to me:

“Good heavens. Twelve hundred thousand dollars!”

I, feeling better because it was obvious what he was up to, grinned at him. “Yes, sir. You would go over big on the air. You could read poetry. By the way, if you want to hear her earn her segment, she’s on every Tuesday and Friday morning from eleven to twelve. You’d get pointers. Was that your idea?”

“No.” He was gruff. “My idea is to land a job I know how to do. Take your notebook. These instructions will be a little complicated on account of the contingencies to be provided for.”

I got my notebook from a drawer.

A
FTER THREE TRIES that Saturday at the listed Manhattan number of Madeline Fraser, with “don’t answer” as the only result, I finally resorted to Lon Cohen of the
Gazette
and he dug it out for me that both Miss Fraser and her manager, Miss Deborah Koppel, were week-ending up in Connecticut. As a citizen in good standing—anyway pretty good—my tendency was to wish the New York Police Department good luck in its contacts with crime, but I frankly hoped that Inspector Cramer and his homicide scientists wouldn’t get Scotch tape on the Orchard case before we had a chance to inspect the contents. Judging from the newspaper accounts I had read, it didn’t seem likely that Cramer was getting set to toot a trumpet, but you can never tell how much is being held back, so I was all for driving to Connecticut and horning in on the week end, but Wolfe vetoed it and told me to wait until Monday.

By noon Sunday he had finished the book of poems and was drawing pictures of horses on sheets from his memo pad, testing a theory he had run across somewhere that you can analyze a man’s character from the way he draws a horse. I had completed Forms 1040 and 1040-ES and, with checks enclosed, they had been mailed. After lunch I hung around the kitchen a while, listening to Wolfe and Fritz Brenner, the chef and household jewel, arguing whether horse mackerel is as good as Mediterranean tunny fish for
vitello tonnato
—which, as prepared by Fritz, is the finest thing on earth to do with tender young veal. When the argument began to bore me because there was no Mediterranean tunny fish to be had anyhow, I went up to the top floor, to the plant rooms that had been built on the roof, and spent a couple of hours with Theodore Horstmann on the germination records. Then, remembering that on account of a date with a lady I wouldn’t have the evening for it, I went down three flights to the office, took the newspapers for five days to my desk, and read everything they had on the Orchard case.

When I had finished I wasn’t a bit worried that Monday morning’s paper would confront me with a headline that the cops had wrapped it up.

T
HE BEST I WAS able to get on the phone was an appointment for 3:00
P.M.
, so at that hour Monday afternoon I entered the lobby of an apartment house in the upper Seventies between Madison and Park. It was the palace type, with rugs bought by the acre, but with the effect somewhat spoiled, as it so often is, by a rubber runner on the main traffic lane merely because the sidewalk was wet with rain. That’s no way to run a palace. If a rug gets a damp dirty footprint, what the hell, toss it out and roll out another one, that’s the palace spirit.

I told the distinguished-looking hallman that my name was Archie Goodwin and I was bound for Miss Fraser’s apartment. He got a slip of paper from his pocket, consulted it, nodded, and inquired:

“And? Anything else?”

I stretched my neck to bring my mouth within a foot of his ear, and whispered to him:

“Oatmeal.”

He nodded again, signaled with his hand to the elevator man, who was standing outside the door of his car fifteen paces away, and said in a cultivated voice, “Ten B.”

“Tell me,” I requested, “about this password gag, is it just since the murder trouble or has it always been so?”

He gave me an icy look and turned his back. I told the back:

“That costs you a nickel. I fully intended to give you a nickel.”

With the elevator man I decided not to speak at all. He agreed. Out at the tenth floor, I found myself in a box no bigger than the elevator, another palace trick, with a door to the left marked 10A and one to the right marked 10B. The elevator man stayed there until I had pushed the button on the latter, and the door had opened and I had entered.

The woman who had let me in, who might easily have been a female wrestling champion twenty years back, said, “Excuse me, I’m in a hurry,” and beat it on a trot. I called after her, “My name’s Goodwin!” but got no reaction.

I advanced four steps, took off my hat and coat and dropped them on a chair, and made a survey. I was in a big square sort of a hall, with doors off to the left and in the wall ahead. To the right, instead of a wall and doors, it just spread out into an enormous living room which contained at least twenty different kinds of furniture. My eye was professionally trained to take in anything from a complicated street scene to a speck on a man’s collar, and really get it, but for the job of accurately describing that room I would have charged double. Two of the outstanding items were a chrome-and-red-leather bar with stools to match and a massive old black walnut table with carved legs and edges. That should convey the tone of the place.

There was nobody in sight, but I could hear voices. I advanced to pick out a chair to sit on, saw none that I thought much of, and settled on a divan ten feet long and four feet wide, covered with green burlap. A near-by chair had pink embroidered silk. I was trying to decide what kind of a horse the person who furnished that room would draw, when company entered the square hall sector from one of the doors in the far wall—two men, one young and handsome, the other middle-aged and bald, both loaded down with photographic equipment, including a tripod.

“She’s showing her age,” the young man said.

“Age, hell,” the bald man retorted, “she’s had a murder, hasn’t she? Have you ever had a murder?” He caught sight of me and asked his companion, “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know, never saw him before.” The young man was trying to open the entrance door without dropping anything. He succeeded, and they passed through, and the door closed behind them.

In a minute another of the doors in the square hall opened and the female wrestler appeared. She came in my direction, but, reaching me, trotted on by, made for a door near a corner off to the left, opened it, and was gone.

I was beginning to feel neglected.

Ten minutes more and I decided to take the offensive. I was on my feet and had taken a couple of steps when there was another entrance, again from an inside door at the far side of the square hall, and I halted. The newcomer headed for me, not at a jerky trot but with a smooth easy flow, saying as she approached:

“Mr. Goodwin?”

I admitted it.

“I’m Deborah Koppel.” She offered her hand. “We never really catch up with ourselves around here.”

She had already given me two surprises. At first glance I had thought her eyes were small and insignificant, but when she faced me and talked I saw they were quite large, very dark, and certainly shrewd. Also, because she was short and fat, I had expected the hand I took to be pudgy and moist, but it was firm and strong though small. Her complexion was dark and her dress was black. Everything about her was either black or dark, except the gray, almost white by comparison, showing in her night-black hair.

“You told Miss Fraser on the phone,” she was saying in her high thin voice, “that you have a suggestion for her from Mr. Nero Wolfe.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s very busy. Of course she always is. I’m her manager. Would you care to tell me about it?”

“I’d tell you anything,” I declared. “But I work for Mr. Wolfe. His instructions are to tell Miss Fraser, but now, having met you, I’d like to tell her
and
you.”

She smiled. The smile was friendly, but it made her eyes look even shrewder. “Very good ad-libbing,” she said approvingly. “I wouldn’t want you to disobey your instructions. Will it take long?”

“That depends. Somewhere between five minutes and five hours.”

“By no means five hours. Please be as brief as you can. Come this way.”

She turned and started for the square hall and I followed. We went through a door, crossed a room that had a piano, a bed, and an electric refrigerator in it, which left it anybody’s guess how to name it, and on through another door into a corner room big enough to have six windows, three on one side and three on another. Every object in it, and it was anything but empty, was either pale yellow or pale blue. The wood, both the trim and the furniture, was painted blue, but other things—rugs, upholstery, curtains, bed coverlet—were divided indiscriminately between the two colors. Among the few exceptions were the bindings of the books on the shelves and the clothes of the blond young man who was seated on a chair. The woman lying on the bed kept to the scheme, with her lemon-colored house gown and her light blue slippers.

The blond young man rose and came to meet us, changing expression on the way. My first glimpse of his face had shown me a gloomy frown, but now his eyes beamed with welcome and his mouth was arranged into a smile that would have done a brush salesman proud. I suppose he did it from force of habit, but it was uncalled for because I was the one who was going to sell something.

“Mr. Goodwin,” Deborah Koppel said. “Mr. Meadows.”

“Bill Meadows. Just make it Bill, everyone does.” His handshake was out of stock but he had the muscle for it. “So you’re Archie Goodwin? This is a real pleasure! The next best thing to meeting the great Nero Wolfe himself!”

A rich contralto voice broke in:

“This is my rest period, Mr. Goodwin, and they won’t let me get up. I’m not even supposed to talk, but when the time comes that I don’t talk—!”

I stepped across to the bed, and as I took the hand Madeline Fraser offered she smiled. It wasn’t a shrewd smile like Deborah Koppel’s or a synthetic one like Bill Meadows’s, but just a smile from her to me. Her gray-green eyes didn’t give the impression that she was measuring me, though she probably was, and I sure was measuring her. She was slender but not skinny and she looked quite long, stretched out on the bed. With no makeup on it at all it was quite possible to look at her face without having to resist an impulse to look somewhere else, which was darned good for a woman certainly close to forty and probably a little past it, especially since I personally can see no point in spending eyesight on females over thirty.

“You know,” she said, “I have often been tempted—bring chairs up, Bill—to ask Nero Wolfe to be a guest on my program.”

She said it like a trained broadcaster, breaking it up so it would sound natural but arranging the inflections so that listeners of any mental age whatever would get it.

“I’m afraid,” I told her with a grin, “that he wouldn’t accept unless you ran wires to his office and broadcast from there. He never leaves home on business, and rarely for anything at all.” I lowered myself onto one of the chairs Bill had brought up, and he and Deborah Koppel took the other two.

Madeline Fraser nodded. “Yes, I know.” She had turned on her side to see me without twisting her neck, and the hip curving up under the thin yellow gown made her seem not quite so slender. “Is that just a publicity trick or does he really like it?”

“I guess both. He’s very lazy, and he’s scared to death of moving objects, especially things on wheels.”

“Wonderful! Tell me all about him.”

“Some other time, Lina,” Deborah Koppel put in. “Mr. Goodwin has a suggestion for you, and you have a broadcast tomorrow and haven’t even looked at the script.”

“My God, is it Monday already?”

“Monday and half past three,” Deborah said patiently.

The radio prima donna’s torso propped up to perpendicular as if someone had given her a violent jerk. “What’s the suggestion?” she demanded, and flopped back again.

“What made him think of it,” I said, “was something that happened to him Saturday. This great nation took him for a ride. Two rides. The Rides of March.”

“Income tax? Me too. But what—”

“That’s good!” Bill Meadows exclaimed. “Where did you get it? Has it been on the air?”

“Not that I know of. I created it yesterday morning while I was brushing my teeth.”

“We’ll give you ten bucks for it—no, wait a minute.” He turned to Deborah. “What percentage of our audience ever heard of the Ides of March?”

“One-half of one,” she said as if she were quoting a published statistic. “Cut.”

“You can have it for a dollar,” I offered generously. “Mr. Wolfe’s suggestion will cost you a lot more. Like everyone in the upper brackets, he’s broke.” My eyes were meeting the gray-green gaze of Madeline Fraser. “He suggests that you hire him to investigate the murder of Cyril Orchard.”

“Oh, Lord,” Bill Meadows protested, and brought his hands up to press the heels of his palms against his eyes. Deborah Koppel looked at him, then at Madeline Fraser, and took in air for a deep sigh. Miss Fraser shook her head, and suddenly looked older and more in need of makeup.