And Be a Villain (3 page)

“We have decided,” she said, “that the only thing we can do about that is forget it as soon as possible. We have ruled it out of conversation.”

“That would be fine and sensible,” I conceded, “if you could make everyone, including the cops and the papers, obey the rule. But aside from the difficulty of shutting people up about any old kind of a murder, even a dull one, it was simply too good a show. Maybe you don’t realize how good. Your program has an eight million audience, twice a week. Your guests were a horse-race tipster and a professor of mathematics from a big university. And smack in the middle of the program one of them makes terrible noises right into the microphone, and keels over, and pretty soon he’s dead, and he got the poison right there on the broadcast, in the product of one of your sponsors.”

I darted glances at the other two and then back to the woman on the bed. “I knew I might meet any one of a dozen attitudes here, but I sure didn’t expect this one. If you don’t know, you ought to, that one like that doesn’t get ruled out of conversation, not only not in a week, but not in twenty years—not when the question is still open who provided the poison. Twenty years from now people would still be arguing about who was it, Madeline Fraser or Deborah Koppel or Bill Meadows or Nathan Traub or F. O. Savarese or Elinor Vance or Nancylee Shepherd or Tully Strong—”

The door came open and the female wrestler entered and announced in a hasty breath:

“Mr. Strong is here.”

“Send him in, Cora,” Miss Fraser told her.

I suppose I would have been struck by the contrast between Tully Strong and his name if I hadn’t known what to expect from his pictures in the papers. He looked like them in the obvious points—the rimless spectacles, the thin lips, the long neck, the hair brushed flat—but somehow in the flesh he didn’t look as dumb and vacant as the pictures. I got that much noted while he was being greeted, by the time he turned to me for the introduction.

“Mr. Strong,” Deborah Koppel told me, “is the secretary of our Sponsors’ Council.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Mr. Goodwin,” she told him, “has called with a suggestion from Nero Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe is a private detective.”

“Yes, I know.” Tully Strong smiled at me. With lips as thin as his it is often difficult to tell whether it’s a smile or a grimace, but I would have called it a smile, especially when he added, “We are both famous, aren’t we? Of course you are accustomed to the glare of the spotlight, but it is quite new to me.” He sat down. “What does Mr. Wolfe suggest?”

“He thinks Miss Fraser ought to hire him to look into the murder of Cyril Orchard.”

“Damn Cyril Orchard.” Yes, it had been a smile, for now it was a grimace, and it was quite different. “Damn him to hell!”

“That’s pretty tough,” Bill Meadows objected, “since he may be there right now.”

Strong ignored him to ask me, “Aren’t the police giving us enough trouble without deliberately hiring someone to give us more?”

“Sure they are,” I agreed, “but that’s a shortsighted view of it. The person who is really giving you trouble is the one who put the poison in the Hi-Spot. As I was explaining when you came, the trouble will go on for years unless and until he gets tapped on the shoulder. Of course the police may get him, but they’ve had it for six days now and you know how far they’ve got. The one that stops the trouble will be the one that puts it where it belongs. Do you know that Mr. Wolfe is smart or shall I go into that?”

“I had hoped,” Deborah Koppel put in, “that Mr. Wolfe’s suggestion would be something concrete. That he had a … an idea.”

“Nope.” I made it definite. “His only idea is to get paid twenty thousand dollars for ending the trouble.”

Bill Meadows let out a whistle. Deborah Koppel smiled at me. Tully Strong protested indignantly:

“Twenty thousand!”

“Not from me,” said Madeline Fraser, fully as definite as I had been. “I really must get to work on my broadcast, Mr. Goodwin.”

“Now wait a minute.” I concentrated on her. “That’s only one of my points, getting the trouble over, and not the best one. Look at it this way. You and your program have had a lot of publicity out of this, haven’t you?”

She groaned. “Publicity, my God! The man calls it publicity!”

“So it is,” I maintained, “but out of the wrong barrel. And it’s going to keep coming, still out of the wrong barrel, whether you like it or not. Again tomorrow every paper in town will have your name in a front-page headline. You can’t help that, but you can decide what the headline will say. As it stands now you know darned well what it will say. What if, instead of that, it announces that you have engaged Nero Wolfe to investigate the murder of the guest on your program because of your passionate desire to see justice done? The piece would explain the terms of the arrangement; you are to pay the expenses of the investigation—unpadded, we don’t pad expenses—and that’s all you are to pay unless Mr. Wolfe gets the murderer with evidence to convict. If he comes through you pay him a fee of twenty thousand dollars. Would that get the headline or not? What kind of publicity would it be, still out of the wrong barrel? What percentage of your audience and the general public would it persuade, not only that you and yours are innocent, but that you are a hero to sacrifice a fortune for the sake of justice? Ninety-nine and one-half per cent. Very few of them would stop to consider that both the expenses and the fee will be deductible on your income tax and, in your bracket, the actual cost to you would be around four thousand dollars, no more. In the public mind you would no longer be one of the suspects in a sensational murder case, being hunted—you would be a champion of the people,
hunting
a murderer.”

I spread out my hands. “And you would get all that, Miss Fraser, even if Mr. Wolfe had the worst flop of his career and all it cost you was expenses. Nobody could say you hadn’t tried. It’s a big bargain for you. Mr. Wolfe almost never takes a case on a contingent basis, but when he needs money he breaks rules, especially his own.”

Madeline Fraser had closed her eyes. Now she opened them again, and again her smile was just from her to me. “The way you tell it,” she said, “it certainly is a bargain.—What do you think, Debby?”

“I think I like it,” Miss Koppel said cautiously. “It would have to be discussed with the network and agencies and sponsors.”

“Mr. Goodwin.”

I turned my head. “Yes, Mr. Strong?”

Tully Strong had removed his spectacles and was blinking at me. “You understand that I am only the secretary of the Council of the sponsors of Miss Fraser’s program, and I have no real authority. But I know how they feel about this, two of them in particular, and of course it is my duty to report this conversation to them without delay, and I can tell you off the record that it is extremely probable they would prefer to accept Mr. Wolfe’s offer on their own account. For the impression on the public I think they would consider it desirable that Mr. Wolfe should be paid by them—on the terms stated by you. Still off the record, I believe this would apply especially to the makers of Hi-Spot. That’s the bottled drink the poison was put into.”

“Yeah, I know it is.” I looked around at the four faces. “I’m sort of in a hole. I hoped to close a deal with Miss Fraser before I left here, but Miss Koppel says it has to be discussed with others, and now Mr. Strong thinks the sponsors may want to take it over. The trouble is the delay. It’s already six days old, and Mr. Wolfe should get to work at once. Tonight if possible, tomorrow at the latest.”

“Not to mention,” Bill Meadows said, smiling at me, “that he has to get ahead of the cops and keep ahead if he wants to collect. It seems to me—Hello, Elinor!” He left his chair in a hurry. “How about it?”

The girl who had entered without announcement tossed him a nod and a word and came toward the bed with rapid steps. I say girl because, although according to the newspapers Elinor Vance already had under her belt a Smith diploma, a play written and nearly produced, and two years as script writer for the Madeline Fraser program, she looked as if she had at least eight years to go to reach my deadline. As she crossed to us the thought struck me how few there are who still look attractive even when they’re obviously way behind on sleep and played out to the point where they’re about ready to drop.

“I’m sorry to be so late, Lina,” she said all in a breath, “but they kept me down there all day, at the District Attorney’s office … I couldn’t make them understand … they’re terrible, those men are …”

She stopped, and her body started to shake all over.

“Goddam it,” Bill Meadows said savagely. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“I’m already getting it, Bill,” Tully Strong called from a side of the room.

“Flop here on the bed,” Miss Fraser said, getting her feet out of the way.

“It’s nearly five o’clock.” It was Miss Koppel’s quiet determined voice. “We’re going to start to work right now or I’ll phone and cancel tomorrow’s broadcast.”

I stood up, facing Madeline Fraser, looking down at her. “What about it? Can this be settled tonight?”

“I don’t see how.” She was stroking Elinor Vance’s shoulder. “With a broadcast to get up, and people to consult …”

“Then tomorrow morning?”

Tully Strong, approaching with the drink for Elinor Vance, handed it to her and then spoke to me:

“I’ll phone you tomorrow, before noon if possible.”

“Good for you,” I told him, and beat it.

W
ITHOUT AT ALL INTENDING TO, I certainly had turned it into a seller’s market.

The only development that Monday evening came not from the prospective customers, but from Inspector Cramer of Homicide, in the form of a phone call just before Fritz summoned Wolfe and me to dinner. It was nothing shattering. Cramer merely asked to speak to Wolfe, and asked him:

“Who’s paying you on the Orchard case?”

“No one,” Wolfe replied curtly.

“No? Then Goodwin drives your car up to Seventy-eighth Street just to test the tires?”

“It’s my car, Mr. Cramer, and I help to pay for the streets.”

It ended in a stalemate, and Wolfe and I moved across the hall to the dining room, to eat fried shrimps and Cape Cod clam cakes. With those items Fritz serves a sour sauce thick with mushrooms which is habit-forming.

Tuesday morning the fun began, with the first phone call arriving before Wolfe got down to the office. Of course that didn’t mean sunup, since his morning hours upstairs with Theodore and the orchids are always and forever from nine to eleven. First was Richards of the Federal Broadcasting Company. It is left to my discretion whether to buzz the plant rooms or not, and this seemed to call for it, since Richards had done us a favor the day before. When I got him through to Wolfe it appeared that what he wanted was to introduce another FBC vice-president, a Mr. Beech. What Mr. Beech wanted was to ask why the hell Wolfe hadn’t gone straight to the FBC with his suggestion about murder, though he didn’t put it that way. He was very affable. The impression I got, listening in as instructed, was that the network had had its tongue hanging out for years, waiting and hoping for an excuse to hand Wolfe a hunk of dough. Wolfe was polite to him but didn’t actually apologize.

Second was Tully Strong, the secretary of the Sponsors’ Council, and I conversed with him myself. He strongly hoped that we had made no commitment with Miss Fraser or the network or anyone else because, as he had surmised, some of the sponsors were interested and one of them was excited. That one, he told me off the record, was the Hi-Spot Company, which, since the poison had been served to the victim in a bottle of Hi-Spot, The Drink You Dream Of, would fight for its exclusive right to take Wolfe up. I told him I would refer it to Wolfe without prejudice when he came down at eleven o’clock.

Third was Lon Cohen of the
Gazette
, who said talk was going around and would I kindly remember that on Saturday he had moved heaven and earth for me to find out where Madeline Fraser was, and how did it stand right now? I bandied words with him.

Fourth was a man with a smooth, low-pitched voice who gave his name as Nathan Traub, which was one of the names that had been made familiar to the public by the newspaper stories. I knew, naturally, that he was an executive of the advertising agency which handled the accounts of three of the Fraser sponsors, since I had read the papers. He seemed to be a little confused as to just what he wanted, but I gathered that the agency felt that it would be immoral for Wolfe to close any deal with anyone concerned without getting an okay from the agency. Having met a few agency men in my travels, I thought it was nice of them not to extend it to cover any deal with anyone about anything. I told him he might hear from us later.

Fifth was Deborah Koppel. She said that Miss Fraser was going on the air in twenty minutes and had been too busy to talk with the people who must be consulted, but that she was favorably inclined toward Wolfe’s suggestion and would give us something definite before the day ended.

So by eleven o’clock, when two things happened simultaneously—Wolfe’s entering the office and my turning on the radio and tuning it to the FBC station, WPIT—it was unquestionably a seller’s market.

Throughout Madeline Fraser’s broadcast Wolfe leaned back in his chair behind his desk with his eyes shut. I sat until I got restless and then moved around, with the only interruptions a couple of phone calls. Bill Meadows was of course on with her, as her stooge and feeder, since that was his job, and the guests for the day were an eminent fashion designer and one of the Ten Best-Dressed Women. The guests were eminently lousy and Bill was nothing to write home about, but there was no getting away from it that Fraser was good. Her voice was good, her timing was good, and even when she was talking about White Birch Soap you would almost as soon leave it on as turn it off. I had listened in on her the preceding Friday for the first time, no doubt along with several million others, and again I had to hand it to her for sitting on a very hot spot without a twitch or a wriggle.

It must have been sizzling hot when she got to that place in the program where bottles of Hi-Spot were opened and poured into glasses—drinks for the two guests and Bill Meadows and herself. I don’t know who had made the decision the preceding Friday, her first broadcast after Orchard’s death, to leave that in, but if she did she had her nerve. Whoever had made the decision, it had been up to her to carry the ball, and she had sailed right through as if no bottle of Hi-Spot had ever been known even to make anyone belch, let alone utter a shrill cry, claw at the air, have convulsions, and die. Today she delivered again. There was no false note, no quiver, no slack or speedup, nothing; and I must admit that Bill handled it well too. The guests were terrible, but that was the style to which they had accustomed us.