Bloodied Ivy (18 page)

I told him that sounded good and that I’d be at his place no later than ten. I also kept calling Greenbaum at home, and finally got him on the fifth try. If Cortland’s initial reaction to me had been chilly, Greenbaum’s was positively glacial, and he never did thaw out. He said his calendar had no evening notation for September twenty-third and that he probably spent it at home with his wife.

“Would you have left at any time?” I asked.

“Mr. Goodwin, I leave the house every night,” he said, pronouncing each word deliberately. “I have a dog. His name is Alonzo, and he is a Collie. I invariably take him for a walk, and we’re never gone for less than half an hour, usually from about ten-thirty to eleven. The exercise is good for both of us. We walk all over the campus and, yes, sometimes we go through the Old Oaks—I even passed Hale on his walk once about six or eight months ago when I was with Alonzo and we said hello to each other. Did I see Hale on the night he fell into the Gash? No. Did I see anything suspicious that night? No. How do I know that? Because I surely would have remembered it the next day when I heard what happened to Hale. Now I have posed the questions you were going to ask me and I have answered them. Good evening, Mr. Goodwin.” He slammed down his receiver harder than he had to, but then maybe receiver banging is good therapy—everyone seemed to be doing it.

The other noteworthy event of Friday afternoon involved Leander Bach. Wolfe waited until just before his four o’clock session with the orchids to call, presumably giving Potter a chance to prepare Bach for the experience. I dialed the number of his office in the Pan Am Building while Wolfe picked up his receiver. Getting through the main switchboard to the executive suite was easy enough, and when a crisp female voice answered “Mr. Bach’s office,” Wolfe took over. “This is Nero Wolfe. I would like to speak to Mr. Bach. I believe Mr. Potter of Prescott University told him I would be calling.”

“May I ask what this is about?” she responded.

Wolfe frowned. “I am investigating the death of Mr. Hale Markham.”

“Hold the line please,” she said, somewhat less crisply than before.

“Yes, may I help you? I am Mr. Bach’s executive assistant.” It was another female voice, this one also crisp, but with a slight southern tinge. Wolfe took a deep breath and repeated what he had told the first line of defense. “Please hold for a moment,” she said.

The moment turned out to be thirty-five seconds. At this rate, Wolfe would be late for his elevator ride to the roof and Theodore would be working on an ulcer wondering what calamity could possibly cause a rupture in the precious schedule. Just when it looked like Wolfe was going to hang up and stomp out of the office, another voice came on the line.

“This is Bach. Mr. Wolfe?”

“Yes, sir. I had asked Mr. Potter to inform you I would be calling.”

“Haven’t heard from Keith today,” the hoarse voice responded. “No matter. I know who you are, of course. What the hell, everybody does. Through the years I’ve read about you Lord knows how many times. What’s this about an investigation into that buzzard Markham’s death? What’s to investigate?”

“There is reason to believe Mr. Markham’s fall was not accidental.”

“Eh? Well, I can guess there’s a truckload of people who’ve considered wringing Markham’s neck, but I hardly think they’d carry out the real thing. What do you want from me? I never met the man, and I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“I would like to talk to you about Mr. Markham,” Wolfe said. “I think your perspective would be helpful.”

“Even though I never met him? Oh, hell, all right, I’ll go along with this, if only to meet you. Can you come to my office Monday morning? I don’t much like talking on the phone. I’m a face-to-face guy.”

“I share your distaste for the telephone, sir. I make it a practice not to leave my home, however. Would it be possible for you to come here?”

“The reclusive genius bit, eh? I guess I’ve read about that, too. Hell, yes, I’ll come—why not? But I have a practice that you should be aware of, too, and it’s hard-and-fast: I never go anywhere to a meeting without my personal assistant, Miss Carswell. She was the one you spoke to before I came on the line. If I come to see you, she comes as well.”

“I have no objections, sir. Let us agree on a time.”

The upshot was that Bach and the indispensable Miss Carswell would come to the brownstone Sunday night at nine. That, coupled with the Saturday swing up to Prescott, effectively canceled my plans to spend the weekend with Lily at her hideaway in Dutchess County. But she’s used to cancellations from me, and she’s done some canceling herself through the years. Our relationship is the kind that calls for understanding and flexibility, and we both have lots of that, at least where the other is concerned. “I’ll try to enjoy myself up there alone,” she had told me on the phone Friday when I called to bow out. “Just remember, I may not invite you to the country again until…oh, say, next weekend.”

“I humbly accept and hereby vow to annihilate my eccentric and irascible employer if he dares to find chores for me that will conflict,” I said, sealing our date.

I was thinking about Lily and her luxurious retreat overlooking the Hudson when the town of Prescott snuck up on me. I cruised along the picture-postcard streets, following the directions Cortland had given to his residence, which turned out to be a small white frame bungalow with green shutters just a block off the main stem and not far from the police station where I had so recently been a jewel on the cushion of Prescott police hospitality. I parked at the curb and bounded up the creaking steps to his door, giving the bell a punch.

“Ah, you’re right on time, as I fully expected you would be,” he said with one of his thin smiles, squinting at the sunlight as he leaned out the front door. “I suggested taking my car when you called, but it’s only three blocks and the weather’s nice—you may want to walk it instead.”

I said I needed the exercise, so while I locked the Mercedes, Cortland went back inside for a book, then we were off down the shady streets of a town I was beginning to feel I knew. The stubby professor, this time in a corduroy sportcoat, puffed to keep up with me, and less than ten minutes later, we were on Markham’s block of Clinton, which was as quiet as the other time I’d been there. “Hale loved this house,” Cortland told me as we went up the front walk. “Said it was a haven for him from what he called the maelstrom of academe. I thought that after Lois died, he’d probably want to move out and take a smaller place, maybe an apartment, but he seemed perfectly content to stay here.”

“Did he ever entertain?” I asked as Cortland unlocked the door.

“Almost never. Oh, maybe once every two years or so he’d have a group of graduate students over in the spring for an end-of-the-term party—beer and hamburgers, that sort of thing. Nothing elaborate, mind you. But overall, Hale wasn’t much for socializing.”

“Except for Elena Moreau and Gretchen Frazier?”

Cortland’s ears turned red. “He used to escort Elena to various functions, yes, but as I told you before, he was five decades older than the Frazier girl,” he said reprovingly. “And besides, Hale would never have permitted himself to become entangled with a student.”

“It’s happened before. And after all, she
is
an attractive young scholar.”

Cortland looked at me as if I were depraved, something Lily has been convinced of for years. “We’re here,” he said, pointedly changing the subject. “Start wherever you want to and take as long as you want. If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit in the living room and read. If I get in your way, feel free to ask me to move.”

“Fair enough. Who has been in here since Markham died?”

“Only me, and the cleaning woman. She used to work twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays I think, when Hale was alive, but now, I’ve asked her to come only every other week to dust and such.”

“No realtors?”

“No.” Cortland shook his head. “Although since they’ve learned I’m executor, several have called me endeavoring to obtain the listing. I’ve temporized, though, by saying any decision on selling the place will have to wait until Christina, his niece, comes to town.”

“Has anything been moved out?”

“No, I haven’t touched a thing, other than the article I mentioned to you, the one he’d written for that magazine, which wanted to go ahead and publish it posthumously.”

“So you said. Okay, I’m going to start in his office area—that’s where I was when the police came.”

Cortland told me to be his guest, and he slouched in one of the easy chairs in the living room with his book while I went out to the sun porch–turned–office. It looked just the same as when I’d been so rudely interrupted by Nevins and Amundsen day before yesterday.

I sat in the comfortable, high-backed swivel chair and had a look at Markham’s terminal. It was set up to take two floppy disks, but both disk drives were empty, so I didn’t even bother turning the thing on. On the table, though, there was a holder with some three dozen disks in it. I pulled a batch out and shuffled through them; they were labeled everything from
NOTES ON BURKE BOOK
to
CHECKING ACCOUNT
to
ELECTRIC BILLS
to
HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES
. “Did Markham keep his whole life on the computer?” I said, turning in the direction of the living room.

“He most certainly did,” Cortland answered, getting up and coming over to stand in the doorway. “Four years ago, he didn’t even own a computer, but he started experimenting with one in the office over at school one day and he became addicted. Hale was extremely meticulous in everything he undertook, and the computer permitted him to be even more so. He was obsessive about his record keeping.”

“Maybe not such a bad thing,” I said. “If you don’t have any objection, I’d like to take the whole batch of disks home and run them through my machine. I’ll bring everything back intact.”

“No objection at all, but I really doubt you’ll find anything worthwhile. Please be particularly careful with the disk with the book notes on it. Hale was in the early stages of researching a new biography of Edmund Burke, and I’m optimistic I can be successful in persuading the publisher to allow me to complete it.”

I told him to have no fear and started in on the rest of the house while he went back to his reading. There may be somebody in the world better at combing a place than I am, but I have yet to meet that somebody, although I admit that Saul Panzer comes close. The whole operation took me more than three hours, including the bookcases, of which there were sets in the living room, the office, and the master bedroom upstairs. I went through dresser drawers, nightstands, photo albums, stacks of old bills, file drawers of correspondence—all of it professional—storage boxes of clothes, and a basement that was cleaner than most kitchens. And nowhere did I find anything remotely helpful. Cortland popped in on me every so often to monitor my progress, but otherwise kept busy with his book, which was as fat as a dictionary and looked to be about as juicy. “I’ll say this for Markham,” I told him as we were getting ready to leave, “he was one well-ordered guy, or else he had the world’s best cleaning woman.”

“Some of both, I suppose” was his answer. “As I said earlier, Hale was extremely fastidious about his record keeping, and that sense of order and neatness carried over into everything he did. He was the antithesis of the absentminded professor stereotype, as you’ve obviously gathered.” He grimaced. “Indeed, he often scoffed at me for my own untidiness. Have you made any significant discoveries?”

“No, and I seriously doubt there’s anything in here, either,” I said, gesturing to the box of disks I was carrying, “but I can’t afford to ignore them, and as long as they work in our PC, I can avoid tying up any more of your time. What about Markham’s office at the school?”

“We can run over there if you like, but I’ve pretty well gone through it, and there wasn’t much to begin with—mostly papers, the majority of which Hale had already graded. He kept most of his files at home.”

I told him I’d like to take a look anyway, so we walked back to his house and got the Mercedes. Markham’s office was just down the corridor from Cortland’s in Richardson Hall. The place was small, but infinitely neater than either Cortland’s or Elena Moreau’s. Markham’s name was still on the door, but there wasn’t much else to indicate who the tenant had been.

Twenty minutes later, I’d gone through the desk drawers and bookshelves, and I felt as frustrated as I had at his house. Walking out of the building, I asked Cortland if anybody else had helped clean out Markham’s office.

“No, just me, at least as far as I know. Because I was his closest friend, as well as executor, Orville had the good sense to suggest I be the one to sift through Hale’s things here. In fact, I plan to move out what little you saw there by next week, so the space can be utilized by somebody else. Space is always at a premium here on campus. Frankly, it’s a depressing chore, but I guess I’d resent anybody else doing it.”

I sympathized with Cortland—after all, he was talking about the man who had been, as he said, his closest friend, not to mention his mentor. I dropped him off back at his house and told him that Leander Bach was going to visit Wolfe on Sunday, and ended by giving him the stock line that he’d be hearing from us shortly. The fact that we’d be talking to Bach made him brighten slightly, but I sensed that the little guy was beginning to have doubts about having hired us.

As I headed out of Prescott for the third time in four days, I thought fleetingly about crossing the Hudson and aiming the Mercedes north toward a certain oasis on the Dutchess County side of the river. But I vetoed the idea of making a surprise appearance. I’d probably end up thinking about the case while I was there, and Lily’s the kind who thrives on undivided attention. For that matter, I’m the kind who likes to give it to her.

I
GOT BACK TO THE BROWNSTONE
at just after four, which of course meant the office was empty because the owner of the establishment was up communing with his orchids. Out in the kitchen, Fritz was doing some communing of his own, with the shrimp that would be tonight’s entrée. I gave him a nod and took a carton of milk from the refrigerator; I needed something cool and soothing after the drive.