Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “Bring them,” he said, “but not here. I want them all assembled at five o’clock this afternoon at the scene of the crime.”

  “The bookshop? You’re willing to leave the house?”

  “It’s not entirely business,” he said. “Our client is more than a client. He’s a friend, and an important source of books. The reading copies he so disdains have enriched our own library immeasurably. And you know how important that is.”

  If there’s anything you need to know, you can find it in the pages of a detective novel. That’s Haig’s personal conviction, and I’m beginning to believe he’s right.

  “I’ll pay him a visit,” he went on. “I’ll arrive at 4:30 or so, and perhaps I’ll come across a book or two that I’ll want for our library. You’ll arrange that they all arrive around five, and we’ll clear up this little business.” He frowned in thought. “I’ll tell Wong we’ll want Christmas dinner at eight tonight. That should give us more than enough time.”

  Again, if this were a novel, I’d spend a full chapter telling you what I went through getting them all present and accounted for. It was hard enough finding them, and then I had to sell them on coming. I pitched the event as a second stage of last night’s party—their host had arranged, for their entertainment and edification, that they should be present while a real-life private detective solved an actual crime before their very eyes.

  According to Haig, all we’d need to spin this yarn into a full-length book would be a dead body, although two would be better. If, say, our client had wandered into his library that morning to find a corpse seated in his favorite chair, and the Woolrich manuscript gone, then I could easily stretch all this to sixty thousand words. If the dead man had been wearing a deerstalker cap and holding a violin, we’d be especially well off; when the book came out, all the Sherlockian completists would be compelled to buy it.

  Sorry. No murders, no Baker Street Irregulars, no dogs barking or not barking. I had to get them all there, and I did, but don’t ask me how. I can’t take the time to tell you.

  “Now,” Zoltan Mihalyi said. “We are all here. So can someone please tell me why we are all here?” There was a twinkle in his dark eyes as he spoke, and the trace of a knowing smile on his lips. He wanted an answer, but he was going to remain charming while he got it. I could believe he swept a lot of women off their feet.

  “First of all,” Jeanne Botleigh said, “I think we should each have a glass of eggnog. It’s festive, and it will help put us all in the spirit of the day.”

  She was the caterer, and she was some cupcake, all right. Close-cut brown hair framed her small oval face and set off a pair of China-blue eyes. She had an English accent, roughed up some by ten years in New York, and she was short and slender and curvy, and I could see why our client had hoped she would stick around.

  And now she’d whipped up a batch of eggnog, and ladled out cups for each of us. I waited until someone else tasted it—after all the mystery novels Haig’s forced on me, I’ve developed an imagination—but once the Corn-Wallaces had tossed off theirs with no apparent effect, I took a sip. It was smooth and delicious, and it had a kick like a mule. I looked over at Haig, who’s not much of a drinker, and he was smacking his lips over it.

  “Why are we here?” he said, echoing the violinist’s question. “Well, sir, I shall tell you. We are here as friends and customers of our host, whom we may be able to assist in the solution of a puzzle. Last night all of us, with the exception of course of myself and my young assistant, were present in this room. Also present was the original manuscript of an unpublished novel by Cornell Woolrich. This morning we were all gone, and so was the manuscript. Now we have returned. The manuscript, alas, has not.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. “You’re saying one of us took it?”

  “I say only that it has gone, sir. It is possible that someone within this room was involved in its disappearance, but there are diverse other possibilities as well. What impels me, what has prompted me to summon you here, is the likelihood that one or more of you knows something that will shed light on the incident.”

  “But the only person who would know anything would be the person who took it,” Harriet Quinlan said. She was what they call a woman of a certain age, which generally means a woman of an uncertain age. Her figure was a few pounds beyond girlish, and I had a hunch she dyed her hair and might have had her face lifted somewhere along the way, but whatever she’d done had paid off. She was probably old enough to be my mother’s older sister, but that didn’t keep me from having the sort of ideas a nephew’s not supposed to have.

  Haig told her anyone could have observed something, and not just the guilty party, and Philip Perigord started to ask a question, and Haig held up a hand and cut him off in mid-sentence. Most people probably would have finished what they were saying, but I guess Perigord was used to studio executives shutting him up at pitch meetings. He bit off his word in the middle of a syllable and stayed mute.

  “It is a holiday,” Haig said, “and we all have other things to do, so we’d best avoid distraction. Hence I will ask the questions and you will answer them. Mr. Corn-Wallace. You are a book collector. Have you given a thought to collecting manuscripts?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Jon Corn-Wallace said. He was the best-dressed man in the room, looking remarkably comfortable in a dark blue suit and a striped tie. He wore bull and bear cufflinks and one of those watches that’s worth $5000 if it’s real or $25 if you bought it from a Nigerian street vendor. “He tried to get me interested,” he said, with a nod toward our client. “But I was always the kind of trader who stuck to listed stocks.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it’s impossible to pinpoint the market value of a one-of-a-kind item like a manuscript. There’s too much guesswork involved. I’m not buying books with an eye to selling them, that’s something my heirs will have to worry about, but I do like to know what my collection is worth and whether or not it’s been a good investment. It’s part of the pleasure of collecting, as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve stayed away from manuscripts. They’re too iffy.”

  “And had you had a look at As Dark as It Gets?”

  “No. I’m not interested in manuscripts, and I don’t care at all for Woolrich.”

  “Jon likes hard-boiled fiction,” his wife put in, “but Woolrich is a little weird for his taste. I think he was a genius myself. Quirky and tormented, maybe, but what genius isn’t?”

  Haig, I thought. You couldn’t call him tormented, but maybe he made up for it by exceeding the usual quota of quirkiness.

  “Anyway,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said, “I’m the Woolrich fan in the family. Though I agree with Jon as far as manuscripts are concerned. The value is pure speculation. And who wants to buy something and then have to get a box made for it? It’s like buying an unframed canvas and having to get it framed.”

  “The Woolrich manuscript was already boxed,” Haig pointed out.

  “I mean generally, as an area for collecting. As a collector, I wasn’t interested in As Dark as It Gets. If someone fixed it up and completed it, and if someone published it, I’d have been glad to buy it. I’d have bought two copies.”

  “Two copies, madam?”

  She nodded. “One to read and one to own.”

  Haig’s face darkened, and I thought he might offer his opinion of people who were afraid to damage their books by reading them. But he kept it to himself, and I was just as glad. Jayne Corn-Wallace was a tall, handsome woman, radiating self-confidence, and I sensed she’d give as good as she got in an exchange with Haig.

  “You might have wanted to read the manuscript,” Haig suggested.

  She shook her head. “I like Woolrich,” she said, “but as a stylist he was choppy enough after editing and polishing. I wouldn’t want to try him in manuscript, let alone an unfinished manuscript like that one.”

  “Mr. Mihalyi,” Haig said. “You collect manuscripts, don’t you?”


  “I do.”

  “And do you care for Woolrich?”

  The violinist smiled. “If I had the chance to buy the original manuscript of The Bride Wore Black,” he said, “I would leap at it. If it were close at hand, and if strong drink had undermined my moral fiber, I might even slip it under my coat and walk off with it.” A wink showed us he was kidding. “Or at least I’d have been tempted. The work in question, however, tempted me not a whit.”

  “And why is that, sir?”

  Mihalyi frowned. “There are people,” he said, “who attend open rehearsals and make surreptitious recordings of the music. They treasure them and even bootleg them to other like-minded fans. I despise such people.”

  “Why?”

  “They violate the artist’s privacy,” he said. “A rehearsal is a time when one refines one’s approach to a piece of music. One takes chances, one uses the occasion as the equivalent of an artist’s sketch pad. The person who records it is in essence spraying a rough sketch with fixative and hanging it on the wall of his personal museum. I find it unsettling enough that listeners record concert performances, making permanent what was supposed to be a transitory experience. But to record a rehearsal is an atrocity.”

  “And a manuscript?”

  “A manuscript is the writer’s completed work. It provides a record of how he arranged and revised his ideas, and how they were in turn adjusted for better or worse by an editor. But it is finished work. An unfinished manuscript . . .”

  “Is a rehearsal?”

  “That or something worse. I ask myself, What would Woolrich have wanted?”

  “Another drink,” Edward Everett Stokes said, and leaned forward to help himself to more eggnog. “I take your point, Mihalyi. And Woolrich might well have preferred to have his unfinished work destroyed upon his death, but he left no instructions to that effect, so how can we presume to guess his wishes? Perhaps, for all we know, there is a single scene in the book that meant as much to him as anything he’d written. Or less than a scene—a bit of dialogue, a paragraph of description, perhaps no more than a single sentence. Who are we to say it should not survive?”

  “Perigord,” Mihalyi said. “You are a writer. Would you care to have your unfinished work published after your death? Would you not recoil at that, or at having it completed by others?”

  Philip Perigord cocked an eyebrow. “I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. “I’ve spent twenty years in Hollywood. Forget unfinished work. My finished work doesn’t get published, or ‘produced,’ as they so revealingly term it. I get paid, and the work winds up on a shelf. And, when it comes to having one’s work completed by others, in Hollywood you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. It happens during your lifetime, and you learn to live with it.”

  “We don’t know the author’s wishes,” Harriet Quinlan put in, “and I wonder how relevant they are.”

  “But it’s his work,” Mihalyi pointed out.

  “Is it, Zoltan? Or does it belong to the ages? Finished or not, the author has left it to us. Schubert did not finish one of his greatest symphonies. Would you have laid its two completed movements in the casket with him?”

  “It has been argued that the work was complete, that he intended it to be but two movements long.”

  “That begs the question, Zoltan.”

  “It does, dear lady,” he said with a wink. “I’d rather beg the question than be undone by it. Of course I’d keep the Unfinished Symphony in the repertoire. On the other hand, I’d hate to see some fool attempt to finish it.”

  “No one has, have they?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But several writers have had the effrontery to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and I do think Dickens would have been better served if the manuscript had gone in the box with his bones. And as for sequels, like those for Pride and Prejudice and The Big Sleep, or that young fellow who had the colossal gall to tread in Rex Stout’s immortal footsteps . . .”

  Now we were getting onto sensitive ground. As far as Leo Haig was concerned, Archie Goodwin had always written up Wolfe’s cases, using the transparent pseudonym of Rex Stout. (Rex Stout = fat king, an allusion to Wolfe’s own regal corpulence.) Robert Goldsborough, credited with the books written since the “death” of Stout, was, as Haig saw it, a ghostwriter employed by Goodwin, who was no longer up to the chore of hammering out the books. He’d relate them to Goldsborough, who transcribed them and polished them up. While they might not have all the narrative verve of Goodwin’s own work, still they provided an important and accurate account of Wolfe’s more recent cases.

  See, Haig feels the great man’s still alive and still raising orchids and nailing killers. Maybe somewhere on the Upper East Side. Maybe in Murray Hill, or just off Gramercy Park . . .

  The discussion about Goldsborough, and about sequels in general, roused Haig from a torpor that Wolfe himself might have envied. “Enough,” he said with authority. “There’s no time for meandering literary conversations, nor would Chip have room for them in a short-story-length report. So let us get to it. One of you took the manuscript, box and all, from its place on the shelf. Mr. Mihalyi, you have the air of one who protests too much. You profess no interest in the manuscripts of unpublished novels, and I can accept that you did not yearn to possess As Dark as It Gets, but you wanted a look at it, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t own a Woolrich manuscript,” he said, “and of course I was interested in seeing what one looked like. How he typed, how he entered corrections . . .”

  “So you took the manuscript from the shelf.”

  “Yes,” the violinist agreed. “I went into the other room with it, opened the box, and flipped through the pages. You can taste the flavor of the man’s work in the visual appearance of his manuscript pages. The words and phrases x’d out, the pencil notations, the crossovers, even the typographical errors. The computer age puts paid to all that, doesn’t it? Imagine Chandler running Spel-Chek, or Hammett with justified margins.” He sighed. “A few minutes with the script made me long to own one of Woolrich’s. But not this one, for reasons I’ve already explained.”

  “You spent how long with the book?”

  “Fifteen minutes at the most. Probably more like ten.”

  “And returned to this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “And brought the manuscript with you?”

  “Yes. I intended to return it to the shelf, but someone was standing in the way. It may have been you, Jon. It was someone tall, and you’re the tallest person here.” He turned to our client. “It wasn’t you. But I think you may have been talking with Jon. Someone was, at any rate, and I’d have had to step between the two of you to put the box back, and that might have led to questions as to why I’d picked it up in the first place. So I put it down.”

  “Where?”

  “On a table. That one, I think.”

  “It’s not there now,” Jon Corn-Wallace said.

  “It’s not,” Haig agreed. “One of you took it from that table. I could, through an exhausting process of cross-questioning, establish who that person is. But it would save us all time if the person would simply recount what happened next.”

  There was a silence while they all looked at each other. “Well, I guess this is where I come in,” Jayne Corn-Wallace said. “I was sitting in the red chair, where Phil Perigord is sitting now. And whoever I’d been talking to went to get another drink, and I looked around, and there it was on the table.”

  “The manuscript, madam?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that was what it was, not at first. I thought it was a finely bound limited edition. Because the manuscripts are all kept on that shelf, you know, and this one wasn’t. And it hadn’t been on the table a few minutes earlier, either. I knew that much. So I assumed it was a book someone had been leafing through, and I saw it was by Cornell Woolrich, and I didn’t recognize the title, so I thought I’d try leafing through it myself.”

  “And you found it was a manuscript.”r />
  “Well, that didn’t take too keen an eye, did it? I suppose I glanced at the first twenty pages, just riffled through them while the party went on around me. I stopped after a chapter or so. That was plenty.”

  “You didn’t like what you read?”

  “There were corrections,” she said disdainfully. “Words and whole sentences crossed out, new words penciled in. I realize writers have to work that way, but when I read a book I like to believe it emerged from the writer’s mind fully formed.”

  “Like Athena from the brow of What’s-his-name,” her husband said.

  “Zeus. I don’t want to know there was a writer at work, making decisions, putting words down, and then changing them. I want to forget about the writer entirely and lose myself in the story.”

  “Everybody wants to forget about the writer,” Philip Perigord said, helping himself to more eggnog. “At the Oscars each year some ninny intones, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ before he hands out the screenwriting awards. And you hear the usual crap about how they owe it all to chaps like me who put words in their mouths. They say it, but nobody believes it. Jack Warner called us schmucks with Underwoods. Well, we’ve come a long way. Now we’re schmucks with Power Macs.”

  “Indeed,” Haig said. “You looked at the manuscript, didn’t you, Mr. Perigord?”

  “I never read unpublished work. Can’t risk leaving myself open to a plagiarism charge.”

  “Oh? But didn’t you have a special interest in Woolrich? Didn’t you once adapt a story of his?”

  “How did you know about that? I was one of several who made a living off that particular piece of crap. It was never produced.”

  “And you looked at this manuscript in the hope that you might adapt it?”

  The writer shook his head. “I’m through wasting myself out there.”

  “They’re through with you,” Harriet Quinlan said. “Nothing personal, Phil, but it’s a town that uses up writers and throws them away. You couldn’t get arrested out there. So you’ve come back east to write books.”