Death on Deadline

by Robert Goldsborough

  Gazette into a first-rate paper. He died in the early sixties, and she’s been in charge ever since. One hell of a woman. She’s over seventy now, and is the largest single stockholder, with a little more than one-third of all the shares. The figure I’ve heard most often is thirty-five percent.”

  “Is she likely to sell?”

  “Definitely not, and that’s one of the most encouraging things right now,” Lon answered. “From the start, MacLaren is frozen out of the biggest chunk. Which means he’s really targeting the others.”

  “And they are . . . ?”

  “The next two largest holders are Harriet’s stepchildren, David and Donna—Donna Palmer—who have about seventeen-plus percent each. David’s president of the company, but that’s pretty much a figurehead job. He has wanted more for years, but for my money, the guy’s a loser. He’s erratic, has a hot temper, plus a real fondness for the bottle. His wife, Carolyn, has far more brains and savvy than he does. Harriet would never let him run the company if she could prevent it.

  “Donna, the stepdaughter, is pretty much out of the picture.” Lon held the snifter to the light and squinted. “She’s divorced, lives up in Boston, where she runs a public-relations firm. I don’t think she’s much interested m the paper, or in New York, for that matter.”

  “Is that all the family members who share in the ownership?”

  “No, there’s also Scott Haverhill, Harriet’s nephew, with about ten percent. He’s the general manager, and he wants the top spot about as badly as David does. He’s an oily bastard, always trying to ingratiate himself with his aunt and maneuvering behind the scenes to weasel more power. She’d probably choose Scott over David to run the whole show, but only just barely. Lesser of two evils.”

  “You’ve accounted for about eighty percent of the ownership,” Wolfe said, ringing for more beer. “The rest?”

  “It’s in smaller pieces,” Lon said. “My boss, Carl Bishop, the publisher, has five percent, and he’d hold out against MacLaren till the finish. Elliot Dean, the family lawyer, who’s been around for a hundred years, has about two or three percent, I think. He was a confidant of Wilkins Haverhill, and he’s been Harriet’s adviser since the old man died. A magazine publishing company, Arlen, has a piece, and so does a guy named Demarest, whose family sold the Gazette to Wilkins Haverhill.”

  Wolfe leaned back and practiced lacing his fingers over his middle mound. “Which holdings do you see as being completely safe from Mr. MacLaren?”

  “Harriet’s, of course, and Bishop’s. And I can’t imagine Dean selling out on her,” Lon said. “The kids I wouldn’t be sure of for a minute—any of them. Same with Arlen and Demarest. They’d both go where they could get the biggest—and quickest—profit, and right now, that looks like MacLaren. The Gazette’s a profitable operation, but neither one of them may ever get another chance like this, and they’ve got no loyalty to the paper.”

  “So the anti-MacLaren forces, to call them that, control only about forty-three percent of the shares?”

  Lon nodded. “Our story in the late edition doesn’t go into any detail on this, of course. Just a few graphs quoting MacLaren and a comment from Mrs. Haverhill saying only that the Gazette was interested in learning more about the offer.”

  Wolfe asked more questions about MacLaren, the Gazette, and the family, but you’ve already gotten the flavor. It was nearly eleven when Lon yawned, stretched, and lapped up the last of his fourth snifter of Remisier.

  “I still don’t know why you’re so interested in that miserable Scotsman. But if anything I’ve said tonight gives you an inspiration about how to stop him, it will bring me more satisfaction than this meal has, which is saying a lot. Don’t bother getting up, Archie, I’ll see myself out.”

  I walked him to the front door anyway, partly because a guest in the brownstone is a jewel resting on a cushion of hospitality and partly because I feel better when I do the final bolting of the front door for the night myself. It’s force of habit, spurred by the knowledge that there are at least ten people loose in Manhattan who would be more than happy to help arrange Nero Wolfe’s funeral, not to mention a few who’d chip in to buy me a tombstone too.

  When I walked back into the office, Wolfe was sitting upright, staring straight ahead, with his palms down on the desk.

  “Archie, what does a full-page advertisement in the Times cost?”

  “Beats me,” I answered, raising one eyebrow and easing into my desk chair. “Well up in the thousands, I suppose. You planning a spectacular new way to solicit clients? A little showy, isn’t it?”

  He glared but said nothing, then closed his eyes. Because I have a thing about time, I checked my wrist and waited. After seven minutes, he woke up and blinked. “Instructions,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” I flipped open my notebook.

  “Call the Times tomorrow morning and determine the cost of a full page. Let me know the price, although it will make little difference. Then go to their office and place the advertisement that—”

  “What advertisement?”

  “Don’t interrupt! The advertisement that I’m about to give you. First, the headline, in forty-eight-point type . . .”

  With that, he began dictating one of the most unusual messages a reader of the Times is ever likely to see. It took almost forty minutes, and he stopped occasionally to check a fact in his World Almanac. When he was done, I read my shorthand back to him, and he made a few minor changes.

  “They won’t print this,” I ventured.

  “I disagree. Through the years, the Times has run thousands of open letters and advocacy advertisements from individuals and organizations. It’s part of their tradition. You like wagers, Archie; I’ll be happy to give you odds they will accept it.”

  I grinned. “You’re too confident; I pass.”

  “Make sure to keep a carbon when you type it,” he said, getting up to go to bed. That was totally uncalled for. I always make carbons.

  FOUR

  At a few minutes before eight the next morning, Saturday, I was where I preferred to be at that time of day: sitting at the small table in the kitchen with grapefruit juice, Canadian bacon, eggs, pancakes, toast, black coffee, and the Times propped up on the rack in front of me.

  “Well, there it is,” I said to no one in particular as I scanned the front page.

  “There is what, Archie?” Fritz asked. He was fussing with a tray to take up to Wolfe in his bedroom, where he always has breakfast.

  “A man named MacLaren is trying to scoop up the Gazette,” I said. “The story’s on page one of the Times.”

  “Mr. Cohen’s paper? Bought by that rogue?”

  Whenever I think I’ve got Fritz completely pegged, he does something to throw me off. Because he spends so much time creating world-class meals, I tend to forget how well-read he is. He sees a copy of the Times every day, although he doesn’t usually get to read it until evening. And then there are all those European magazines he subscribes to. I guess what really bothered me was that I seemed to be the only one around who hadn’t known much about the Scots Citizen Kane until the last day or so.

  The Times story, under a two-column headline in the lower-right-hand corner of the page, added nothing to what Lon had told us last night. In essence, it reported that MacLaren had issued a statement saying he was offering forty dollars a share for Gazette stock, and that he already had a “sizable percentage” in his control.

  According to the story, he refused to be specific about how much he held.

  There also was a comment from a securities analyst on Wall Street who specializes in media companies. He said his firm currently valued Gazette stock at about thirty-two dollars, and was quoted as saying MacLaren’s offer was “unrealistically high, based on the company’s estimated profits over the last year.”

  The Times reporter had reached Harriet Haverhill, but all she gave him was a “no comment” to anonymous reports that various members of the family had already sold their h
oldings to MacLaren.

  I clipped the Times article and slid it into my top-right desk drawer for later reference, then turned to the Gazette, whose own story was briefer than the one in the Times and was back on page five. It reported MacLaren’s statement about offering forty bucks a share, but didn’t use his “sizable-percentage” comment. Harriet Haverhill was quoted as saying she would “carefully study Mr. MacLaren’s offer.” There wasn’t much else, other than a short biography of MacLaren and a listing of the newspapers and other properties he owned.

  After clipping the Gazette article and adding it to my collection, I called the Times, but found that the advertising department was closed until Monday. I debated ringing Wolfe in the plant rooms, but decided to wait till eleven, when he came down. He handles bad news better when he’s behind his desk with beer and book.

  As it turned out, he seemed unconcerned that we couldn’t make any progress on the advertisement (he hates the word “ad”) until Monday, and seemed equally unfazed when I reminded him that I would be spending the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday with Lily Rowan at the country place she’d just bought up in Dutchess County. Lily liked to call it a cottage, which I thought was a quaint way to refer to a layout including a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house with a sauna and two fireplaces and an in-ground pool and tennis court on a ten-acre spread overlooking a stretch of the Hudson which looks like the setting for a travel poster.

  I won’t bore you with details of my weekend, except to say it was relaxing. I kept in touch with the outside world just enough to know that the MacLaren Organization offer for the Gazette rated thirty seconds on a national TV news show Saturday night, and that the Sunday Times carried an extensive piece on MacLaren’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune in the business section.

  Monday morning after breakfast, I called the Times, and after being passed around to a half-dozen voices, I got a syrupy-sounding woman who told me that the “open, one-time rate” for the type of advertisement I had in mind would be $32,932 on a weekday, $39,699 on a Sunday. I then buzzed Wolfe in the plant rooms, per his instructions, and gave him the two figures. “If you still want to go through with this, I assume we do it on a weekday?”

  “Yes!” he snarled, banging down the receiver. One thing he hates even more than being interrupted when he’s playing with his plants is spending money on anything other than food, beer, books, and orchids.

  The rest of my morning was taken up trying to get the advertisement into the Times. My first stop was the local branch of the Metropolitan Trust Company, where I had a cashier’s check drawn for almost thirty-three grand. Then it was off to the Times. They liked my check, all right, but one very polite, very attractive, very redheaded young woman patiently explained in a voice like bells that because of what she called the “controversial nature of the copy,” it would have to be approved.

  “How long will that take?” I flashed my most sincere smile.

  “We might be able to get back to you today,” she answered with a sincere grin of her own. “It depends on how busy Mr. Warner is. He’s the one who decides if it’s acceptable, and he may want to make some changes. Or he may not want to run it at all.”

  “If we do get this worked out today, when can the ad run?”

  “Probably Wednesday’s editions.” Another sincere smile. We were on the same wavelength.

  “Not tomorrow?” I asked, smiling again and raising one eyebrow, which Lily once told me is my most appealing expression.

  “No, not tomorrow,” she said, raising an eyebrow of her own. Bright girl. “We’ll make sure you get a call right away, Mr. Goodwin, when a decision has been made.”

  After a few more feeble attempts to speed things up, which got nowhere, I wound up by giving the redhead our phone number, and she expertly filled out an impressive array of paperwork on the order. I was revising my opinion of redheads.

  It was after eleven when I got back to the brownstone. Wolfe was at his desk going through seed catalogs when I sat at my own desk and turned to him.

  “Well, the check’s been cut and the ad—advertisement—is in the hands of the Times, but it may not pass their censors.”

  “Indeed?” he said, looking up from the catalog. “On what grounds?”

  “They didn’t tell me. They just said that because of its controversial nature, it would have to go through some sort of approval process.”

  “Pah!” Wolfe spat. “They won’t alter a syllable.”

  “I don’t care how confident you are,” I shot back. “A sawbuck says they make some changes. Even money.”

  “Archie, your ten dollars is lost,” Wolfe said smugly, turning back to the seed catalog.

  I actually hoped he was right, but I felt my money would be doubled. What bothered me just then was that the Times might not call back, for whatever reason, and the whole damn thing would be delayed several more days. Then I’d have to wait longer to find out what Wolfe had in mind. I worried needlessly, though; just after lunch, the phone rang.

  “Nero Wolfe’s office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

  “Yes. Mr. Goodwin, this is The New York Times. May I please speak to Mr. Wolfe?” A clipped male voice.

  I mouthed the name of the paper silently to Wolfe and he picked up his receiver while I stayed on the line.

  “This is Nero Wolfe.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Wolfe, my name is Bob Warner, of the

  Times. I’m phoning to tell you that your ad copy is acceptable as written. We can have it ready to run in Wednesday’s editions. If you have no specific instructions other than the forty-eight-point headline, we’ll set it up in one of our standard body type sizes. Is that agreeable?”

  “Yes, it is, Mr. Warner,” Wolfe answered.

  “Also, we can have a proof to show you tomorrow morning.”

  “Mr. Goodwin will come to look it over. Thank you.”

  After we hung up, I shook my head. “All right, gloat all you want to. I’m told it’s healthy.”

  “Archie, I do not gloat,” he said, but the folds in his cheeks deepened, which gave him away. That’s his version of a smile.

  I reached for my wallet, pulled out a ten, and walked over to his desk, laying it on the blotter with a flourish.

  “Nuts, I still call it a gloat,” I said as he folded the bill neatly and slipped it into his vest pocket.

  Every morning, three copies of the Times are delivered to the brownstone, one each for Wolfe, Fritz, and me. But I was so antsy on Tuesday night to see how our page came out that at ten-thirty I left Wolfe reading in the office and walked out into the balmy night, heading east to Ninth Avenue, where I hailed a cab to the Times Building, the one place I knew for sure I could get the next day’s edition at that hour.

  The cabbie waited while I went into the lobby and got a paper from the box. As we headed back south, I riffled through the first section, toward the back. There it was. Not that I worried about how it read, mind you. I had been to the Times that morning for a look at a page proof, which seemed fine to me except for a couple of typos their proofreaders already had caught.

  I just had to see how the finished thing looked, though. I couldn’t read it in the cab—the light was too dim. When I got back to the office after an absence of twenty minutes, Wolfe didn’t even look up from his

  book, and I could study the text uninterrupted. So you can keep up, here it is:

  AN OPEN LETTER TO EVERYONE WHO LOVES NEWSPAPERS

  As most of you know from reading this newspaper and others and from watching television news programs, the New York Gazette currently is the acquisition target of Mr. Ian MacLaren of Edinburgh, Scotland, who owns numerous other newspapers around the world.

  Many of you read the Gazette as well as the Times. Others do not. For those not familiar with the Gazette, a few facts:

  1. According to the most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has the sixth-largest daily circulation of any American newspaper and the eighth-largest Sunday circulation
.

  2. It was named—along with the Times—as one of the ten best American papers last year in a poll of college journalism professors. It also finished in the top ten in a similar poll three years earlier.

  3. In the last fifteen years, the Gazette has won eight Pulitzer prizes, four of them for local reporting. Only three other newspapers, one being the Times, have won more Pulitzers during the same period.

  Whatever significance you may attach to any or all of the above items, one point is inarguable: the New York Gazette is an excellent newspaper, flawed to be sure, but with a balanced and independent editorial voice, a commitment to local coverage, and a genuine concern for this city and its environs. The Gazette is a precious asset to New York and its residents, more than 900,000 of whom pay thirty cents a day to read it.

  Now a few facts about Ian MacLaren:

  1. He controls newspapers in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and the United States.

  2. His three American papers have not won a single Pulitzer prize in the years he has owned them—more than a decade in each case. Yet his Los Angeles paper won Pulitzers in three of the last five years before he purchased it in 1974.

  3. His American papers speak with a single editorial voice—Mr. MacLaren’s. For instance, in each of the last three presidential campaigns, all three of his newspapers supported the Republican candidate. And in every campaign for the Senate or House of Representatives in that period, his papers have endorsed the Republican.

  Again, each of you will attach your own degree of significance to the above information, which can be documented. But I suggest that you buy a copy of any of his publications at an out-of-town newspaper stand. His United States papers are the Los Angeles Globe-American, Detroit Star, and Denver Times-Arrow. His Canadian paper, the Toronto Banner, also may be available. You will find them interesting reading, and I invite comparison between each of these newspapers and the Gazette.

  My bias is of course apparent, and it is the reason I purchased this advertisement. Although my work as a private investigator has enabled me to live in relative comfort, I am by no means a rich man, and the cost of this page has made a substantial impact on my balance sheet.