“I noticed that Cordwell knows how to handle his boss, all right. But having said that, your owner was not exactly happy when he left here last night.”
“There’s a reason. His wife, Felicia, was absolutely passionate about Clay’s column.”
“And also about Clay himself?”
“Oh no, no, not at all, which Eric pointed out last night,” Lon said. “But she loved reading his stuff, particularly the seamier items, the affairs, divorces, innuendos, insults, political backbiting, all those things that Cameron loved to write about. It is hardly a stretch to say Felicia was his biggest fan. And she is absolutely convinced he was murdered and has been pushing Eric to get to the bottom of it. From what I’m hearing, she’s obsessed with nailing a murderer.”
“Does she have someone in mind?”
“I’m not sure of that, but she simply cannot believe Clay did himself in.”
“So she’s pushing her husband. Ah, the power behind the throne. But it seems that Cordwell, who’s plenty level-headed, thinks Clay was killed as well.”
“Yes, he feels very strongly about it,” Lon said. “But I know you called for a reason. What’s the plan of attack?”
“My boss wants to talk to Larry McNeil.”
“Not surprising. McNeil seems to be pretty broken up right now, and on top of that, the police have given him a thorough grilling, despite their belief that this was suicide. I suppose Wolfe would like to see him soon.”
“Good supposition. Tonight, nine o’clock.”
“Well, he’s in the office this morning helping go through Cameron’s files. I’ll talk to him and get back to you.”
Half an hour later, Lon rang. “Okay, McNeil will be at your place at nine. I hope Wolfe goes easy on him. As I said before, he’s shaken.”
When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms, I told him Clay’s assistant would be here as requested. “Anything else?”
“Not for the moment,” he said, placing a raceme of purple orchids in the vase on his desk and ringing for beer. “We may find it instructive to talk to Mr. McNeil.”
The young man arrived at the brownstone on time, a point in his favor. Larry McNeil was slim and just shy of my height, with close-cropped blond hair and a long, thin face that wore a somber expression.
“I have heard a lot about Nero Wolfe,” he said as I hung his coat up, “and I’ve always wanted to meet him, although I’m sorry that it has to be under these circumstances.”
“A lot of people meet Mr. Wolfe under less than ideal circumstances,” I said as I led him down the hall to the office. Wolfe was seated at his desk and greeted our guest with a dip of the chin. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “As you see, I am having beer.”
“A beer sounds good to me,” McNeil said, and I went to the kitchen to get him a bottle and a glass. When I returned, he was in mid-sentence. “… so I had just graduated from Columbia, and Cameron—Mr. Clay—took a chance on me, even though my only experience was as a reporter at a small daily over in New Jersey during the summer between my junior and senior years.”
“Did Mr. Clay make it a practice to hire assistants with little, if any, experience?” Wolfe asked.
“Yes, he did, sir. He said he wanted to train his legmen himself. ‘Most colleges don’t train you for the real world,’ he told me. ‘I learned that myself when I was in school. You will learn everything that you need to know from me.’”
“What were your functions as Mr. Clay’s legman?”
“Where to start? For one thing, he assigned me to attend various meetings, the City Council sessions, for example. The Gazette has a beat reporter who regularly goes to those meetings; however, my role was not to cover the news but to supply feature stuff, such as which councilmen fell asleep during the meeting or whether Millard Beardsley was in attendance. Mr. Clay loved to tweak Beardsley, which was easy because he missed so many meetings and never said much at the ones he showed up for.
“I also would make the rounds of the best Midtown restaurants to report on which celebrities were there and who they were with. If you read the column, you may remember an item a while back about a Yankee outfielder who was seen around town with a woman who wasn’t his wife. That was mine,” he said gleefully, “and Cameron loved it. ‘That guy’s been sleeping around for years,’ he told me. ‘We really stuck it to him.’”
Wolfe displayed no emotion, but I knew he was appalled. “I recall that the column did not identify the baseball player,” he said.
“No, but everybody in town knows who it is,” McNeil replied. “I never saw Cameron so happy about an item I came up with.”
“Mr. Clay certainly was not averse to making enemies.”
McNeil nodded grimly. “Yeah, and it got him killed.”
“You found the body,” Wolfe said. “Tell us about the circumstances.”
“I’ve already told the police everything, but I realize you want to hear it from me. Each weekday morning, I would go to Cameron’s brownstone in Chelsea at eight, and we would plan the day over coffee and the bagels I picked up from a local deli.”
“Couldn’t you have just as easily made these plans over the telephone?” Wolfe posed.
“Oh sure, but Cameron seemed to enjoy our meetings, and for that matter, so did I. It gave him a chance to talk about what he wanted to put in the next day’s column. He used me as a sort of sounding board, and sometimes we would bounce ideas back and forth. Occasionally, he even took my advice.”
“Then came that fateful morning.”
McNeil exhaled loudly. “Yeah, I got there right around eight, as usual, but I was hungover, and I do mean really hungover. I’d been to a good friend’s bachelor party the night before with six other guys in a second-floor party room of a tavern down in the Village, and we didn’t break up until after six thirty in the morning.”
Wolfe pursed his lips, clearly disgusted. “Did you go straight from there to Mr. Clay’s home?”
“I stopped at my place to get cleaned up, then I went to Cameron’s. I had my own key to his brownstone, but I didn’t need it, because the front door was ajar, which was very unusual.”
“I understand Mr. Clay had an alarm system,” Wolfe said.
“Yeah, he did, but a lot of times, he’d forget to switch it on before he turned in for the night. He was careless by nature.”
“But was he so careless that he would have forgotten to check the front door to make sure it was closed?” I put in.
“I have to admit that I’d never seen it before,” McNeil said. “What usually happened was that I would ring the doorbell, and Cameron would disarm the alarm system, then I would use my key to get in. Anyway, I went on in and headed for the living room, where we always met. He was … he was sitting on the sofa near the front windows. At first I thought he was dozing, but then I saw that … that both his eyes and mouth were open, and that a revolver was lying on the cushion next to him, just below his right hand, which hung limp.”
“You established that he was dead?” Wolfe asked.
He nodded, swallowing hard. “I had taken a first-aid course in school, and I knew enough to check his carotid and his pulse. Nothing. It seemed like he’d been dead for a while.”
“Was the revolver his?”
“It certainly looked like it. Once a couple of years ago, I asked him if he was worried that somebody might come after him at home, and he grinned and pulled open a drawer in a living-room end table, pulling out the pistol. It sure looked like the same gun he was shot with, but I don’t know if the police found another one in the house.”
“I noticed that you didn’t say ‘the one he shot himself with,’” I said. “You don’t think it was suicide?”
“Not at all!” Larry McNeil bristled. “Cameron would never, ever kill himself.”
“Do you have a candidate as the killer?” Wolfe asked.<
br />
McNeil replied to a question with a question. “Are you aware that he had been receiving threatening phone calls lately?”
“Yes,” Wolfe said. “Had you been privy to any of those calls?”
McNeil nodded. “Only once. It was on a morning when we were meeting at Cameron’s place. He picked up the ringing phone and immediately got angry and red-faced. He said something like ‘Who the hell are you?’ and then he slammed the receiver down so hard I thought it would break. I asked what the caller said, and he told me it was just somebody trying to scare him. He said he’d gotten several calls like it recently.”
“Do you believe Mr. Clay took the threats seriously?”
“That morning, he acted like he wasn’t all that concerned, but I knew him well enough to tell that he was shaken.”
“Did he say who he suspected was behind the threats?”
“He listed several possibilities, as maybe Mr. Cohen has told you.”
“I would like to hear those possibilities from you,” Wolfe said. McNeil proceeded to reel off the same five names Lon had mentioned.
“Do you feel any one of them is the likeliest candidate?” Wolfe asked.
“Well … based on things that Cameron said to me, both that morning and at other times, I think he felt he had the most to fear from Tobin, that ex-cop and ex-con. But just to be clear, he told me that he could never identify anyone in any of the calls he got. He figured whoever was on the line was disguising his voice.”
“That would seem to eliminate Miss Sanchez.”
“I suppose,” McNeil said, “but then, she might have got someone else to do the phoning.”
“I understand Mr. Cameron was having health issues,” Wolfe continued.
“Serious ones,” McNeil said. “He had diabetes, and he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He had been to several doctors, and they gave him anywhere from six months to two years.”
“That had to have shaken him up,” I said.
“Well, Mr. Goodwin, as I’ve indicated, Cameron always tried to hide his feelings, and that was also the case with his health. He acted, at least with me, like the problem didn’t exist. I guess you could say that he was in denial.”
“What will happen to the column now?” Wolfe asked.
“That’s out of my hands,” McNeil said. “Of course, I would love to be considered as a candidate, but my youth and relative inexperience would probably work against me.”
“Since you do not believe Mr. Clay took his own life, do you have any theories as to what might have transpired in his home before you arrived on that morning?”
“I don’t, and as I told the police, I’m really baffled,” McNeil replied. “I have got to assume that Cameron admitted someone after shutting off the alarm, someone who he must have known.”
“Because you are operating on the assumption that Mr. Clay was murdered, do you feel the killer was one of the five individuals he is said to have feared most?” Wolfe posed.
“I have no other explanation,” McNeil said, throwing up his hands.
“Then, if that were the case, would he have knowingly admitted one of them to his home?”
“I don’t have an answer, and it’s been gnawing at me. That plus the fact that I found the front door ajar.”
“After your morning meetings, did you both go to the Gazette’s office?” Wolfe asked.
“Not together. I usually got a cab to the paper right after our meeting. Cameron went in later, usually around ten. He had a standing order to be picked up by the same yellow-cab driver every day, and the same man brought him home at night, unless, of course, he had an evening function to go to.”
“The driver’s name?”
“Uh, Walter, Walter … Bartlett. That’s it … Bartlett.”
“Have you a telephone number for him?”
“I’m sure it’s somewhere in Cameron’s files in the office. I can get it for you.”
Wolfe leaned back in his chair. “Please do, and give it to Mr. Goodwin. Is there anything more you would like to add?”
McNeil shook his head. “If something comes to mind, I will let you know, sir. This must not go down as a suicide.”
“I am sure we will be in touch,” Wolfe said as I rose from my chair to usher Larry McNeil out.
“Well, what did you think of him?” I asked Wolfe when I got back to the office.
He grunted. “An intelligent young man, and also an ambitious one. We have not seen the last of him.”
And Wolfe has accused me of being enigmatic.
Chapter 13
I had finished typing the letters Wolfe had dictated the day before when he came down from the plant rooms, asked if I had slept well, and settled into his reinforced desk chair. He had just rung for beer when the doorbell rang. Because Fritz was occupied with taking the beer in to Wolfe, I did the honors of going to the front door. Through the one-way glass, I saw the solid figure of Inspector Cramer. He was not smiling.
I returned to the office. “Your old friend from New York’s finest,” I told Wolfe. “Do I admit him?”
“Confound it, yes.”
“Good morning, Inspector,” I said, opening the door.
“Just say ‘morning,’ and I’ll tell you whether it’s good or not,” he growled, not bothering to take off his hat and coat as he marched down the hall to the office.
“So, that business about not having a client in the Clay case was another one of your cute little tricks, eh?” Cramer said, planting himself in the red leather chair as if he owned it. “And to think I actually believed you. When will I ever learn?” He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand and pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket, jamming it unlit into his mouth.
“Mr. Cramer, when you asked me that question on your last visit, I told you the truth. At that time, I did not have a client.”
“So you say,” Cramer replied, gnawing on the cigar. “I assume that you are now going to take what clearly was a suicide and magically transform it into a murder, earning yourself thousands of dollars in the process.”
“My commission, sir, is to determine the circumstances of Mr. Clay’s death, not necessarily to prove that it was a murder.”
“As if the police are not skilled enough to do this, right?”
“If you are firm in your conclusions, my involvement should not be a detriment to the department and its work.”
“Oh sure. All that your buddy Cohen has to do to cause a ruckus is order up a story in the Gazette that says something like, ‘Nero Wolfe, the noted private investigator, has been engaged by this newspaper to determine the circumstances of Cameron Clay’s death.’ See, I even used your own words. Once the hundreds of thousands of readers of the Gazette see that, we will be deluged with calls from people demanding to know why we’re insisting this was a suicide. And, of course, the other papers will pick the story up and start running editorials about how the department doesn’t want another murder on the books.”
“What can you do to persuade me it was a suicide?” Wolfe asked, raising his eyebrows.
“For starters, there was no note,” Cramer snapped. “Second, Clay’s health had deteriorated. The medical examiner said he had an advanced case of lung cancer and probably wouldn’t have lasted much more than a year or two. Third, the only fingerprints on the revolver—his revolver, we know—were his own. Fourth—am I going too fast for you?—no one was seen or heard entering or leaving Clay’s brownstone in the hours before his young assistant, McNeil, arrived for his usual morning meeting with his boss around eight. And five, would Clay have sat calmly on his sofa and let someone shoot him?”
“What time did the medical examiner estimate that Mr. Clay died?” Wolfe asked.
“Sometime between one and four that morning. That’s as close as he wanted to pinpoint it.”
“All right, let me ad
dress your points, sir: One, as we both are aware, not every suicide leaves a note; two, Clay was a man with a formidable ego and probably would have wanted to continue writing his column until the very end; three, a killer could easily have erased his or her prints from the revolver and then pressed Clay’s prints on the handle; four, because Clay likely died in the early hours of the morning, both vehicle and foot traffic on the street likely would have been almost nonexistent; five, it is possible that Clay was shot elsewhere in the house, perhaps after having been surprised or even sound asleep in his bed, and then moved to the sofa to make it appear to be a suicide; and six, the front door being ajar suggests that an individual who somehow had gained admittance to the home had left in a hurry.”
“All right, Wolfe, my points may have some holes, I grant you that,” the inspector said, “but so do yours. For instance, assuming Clay was distraught about his health and had planned to kill himself; he would hardly care whether or not his front door was closed.”
“Well taken, sir,” Wolfe conceded. “I acknowledge that there are unanswered questions. I assume you are aware that Mr. Clay had received threatening telephone calls.”
“Yes, so his assistant has told us, and your buddy Lon Cohen affirmed it when we talked to him, although I wish he had volunteered that information earlier.”
“Have you talked to any of those Mr. Clay suspected of harassing him?”
“We have not, because of our belief that this is a suicide. But I suppose you’re going to grill them, or have you already?” Cramer said in a belligerent tone.
“Not yet. Mr. Cramer, I assure you it is not my intent to in any way disrupt your department’s investigation of Mr. Clay’s death.”
“That’s what you say, although you’ve done plenty of disrupting in the past. Why should this time be any different?”
“At the risk of being accused of self-aggrandizement, I will point out that on numerous occasions, I—with the help of Mr. Goodwin and others in my employ—have been of assistance to you and the police department, and in most cases have not asked for, nor sought, publicity or acclaim.”
Stop the Presses! Page 8
