“Mercury Couriers.” An icy feminine voice.
I told the voice’s owner I was a detective—leaving out the “private” part—and said I needed to locate an employee on a matter of grave importance. She listened to the description, but it rang no bells; it was one of the smaller services, she explained, and she knew all the personnel. I looked to Lyon, who merely shrugged. I was on the point of thanking her anyway and hanging up, when she interrupted.
“Has this anything to do with the attack on Lloyd Berber?”
Cagily, I replied that that was official business I wasn’t at liberty to discuss.
What I got, through sly questioning, was this:
Someone had jumped this Berber on his rounds yesterday, knocking him out with a blow from behind, and stripped him of his uniform. He was in Presbyterian Hospital under observation for a possible concussion. A single package was missing from his truck, addressed to—
We hung up after getting the name. Lyon, trying hard not to betray his excitement, opened his desk drawer to count the pull-tabs inside. They belonged to cans of cream soda, his beverage of—well, not exactly choice. The copycat purist in him would prefer beer, but half a bottle is sufficient to send him strolling down Avenue J stark naked; which you don’t want to see. Trust me.
When I finally shook that image out of my head, I looked over and saw him rooting around in his ear with a forefinger. He wasn’t after wax. He was poking at his brain for the solution that was buried just under the surface.
Police Captain Stoddard’s furious face and balled fists showed up in the foyer twenty minutes later. Normally he’s about as welcome as a bleeding ulcer, but Lyon had established a new precedent by having me call him at headquarters and issue an invitation. I’d attended to my bladder in preparation for the visit, but it was still a near thing as I conducted him to the office. Lyon’s voice sopranoed more in his presence than when he talked on the phone, but he managed to hand him the name he’d written on a sheet of paper without dropping it.
“Who the hell is Taddeus Poldaski?” Stoddard demanded.
Lyon squeaked, “He is Simeon Poldaski’s brother.”
“And who the hell—?”
“I—we—suspect Simeon of stealing this item from St. Cecily’s Catholic Church last week.” Lyon took the shepherd figure from the deep drawer of his desk and stood it on top.
Stoddard seized it in a hairy fist and looked it over top to bottom. “Where’d you get it? How long have you had it? By God, I’ve been waiting for this. Withholding evidence in a felony investig—”
For the second time in ninety seconds, the fat little guy cut in on Stoddard in midstream. He was pale and his jaw quivered, but I had to hand it to him. I don’t know now if I’d have the guts. “With respect, sir, in the little more than twenty-four hours we’ve had it, we weren’t able to determine for certain that it was the property stolen. Indeed, we’re still proceeding on the assum—”
This time the captain did the butting in. “I asked you where you got it.”
“I shall supply that information after you locate Taddeus Poldaski and bring him here so that Mr. Woodbine can identify him—or not, if that should be the case.”
“I can’t arrest a man without evidence, and I sure as hell can’t arrest him for being the brother of a crook; if he even is a crook. And I sure as hell wouldn’t bring him here. I’d take him to headquarters and sweat a confession out of him.”
The cop’s face was red, Lyon’s dead white. But his vocal cords remained in working order, although they could’ve done with a drop of oil. “I apologize, Mr. Stoddard; I was unclear. We—I—suspect Simeon Poldaski of the church theft. We’re also proceeding on the assumption that Taddeus is responsible for assaulting Lloyd Berber, a messenger with Mercury Couriers, in Manhattan the next day.”
“That isn’t my jurisdiction.”
“Yes. I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that in the spirit of cooperation, once you’ve closed your neighbors’ case, you’ll close yours.”
They went back and forth. Stoddard threatened to haul us in as material witnesses unless we told him why we thought I could finger Taddeus for Berber, what that had to do with the incident at St. Cecily’s, and why we were so damn sure Simeon was behind that; but Lyon stuck solid as a gob of goo in a drainpipe. It probably cost him the price of a pair of shorts, but he outlasted the purple artery pounding on the side of the captain’s neck. He called Lyon a name that would shock a pirate, and blew on out, carrying the ivory piece and slamming every door on the way.
I broke the loud silence. “He took it better than expected.”
Lyon mopped his face with a green hanky. “Do you think he’ll do as we asked?”
“Sure. No self-respecting cop would pass up the chance to break a case in his own backyard and show up the competition in theirs at the same time. Question is, will he make good on his promise? They don’t let you grow tomatoes in Sing Sing.”
He picked up Encyclopedia Brown and found the place he’d marked with an old slice of bacon while I played with the germination records software in the computer; but in ten minutes with his nose stuck in the book I never heard him turn a page.
Next day was Christmas Eve. I got up from Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol to answer the doorbell, reflecting on Magoo’s myopia, an affliction Lyon shared, but only in his brain.
Stoddard barged past me into the office. “It was the McCoy. The pastor identified it. Now spill.”
Lyon flicked off the TV. “Have you found Taddeus Poldaski?”
Stoddard barked into a cell. A patrolman brought in a shortish character, saluted, left. Taddeus wore a gray suit, cheap but a good fit, with a red tie. It was an improvement over his messenger’s uniform. I looked from the cold sore on his lip to Lyon and nodded. The little man behind the big desk squirmed happily in his chair. “You took the messenger’s place and delivered a parcel bound for a Manhattan address to this one instead. Why?”
All he got for an answer was a sullen look. Lyon turned up a palm made of pink Play-Doh.
“The question may as well be rhetorical. Your brother, in his repentance, told you of his crime and that he’d sent the evidence to Nero Wolfe. I assume it was a fait accompli, since you failed to stop him. You acted to postpone or prevent an official solution. Was it fraternal love or self-protection?”
Stonewall. Stoddard put in a big flat toe. “You say your brother’s in Israel. The State Department might not extradite him just for burglary, but I hear that messenger you conked might not pull through. Accomplice to murder will swing the deal.”
“That’s impossible. I barely hit him.”
Stoddard’s jaw clamped. Anyone else’s would’ve dropped open. I knew what he was thinking: The little toad hit a homer.
Well, the captain had set it up with that whopper about Berber, whom we’d heard had recovered and been sent home; but even so. Before this, all he’d seen Lyon solve were word games.
Shaken, Taddeus dropped into the orange chair reserved for guests of honor. “I can’t let Simeon take all the blame. We both worship at St. Cecily’s. He told me he was short on cash, had acted on impulse, and what he’d done then. I panicked. I’m being considered for a federal job. It’s not very important, but it requires screening for criminal activity and associations. I’d be sunk if it got out my brother’s a felon. It took only a call, pretending I was Simeon, to find out where the messenger was on his route.” He breathed in and out. “The rest you know.”
“Not quite,” Lyon said. “As the only one close to the thief, you were the logical candidate for the second crime. But surely you know, even if you delayed the investigation long enough to be hired, your superiors would have dismissed you the moment the truth came out.”
“That’s just it. Everyone knows you’re a joke, and Woodbine’s a crook who’d say he’s Cap’n Crunch to get his hands on something that might be valuable. I thought with you two in charge, it was better than throwing the package in the river.”<
br />
Lyon pulled his baby’s scowl. Stoddard’s grin looked like a crocodile crossed with a bear trap. He called the patrolman back in and had Taddeus cuffed, Mirandized, and removed.
“St. Cecily says they won’t press charges now the dingus is recovered,” Stoddard said. “It’s that time of year. But the brother’s still on the hook for the messenger. Gimme the wrapping the package came in.”
I fetched it. He sniffed at it. “Smells like meat.”
Lyon told him about the Schweidnitzenschnitzel. “Some courier services x-ray parcels looking for hazardous material. Someone might have recognized the shape and reported it. Simeon found the ideal camouflage right where he worked.”
“Gimme this Schweiden-whatsit too. The DA likes to be thorough.”
“Unfortunately, so do I.” Claudius Lyon stifled a belch.
WOLFE AND WARP
“You can’t be Wolfe without a supervillain of your own to fight, so you’re studying up on how to build one from scratch.”
I was processing the final draft of Claudius Lyon’s essay for the Urban Herb and Vegetable Growers’ Bulletin (“Cherry Tomatoes: Miniature Perfection or Genetic Dwarfism? Part III”) when a shadow fell across the keyboard. The little pipsqueak’s fulsome prose had my thoughts so tangled I hadn’t heard Gus enter the office.
The kosher chef and door-opener of our establishment was holding one of the three-by-five cards he wrote his recipes on, but the way he carried it, by one corner like a dead rat by its tail, suggested it contained something less pleasant than a list of the ingredients of his famous (in that house, anyway) horseradish sauce.
I didn’t take it. I’d broken the very American habit of accepting whatever was thrust at me the last time I was served with a warrant. “What’s the errand this time, fertilizer? I told him last time I wouldn’t take any more of his—”
“Books.”
“Whose book? I told Manny the Monk I’d pay him next Tuesday.”
“Books. Printed paper with a cover glued on. Mysteries. He wants you to bring ’em back from the liberry.”
I won’t say my jaw dropped; the last time Arnie Woodbine’s jaw did that was at age fourteen, when the judge ruled against trying him as an adult. But bringing mysteries to that particular Brooklyn townhouse would be like delivering seafood to SpongeBob SquarePants.
Lyon had had the walls double-reinforced to support many tons of Lord Peter Wimsey and Basil of Baker Street, but he’d overlooked the foundation, and kept a team of lawyers busy preventing the city building inspector from prowling inside the crumbling basement. He can afford to support those sharks in gray worsted; he’s loaded, which is good for him, because his collection is largely worthless. I have that on the authority of the rare-book dealer I tried to sell some volumes I’d snitched off the shelves. He’d read the covers off half and made notes in the rest in his moronic scrawl, and you can’t give that stuff away.
I snatched the card from Gus. Fantômas. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I brought it within eyelash length: Yep, that’s what the hen had scratched.
“I don’t know about the others,” I said, “but he donated all his Holmes to B’nai B’rith last year: Said he knew it all by heart, but the truth is he’s intimidated by Sherlock’s brain power. The only reason he picked Nero Wolfe to imitate is they’re both fat.”
“Can I tell him you’ll do it or not? I got a mess of potato latkes in the oven and two more pans waiting to go in. You know once he starts noshing on them I got to get out the coal shovel.”
I was plenty sure Archie Goodwin, my opposite number in the Wolfe household, didn’t do delivery-boy duty unless it was a suspect or a vital clue; but I’m a thief, and my probationary officer considers unemployment a mark on the red side of my rehabilitation ledger.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He didn’t reply except with a smug look. Gus and I had been fleecing the boss for years and had few secrets from each other.
Libraries make me nervous. To duck arrest for picking the pocket of a sports coat hanging on the back of a reader’s chair, I’d let security take my picture in the local main branch, and it had been sent to all the others. That meant hiking all the way to the New York Public Library in Manhattan, and a subway ride back with all the other sardines packed in at rush hour, with a load of books under each arm.
I got a break, though, winning a race with a woman in her third trimester for a seat that had just opened. The books gave me an excuse to avoid a lot of angry eyes. I read just enough in each volume to suspect a pattern, and when I lugged the stack into the office just as the big chair behind Lyon’s big desk was swallowing him whole, he confirmed the point: He slid the petrified slice of bacon he used for a bookmark—kosher chef Gus would settle for no other use of it—from a copy of And Be a Villain.
“I know that one,” I said, dumping the pile onto the desk. “That’s where Nero Wolfe meets Arnold Zeck.”
“It is.” Raising the volume, he pretended to lose himself in Rex Stout’s prose as dictated by Goodwin.
I picked up each book in turn. “Fantômas. Fu Manchu. Dr. Mabuse. Professor Moriarty. Now Zeck. All criminal masterminds. You went round the bend before we ever met, but now you’re on your third lap. You can’t be Wolfe without a supervillain of your own to fight, so you’re studying up on how to build one from scratch.”
“Once again, Arnie, you demonstrate the exact measurement of the abyss that exists between your intellect and mine. Why should I whip up a nemesis when I already have one ready-made?” Without taking his nose from the page, he indicated my desk with a pudgy pink palm.
Across the keyboard of my word processor lay a copy of the Garden State Gazette, a tabloid based in Jersey City. Before placing it there, he’d folded away the front-page picture of a swollen-headed space alien seated in the Oval Office to an inside article headed:
FURNITURE KING’S DAUGHTER MARRIES TYCOON’S SON
It was a more-or-less standard society piece covering the wedding of one Daffodil Warp to Hyman Brill III, only child of Hyman Brill Jr., a billionaire venture capitalist living in Newark; but it had a smarmy slant, implying that the union was a merger of fortunes rather than a match made in heaven. The bride’s father, one Delmer Warp, had made a fortune selling estate furniture. He’d had the inside track as a longtime mortician, snapping up antiques cheap from bereaved families of his clients and selling them for five times what he’d paid. Five years of that and he’d sold the undertaking business in order to manage his chain of furniture emporia across the state of New Jersey.
“Huh!” I wasn’t sure if I disliked Warp based on his face in the wedding photograph, pale and bald, with coarse white hair sprouting from his ears and a nose like the corner of a skyscraper, or because he’d stumbled on a racket I’d overlooked.
“Sooner or later,” Lyon said, “we two planets were bound to collide; I saw it the moment I read the article. Anticipating that, I must arm myself with the methods employed against the archfiends in these books.”
“Yeah, I get it. Arnold Zeck equals Delmer Warp. You went three letters past A and three back from Z and got your man, just like Gus mixes cream cheese with lox and spreads it on a bagel. What if Warp don’t come near your orbit? Am I supposed to hogtie him and drag him into it?”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ve an appointment with him in this room tomorrow morning.”
It came about like this:
Daffodil Warp (it’s a crying shame what parents do to defenseless infants) had come back from her honeymoon in Acapulco, sobbing into Daddy Delmer’s vest that bridegroom Brill had disappeared. He’d left the hotel, he’d said, to buy an English newspaper, and had never returned. Having stumbled upon Lyon’s advertisement in the Newark Star-Ledger:
Vexed? Stymied? Up a tree? Consult Claudius Lyon,
the world’s greatest amateur detective. No fees
charged. Your satisfaction is my reward. Apply in
person at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.
Warp had immediately called for an appointment, apparently while I was out buying tomato seeds from Lyon’s favorite gardening shop clear out in Canarsie. There was no mystery in why the little chub worked for free: He’s filthy rich, as I said, thanks to an invention of his dead dad’s, and the moment Captain Stoddard of Brooklyn Bunco hears he’s been paid so much as a Canadian penny for conducting an unlicensed private investigation, we’d be raided. Nor did I have to scratch my head over why Warp would choose the boss over a legitimate dick like Wolfe: Self-made millionaires are notoriously stingy when it comes to coughing up dough for services rendered.
Just how my generous employer intended to turn a high-profile client into a supercriminal was worth postponing an update to my phony resume.
Warp’s nose looked even more out of proportion to his thin pasty face through the two-way glass we’d installed in the front door a la Wolfe’s, in place of the old peephole; but it was a flat pane, not a fisheye, so the truth was the man went through life looking as if he were staring through both sides of an aquarium. He had Daffodil with him, and if anything she’d inherited the family physical trait in spades, and red to boot, no doubt from bawling; she could have guided Santa’s sleigh through a roaring blizzard.
“Welcome!” I said, flinging open the door on a grand or two, if I could just talk Lyon into accepting a retainer despite his fears I knew a lawyer who could help him hide it, if we could stall the client along for two-to-five till he got out; he’d split his fee with me. “I’m Arnie—”
Which is as far as I got before Delmer Warp unburdened himself of his Homburg and camel’s-hair coat and bundled them into my arms.
I thought about hurling them into a corner. It’s what Goodwin would have done; but he wasn’t working for a man who could wind up in a room lined with mattresses and in no further need of an assistant. I hung them up in the hall closet and hotfooted it to beat our guests to the office door. All the townhouses of that vintage were laid out identically, so no detecting skills were required on our visitors’ part to find the most likely room for doing business.
Nearly Nero Page 12
