Corpus Corpus

by H. Paul Jeffers

  corpus corpus.Copyright © 1998 by H. Paul Jeffers. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jeffers, H. Paul (Harry Paul)

  Corpus corpus: a Sergeant John Bogdanovic mystery / by H. Paul Jeffers.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-312-18558-8 I. Title. PS3560.E36C6 1998

  813'.54—dc21 98-14625

  CIP

  First Edition: August 1998

  For my nephew Robert Devonshire

  and with gratitude to Rex Todhunter Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe;

  the late William S. Baring-Gould, author of Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street; and Kevin Gordon for his insights into the Wolfe Pack.

  Very few people like lawyers.

  —Nero Wolfe

  Wiggins awoke in the middle of a steamy July night with an exciting brainstorm. Margaret Dane would present the Nero Wolfe Award to Theodore Janus! What a publicity coup it would be for the Wolfe Pack were he to bring together at this year's Black Orchid Banquet the lawyers whose courtroom sparring had enthralled the country for nearly a year. But when he offered the proposal to the steering committee there was a terrible row, proving the Nero Wolfe maxim that one man's flower is another man's weed.

  Himself an attorney and a former district attorney, James Hamilton railed, "Theo Janus is just as bad as the gangsters he defends. Instead of getting such an honor, the bastard ought to be disbarred and run out of town on a rail."

  Oscar Pendelton answered, "I appreciate that you still have the taste of sour grapes on your tongue because Janus has beaten you in court, not once but twice, but personal feelings should be set aside. We will not be honoring Theodore Janus the lawyer. We are recognizing his contribution to the cause of Nero Wolfe."

  "Such hypocrisy," Hamilton retorted. "Why am I not allowed personal feelings but it's okay for a vote in favor of this from you, the very man who published Janus's book? And, I might add, the novels authored by our chairman."

  "Are you suggesting I put Wiggins up to this?" Pendelton demanded. "If so, where is your evidence?"

  Hamilton shrugged. "It's purely circumstantial."

  The sweet voice of Marian Pickering Henry cut in with, "The essence of democracy, James, is that a person is free to cast a ballot for or against something or someone for whatever reason he or she chooses and not be called on to justify that vote."

  "I take that to mean, Marian, that America's most popular writer of thrillers is joining with the man who also happens to be your publisher. Am I to be the only one to say 'nay' to this preposterous idea?"

  "You do not stand alone in opposition, James," thundered Judge Reginald Simmons. "Theodore Janus is a national disgrace!"

  "You are hardly objective, Judge," said Wiggins. "You have your own score to settle with Janus."

  "Excuse me," said Harold Randolph meekly, "but may we debate Wiggins's proposal without all these harsh adjectives? I have no great love for Janus, either, but for reasons Marian Henry has so eloquently stated, and because I agree that Janus has earned this coveted award on the basis of his scholarship, I shall cast my vote in favor of the motion."

  Nicholas Stamos pleaded, "Mr. Chairman, may we dispense with further discussion? Please call the roll on your nomination of Janus so that we can move on to other business. I vote nay."

  Pendelton all but shouted. "I vote aye."

  "As do I," said Marian Pickering Henry, quiedy.

  "No, no," bellowed Hamilton, thumping a fist on the table. "And if this motion carries, I may be left with no choice but to resign from the committee, and perhaps from the Wolfe Pack."

  Wiggins turned to the sixth member. "Admiral Home, with two in favor and two opposed and the chairman not eligible to vote except in a tie, it's up to you."

  As tall and stately as the mast of his prized yacht, Trevor Home had spent thirty years in the navy and had adopted a way of seasoning his speech with sea salt. "I know we're not supposed to discuss this anymore," he said, "but as I see it, we could run into heavy weather if we set sail into these uncharted waters. If we give our highest award to this notorious shyster for whom I bear personal animus because he filed a meritless law suit against me, we risk not only Hal's resignation, but perhaps being swamped in an ocean of resignations! But on the other hand,Janus's yeoman work in compiling the Wolfe encyclopedia can't be overlooked."

  "If you are reluctant to vote in the affirmative," Wiggins said, "may I suggest you consider Nero Wolfe's maxim that it is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust to inertia."

  After several moments of deliberation, Home said, "Yes, I must abstain."

  Wiggins beamed. "The chairman votes aye."

  During the long and sensational murder trial that had held the whole country spellbound and left the majority of the people outraged at the acquittal, commentators had invoked many adjectives to describe the man who led the team of defense attorneys. He had been called gaudy, flamboyant, a dude, and the courtroom cowboy. Yet these terms had failed miserably in preparing Peter Burford for the effect of seeing Theodore R. Janus in person.

  He wore a white western-style Stetson hat, a three-quarter-length shearling jacket, a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, a yellow neck bandana, and gleaming brown and white cowboy boots. Chocolate brown jeans cinched by a wide black belt cried out to support a holster and a Colt .45 Peacemaker six-shooter. The only indication that Janus was a lawyer was his bulky brown leather briefcase, which looked so shabby it was reasonable to suppose the silver-haired character who carried it into the office had picked up a far less successful attorney's by mistake.

  "Back so soon, Mr. Janus," said Burford. Long and sinewy in mechanics' coveralls and with a well-worn gray Cessna Aircraft baseball cap cocked jauntily backward on a head of thinning blond hair, he stood at a combination counter and display case. With shelves cluttered by gauges, meters, oil pumps, and other aeronautical gadgets, it would be to an untrained eye as mysterious as the shelves of fat volumes of criminal and civil codes might appear to the clients of Janus's law firm. There the visitor invariably found wood-paneled walls festooned with expensively framed diplomas and certificates and quaint old prints of wigged and robed English barristers that had become familiar in British courtroom dramas of movies and on television in the form of Rumpole of the Bailey.

  In Burford's realm, as in numberless small private aviation airports, airfields, and landing strips to which Janus had flown in the thirty-five years since earning his pilot's license, the attorney found the floor-to-ceiling sheets of faux wood paneling decorated with dime-store framed photographs of classic aircraft from double-winged and kitelike planes of the barnstorming era to sleek corporate jets of a world when travel had been measured in miles not time. Except for these, the office and the young man behind the counter might have been familiar to Charles A. Lindbergh.

  Burford said, "Your Mooney's all fueled up, sir."

  "Thank you. What do I owe you?"

  "Fuel and topping off the oil came to fifty-eight dollars."

  "And the car rental?"

  "Did you happen to check your mileage?"

  "Seventy-four."

  "The first hundred's included in the day rate, so that'll be thirty-six dollars," the young man said as he entered the mileage on the rental form.

  From his wallet Janus drew a gold credit card and slapped it on the counter.

  "You had no problem finding the prison, I hope, Mr. Janus." "Your directions were excellent."

  "I live not far from i
t, so I'm familiar with the route. And we often get people stopping to ask for directions, although most of the folks who come to Watertown to visit the prison don't fly in on their own planes."

  "No, I'm sure," Janus said as he stuffed the receipt for the fuel and oil and a copy of the rental form into the bulging lackluster bag.

  "I watched 'em build that place, you know," Burford went on. "That land used to be the site of a Nike missile base back in the old days when we worried about the damn Russians sending rockets across Canada en route to New York. I don't know what's a sadder comment on things, the need to build a missile defense against foreigners or us having to build prisons to protect us against our own people. Of course, nowadays they're not prisons. It's the Watertown Correctional Facility. I say we ought to forget about correcting those creeps. They're guilty. Let 'em rot in prison."

  Janus smiled tightly. "You're quite the philosopher, sir." "I hope you didn't take that personal. If I ever got in a mess I'd want the best mouthpiece in the country, which is you." "You're very generous."

  "Like everybody else in the whole country, I watched you on television during the big trial out in Los Angeles. You and your associates did an amazing job getting that guy off, even though I did think he was guilty as sin and walked away only on account of he had plenty of money to afford to hire the likes of you."

  Janus's smile stretched thinner.

  As Burford's skin flushed from his open collar to slightly receding hairline, he blurted, "Gee, I'm sorry. 'Likes of you' was a bad choice of words. At times this old mouth of mine lands before my brain signals the wheels are down."

  Janus's smile relaxed. "That's why there are lawyers."

  "I understand it was your job to get him off."

  "That was the jury's decision. But you are quite right about prisons. Blessed little correction is taking place."

  Burford flashed a nervous smile. "Are there any changes in your plan, Mr. Janus?"

  "My plan?"

  "Your flight plan."

  "Oh. It's still straight back to Stone County Airport."

  As to the other plan, the one that had brought him winging upstate to quaint old Watertown, he had run into a stone wall by the name of Jake Elwell.

  Now it was back to square one.

  "How's the flying weather?" he asked. "The announcer on the local radio station said some snow is in the offing. I can't be grounded. I've got a very important appointment tonight with a friend who's bringing me a box of rare Cuban cigars."

  "Well, you needn't worry about snow delaying you. There's only the usual lake-effect showers expected from a weak front moving in. You'll be home long before it gets here."

  "Thanks for your many kindnesses," said Janus, lifting the hefty bag and striding toward the door as if he were John Wayne or James Stewart going out to the street for a shootout. "You've got a fine little airport here and you run it very well." "Hope to serve you again, sir."

  Hurrying to his plane, Janus muttered, "Not bloody likely."

  Flying all the way up to Watertown again in hope of finding that Jake Elwell had had a change of heart about talking would be a fool's errand.

  In an elegant gold-leaf frame above an antique rolltop desk in the small, cluttered office of the proprietor at the rear of the Usual Suspects bookstore a florid red and green needlepoint embroidery proclaimed:

  CLOTHES MISTAKE THE MAN

  For proof of the motto one had only to observe the man who had coined it. In wintertime, donned in his tweed Inverness cloak and deerstalker cap, Wiggins was Sherlock Holmes. In spring and summer in a white suit and straw panama hat with slouching brim he was, according to some people, the late Truman Capote. Those of a slightly older generation found in him a strong resemblance to the fat man who had been the cleverest of the wags of New York in the 1920s and '30s known collectively as the Algonquin Round Table: Alexander Woollcott.

  Indeed, all Wiggins needed to be Woollcott's exact replica was a little mustache and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. But those adornments carried with them a tiresome necessity of being taken care of. The glasses had to be cleaned and the mustache required constant trimming. But similarities between Alec, as the Round Tablers had called Woollcott, and himself went beyond the physical, for not since the days of the Round Table had the New York literary world encountered a man with the impressive knowledge of criminality, real and imagined, as that which Wiggins delighted in exhibiting for the elucidation of his customers.

  In Alec Woollcott's era the newspapers had doted on the oh-so-mysterious death of Dot King, the Broadway Butterfly It had gone unsolved, as did the killing of another Manhattan lovely by the name of Louise Lawson. Although both cases had been marked by impressive sleuthing, it had been coverage by the press that had made them sensational. Alec also had been diverted by ludicrous lovers Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray and their harebrained plot to kill Ruth's husband. Around the same time, the unbeatable combination of sex and murder had drawn Woollcott, Damon Runyon, and a flock of other worthy celebrities of the Fourth Estate to New Jersey where one Eleanor Mills and her two brothers were accused of murdering her husband, the Reverend Edward Hall.

  So influential had Woollcott been at the time that when he declared that a Stanford University professor had been unjustly convicted of murdering his wife, the man won a new trial, which ended in acquittal. Then there had been the murder of Mrs. Nancy Evans Titterton, cracked by intrepid detectives who followed a strand of upholsterer's twine to a dim bulb named John Fiorenza. An arrest in the Bronx meant death in an electric chair at Sing Sing whose wooden arms had also embraced Ruth and Judd.

  But while all this had been going on for the titillation of Woollcott's readers and radio listeners during the Depression, other fascinating crimes were casting spells upon the readers of detective stories titled Fer-de-Lance, The League of Frightened Men, The Rubber Band, The Red Box, Too Many Cooks, and Some Buried Caesar. Featuring the private detective Nero Wolfe, they had been turned out with amazing alacrity by an author whose name often led readers to the mistaken assumption that Rex Stout had to be as fat as the private detective Stout's imagination had invented.

  That the writer of the country's most popular detective of novels and Alexander Woollcott, an insatiable reader of mysteries, would come to know one another had been inevitable. Indeed, Woollcott was so convinced, after reading The League of Frightened Men, that he had been Stout's model for Wolfe that he invited Stout to dinner at the Lambs' Club in 1935 and confronted Stout with his confirming evidence. First, he was fat, brilliant, and an absolutist. Secondly, in 1933 Edna Ferber had referred to Woollcott as a "New Jersey Nero." Third, Woollcott was author of While Rome Burns, and who had burned Rome? Nero!

  Although Stout had brushed the theorizing aside, Wiggins had refused to do so, advising his bookstore clientele and associates in a universe of writers, editors, publishers, and readers of the whodunnit that Woollcott had indeed provided the inspiration, and that because of his resemblance to Woollcott, if anyone wanted to see Wolfe in the flesh, all one had to do was look at himself.

  Unfortunately, Woollcott had died long before the arrival of Usual Suspects only two blocks from Woollcott's East Fifty-first Street apartment. Had its portly tenant lived in the 1990s, would there have been reason to doubt that he would be a frequent and knowing customer?

  He certainly would have derived great pleasure in the lurid history of the store's address. As buildings went in a city Alec had described as having no attics and no yesterdays, the store at Beekman Place had been site of the nineteenth-century ax murder of Cleopatra Ducoyne by a notorious deceiver of wealthy women. In the speakeasy years it had belonged to the gangster Owney Madden. Then it was a safe house for a cell of Depression era communists and the naive fellow travelers of the 1930s literary smart set which included, allegedly, Dashiell Hammett. World War Two years saw it used as a brothel, while the 1950s had brought subdivision into floor-through apartments. In the sixties its basement had been a bomb factory for We
atherman revolutionaries.

  Now restored on the outside to the condition in which the ill-fated Cleopatra Ducoyne had left it, the four-story interior accommodated the bookstore on the first and second floors, storage space on the third, and the owner's apartment on the fourth.

  Venturing out of it occurred only for the most urgent reason and on four occasions for pleasure—to attend the convocation of the Baker Street Irregulars in early January, the Edgar Allan Poe Awards in the spring, the Wolfe Pack's gathering known as the Shad Roe Dinner, and the Black Orchid Banquet in December.

  Now, suddenly, shortly before that event, Wiggins found himself talking on the telephone with the man who was to receive the Pack's most prestigious award.

  "Wiggins, I need your assistance with something I must take care of right away," Janus declared. "I appreciate your aversion to leaving your store, not to mention journeying out of the city, but I hope you will set all that aside in this case and come up to see me at my ranch on Sunday."

  Thinking that only Theodore Janus would refer to his small horse farm in Stone County, only forty-five minutes by car from the city, as a ranch, Wiggins answered, "I trust this isn't going to require my getting into a saddle."

  The attempt at levity was greeted as mirthlessly as if Janus were summing up for a jury in one of his famous murder trials. "I assure you this is strictly business," he said, brusquely. "I'll have my driver pick you up at your door in the Rolls Sunday morning at eight and take you back as soon as we're through."

  With a mournful sigh that lifted his great shoulders and swelled his massive chest, Wiggins found himself in the back of a marvelous automobile offering the comfort of plush seating, a bot-de of champagne in a silver ice bucket, and a bowl of chilled strawberries with heavy cream. Sunday's New York Times had been carefully culled of the sections that nobody ever read, unless the object was finding employment through the classified ads, a rental apartment, condominium, or co-op in the real estate section, or exotic vacation ideas in the travel pages.