Corpus Corpus

by H. Paul Jeffers

  "Too easy, Maggie. It was L. T. Cramer. That's how he got to be an inspector."

  With hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and eyes on a red light he could have avoided if the drunks had not forced him to brake, Bogdanovic let out a forlorn sigh. As he waited for the light to go green again, he resigned himself to the inevitable as Goldstein and his amenable passenger engaged in Goldstein's favorite pastime of detective story trivia.

  For thirty-two blocks heading downtown to Goldstein's apartment on Fifty-sixth Street just east of Second Avenue, he listened in silence while they traded rapid-fire questions and answers, each drawn from a seemingly bottomless well of Nero Wolfe minutiae.

  By Eighty-second Street he had learned that any spoke will lead an ant to the hub, frogs can't fly, a hole in the ice was a peril only to those who go skating, you can not pick plums in a desert, and Nero Wolfe did not like being pestered, bullied, riled, badgered, or hounded.

  Were any of these to occur, he heard from Dane as the car dashed across Seventy-ninth Street, Wolfe was likely to protest with expletives from a quaint thesaurus: "Egad!"

  "Pfui"

  "Confound it!"

  "Great hounds and Cerebus!"

  And the occasional "Bah."

  The great detective had resolved cases recorded under the names "Bullet for One," "Omit Flowers," "Black Orchids," "Booby Trap," "The Father Hunt," and "Death of a Doxy," whatever the hell a doxy was.

  Brought to a halt at Sixty-fifth Street by a traffic light he was regaled by domestic arrangements of the house on Thirty-fifth Street. An orchid nursery on the roof watched over by a man named Horstmann. A basement with a pool table and a cubbyhole with a couch, as well as the quarters of a majordomo called Fritz and an insulated room for storage of bottled beer. The ground floor had an office for Wolfe, a front room, a dining room, a kitchen, and an amply stocked pantry.

  Finally, as he turned the car into East Fifty-sixth Street, he learned that there was an unresolved question concerning where Wolfe had been born. Although he claimed to have come into the world in the United States, he was on record saying he had been born on the border of Montenegro and Albania in the shadow of the Black Mountain, from which he claimed the name Nero was taken.

  "All in all, it's been an interesting evening," Goldstein said as he left the car. "A fine dinner, the camaraderie of the Wolfe Pack, two extremely pleasant companions, the sdmuladon of literary conversation, and a challenging case of murder. Could we ask for anything more? Good night to you both."

  Bogdanovic smiled fondly. "G'night, Chief."

  "Pleasant dreams," said Dane.

  With a wave of hand, Goldstein went up two steps, unlocked the door, and entered the building.

  A moment later as a light turned on in a front window on the first floor, Bogdanovic turned to Dane and said, "Okay. Next stop, the Waldorf-Astoria."

  "Do you always wait around until he's in his apartment?"

  "There are lots of people that he sent to prison through the years who might be out walking the streets and decide that now is the time to finally settle their accounts."

  "That's very touching, John."

  "It's pretty selfish of me, actually. I have no desire to spend a lot of time breaking in a new boss."

  "Yes, I can see why you'd feel that way, especially when there are so many bad guys that need to be brought to justice in a city that never sleeps."

  "Do you ever miss New York?"

  "Sometimes."

  "What times?"

  "When I'm looking at a television show about cops, or at a movie that was made here, and there's a shot of the skyline at night, all lit up and sparkling like a million jewels. Sometimes a courtroom drama will gave me a nostalgic tug by reminding me of the years I spent jousting for justice for the people of New York in the down-at-the-heels chambers in that foreboding, ugly gray monstrosity known as the Criminal Courts Building at One hundred Centre Street."

  "Then why did you leave all that?"

  "That's a very long story," she said as the car moved along deserted streets. "No, it's more like a Joan Collins novel. Woman falls in love with a dashing and handsome guy, follows her heart instead of her head, then realizes too late that the heart is not a very reliable compass. By then she has the responsibility of a child and before she knows what's happening she finds herself the lead prosecutor in what should have been a slam-dunk case. But it becomes the trial of the century with the whole country watching her and justice go into the sewer on Court TV."

  'Janus took it into the sewer."

  "He did what he believed he had to do for his client," she said looking through the window and realizing they had arrived at the hotel. "Wiggins raided the Wolfe Pack treasury to put me up in this palace and now I'm too damn excited by all that happened at that uptown hotel to sleep."

  "Murder has a way of doing that."

  "You're quite right, Sergeant Bogdanovic," she said, opening the car door. "But if death ever slept, you and I would be out of a job, wouldn't we?"

  "What time shall I pick you up for our visit to Janus?"

  "Suppose I give him a call around ten to see what hour he'll be ready to receive us at his ranch. Since the subject under discussion will be himself, I'm sure he'll be eager to do so."

  HALF AN HOUR later, after circling the block several times and failing to find a legal place to park, Bogdanovic gave up looking and put the car in a bus stop. Trusting the blue police department parking permit in the front window would be noticed, should a traffic enforcement cop pass by looking to meet a daily quota for writing tickets, he turned up his coat collar against a cold wind biting from behind and walked the two blocks to his apartment house.

  On the south side of Eighty-ninth Street just east of Riverside Drive with its pretty park dominated by the majestic rotunda of the tomb that had been built for the repose of the remains of Ulysses S. Grant, the stately limestone-front, five-story nineteenth-century mansion had been converted in the 1980s to one-per-floor apartments. Standing in its wood-paneled lobby and peering up four flights of stairs, he thought back eight years to the day he had rented the one on the top floor in anticipation of sharing it with a woman he had hoped to marry.

  Wiser than he, she had discerned in that prospect the seeds of disaster in the form of the demands of conflicting careers and had left him to move, brokenhearted, into the apartment alone. Bigger than one person needed, it proved too much of a prize to give up.

  It had two large bedrooms, one of which became an office. A spacious bathroom had a huge tub with a jacuzzi. Closet space was more than ample. The kitchen had a cozy breakfast nook. The huge living room offered a fireplace. A skylighted loft proved perfect for workout equipment.

  Then, he had welcomed the prospect of a daily steep climb as an adjunct to keeping physically fit. Scaling the steps two at a time, he reasoned, would save the cost of joining a health club. He also looked forward to not having to waste time waiting to use workout equipment at the persistently crowded departmental gym at One Police Plaza.

  Now, he regarded the stairs and wondered not only if he could summon the energy to make the climb, but if he ought to look elsewhere for a smaller apartment closer to police headquarters. And in a building with elevators and a garage.

  Only slightly out of breath after the ascent, he opened the door and paused a moment to reflect upon Chief Goldstein's first visit to the apartment. Invited up for drinks a few weeks after the move in, and having been given a tour of the apartment, he'd plopped into a corner of a long couch and declared, "You've got a lot of space for a single guy, John, but don't worry about that. Soon you will discover the truth of what I call Goldstein's Maxim Number One Regarding Living Accommodations. I quote: The rate of acquisition of things that are of absolutely no practical use but absolutely essential to a civilized lifestyle is in direct ratio to the space available to be filled. Unquote."

  "If there is a Goldstein first maxim, I deduce there must be a second,"

  Goldstein
sipped from a glass of single-malt scotch. "You deduce correctly It goes thusly: A man can never have too much room for books." Looking round, he added, "On that score I find you woefully remiss." He raised the hand holding the glass and pointed across the living room. "I observe a single bookcase. And from this distance I perceive not one volume in it that belongs to the mystery novel genre. We'll have to take steps to correct this glaring deficiency."

  Intervening years had brought further visits marked by Goldstein's presentation of books drawn from the stock of the Usual Suspects bookstore, resulting in one bookcase devoted entirely to mysteries given to him by Goldstein. Assuming its place beside the first and two more that accommodated a wide range of other tides and subjects, it joined a steadily increasing accumulation of possessions that made moving into a new apartment a daunting prospect.

  Deciding to go directly to bed, he paused in the doorway of the adjoining bedroom that had been made into an office. A green light on his answering machine signified that no one had called.

  When the ringing of the phone beside his bed jolted him awake, a crisp male voice greeted him with, "I'm sorry to disturb you, Sergeant Bogdanovic. This is Officer Jim Trainer in communications. We've just got a report from the One-three Precinct of a man shot in the head in a car across the street from Thirty-six Gramercy Park East. Captain Tinney ordered me to inform you right away that according to the name on the victim's driver's license, the victim is Theodore R. Janus."

  "FIRST, WE HAVE a mob informant who has flung himself out a ninth-floor window," said Goldstein as Bogdanovic's car sped down Second Avenue. "Number two: In Mancuso's room we found the book written by Theodore Janus, who has a reputation as the mouthpiece for the mob. Third, at one time he represented Mancuso. Fourth, Janus might or might not have inscribed a message in that book to his former client. Fifth, the words used could be interpreted as a threat, namely, that if Mancuso were to sing he could expect to see his wife and kids no more."

  "Thereby providing the impetus for Mancuso's leap into the arms of Abraham," Bogdanovic said.

  "Sixth and last," Goldstein continued, "a few hours later Janus apparently has been found shot to death. Do you find that all this as fascinating as I do, John?"

  "It could be coincidence."

  "I happen to be a graduate of the Sherlock Holmes college of criminology," Goldstein said as the car hurded past Forty-second Street. "When everybody else sees the simple explanation, I find myself looking for a more complex one. I am prompted to do so in this instance because of what Janus said to me at the Wolfe Pack dinner when we talked about Mancuso's decision to turn state's evidence. Janus asked if I was involved in that matter. When I told him I wasn't he expressed the opinion I was lucky I had not been dragged into what he called that quagmire. The words went in one ear and out the other at the time. In retrospect and in view of all that's happened since that dinner I have to wonder what he meant by it."

  "Quagmire," said Bogdanovic. "The last time I heard anybody use that word was in reference to the Vietnam War."

  "That was boggy ground, indeed. But what comes to my mind is the fearsome Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Not even Sherlock Holmes was able to rescue Stapleton once he'd blundered into it in a desperate effort to escape."

  Bogdanovic smiled. "Will there ever be a situation in which you won't come up with a parallel in some mystery story?"

  "Impossible," Goldstein answered as the car raced past the funnel of approach lanes to the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel at Thirty-sixth Street. "I know only two literary sources that offer more insight into the human condition than the mystery story. They are the Holy Bible and the plays of Shakespeare."

  Five minutes later, as Bogdanovic slowed the car to execute a right turn from Second Avenue, he found long, blue-painted wooden police barriers blocking entry into the first of three blocks of East Twenty-first Street known as Gramercy Park North, despite the fact that only one of the blocks actually adjoined the park. Beyond the barriers, revolving lights on the roofs of a line of patrol cars flashed streaks of red and blue on the facades of the surrounding buildings.

  "Scene of the crime," Bogdanovic muttered, wedging the car between a barrier and the last of the patrol units. "Two in the same night."

  "Not for the first time," Goldstein said, getting out.

  After walking a short block, they turned into Gramercy Park East. Ahead on the right in front towered a white apartment house with elaborate Gothic motifs, bay windows, and balustrades. Two silver-painted stone figures of knights in armor flanked the entrance court of number Thirty-six. Their hands in mailed gauntlets grasped long poles that looked like lances but were topped with unlit lamps.

  As residents of buildings surrounding the park leaned from windows to see what had happened to disturb the serenity of their park and their sleep, the two statues with their helmeted heads seemed to watch impassively as across the narrow street police officers in navy blue uniforms and detectives in plain clothes milled around the silver Rolls-Royce.

  Seated at the steering wheel, the body of the dead man was upright with the head slumped slightly to the right. From a small hole in the left temple a trickle of blood had run down the left side of the face. Slanting from the right corner of the mouth was a half-smoked cigar with a black and gold band.

  If the statues had eyes behind the narrow openings of the visors of the helmets, and if their maker had given them brains, mouths, and tongues, Bogdanovic mused as he and Goldstein strode toward the car and the men, there would have been no mystery as to what had happened during the night to Theodore R. Janus. But the task and challenge of resolving that question had fallen to a collection of human beings with police shields pinned to coats or carried in wallets in suit pockets.

  Captain Walter Tinney stepped forward to greet Goldstein with a handshake, Bogdanovic with a nod and a smile, and no amenities. "The single shot to the left temple appears to have been from small-caliber gun, probably a twenty-two."

  Bending down a little and peering into the car, Goldstein asked, "Who found him?"

  "It was one of our own. Officer George Wieser of the One-three was on his way to work and thought the occupant might have had a heart attack. When he stopped to have a look he saw that the window was down. But it doesn't appear to be a robbery. I've got officers canvassing the neighborhood to find out if anybody saw or heard anything."

  Bogdanovic asked, "Any idea when it happened?"

  "Wieser found him just before four o'clock."

  "I think you may assume that he took that bullet a little after midnight," Goldstein asserted, stepping away from the car. "Do you agree, John?"

  "Makes sense to me," Bogdanovic said. "Unless he hung around the hotel awhile after the dinner."

  "Excuse me, fellas," exclaimed Tinney. "You two sound as if you were with him last night."

  "Right over there," Bogdanovic replied, pointing toward the Gramercy Park Hotel. 'Janus was the honored guest at a banquet of the Wolfe Pack. Unfortunately, the chief and I were called away from the festivities a little early."

  "Ah yes," interjected Tinney. "The Mancuso thing uptown."

  "Yes. So we have no way of knowing exacdy what dme Janus may have left the Gramercy Park Hotel."

  "I think it's safe to assume he didn't linger long," Goldstein said. 'Janus wasn't a man to stick around after the spotlight was turned off. He would have tucked his Nero Wolfe Award under his arm and headed for the ranch."

  "Even when the traffic is light that's almost an hour's drive from the city," said Bogdanovic."

  "There's also a clue to the time of death in the cigar he's got in his mouth," Goldstein continued. "It's thick, and I'd say it was originally seven inches long. He smoked about half of it by the time he was shot, which would take him about half an hour. More than likely, he lit it at the hotel and was still smoking it when he reached this car. He may have decided to finish it before he drove away."

  "Then somebody walked up to him," Bogdanovic said.r />
  "Somebody he'd felt safe enough to talk to by winding down the window," suggested Tinney.

  "That's why this isn't likely to have been a random act," Goldstein said. "In this era of car hijackings Janus would never sit still, much less roll down a window, for some stranger, even in Gramercy Park. Not to mention the fact that Theodore Janus was a lawyer who managed to accumulate more enemies in one year than other attorneys have been able to do in their entire careers."

  "Including a few who had dinner with him last night, barely a stone's throw from this very spot," Bogdanovic said. Smiling at Goldstein, he added, "Maybe at the dinner last night there was a wolf in Wolfe's clothing."

  Slowly shaking his head, Tinney said, "Would you two care to save me lot of time by naming the shooter?"

  "Nothing would please us more, Walt," said Goldstein. "Alas, the suspects appear to be legion. There may also be a connection between Janus's murder and the one uptown."

  "Mancuso wasn't a suicide?"

  "I'm reasonably sure he went out the window of his own volition, but there are indications he was coerced into it. Now we're faced with a killing that may be related to what happened uptown. That's why, Walt, as of now my office will be running both the Mancuso investigation and this one, with Johnny coordinating."

  Tinney smiled. "That's just fine with me, Chief."

  "I know it is, Walt. But let no one else doubt, no matter what his rank, that if Sergeant Bogdanovic gives an order it will be the same as though it came direcy from me. There is, as of now, no case on the books with any higher priority."