Corpus Corpus
Page 23
"You've turned the tables on me, Sergeant," Henry said. "Now I'm the one on the receiving end of high praise, both as author and murderer. Of course I was not motivated by money. And not by a thirst for vengeance, though I might have been at first, because I was also offended by Theo's manner. He wasn't a pleasant man. When he demanded that I give up writing a book on the trial, he was brutal. As I said, a schoolyard bully. But kill him for being a nasty man?"
Dane leaned forward urgently. "Then why?"
Henry's eyes sparkled and the corners of her lips twitched with an incipient smile as she looked to Bogdanovic. "Would you care to venture a guess, Sergeant? Or do you, like Mr. Sherlock Holmes, never resort to guesswork because it is destructive to the logical faculty?"
"When I guess, I'm usually wrong."
"It's the same thing."
"I will offer you a hypothesis. I propose that you did it to find out if you could get away with it."
"Unfortunately, the case was assigned to a detective whose imagination was sharper than mine."
"That's very kind of you, Marian. If it's any consolation, you almost succeeded."
"You know what the man said, Sergeant."
"If the man was Nero Wolfe, I don't."
"No, you won't find this quotation in Theo's Nero Wolfe encyclopedia. The man said, 'Close, but no cigar.' "
"THE CHIEF WILL be a little late in joining us at Neary's," Bogdanovic announced as Dane got into the car. "He's tied up at the DA's office in another big meeting. The brass is trying to put as good a face as possible on the Mancuso debacle. In short, it's cover-one's-ass time."
"The case has been solved?"
"No thanks to the DA's office. Goldstein unleashed Leibholz and Reiter and ordered them not to come back until they found out what the hell happened in that hotel room."
"Evidently they did."
"It turns out that the three assistant DAs who were minding Mancuso decided to break the monotony by having a little fun at poor Paulie's expense. One of them came up with the loony idea of making Paulie believe he was not long for this world. They got Janus's book and one of them wrote the inscription about Paulie doing the right thing. The trouble was, Paulie did not find it at all amusing. So it was sic transit Paulie, right out the window. And now it is sic transit that zany trio out the door with the outline of Cornelius Vanderhoff’s toe imprinted indelibly on the tails of their Calvin Klein suits. And right behind them will go the deputy district attorney who was in charge of keeping Paulie alive and well until he testified. You know what that means."
"Of course. Four careers in law are over."
"The hell with them. What it means is that Vanderhoff is in need of a new deputy. Someone of such standing, and with such an exemplary reputation, that her arrival at One Hogan Place will set the local press atwitter with excitement and hosannas of praise for Vanderhoff. I refer, of course, to yourself."
"The closest I intend to get to a courtroom is supervising moot courts in a law school. I am headed for the quiet groves of academia."
"There are too many law school graduates already. Furthermore, Vanderhoff can't go on in that job forever. Who better to take over for him after he retires or dies than you?"
"The office of district attorney is not inherited, Sergeant. Whoever succeeds Cornelius Vanderhoff will have to be chosen by the people in an election."
"You've already got my vote. Plus Goldstein's. And Leibholz and Reiter think you are the cat's pajamas. That's four. Yours is five. You're on your way to a landslide!"
"This is very flattering, but I'm afraid my answer has to be one of Nero Wolfe's favorite phrases: I will not be hounded."
A former broadcast journalist, H. Paul Jeffers has published nearly forty books. His most recent nonfiction includes The Good Cigar and a history and guide on the subject of spiritous drinks, High Spirits. In addition to the Sgt. John Bogdanovic series of novels, he is author of the Arlene Flynn mysteries, also from St. Martin's Press. He smokes, drinks, and writes in Manhattan.
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