Murder On Christmas Eve Page 14

  ‘After everybody else went home. He lives upstairs from the bookshop, and he was hoping for a chance to show her his living quarters.’

  Haig shrugged. He’s not quite the misogynist his idol is, but he hasn’t been at it as long. Give him time. He said, ‘Chip, it’s hopeless. Fifty suspects?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘By two o’clock,’ I said, ‘just about everybody had called it a night. The ones remaining got a reward.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Some fifty-year-old Armagnac, served in Waterford pony glasses. We counted the glasses, and there were seven of them. Six guests and the host.’

  ‘And the manuscript?’

  ‘Was still there at the time, and still sheathed in plastic. See, he’d covered all the boxed manuscripts, same as the books on the shelves. But the cut-glass ship’s decanter was serving as a sort of bookend to the manuscript section, and he took off the plastic to get at it. And while he was at it he took out one of the manuscripts and showed it off to his guests.’

  ‘Not the Woolrich, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘No, it was a Peter Straub novel, elegantly handwritten in a leatherbound journal. Straub collects Chandler, and our client had traded a couple of Chandler firsts for the manuscript, and he was proud of himself.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘But the Woolrich was present and accounted for when he took off the plastic wrap, and it may have been there when he put the Straub back. He didn’t notice.’

  ‘And this morning it was gone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Six suspects,’ he said. ‘Name them.’

  I took out my notebook. ‘Jon and Jayne Corn-Wallace,’ I said. ‘He’s a retired stockbroker, she’s an actress in a daytime drama. That’s a soap opera.’

  ‘Piffle.’

  ‘Yes, sir. They’ve been friends of our client for years, and customers for about as long. They were mystery fans, and he got them started on first editions.’

  ‘Including Woolrich?’

  ‘He’s a favorite of Jayne’s. I gather Jon can take him or leave him.’

  ‘I wonder which he did last night. Do the Corn-Wallaces collect manuscripts?’

  ‘Just books. First editions, though they’re starting to get interested in fancy bindings and limited editions. The one with a special interest in manuscripts is Zoltan Mihalyi.’

  ‘The violinist?’

  Trust Haig to know that. I’d never heard of him myself. ‘A big mystery fan,’ I said. ‘I guess reading passes the time on those long concert tours.’

  ‘I don’t suppose a man can spend all his free hours with other men’s wives,’ Haig said. ‘And who’s to say that all the stories are true? He collects manuscripts, does he?’

  ‘He was begging for a chance to buy the Straub, but our friend wouldn’t sell.’

  ‘Which would make him a likely suspect. Who else?’

  ‘Philip Perigord.’

  ‘The writer?’

  ‘Right, and I didn’t even know he was still alive. He hasn’t written anything in years.’

  ‘Almost twenty years. More Than Murder was published in 1980.’

  Trust him to know that, too. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he didn’t die. He didn’t even stop writing. He just quit writing books. He went to Hollywood and became a screenwriter.’

  ‘That’s the same as stopping writing,’ Haig reflected. ‘It’s very nearly the same as being dead. Does he collect books?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Manuscripts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps he wanted the manuscripts for scrap paper,’ Haig said. ‘He could turn the pages over and write on their backs. Who else was present?’

  ‘Edward Everett Stokes.’

  ‘The small-press publisher. Bought out his partner, Geoffrey Poges, to became sole owner of Stokes-Poges Press.’

  ‘They do limited editions, according to our client. Leather bindings, small runs, special tip-in sheets.’

  ‘All well and good,’ he said, ‘but what’s useful about Stokes-Poges is that they issue a reasonably priced trade edition of each title as well, and publish works otherwise unavailable, including collections of short fiction from otherwise uncollected writers.’

  ‘Do they publish Woolrich?’

  ‘All his work has been published by mainstream publishers, and all his stories collected. Is Stokes a collector himself?’

  ‘Our client didn’t say.’

  ‘No matter. How many is that? The Corn-Wallaces, Zoltan Mihalyi, Philip Perigord, E. E. Stokes. And the sixth is –’

  ‘Harriet Quinlan.’

  He looked puzzled, then nodded in recognition. ‘The literary agent.’

  ‘She represents Perigord,’ I said, ‘or at least she would, if he ever went back to novel-writing. She’s placed books with Stokes-Poges. And she may have left the party with Zoltan Mihalyi.’

  ‘I don’t suppose her client list includes the Wool-rich estate. Or that she’s a rabid collector of books and manuscripts.’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘No matter. You said six suspects, Chip. I count seven.’

  I ticked them off. ‘Jon Corn-Wallace. Jayne Corn-Wallace. Zoltan Mihalyi. Philip Perigord. Edward Everett Stokes. Harriet Quinlan. Isn’t that six? Or do you want to include our client, the little man with the palindromic first name? That seems farfetched to me, but –’

  ‘The caterer, Chip.’

  ‘Oh. Well, he says she was just there to do a job. No interest in books, no interest in manuscripts, no real interest in the world of mysteries. Certainly no interest in Cornell Woolrich.’

  ‘And she stayed when her staff went home.’

  ‘To have a drink and be sociable. He had hopes she’d spend the night, but it didn’t happen. I suppose technically she’s a suspect, but –’

  ‘At the very least she’s a witness,’ he said. ‘Bring her.’

  ‘Bring her?’

  He nodded. ‘Bring them all.’

  It’s a shame this is a short story. If it were a novel, now would be the time for me to give you a full description of the off-street carriage house on West Twentieth Street, which Leo Haig owns and where he occupies the top two floors, having rented out the lower two stories to Madam Juana and her All-Girl Enterprise. You’d hear how Haig had lived for years in two rooms in the Bronx, breeding tropical fish and reading detective stories, until a modest inheritance allowed him to set up shop as a poor man’s Nero Wolfe.

  He’s quirky, God knows, and I could fill a few pleasant pages recounting his quirks, including his having hired me as much for my writing ability as for my potential value as a detective. I’m expected to write up his cases the same way Archie Goodwin writes up Wolfe’s, and this case was a slam-dunk, really, and he says it wouldn’t stretch into a novel, but that it should work nicely as a short story.

  So all I’ll say is this. Haig’s best quirk is his unshakable belief that Nero Wolfe exists. Under another name, of course, to protect his inviolable privacy. And the legendary brownstone, with all its different fictitious street numbers, isn’t on West 35th Street at all but in another part of town entirely.

  And someday, if Leo Haig performs with sufficient brilliance as a private investigator, he hopes to get the ultimate reward – an invitation to dinner at Nero Wolfe’s table.

  Well, that gives you an idea. If you want more in the way of background, I can only refer you to my previous writings on the subject. There have been two novels so far, Make Out With Murder and The Topless Tulip Caper, and they’re full of inside stuff about Leo Haig. (There were two earlier books from before I met Haig, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, but they’re not mysteries and Haig’s not in them. All they do, really, is tell you more than you’d probably care to know about me.)

  Well, end of commercial. Haig said I should put it in, and I generally do what he tells me. After all, the man pays my salary.

  And, in his
own quiet way, he’s a genius. As you’ll see.

  ‘They’ll never come here,’ I told him. ‘Not today. I know it will always live in your memory as The Day the Cichlids Spawned, but to everybody else it’s Christmas, and they’ll want to spend it in the bosoms of their families, and –’

  ‘Not everyone has a family,’ he pointed out, ‘and not every family has a bosom.’

  ‘The Corn-Wallaces have a family. Zoltan Mihalyi doesn’t, but he’s probably got somebody with a bosom lined up to spend the day with. I don’t know about the others, but –’

  ‘Bring them,’ he said, ‘but not here. I want them all assembled at five o’clock this afternoon at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘The bookshop? You’re willing to leave the house?’

  ‘It’s not entirely business,’ he said. ‘Our client is more than a client. He’s a friend, and an important source of books. The reading copies he so disdains have enriched our own library immeasurably. And you know how important that is.’

  If there’s anything you need to know, you can find it in the pages of a detective novel. That’s Haig’s personal conviction, and I’m beginning to believe he’s right.

  ‘I’ll pay him a visit,’ he went on. ‘I’ll arrive at 4:30 or so, and perhaps I’ll come across a book or two that I’ll want for our library. You’ll arrange that they all arrive around five, and we’ll clear up this little business.’ He frowned in thought. ‘I’ll tell Wong we’ll want Christmas dinner at eight tonight. That should give us more than enough time.’

  Again, if this were a novel, I’d spend a full chapter telling you what I went through getting them all present and accounted for. It was hard enough finding them, and then I had to sell them on coming. I pitched the event as a second stage of last night’s party – their host had arranged, for their entertainment and edification, that they should be present while a real-life private detective solved an actual crime before their very eyes.

  According to Haig, all we’d need to spin this yarn into a full-length book would be a dead body, although two would be better. If, say, our client had wandered into his library that morning to find a corpse seated in his favorite chair, and the Woolrich manuscript gone, then I could easily stretch all this to sixty thousand words. If the dead man had been wearing a deerstalker cap and holding a violin, we’d be especially well off; when the book came out, all the Sherlockian completists would be compelled to buy it.

  Sorry. No murders, no Baker Street Irregulars, no dogs barking or not barking. I had to get them all there, and I did, but don’t ask me how. I can’t take the time to tell you.

  ‘Now,’ Zoltan Mihalyi said. ‘We are all here. So can someone please tell me why we are all here?’ There was a twinkle in his dark eyes as he spoke, and the trace of a knowing smile on his lips. He wanted an answer, but he was going to remain charming while he got it. I could believe he swept a lot of women off their feet.

  ‘First of all,’ Jeanne Botleigh said, ‘I think we should each have a glass of eggnog. It’s festive, and it will help put us all in the spirit of the day.’

  She was the caterer, and she was some cupcake, all right. Close-cut brown hair framed her small oval face and set off a pair of China-blue eyes. She had an English accent, roughed up some by ten years in New York, and she was short and slender and curvy, and I could see why our client had hoped she would stick around.

  And now she’d whipped up a batch of eggnog, and ladled out cups for each of us. I waited until someone else tasted it – after all the mystery novels Haig’s forced on me, I’ve developed an imagination – but once the Corn-Wallaces had tossed off theirs with no apparent effect, I took a sip. It was smooth and delicious, and it had a kick like a mule. I looked over at Haig, who’s not much of a drinker, and he was smacking his lips over it.

  ‘Why are we here?’ he said, echoing the violinist’s question. ‘Well, sir, I shall tell you. We are here as friends and customers of our host, whom we may be able to assist in the solution of a puzzle. Last night all of us, with the exception of course of myself and my young assistant, were present in this room. Also present was the original manuscript of an unpublished novel by Cornell Woolrich. This morning we were all gone, and so was the manuscript. Now we have returned. The manuscript, alas, has not.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Jon Corn-Wallace said. ‘You’re saying one of us took it?’

  ‘I say only that it has gone, sir. It is possible that someone within this room was involved in its disappearance, but there are diverse other possibilities as well. What impels me, what has prompted me to summon you here, is the likelihood that one or more of you knows something that will shed light on the incident.’

  ‘But the only person who would know anything would be the person who took it,’ Harriet Quinlan said. She was what they call a woman of a certain age, which generally means a woman of an uncertain age. Her figure was a few pounds beyond girlish, and I had a hunch she dyed her hair and might have had her face lifted somewhere along the way, but whatever she’d done had paid off. She was probably old enough to be my mother’s older sister, but that didn’t keep me from having the sort of ideas a nephew’s not supposed to have.

  Haig told her anyone could have observed something, and not just the guilty party, and Philip Perigord started to ask a question, and Haig held up a hand and cut him off in mid-sentence. Most people probably would have finished what they were saying, but I guess Perigord was used to studio executives shutting him up at pitch meetings. He bit off his word in the middle of a syllable and stayed mute.

  ‘It is a holiday,’ Haig said, ‘and we all have other things to do, so we’d best avoid distraction. Hence I will ask the questions and you will answer them. Mr Corn-Wallace. You are a book collector. Have you given a thought to collecting manuscripts?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ Jon Corn-Wallace said. He was the best-dressed man in the room, looking remarkably comfortable in a dark blue suit and a striped tie. He wore bull and bear cufflinks and one of those watches that’s worth $5000 if it’s real or $25 if you bought it from a Nigerian street vendor. ‘He tried to get me interested,’ he said, with a nod toward our client. ‘But I was always the kind of trader who stuck to listed stocks.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning it’s impossible to pinpoint the market value of a one-of-a-kind item like a manuscript. There’s too much guesswork involved. I’m not buying books with an eye to selling them, that’s something my heirs will have to worry about, but I do like to know what my collection is worth and whether or not it’s been a good investment. It’s part of the pleasure of collecting, as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve stayed away from manuscripts. They’re too iffy.’

  ‘And had you had a look at As Dark as It Gets?’

  ‘No. I’m not interested in manuscripts, and I don’t care at all for Woolrich.’

  ‘Jon likes hard-boiled fiction,’ his wife put in, ‘but Woolrich is a little weird for his taste. I think he was a genius myself. Quirky and tormented, maybe, but what genius isn’t?’

  Haig, I thought. You couldn’t call him tormented, but maybe he made up for it by exceeding the usual quota of quirkiness.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jayne Corn-Wallace said, ‘I’m the Wool-rich fan in the family. Though I agree with Jon as far as manuscripts are concerned. The value is pure speculation. And who wants to buy something and then have to get a box made for it? It’s like buying an unframed canvas and having to get it framed.’

  ‘The Woolrich manuscript was already boxed,’ Haig pointed out.

  ‘I mean generally, as an area for collecting. As a collector, I wasn’t interested in As Dark as It Gets. If someone fixed it up and completed it, and if someone published it, I’d have been glad to buy it. I’d have bought two copies.’

  ‘Two copies, madam?’

  She nodded. ‘One to read and one to own.’

  Haig’s face darkened, and I thought he might offer his opinion of people who were afraid to damage their books by reading
them. But he kept it to himself, and I was just as glad, Jayne Corn-Wallace was a tall, handsome woman, radiating self-confidence, and I sensed she’d give as good as she got in an exchange with Haig.

  ‘You might have wanted to read the manuscript,’ Haig suggested.

  She shook her head. ‘I like Woolrich,’ she said, ‘but as a stylist he was choppy enough after editing and polishing. I wouldn’t want to try him in manuscript, let alone an unfinished manuscript like that one.’

  ‘Mr Mihalyi,’ Haig said. ‘You collect manuscripts, don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And do you care for Woolrich?’

  The violinist smiled. ‘If I had the chance to buy the original manuscript of The Bride Wore Black,’ he said, ‘I would leap at it. If it were close at hand, and if strong drink had undermined my moral fiber, I might even slip it under my coat and walk off with it.’ A wink showed us he was kidding. ‘Or at least I’d have been tempted. The work in question, however, tempted me not a whit.’

  ‘And why is that, sir?’

  Mihalyi frowned. ‘There are people,’ he said, ‘who attend open rehearsals and make surreptitious recordings of the music. They treasure them and even bootleg them to other like-minded fans. I despise such people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They violate the artist’s privacy,’ he said. ‘A rehearsal is a time when one refines one’s approach to a piece of music. One takes chances, one uses the occasion as the equivalent of an artist’s sketch pad. The person who records it is in essence spraying a rough sketch with fixative and hanging it on the wall of his personal museum. I find it unsettling enough that listeners record concert performances, making permanent what was supposed to be a transitory experience. But to record a rehearsal is an atrocity.’

  ‘And a manuscript?’

  ‘A manuscript is the writer’s completed work. It provides a record of how he arranged and revised his ideas, and how they were in turn adjusted for better or worse by an editor. But it is finished work. An unfinished manuscript …’

  ‘Is a rehearsal?’

  ‘That or something worse. I ask myself, What would Woolrich have wanted?’

  ‘Another drink,’ Edward Everett Stokes said, and leaned forward to help himself to more eggnog. ‘I take your point, Mihalyi. And Woolrich might well have preferred to have his unfinished work destroyed upon his death, but he left no instructions to that effect, so how can we presume to guess his wishes? Perhaps, for all we know, there is a single scene in the book that meant as much to him as anything he’d written. Or less than a scene – a bit of dialogue, a paragraph of description, perhaps no more than a single sentence. Who are we to say it should not survive?’