And Be a Villain Read online

  “Tell me,” I requested, “about this password gag, is it just since the murder trouble or has it always been so?”

  He gave me an icy look and turned his back. I told the back:

  “That costs you a nickel. I fully intended to give you a nickel.”

  With the elevator man I decided not to speak at all. He agreed. Out at the tenth floor, I found myself in a box no bigger than the elevator, another palace trick, with a door to the left marked 10A and one to the right marked 10B. The elevator man stayed there until I had pushed the button on the latter, and the door had opened and I had entered.

  The woman who had let me in, who might easily have been a female wrestling champion twenty years back, said, “Excuse me, I’m in a hurry,” and beat it on a trot. I called after her, “My name’s Goodwin!” but got no reaction.

  I advanced four steps, took off my hat and coat and dropped them on a chair, and made a survey. I was in a big square sort of a hall, with doors off to the left and in the wall ahead. To the right, instead of a wall and doors, it just spread out into an enormous living room which contained at least twenty different kinds of furniture. My eye was professionally trained to take in anything from a complicated street scene to a speck on a man’s collar, and really get it, but for the job of accurately describing that room I would have charged double. Two of the outstanding items were a chrome-and-red-leather bar with stools to match and a massive old black walnut table with carved legs and edges. That should convey the tone of the place.

  There was nobody in sight, but I could hear voices. I advanced to pick out a chair to sit on, saw none that I thought much of, and settled on a divan ten feet long and four feet wide, covered with green burlap. A near-by chair had pink embroidered silk. I was trying to decide what kind of a horse the person who furnished that room would draw, when company entered the square hall sector from one of the doors in the far wall—two men, one young and handsome, the other middle-aged and bald, both loaded down with photographic equipment, including a tripod.

  “She’s showing her age,” the young man said.

  “Age, hell,” the bald man retorted, “she’s had a murder, hasn’t she? Have you ever had a murder?” He caught sight of me and asked his companion, “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know, never saw him before.” The young man was trying to open the entrance door without dropping anything. He succeeded, and they passed through, and the door closed behind them.

  In a minute another of the doors in the square hall opened and the female wrestler appeared. She came in my direction, but, reaching me, trotted on by, made for a door near a corner off to the left, opened it, and was gone.

  I was beginning to feel neglected.

  Ten minutes more and I decided to take the offensive. I was on my feet and had taken a couple of steps when there was another entrance, again from an inside door at the far side of the square hall, and I halted. The newcomer headed for me, not at a jerky trot but with a smooth easy flow, saying as she approached:

  “Mr. Goodwin?”

  I admitted it.

  “I’m Deborah Koppel.” She offered her hand. “We never really catch up with ourselves around here.”

  She had already given me two surprises. At first glance I had thought her eyes were small and insignificant, but when she faced me and talked I saw they were quite large, very dark, and certainly shrewd. Also, because she was short and fat, I had expected the hand I took to be pudgy and moist, but it was firm and strong though small. Her complexion was dark and her dress was black. Everything about her was either black or dark, except the gray, almost white by comparison, showing in her night-black hair.

  “You told Miss Fraser on the phone,” she was saying in her high thin voice, “that you have a suggestion for her from Mr. Nero Wolfe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She’s very busy. Of course she always is. I’m her manager. Would you care to tell me about it?”

  “I’d tell you anything,” I declared. “But I work for Mr. Wolfe. His instructions are to tell Miss Fraser, but now, having met you, I’d like to tell her and you.”

  She smiled. The smile was friendly, but it made her eyes look even shrewder. “Very good ad-libbing,” she said approvingly. “I wouldn’t want you to disobey your instructions. Will it take long?”

  “That depends. Somewhere between five minutes and five hours.”

  “By no means five hours. Please be as brief as you can. Come this way.”

  She turned and started for the square hall and I followed. We went through a door, crossed a room that had a piano, a bed, and an electric refrigerator in it, which left it anybody’s guess how to name it, and on through another door into a corner room big enough to have six windows, three on one side and three on another. Every object in it, and it was anything but empty, was either pale yellow or pale blue. The wood, both the trim and the furniture, was painted blue, but other things—rugs, upholstery, curtains, bed coverlet—were divided indiscriminately between the two colors. Among the few exceptions were the bindings of the books on the shelves and the clothes of the blond young man who was seated on a chair. The woman lying on the bed kept to the scheme, with her lemon-colored house gown and her light blue slippers.

  The blond young man rose and came to meet us, changing expression on the way. My first glimpse of his face had shown me a gloomy frown, but now his eyes beamed with welcome and his mouth was arranged into a smile that would have done a brush salesman proud. I suppose he did it from force of habit, but it was uncalled for because I was the one who was going to sell something.

  “Mr. Goodwin,” Deborah Koppel said. “Mr. Meadows.”

  “Bill Meadows. Just make it Bill, everyone does.” His handshake was out of stock but he had the muscle for it. “So you’re Archie Goodwin? This is a real pleasure! The next best thing to meeting the great Nero Wolfe himself!”

  A rich contralto voice broke in:

  “This is my rest period, Mr. Goodwin, and they won’t let me get up. I’m not even supposed to talk, but when the time comes that I don’t talk—!”

  I stepped across to the bed, and as I took the hand Madeline Fraser offered she smiled. It wasn’t a shrewd smile like Deborah Koppel’s or a synthetic one like Bill Meadows’s, but just a smile from her to me. Her gray-green eyes didn’t give the impression that she was measuring me, though she probably was, and I sure was measuring her. She was slender but not skinny and she looked quite long, stretched out on the bed. With no makeup on it at all it was quite possible to look at her face without having to resist an impulse to look somewhere else, which was darned good for a woman certainly close to forty and probably a little past it, especially since I personally can see no point in spending eyesight on females over thirty.

  “You know,” she said, “I have often been tempted—bring chairs up, Bill—to ask Nero Wolfe to be a guest on my program.”

  She said it like a trained broadcaster, breaking it up so it would sound natural but arranging the inflections so that listeners of any mental age whatever would get it.

  “I’m afraid,” I told her with a grin, “that he wouldn’t accept unless you ran wires to his office and broadcast from there. He never leaves home on business, and rarely for anything at all.” I lowered myself onto one of the chairs Bill had brought up, and he and Deborah Koppel took the other two.

  Madeline Fraser nodded. “Yes, I know.” She had turned on her side to see me without twisting her neck, and the hip curving up under the thin yellow gown made her seem not quite so slender. “Is that just a publicity trick or does he really like it?”

  “I guess both. He’s very lazy, and he’s scared to death of moving objects, especially things on wheels.”

  “Wonderful! Tell me all about him.”

  “Some other time, Lina,” Deborah Koppel put in. “Mr. Goodwin has a suggestion for you, and you have a broadcast tomorrow and haven’t even looked at the script.”

  “My God, is it Monday already?”

>   “Monday and half past three,” Deborah said patiently.

  The radio prima donna’s torso propped up to perpendicular as if someone had given her a violent jerk. “What’s the suggestion?” she demanded, and flopped back again.

  “What made him think of it,” I said, “was something that happened to him Saturday. This great nation took him for a ride. Two rides. The Rides of March.”

  “Income tax? Me too. But what—”

  “That’s good!” Bill Meadows exclaimed. “Where did you get it? Has it been on the air?”

  “Not that I know of. I created it yesterday morning while I was brushing my teeth.”

  “We’ll give you ten bucks for it—no, wait a minute.” He turned to Deborah. “What percentage of our audience ever heard of the Ides of March?”

  “One-half of one,” she said as if she were quoting a published statistic. “Cut.”

  “You can have it for a dollar,” I offered generously. “Mr. Wolfe’s suggestion will cost you a lot more. Like everyone in the upper brackets, he’s broke.” My eyes were meeting the gray-green gaze of Madeline Fraser. “He suggests that you hire him to investigate the murder of Cyril Orchard.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Bill Meadows protested, and brought his hands up to press the heels of his palms against his eyes. Deborah Koppel looked at him, then at Madeline Fraser, and took in air for a deep sigh. Miss Fraser shook her head, and suddenly looked older and more in need of makeup.

  “We have decided,” she said, “that the only thing we can do about that is forget it as soon as possible. We have ruled it out of conversation.”

  “That would be fine and sensible,” I conceded, “if you could make everyone, including the cops and the papers, obey the rule. But aside from the difficulty of shutting people up about any old kind of a murder, even a dull one, it was simply too good a show. Maybe you don’t realize how good. Your program has an eight million audience, twice a week. Your guests were a horse-race tipster and a professor of mathematics from a big university. And smack in the middle of the program one of them makes terrible noises right into the microphone, and keels over, and pretty soon he’s dead, and he got the poison right there on the broadcast, in the product of one of your sponsors.”

  I darted glances at the other two and then back to the woman on the bed. “I knew I might meet any one of a dozen attitudes here, but I sure didn’t expect this one. If you don’t know, you ought to, that one like that doesn’t get ruled out of conversation, not only not in a week, but not in twenty years—not when the question is still open who provided the poison. Twenty years from now people would still be arguing about who was it, Madeline Fraser or Deborah Koppel or Bill Meadows or Nathan Traub or F. O. Savarese or Elinor Vance or Nancylee Shepherd or Tully Strong—”

  The door came open and the female wrestler entered and announced in a hasty breath:

  “Mr. Strong is here.”

  “Send him in, Cora,” Miss Fraser told her.

  I suppose I would have been struck by the contrast between Tully Strong and his name if I hadn’t known what to expect from his pictures in the papers. He looked like them in the obvious points—the rimless spectacles, the thin lips, the long neck, the hair brushed flat—but somehow in the flesh he didn’t look as dumb and vacant as the pictures. I got that much noted while he was being greeted, by the time he turned to me for the introduction.

  “Mr. Strong,” Deborah Koppel told me, “is the secretary of our Sponsors’ Council.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Mr. Goodwin,” she told him, “has called with a suggestion from Nero Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe is a private detective.”

  “Yes, I know.” Tully Strong smiled at me. With lips as thin as his it is often difficult to tell whether it’s a smile or a grimace, but I would have called it a smile, especially when he added, “We are both famous, aren’t we? Of course you are accustomed to the glare of the spotlight, but it is quite new to me.” He sat down. “What does Mr. Wolfe suggest?”

  “He thinks Miss Fraser ought to hire him to look into the murder of Cyril Orchard.”

  “Damn Cyril Orchard.” Yes, it had been a smile, for now it was a grimace, and it was quite different. “Damn him to hell!”

  “That’s pretty tough,” Bill Meadows objected, “since he may be there right now.”

  Strong ignored him to ask me, “Aren’t the police giving us enough trouble without deliberately hiring someone to give us more?”

  “Sure they are,” I agreed, “but that’s a shortsighted view of it. The person who is really giving you trouble is the one who put the poison in the Hi-Spot. As I was explaining when you came, the trouble will go on for years unless and until he gets tapped on the shoulder. Of course the police may get him, but they’ve had it for six days now and you know how far they’ve got. The one that stops the trouble will be the one that puts it where it belongs. Do you know that Mr. Wolfe is smart or shall I go into that?”

  “I had hoped,” Deborah Koppel put in, “that Mr. Wolfe’s suggestion would be something concrete. That he had a … an idea.”

  “Nope.” I made it definite. “His only idea is to get paid twenty thousand dollars for ending the trouble.”

  Bill Meadows let out a whistle. Deborah Koppel smiled at me. Tully Strong protested indignantly:

  “Twenty thousand!”

  “Not from me,” said Madeline Fraser, fully as definite as I had been. “I really must get to work on my broadcast, Mr. Goodwin.”

  “Now wait a minute.” I concentrated on her. “That’s only one of my points, getting the trouble over, and not the best one. Look at it this way. You and your program have had a lot of publicity out of this, haven’t you?”

  She groaned. “Publicity, my God! The man calls it publicity!”

  “So it is,” I maintained, “but out of the wrong barrel. And it’s going to keep coming, still out of the wrong barrel, whether you like it or not. Again tomorrow every paper in town will have your name in a front-page headline. You can’t help that, but you can decide what the headline will say. As it stands now you know darned well what it will say. What if, instead of that, it announces that you have engaged Nero Wolfe to investigate the murder of the guest on your program because of your passionate desire to see justice done? The piece would explain the terms of the arrangement; you are to pay the expenses of the investigation—unpadded, we don’t pad expenses—and that’s all you are to pay unless Mr. Wolfe gets the murderer with evidence to convict. If he comes through you pay him a fee of twenty thousand dollars. Would that get the headline or not? What kind of publicity would it be, still out of the wrong barrel? What percentage of your audience and the general public would it persuade, not only that you and yours are innocent, but that you are a hero to sacrifice a fortune for the sake of justice? Ninety-nine and one-half per cent. Very few of them would stop to consider that both the expenses and the fee will be deductible on your income tax and, in your bracket, the actual cost to you would be around four thousand dollars, no more. In the public mind you would no longer be one of the suspects in a sensational murder case, being hunted—you would be a champion of the people, hunting a murderer.”

  I spread out my hands. “And you would get all that, Miss Fraser, even if Mr. Wolfe had the worst flop of his career and all it cost you was expenses. Nobody could say you hadn’t tried. It’s a big bargain for you. Mr. Wolfe almost never takes a case on a contingent basis, but when he needs money he breaks rules, especially his own.”

  Madeline Fraser had closed her eyes. Now she opened them again, and again her smile was just from her to me. “The way you tell it,” she said, “it certainly is a bargain.—What do you think, Debby?”

  “I think I like it,” Miss Koppel said cautiously. “It would have to be discussed with the network and agencies and sponsors.”

  “Mr. Goodwin.”

  I turned my head. “Yes, Mr. Strong?”

  Tully Strong had removed his spectacles and was blinking at me. “You understand that I a
m only the secretary of the Council of the sponsors of Miss Fraser’s program, and I have no real authority. But I know how they feel about this, two of them in particular, and of course it is my duty to report this conversation to them without delay, and I can tell you off the record that it is extremely probable they would prefer to accept Mr. Wolfe’s offer on their own account. For the impression on the public I think they would consider it desirable that Mr. Wolfe should be paid by them—on the terms stated by you. Still off the record, I believe this would apply especially to the makers of Hi-Spot. That’s the bottled drink the poison was put into.”

  “Yeah, I know it is.” I looked around at the four faces. “I’m sort of in a hole. I hoped to close a deal with Miss Fraser before I left here, but Miss Koppel says it has to be discussed with others, and now Mr. Strong thinks the sponsors may want to take it over. The trouble is the delay. It’s already six days old, and Mr. Wolfe should get to work at once. Tonight if possible, tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Not to mention,” Bill Meadows said, smiling at me, “that he has to get ahead of the cops and keep ahead if he wants to collect. It seems to me—Hello, Elinor!” He left his chair in a hurry. “How about it?”

  The girl who had entered without announcement tossed him a nod and a word and came toward the bed with rapid steps. I say girl because, although according to the newspapers Elinor Vance already had under her belt a Smith diploma, a play written and nearly produced, and two years as script writer for the Madeline Fraser program, she looked as if she had at least eight years to go to reach my deadline. As she crossed to us the thought struck me how few there are who still look attractive even when they’re obviously way behind on sleep and played out to the point where they’re about ready to drop.

  “I’m sorry to be so late, Lina,” she said all in a breath, “but they kept me down there all day, at the District Attorney’s office … I couldn’t make them understand … they’re terrible, those men are …”

  She stopped, and her body started to shake all over.

  “Goddam it,” Bill Meadows said savagely. “I’ll get you a drink.”