There were a hundred good reasons not to answer the Help Wanted notice in the Habitual Handicapper, and only one to answer it; but answer it I did, because I’d been canned for gambling on company time and I was on parole.
The text was brief:
Nimble-witted man needed for multitudinous duties.
Salary commensurate with skill. Room and meals
included. Apply at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.
Seven hundred was a townhouse, one of those anonymous sandstone jobs standing in a row like widows at a singles club. It ran to three stories and a half-submerged basement, with glass partitions on the roof for a garden or something. A balding party in a cutaway coat someone had forgotten to return to the rental place answered the doorbell. “Who are you, I should ask?”
I took a header on the accent and replied in Yiddish. “Arnie Woodbine, nimble of wit.” I held up the sheet folded to the advertisement.
“Mr. Lyon is in the plant rooms ten minutes more,” he said, in Yiddish also. “In the office you can wait.”
I followed him down a hall and through the door he opened, into a big room furnished as both office and parlor, with a big desk that looked as if it had been carved out of a solid slab of mahogany, rows of oak file cabinets, scattered armchairs, a big green sofa, and a huge globe in a cradle in one corner, plastered all over with countries that hadn’t existed since they gassed all the pet rocks.
As I sat, in an orange leather chair that barely let my feet touch the floor, I came down with a dose of déjà vu. There was something familiar about the setup, but it was as tough to pin down as a dream. Whatever it was it put my freakometer in the red zone. I was set to fly the coop when something started humming, the walls shook, a paneled section slid open, and I got my first look at Claudius Lyon.
He was the best-tailored beach ball I’d ever met: five feet from top to bottom and from side to side in a mauve three-piece with a green silk necktie and pocket square, soft cordovans on his tiny feet. His face was as round as a baby’s, with no more sign of everyday wear-and-tear than a baby’s had. He was carrying something in a clay pot. I was pretty sure it was a tomato plant.
On his way from the elevator he reached up without pausing to straighten a picture that had been knocked crooked by the vibration in the shaft. So far I didn’t exist, but when he finished arranging the pot on the corner of his desk and with a little hop mounted the nearest thing I’d ever seen to a La-Z-Boy on a swivel, he fixed me with bright eyes and introduced himself. He didn’t offer to shake hands.
When I told him my name, he grinned from ear to ear, a considerable expanse. “Indeed,” he squeaked.
I didn’t know why at the time, but I was dead sure I already had the job.
He asked about my work experience. I gave him an honest answer. I’m always honest about my dishonesty when I’m not actually practicing it. “I’m a good confidence man in the second class and a first-class forger. I’ve got diplomas from two institutions to prove it. I don’t have them on me, but you can confirm it by calling my parole officer.”
He dug a finger inside his left ear, a gesture I would get to know as a sign his brain was in overdrive. The faster and more industriously he dug, the more energy his gray cells were putting out.
When he finished he offered me refreshment. “This is the time of day for my first cream soda.”
I declined, not adding that there’s no time of day when I’d ever consent to join him in one, or anyone else. He startled me then by turning his head and shouting, “Gus!” I’d assumed he’d tug on a bell rope or something. The balding gent in the rusty tailcoat entered a minute later carrying a tray with a can on it and a Bamm-Bamm glass. He took the tray away empty and Lyon poured, drank, and belched discreetly into his green pocket square. He folded and tucked it back in place.
“I admire candor, up to a point.” With a show of fastidiousness, he twisted the pop-top loose from the can, placed it inside his desk drawer, and pushed the drawer shut with his belly. “Yours falls just to the left of that. As it happens, a man who can sell another man a bill of goods would be valuable to this agency. I can also foresee a time when an aptitude with a pen would toe the mark.”
“What agency’s that?”
He lifted the place where eyebrows belonged. “Why, a detective agency, of course. What did you think the job was?”
The coin dropped into the pan; I knew what it was about the situation at 700 Avenue J, from the layout to the funny business with the pop-top, that sent centipedes marching up my spine. Claudius Lyon clinched it with his next question.
“Are you familiar with the work of a writer named Rex Stout?”
That was three years ago. My debt to the State of New York is square, so thank God I don’t have to keep convincing my PO that my association with a screwball like Lyon is legit.
The sticking point was my felon status, and the impossibility of ever qualifying for a license as a private investigator. Lyon hasn’t one, either, lacking as he does the professional experience. He gets around it by not charging for his services.
It’s no hardship, because he’s as rich as the dame who writes the Harry Potter books. His old man had made certain improvements to the gasket that sealed the Cass-O-Matic pressure cooker, which is no longer in manufacture, but NASA has adapted the improvements to the space shuttle, and since the inventor is also no longer in circulation, the royalties come in to Lyon regular as the water bill.
I know what I’m talking about, because it’s my job to deposit the checks in his account. I ordered a deposit only stamp and charged it to household expenses, but I never use it. Lyon’s signature is childlike, absurdly easy to duplicate on the endorsement, and I round the amount deposited to the nearest thousand and pocket the difference. It can be as little as a few bucks or as much as a couple of hundred, and if we ever decide to go our separate ways I can afford to coast for a year or so before I have to turn again to the Help Wanted section.
Claudius Lyon is obsessed with the writings of Rex Stout, or more particularly those of Archie Goodwin, who Stout represented as literary agent until Stout’s death. Goodwin recorded the cases he’d helped solve for his employer, Nero Wolfe, a fat lethargic genius who grows orchids on the roof of his New York City brownstone, drinks beer by the bucket, eats tons of gourmet food prepared by Fritz, his Swiss chef and major-domo, and makes expenses by unraveling complex mysteries put to him by desperate clients, many of them well-heeled. Wolfe rarely leaves home and pays Goodwin to perform as his legman and general factotum.
To a fat little boy growing up in Brooklyn, Nero Wolfe was the nuts. Lyon loved to read mysteries, but he knew he’d never have the energy to emulate Sherlock Holmes, or the physique to withstand and deliver beatings a la Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or the good looks to seduce pertinent information out of swoony female suspects like the Saint. Wolfe’s obesity and sedentary habits, however, suited Lyon right down to his wide bottom.
Some weeks before we met, Lyon had bought the townhouse, had it retrofitted to resemble Wolfe’s sanctum, and changed his name legally to echo his hero’s; Claudius, like Nero, was a lesser Roman emperor, and he felt he’d improved on the original by choosing a surname inspired by a predator more closely associated with the circuses of Rome. I haven’t asked him what name he’d gone by before that. The bureaucrat who sends his checks had been wised up, he himself hasn’t seen fit to volunteer anything, and while I firmly believe that the contents of another man’s wallet might as well be mine, the secrets of his past are his own. To quote Lyon: “Discretion and integrity are not solely the province of the law-abiding.”
I might not be working for him if Arnie Woodbine and Archie Goodwin didn’t look like the same name if you squinted at it and took your eyes out of focus. He was especially pleased to learn that it’s Arnie, not Arnold, on my birth certificate; Goodwin had not been born Archibald.
But maybe I doubt too much. The notice I’d read in the racing sheet had appeared for a week in The New York Times, Daily News, and the Brooklyn rags, and had bought only disappointment in the form of an army of errand boys whose wits were about as nimble as a lawn-roller, and one feminist who protested Lyon’s insistence on hiring a man. (Gus told me the master of the house hid in the plant room until she was ejected.) I’m shorter than Goodwin, not in as good shape, and have a cauliflower ear courtesy of an early disgruntled mark that makes it more of a challenge for me to charm women; but at least I’m not a feminist, and my wit has been known to turn a respectable cartwheel from time to time.
I’m one of his lesser compromises. To begin with, he has no tolerance for adult beverages. Even the so-called nonalcoholic beers blur his judgment, and one bottle of Wolfe’s brand of choice might send him skipping naked through Coney Island singing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” He drinks the cream soda that’s contributed in no small part to his lard, and keeps track of his consumption by counting the pop-tops in his desk, just as Wolfe does his bottle caps.
His other substitutions are strictly personal prejudice:
1. Wolfe’s favorite color is yellow; Lyon prefers green, and overdoes it. With all the red in the rare old office rug hand-woven by the Mandan tribe—which was wiped out by smallpox two minutes after the first European sneezed on it, hence the rarity—all those strong shades of green dotted about look like Christmas year-round;
2. Gus is no Fritz in the kitchen, although his repertoire of kosher recipes is prodigious;
3. The heartiest strain of orchid withers and turns black when it sees Lyon coming. Roses aren’t much less difficult. By the time I came along he’d begun cultivating tomatoes, which Gus tries his best to make work with gefilte fish.
Lyon’s brown thumb has spared him the ordeal of replicating Theodore Horstmann, Wolfe’s resident expert on orchids. Tomatoes require no maintenance beyond watering, fertilizing, and spraying for bugs, and he spends most of his two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon on the roof watching Martin Kane, Private Eye on video. I’ve taken dozens of letters at his dictation urging all the networks to revive the series.
So with my introduction into the household, the metamorphosis was complete, if skewed a bit. You’d think he’d have been as happy as a Wisconsin nut in a Waldorf salad. Instead he went into a tailspin that took all the manic out of his depression for weeks, and with sound reason—or anyone as sound as his reason ever got.
No mystery.
He’d placed another advertisement in all the regulars and the Habitual Handicapper:
Vexed? Stymied? Up a tree? Consult Claudius Lyon,
the world’s greatest amateur detective. No fees
charged. Your satisfaction is my reward. Apply in
person at 700 Avenue J, Flatbush.
The notice ran for weeks, during which time Jimmy Hoffa could have camped out on the stoop with no risk of discovery by a visitor. At Lyon’s prodding I made several trips outside to push the doorbell to make sure it was working. It rang with a kind of ha-ha the little fatty couldn’t have appreciated very much.
“Try taking out the ‘amateur,’ ” I suggested. “People think if you don’t charge anything, that’s all your services are worth.”
“I’m unlicensed.”
“I didn’t say send them a bill. Just don’t say you don’t in the ad.”
“The phrase ‘the world’s greatest detective’ would violate the truth-in-advertising laws. Nero Wolfe is still practicing, and he is demonstrably the world’s finest in his profession.”
“Who’s afraid of Nero Wolfe?” I sang.
“I am. When he learns I’ve counterfeited his life and livelihood, I fully expect a visit from Nathaniel Parker, his attorney. Since I do not claim to be Nero Wolfe, I cannot be accused of theft of identity, and because I accept no emolument for my efforts on behalf of my clients, I am not guilty of fraud. So long as I stay within the law, I’m a fleabite on Wolfe’s thick hide, nothing more. To stray over the line would bring doom upon this roof.” He slumped in his oversize chair, looking like Humpty Dumpty at the base of the wall.
I let him sulk, opened the laptop on my desk, and pecked out this gem:
Mystified? Claudius Lyon never is. See for yourself.
No fees charged where satisfaction is not met. Apply,
etc.
I showed him the printout. I hadn’t seen him smile like that since I’d told him my name. Remember, I’m a first-class second-class con man; although I had to strangle my basic instincts to dupe people into thinking it might cost them when it wouldn’t. It’s a Bizarro World, that billet. I e-mailed the text to all the sheets, then opened the dictionary program Lyon had installed and decided emolument is a good word.
That was Thursday. On Friday we had our first client.
Raymond Nurls’s percentage of body fat wouldn’t have fried a lox in Gus’s skillet. In his three-button black suit he made a dividing line in the center of the guest chair, which was another of those areas where Lyon’s attempt to clone Nero Wolfe’s life had gone south. He’d hired a colorblind upholsterer, who covered it in orange. It clashed with the scarlet in the Mandan rug like our two cultures.
Nurls was halfway through his twenties but well on his way toward crabby old age, with hair mowed to the edge of baldness and a silver chain clipped to the legs of his glasses. He steepled his hands when he spoke.
“I assumed from your advertisement you’re either a detective or a magician. Which is it?”
Lyon tried to lower his lids, but he was too jazzed by the prospect of work to keep them from flapping back up like cheap window shades. “I don’t pull rabbits out of hats, but I can tell you how it’s done.”
I leaned out from my word processor, where I was taking notes. “That means he’s a detective.”
“Very good. I’m the executive director of the American Poetical Association. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”
But unless it advertised in his complete run of Doubleday Crime Club editions, Lyon hadn’t, so Nurls filled us in. The APA was an organization devoted to art patronage, specifically for poets who’d missed the memo that the road to starvation begins with the purchase of one’s first rhyming dictionary. Its purpose was to mooch money from people who’d run out of places to store it and provide grants to support promising talent until their work was ready for publication. To me it seemed cruel to jolly them along only to cut them loose just when their unsold copies were on the way back to the pulp mill, but then my mind wandered after the part about separating the rich from their wealth, so I may have missed some of the fine points. I dislike competition.
Once a year, the association threw a dinner in a hotel in Canarsie, where the winner of the coveted Van Dusen Prize for Outstanding Poetry received a plaque and a check for $10,000. I imagine that mollified some landlord. Certainly it reawakened my interest.
At this point Lyon swooped in for the kill. “Which was stolen, the plaque or the check?”
“Neither.”
Lyon yelled for cream soda.
“I’m new to the Association,” said Nurls, when Gus left with his empty tray. “I replaced the executive director who’d been with the APA since the beginning, who retired rather suddenly to Arizona on the advice of his cardiologist. My first duty is to plan this year’s dinner, which will commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of our founding. Naturally I spent a great deal of time on the phone with my predecessor, gathering historical details to include in the program: names of charter members, events of note, etc. Naturally a complete list of past winners of the Van Dusen Prize was essential.”
“Naturally,” Lyon and I said simultaneously. He scowled at me and I returned my attention to my screen.
Walter Van Dusen, we learned, was a loaded industrialist jonesing for culture, who upon his death had left an endowment that made the cash incentive possible. Before that, the winners had taken home a plaque only, presumably to boil the sap from to make soup.
“When I came aboard,” Nurls went on, “the records situation was rustic, to put it charitably. The old fellow had taken them with him, for reasons of his own; I picture a shabby notebook in his personal shorthand. I rang him up in Phoenix, and he read off the winners’ names and contact information where it existed. I thought it would be a grand gesture to invite as many of them as were available to attend the dinner as guests of the Association.”
He related the tragic circumstances: Of twenty-four former winning poets, eleven could not be located, six had died from natural causes, three had committed suicide, and two weren’t interested; one, over the phone, had been emphatic on the subject to the point of questioning the details of Raymond Nurls’s ancestry. Of the pair remaining, one was too elderly to make the trip. The last was willing, but required mileage and accommodations. These the executive director agreed to provide, since the budget was flush.
“I’m concerned chiefly with one of the names on the list,” Nurls said. “A gentleman named Noah Ward.”
“Dead, disgruntled, or unlocatable?” Lyon asked.
“The last. So far, I’ve been unable to learn anything about him. I Googled the name, and was able to narrow the list to three who have any connection with literary endeavor, but one is far too young—he’d have been in junior high the year Ward was honored, and our prize committee is not disposed to recognize precociousness—another, the editor of the book review page of a Baltimore literary journal, assured me he’d never written poetry and didn’t review it because, quote, ‘I wouldn’t know a grand epic from subway doggerel,’ unquote. The third, a self-published suspense writer, thought the APA had something to do with the Humane Society.” He adjusted his glasses.
Lyon shifted his weight, evidently in sympathetic discomfort with this last piece of intelligence. Actually he was trying to burst a bubble in his gut, which he did, with spectacular results. In a belching contest I’d put every cent I’ve embezzled from him on his nose. “Why this obsession with one name on the list?”
“Because Ward is the only one on it I’ve been unable to confirm ever existed.”
“Ah.”
Encouraged, the executive director steepled his hands higher. “Nary a birth certificate nor a social security number nor a school transcript nor an arrest record nor so much as a ticket for overtime parking. Really, Mr. Lyons—”
“Lyon. I am singular, not plural.”
“I stand corrected. It’s next to impossible, not to say impossible, to exist in today’s world without leaving a footprint of some kind on the Internet. Therefore I propose that Noah Ward is a chimera.”
“And this is significant because—?”
“You’re a detective. Figure it out. Whoever claimed that ten-thousand-dollar prize under a fictitious name is guilty of grand fraud.”
“I assume you’ve ruled out the likelihood of a pseudonym.”
“At once. The rules of the American Poetical Association expressly state that all work must be submitted under the contestant’s legal name. The provision was adopted to prevent anyone from submitting more than one work for consideration. A long lead time was established between the deadline for entry and the announcement of the winner to investigate the identities of all the contributors.”
“Your predecessor could not enlighten you on the details?”
Nurls jammed his glasses farther into his head. “He perished last week, in a fire that consumed his condominium, himself, and any records that might have furnished additional information. The disaster was entirely accidental,” he added, when Lyon’s eyes brightened. “The arson investigators traced it to a faulty electrical circuit.”
His host pouted. “Unfortunate and tragic. I assume you polled the membership for reminiscences? The committee responsible for the honor springs to mind.”
“Our membership rolls run toward an older demographic. Everyone who might have shed light upon the selection has passed. The only member I managed to reach who was present at that dinner is unreliable.” He touched his left temple.
“Dear me. All the powers appear to be aligned against you. Is it your intention to bring legal action for the recovery of the ten thousand?”
“It is. The Association has empowered me, upon filing formal charges, to remit fifteen percent to the party who identifies and exposes the guilty person. Expenses added, of course.” Nurls sat back a tenth of an inch, folding his hands on his spare middle.
Lyon finished his cream soda in one long draft, this time patted back the burp, and replaced his pocket square with all the ceremony of a color guard folding the flag. “I accept the challenge, Mr. Nurls. We’ll discuss payment upon success or an admission of failure. In the latter event I will accept no remuneration.”
I had to hand it to the little balloon. He’d managed to appear professional and hold off the wrath of the State of New York in one elegant speech. I knew him then for a liar when he said he couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat. But the bean counter in the ugly orange chair wouldn’t have taken the Holy Annunciation at face value if Gabriel had blown sixteen bars in his ear. He’d have asked for references, and followed up on them on Yahoo!
“How do I know you can deliver? Forgive me, but all I have to go on is three lines in the Times.”
Lyon looked at the clock. “It’s nearly lunchtime. Chicken soup, with a stock combined of livers and gizzards; free-range poultry, of course. Cheese blintzes for dessert and an acceptable Manischewitz from my cellar. Once you’ve sampled the fare of my table, you’ll be in a better position to judge my success in this profession. Will you join us?”
Nurls declined, looking a shade green around the collar; but he was hooked. Me, too, from then on. A first-rate, second-rate grifter knows a champ when he sees one.
Wolfe says, “Pfui,” but his disciple can’t pronounce the labial without spraying.
He was responding to my suggestion to access the Library of Congress website for poetical compositions copyrighted under the name Noah Ward.
“It’s futile to attempt to prove a man does not exist. It expends energy the way trying to add light to dark wastes paint, with no appreciable effect. We’ll assume as a hypothesis that Nurls is right and Ward is a phantasm.”
“How’d you know that about paint?” I asked.
“I investigated the phenomenon of temporary employment the summer I turned fifteen. A less than august August.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his little finger. “If a check was issued to Noah Ward, someone had to cash it. The transaction took place too far in the past for any bank to retain a record of it, even if we found the bank and its personnel were willing to cooperate. March down to the police station and inquire whether anyone using that name or something similar has ever been arrested for bunco steering.”
“These days they just call it fraud.”
“Indeed? Colorless. A pity.”
“Ever’s a long way to comb back, even if I could get them to do it.”
“Concentrate on the past seven years. I assume that’s still the statute of limitations for most crimes. A man who draws water once may be expected to return to the well the next time he thirsts. Perhaps he wasn’t so successful the second time.”
“What if the well isn’t in Brooklyn?”
“Start here. Unless and until he has the money in hand, a poet is unlikely to come by the travel expenses necessary to collect. My Ode on a Lycopersicon esculentum paid only in copies of the Herbivoron.”
Before taking my leave I looked up all three unfamiliar words, identifying the Latin preferred name of the common tomato and the semimonthly newsletter issued by the Garden Fruit Council of New Jersey.
I have cop friends. I’ve been down there often enough to strike up acquaintances and I have a good line of gab, which they like almost as much as Krispy Kreme and are apt to disregard a little thing like a nonviolent rap sheet in order to enjoy it. I cast my line and caught a big fish, although I didn’t know it at the time and would have thrown it back if I had.
It was Friday night. For religious reasons Gus couldn’t clock in again until after sundown Saturday, and unlike his hero, Lyon is capable of burning a salad, so I fixed him two boxes of mac and cheese in the microwave and made myself a BLT. I can keep kosher as well as the next guy, but every so often I get a craving for swine and shellfish that has to be addressed.
We were just finishing up when the doorbell rang. It rang again before we remembered Gus couldn’t answer it. By the time I got to the door our visitor had abandoned ringing for banging. I used the peephole and hustled back to the dining room.
“It’s cops,” I said. “Actually only one, but what he lacks in number he makes up for in mean.”
Lyon glared up at me from his tilted bowl. I shook my head innocently. I hadn’t tried to sell anyone an autographed Portable Chaucer in six months.
I brought Captain Stoddard into the office, where Lyon was just clambering onto his perch behind the desk. I was halfway through introductions when our visitor brought his fist down on the leather top. “Where do you get off sending this cheap crook to my precinct? I put every officer who gave him the time of day on report.”
“Please have a seat, sir. I have spinal issues that make it agony to tilt my head back more than three degrees.” His tone wobbled a little. He seemed to have authority issues as well, but I gave him points for the show of spunk.
Stoddard did, too, maybe, or maybe he’d been on report himself too many times that fiscal period for pushing around citizens. Anyway, he sat.
Physically, he’s the opposite of Nero Wolfe’s nemesis in NYPD Homicide. Inspector Cramer is beefy where Captain Stoddard is gaunt, and the captain’s a few more years away from mandatory retirement, but he filled the orange chair with nastiness the way Cramer fills the famous red one with buttock. Stoddard commands the local precinct. I was trying out the straight-and-narrow as much to avoid another interrogation by him as to stay out of jail.
“Woodbine left your name,” he told Lyon. “So far I can’t find a record under it, but if you’re partnered up with this little goldbrick artist I’ll start one for you personally. What kind of scam you got going that involves turning the Brooklyn Police Department into an information service?”
“I pay taxes, Mr. Stoddard. If you look up my name outside your rogues’ gallery, you may be able to calculate how much. But even the poorest resident of this country has the right to consult the police when he suspects a law has been broken.”
He gulped, but he got it out. It was a good speech, too. The proof was in the way the man he spoke it to didn’t haul him out of his chair and slam-dunk him into his own recycling bin. Instead his nails dug little semicircles in the pumpkin-colored leather.
“I monitor all the computers in the precinct,” he growled. “Some cops think that when I step out they can fool around in the files and get away with it. They always fold when I jump them. Who’s this bird Ward?”
Spunk has its limits. Lyon looked to me for support, but I was scareder than he was, with experience to justify it. He took a couple of deep breaths to prevent hyperventilating and told Stoddard everything Raymond Nurls had told us. He’d barely finished when the captain sprang to his feet with an Anglo-Saxon outburst that knocked out of line the picture on the wall next to the elevator shaft. I’d thought only the elevator could do that.
“A puzzle!” he roared. “My precinct has murders to investigate, rapes, child abuse, armed robbery, each of which requires three weeks minimum to make an arrest and a case to make it stick, not counting petty little interruptions like burglary, purse-snatching, and assault, and you take up twenty minutes of that time playing Scrabble.”
“You’re being metaphorical, of course,” Lyon put in. “Fraud is not a parlor game.”
The fist came down, jumping a pen out of its little onyx skull. Lyon jumped too and looked ill. “A cheesy award given out by a bunch of nancies for the best poim about a lark. No!” Fist. The pen rolled to the edge of Lyon’s blotter.
The little butterball surprised me. Ever since Stoddard had leapt up he’d been doing his best to shrink himself inside his folds of suet, like an armadillo gathering itself into a ball. Now his eyes opened wide and he straightened himself in his chair, tilting his head back two degrees past agony to meet the glare of his tormentor. “Would you repeat what you just said?”
Stoddard wound back the tape a little too far, back to the unbroadcastable word that had brought him out of his chair.
“After that,” Lyon said. His tone was as steady as the tide. “After I questioned your choice of the word Scrabble.”
“An award! A cheesy award!” The captain shouted into his face, flecks of spittle spattering him from his hairline to the knot of his green silk tie. “Are you deaf, too? I know you’re dumb!”
“Thank you, Mr. Stoddard. You are a synaptic savant.”
That silenced him. It silenced me, too, until I looked up both words on the dictionary program. He straightened, looking around.
“Where’s your investigator’s license? You’re supposed to display it prominently.”
“I haven’t one.”
Stoddard’s bony face twisted to make room for a horse-toothed grin. It wasn’t nice. He isn’t a nice man, or even a good one. He lowered his tone to conversational level; he might have been bidding four, no trump. “Do you know the penalty in this state for conducting professional investigations without a license?”
“I’ve never had cause to look it up. A professional would be well advised to do so, but I don’t charge for my services. My amateur standing remains intact.”
The horse teeth receded. Stoddard’s BB eyes darted left, then right. That put me inside range. “What about Woodbine? Don’t tell me he works for you for free. He’d walk to Albany and back for a dirty dollar.”
“I employ Mr. Woodbine to obtain the information I require to pursue my avocation.”
“That’s investigation. You need a license to earn a salary.”
“Tish-tush.” I gave Lyon double points for that; thumbing his nose to the NYPD while employing a phrase alien to his inspiration. At his insistence I’d made a sizeable dent in his Rex Stout library, and had not once come across it. Somewhere in that roly-poly wad of derivative flapdoodle was an authentic original waiting to be recognized, as well as a tough little nut. “When a personal assistant is asked to pick up the telephone and inquire when a bank closes, is he conducting an illegal investigation or running an errand? Is it your desire to give up your day off to answer that question at a public hearing?”
I never found out if Stoddard had an answer for that. He opened his mouth, presumably to let out a four-letter opinion of the question that had been put to him, but he closed it. Lyon’s eyes were shut tight, and he was foraging inside his left ear with the energy of an anteater.
Nero Wolfe never sums up a case without an audience. It can contain a handful or a horde, but it rarely gathers outside his personal throne room, where the Great Detective holds forth from behind the massive desk on West Thirty-Fifth Street, New York, New York. Claudius Lyon would have it no other way, even if the venue was his office of many compromises in Brooklyn, and his spectators reduced to four.
Stoddard was present, eager to make his case to prosecute Lyon and me for playing detective without saying Simon Says, as well as fraud, and of course Raymond Nurls was invited. My seat, turned from my desk, was a perk of the job, but I couldn’t see any reason why Gus was there, except to fill one more seat in a show that needed a solid third act if it weren’t to be left to die on the road. It had taken all of Lyon’s powers of persuasion to convince the cook that he wouldn’t burn in hell for sitting in on Shabbat. Just to make sure, Gus sat in the green chair nearest the door, where he could escape if anyone asked him to turn on a light or something. Nurls’s thin frame bisected another green chair, and Stoddard deposited his 170 pounds of pure hostility in the orange.
Lyon entered last, straightened the picture on the wall, scowled at the pea-sized green tomato growing at the end of the vine in the pot on his desk, and scaled to his seat. “Thank you all for coming. Does anyone object to Mr. Woodbine taking notes?”
Nurls shook his head, the silver chain swaying on his glasses. Stoddard scooped a small portable cassette recorder out of his pocket and balanced it on his knee. “Just in case he misses something culpable,” he said.
Lyon shrugged and cracked open the can I’d placed on the desk. He took a slug and began.
“Mr. Nurls. When was the Van Dusen Prize first presented?”
“Fifteen years ago this fall. It went to—”
“The American Poetical Association was then ten years old?”
“Yes. I don’t see what this has to do with Noah Ward. He wasn’t honored until years later.”
“I will establish relevance presently. I suppose it goes without saying that before the existence of the ten-thousand-dollar honorarium, the encomium was not referred to as a prize.”
“It does, and yet you said it. A prize without a prize is hardly a prize.”
“Poetically put. How, then, was it referred to?”
“It was called the Golden Muse Award. The plaque still contains an etching in gold of Calliope and Erato, the—”
“Thank you. During our first conversation, you said the man you replaced as executive director had held that position since the APA was founded, is that correct?”
“Yes. Really, Mr. Lyon—”
This time Stoddard interrupted. “I’m with Poindexter. Connect this to a scam artist who conned the sissies out of a bundle.”
“I beg your pardon, sir. That is not my intention.”
Even Gus took his eyes off his escape route to stare at Lyon. Stoddard and Nurls started talking at once. I gave up trying to get it all down.
A pudgy palm came up for silence; the owner broke it himself when his voice squeaked. “I have been engaged to untangle the mystery that surrounds the elusive Noah Ward. I shall now proceed to do so. Mr. Nurls, when you spoke with your predecessor on the telephone, did he call the Van Dusen Prize by that name?”
Nurls started to speak, then adjusted his glasses and started again. “No. As a matter of fact he just called it ‘the award.’ I assume he did so out of habit.”
“Not unusual for one long familiar with the original. How did he read off the names of past winners?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did he say, ‘The Golden Muse Award in nineteen eighty-eight went to Joe Doakes,’ ‘The Golden Muse Award in nineteen eighty-nine went to Jane Doe,’ and so on and so forth?”
“Certainly not. The conversation would have been interminable. He provided the year and the name in each instance, and I wrote them down.”
Lyon drank, burped, wiped. “One of my abandoned interests is the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. I gave up the study when it became clear that the board at Columbia University would never honor Rex Stout, or more appropriately Archie Goodwin for his many contributions to American letters. I do recall that in nineteen forty, when the director of the board objected to the others’ choice of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was decided that no prize would be issued that year. Are you aware if this ever happened in regard to the Van Dusen Prize or the Golden Muse?”
“It never did. The former executive director read off twenty-four years and twenty-four names. This year’s winner has not yet been determined.”
“I submit that it happened, and that he told you as much when he used the phrase you misunderstood for a man’s name. The three syllables you interpreted as ‘Noah Ward,’ had they been spelled out, would in fact read—”
“No award.” Nurls slumped in his seat. I hadn’t thought his spine had that much play in it.
Stoddard shot to his feet. His tape recorder slid off his knee to the floor. “You took up my precinct’s time and mine over a dumb-ass pun?”
“A homonym, to be precise. A hazard of oral communication.”
“You and Woodbine are both under arrest for obstruction of justice.”
Lyon’s moon face was gray as cardboard, but he held his ground.
“Don’t be absurd, Mr. Stoddard. I’ve prevented Mr. Nurls from obstructing justice unwittingly by filing a nuisance complaint. If there never was a Noah Ward, no fraud was perpetrated, and the APA simply reinvested the money that would have been awarded, assuring the continued existence of the Van Dusen Prize. I have you to thank for a signal accomplishment on my part.”
“Don’t drag me into it, you little blimp.”
“No dragging is necessary, sir. Earlier today in this very room, you referred to the Van Dusen as an award, not a prize, and employed an emphatic ‘No’ to indicate your rejection of the importance of the affair to the police. You may have noticed that at that point I entered into a reverie.”
“You stuck your finger in your ear.”
“I find the action stimulates the cortex. Granted you hadn’t a notion you were supplying a catalyst for the chemistry of my cognitive function, but that in no way diminishes your role in the outcome. I congratulate you.”
“Bull. Since when is wordplay a signal accomplishment?”
“I must thank you again, for putting the question. In spite of the laws of physics, I have managed to change a tint of paint by adding a small amount of light to dark. In spite of Aristotle’s philosophy, I have proven that someone never existed.”
Nurls produced a checkbook, scribbled, and got up to place the check on Claudius Lyon’s desk. “Two thousand, including a bonus for a job well done. You are a magician.”
Captain Stoddard hovered. I wouldn’t say he drooled, but he was ready to pounce the second Lyon touched the check.
The man behind the desk never looked at it. “Arnie, will you do the honors?”
I said I’d be pleased as punch. Nurls watched, astonished, Stoddard, boiling, as I tore the check sideways, lengthwise, and crosswise, and dropped the pieces into the wastebasket by my desk.
Stoddard slammed the door behind him, knocking crooked the picture on the wall. Lyon said goodbye to our client, rose, and straightened it on his way to the elevator.