Corpus Corpus (2 page)

Janus's smile stretched thinner.

As Burford's skin flushed from his open collar to slightly receding hairline, he blurted, "Gee, I'm sorry. 'Likes of you' was a bad choice of words. At times this old mouth of mine lands before my brain signals the wheels are down."

Janus's smile relaxed. "That's why there are lawyers."

"I understand it was your job to get him off."

"That was the jury's decision. But you are quite right about prisons. Blessed little correction is taking place."

Burford flashed a nervous smile. "Are there any changes in your plan, Mr. Janus?"

"My plan?"

"Your flight plan."

"Oh. It's still straight back to Stone County Airport."

As to the other plan, the one that had brought him winging upstate to quaint old Watertown, he had run into a stone wall by the name of Jake Elwell.

Now it was back to square one.

"How's the flying weather?" he asked. "The announcer on the local radio station said some snow is in the offing. I can't be grounded. I've got a very important appointment tonight with a friend who's bringing me a box of rare Cuban cigars."

"Well, you needn't worry about snow delaying you. There's only the usual lake-effect showers expected from a weak front moving in. You'll be home long before it gets here."

"Thanks for your many kindnesses," said Janus, lifting the hefty bag and striding toward the door as if he were John Wayne or James Stewart going out to the street for a shootout. "You've got a fine little airport here and you run it very well." "Hope to serve you again, sir."

Hurrying to his plane, Janus muttered, "Not bloody likely."

Flying all the way up to Watertown again in hope of finding that Jake Elwell had had a change of heart about talking would be a fool's errand.

In an elegant gold-leaf frame above an antique rolltop desk in the small, cluttered office of the proprietor at the rear of the Usual Suspects bookstore a florid red and green needlepoint embroidery proclaimed:

CLOTHES MISTAKE THE MAN

For proof of the motto one had only to observe the man who had coined it. In wintertime, donned in his tweed Inverness cloak and deerstalker cap, Wiggins was Sherlock Holmes. In spring and summer in a white suit and straw panama hat with slouching brim he was, according to some people, the late Truman Capote. Those of a slightly older generation found in him a strong resemblance to the fat man who had been the cleverest of the wags of New York in the 1920s and '30s known collectively as the Algonquin Round Table: Alexander Woollcott.

Indeed, all Wiggins needed to be Woollcott's exact replica was a little mustache and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. But those adornments carried with them a tiresome necessity of being taken care of. The glasses had to be cleaned and the mustache required constant trimming. But similarities between Alec, as the Round Tablers had called Woollcott, and himself went beyond the physical, for not since the days of the Round Table had the New York literary world encountered a man with the impressive knowledge of criminality, real and imagined, as that which Wiggins delighted in exhibiting for the elucidation of his customers.

In Alec Woollcott's era the newspapers had doted on the oh-so-mysterious death of Dot King, the Broadway Butterfly It had gone unsolved, as did the killing of another Manhattan lovely by the name of Louise Lawson. Although both cases had been marked by impressive sleuthing, it had been coverage by the press that had made them sensational. Alec also had been diverted by ludicrous lovers Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray and their harebrained plot to kill Ruth's husband. Around the same time, the unbeatable combination of sex and murder had drawn Woollcott, Damon Runyon, and a flock of other worthy celebrities of the Fourth Estate to New Jersey where one Eleanor Mills and her two brothers were accused of murdering her husband, the Reverend Edward Hall.

So influential had Woollcott been at the time that when he declared that a Stanford University professor had been unjustly convicted of murdering his wife, the man won a new trial, which ended in acquittal. Then there had been the murder of Mrs. Nancy Evans Titterton, cracked by intrepid detectives who followed a strand of upholsterer's twine to a dim bulb named John Fiorenza. An arrest in the Bronx meant death in an electric chair at Sing Sing whose wooden arms had also embraced Ruth and Judd.

But while all this had been going on for the titillation of Woollcott's readers and radio listeners during the Depression, other fascinating crimes were casting spells upon the readers of detective stories titled
Fer-de-Lance, The League of Frightened Men, The Rubber Band, The Red Box, Too Many Cooks
, and Some
Buried Caesar
. Featuring the private detective Nero Wolfe, they had been turned out with amazing alacrity by an author whose name often led readers to the mistaken assumption that Rex Stout had to be as fat as the private detective Stout's imagination had invented.

That the writer of the country's most popular detective of novels and Alexander Woollcott, an insatiable reader of mysteries, would come to know one another had been inevitable. Indeed, Woollcott was so convinced, after reading
The League of Frightened Men
, that he had been Stout's model for Wolfe that he invited Stout to dinner at the Lambs' Club in 1935 and confronted Stout with his confirming evidence. First, he was fat, brilliant, and an absolutist. Secondly, in 1933 Edna Ferber had referred to Woollcott as a "New Jersey Nero." Third, Woollcott was author of
While Rome Burns
, and who had burned Rome? Nero!

Although Stout had brushed the theorizing aside, Wiggins had refused to do so, advising his bookstore clientele and associates in a universe of writers, editors, publishers, and readers of the whodunnit that Woollcott had indeed provided the inspiration, and that because of his resemblance to Woollcott, if anyone wanted to see Wolfe in the flesh, all one had to do was look at himself.

Unfortunately, Woollcott had died long before the arrival of Usual Suspects only two blocks from Woollcott's East Fifty-first Street apartment. Had its portly tenant lived in the 1990s, would there have been reason to doubt that he would be a frequent and knowing customer?

He certainly would have derived great pleasure in the lurid history of the store's address. As buildings went in a city Alec had described as having no attics and no yesterdays, the store at Beekman Place had been site of the nineteenth-century ax murder of Cleopatra Ducoyne by a notorious deceiver of wealthy women. In the speakeasy years it had belonged to the gangster Owney Madden. Then it was a safe house for a cell of Depression era communists and the naive fellow travelers of the 1930s literary smart set which included, allegedly, Dashiell Hammett. World War Two years saw it used as a brothel, while the 1950s had brought subdivision into floor-through apartments. In the sixties its basement had been a bomb factory for Weatherman revolutionaries.

Now restored on the outside to the condition in which the ill-fated Cleopatra Ducoyne had left it, the four-story interior accommodated the bookstore on the first and second floors, storage space on the third, and the owner's apartment on the fourth.

Venturing out of it occurred only for the most urgent reason and on four occasions for pleasure—to attend the convocation of the Baker Street Irregulars in early January, the Edgar Allan Poe Awards in the spring, the Wolfe Pack's gathering known as the Shad Roe Dinner, and the Black Orchid Banquet in December.

Now, suddenly, shortly before that event, Wiggins found himself talking on the telephone with the man who was to receive the Pack's most prestigious award.

"Wiggins, I need your assistance with something I must take care of right away," Janus declared. "I appreciate your aversion to leaving your store, not to mention journeying out of the city, but I hope you will set all that aside in this case and come up to see me at my ranch on Sunday."

Thinking that only Theodore Janus would refer to his small horse farm in Stone County, only forty-five minutes by car from the city, as a ranch, Wiggins answered, "I trust this isn't going to require my getting into a saddle."

The attempt at levity was greeted as mirthlessly as if Janus were summing up for a jury in one of his famous murder trials. "I assure you this is strictly business," he said, brusquely. "I'll have my driver pick you up at your door in the Rolls Sunday morning at eight and take you back as soon as we're through."

With a mournful sigh that lifted his great shoulders and swelled his massive chest, Wiggins found himself in the back of a marvelous automobile offering the comfort of plush seating, a bot-de of champagne in a silver ice bucket, and a bowl of chilled strawberries with heavy cream. Sunday's New York Times had been carefully culled of the sections that nobody ever read, unless the object was finding employment through the classified ads, a rental apartment, condominium, or co-op in the real estate section, or exotic vacation ideas in the travel pages.

By the time the Rolls had glided across the George Washington Bridge and with the silence of a cat turned northward on the Palisades Parkway, he had skimmed the Book Review and found, as usual, page after page of tiresome critics whose reviews always seemed to be longer than the books they were assessing. Once at a literary cocktail party he had marshaled the temerity to suggest to an editor of the review that if less space were given over to windy critics about books that few would read, more authors might also be reviewed. He had been answered with the amazed glare one would expect if one showed up at a black-tie affair in a pair of faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots-except, of course, if one happened to be Theodore Roosevelt Janus.

Presently, the Rolls-Royce left the highway for the narrow, winding country roads of Stone County. Peering through the window at the idyllic landscape, he imagined himself in the role of Dr. John H. Watson in "The Copper Beeches," listening intently while Sherlock Holmes mused that the lowest and vilest of the alleys in London did not represent a more dreadful record of sin than the smiling and beautiful countryside.

While Holmes's cases frequently drew him to the countryside, the mere thought of leaving his town house on West Thirty-fifth Street had been anathema to Nero Wolfe. On the rare occasion when the great detective did exit his abode he traveled by automobile, but grudgingly. Even with his trusted aide Archie Goodwin at the steering wheel, Wolfe would clam up and sit anxiously on the edge of the seat, gripping the strap in case he might have to leap for his life.

To ride in a taxi was invariably "a frantic dash." He had done so to visit Archie in a hospital and another time for the purpose of saving his capable assistant's life. And he had called at police headquarters when Archie happened to be locked up in a jail, prompting Wolfe to direct his considerable outrage in the direction of Inspector Cramer, along with a threat to have the police force abolished.

Like himself, Wiggins mused as the Rolls proceeded, only the most extraordinary occasions not connected to a case could entice Wolfe out-of-doors. Once a year he went to the Metropolitan Orchid Show. In 1934 he had left his residence to dine at the same table as Albert Einstein. And rarely did he go to the scene of a crime. He expected Archie Goodwin to do all the legwork and return to report back with all the pertinent details, which Wolfe then pieced together like parts of a jigsaw puzzle to produce the solution to a typically New York sort of crime.

This was not to say that other cities were devoid of stimulating murder and mayhem. Los Angeles had supplied readers of mysteries the cases of hard-boiled private dick Philip Marlowe and a handful of other latter-day fictional sleuths. And there had been occasionally notable actual crimes, such as the Menendez brothers, the O.J. Simpson case, the murder of Bill Cosby's son, and the sensational murder trial that had kept Theodore R. Janus on the West Coast for a year-long media circus. Yet it wasn't the crime that transfixed the nation via television. Its attraction had been Janus's dazzlingly effective swordsmanship in his legal duel with Maggie Dane.

Soon, thanks to his middle-of-the-night brainstorm, Wiggins thought with immense pride and satisfaction as the Rolls took him northward, there would be a grand reunion of the most exciting pairing of male and female lawyers since Spencer Tracy had battled Katharine Hepburn in the film
Adam's Rib
.

Alive with anticipation, he found himself suddenly emerging from woods at the crest of a hill affording spectacular views on all sides of the glories of the Hudson Valley. Executing another turn, the Rolls moved slowly along a dirt road that seemed little more than a cow path. Then he saw a large gray fieldstone house that seemed to crouch like a mountain lion about to spring.

Coatless but wearing a black vest, Janus leaned in the front doorway.

"I'm so grateful that you came up, Wiggins," he said, taking him by the arm and leading him indoors. "Frankly, you're the only one I could ever entrust with this matter."

Following Janus down a long corridor whose walls were hung with framed pencil and pastel sketches of him done by courtroom artists for television news programs, he came to a large office that appeared to be a museum to Janus's namesake. Displayed on every table, shelf, and wall were images and artifacts of Theodore Roosevelt as Dakota Territory cowboy, police commissioner of New York City, vice president and then president of the United States, father and family man at his Sagamore Hill home at Oyster Bay, South American jungle explorer, with his foot resting on a head of a lion on a big-game safari in Africa, and Bull Moose Party candidate for president in 1912.